TONGLEN AND YUTORI

Have you heard of the Buddhist practise called Tonglen? It's a bodhicitta meditation of taking in dark energy, difficulty or despair and breathing out light, radiating beauty. No simple task! The likes of Zen master Pema Chodron are surely better able to know the size and depth of the darkness your own particular heart can hold before attempting alchemy. But I also think this is a practise most of us do every day in some small way.

It has been a tiring year. It is now three months since Dad went into hospital with sepsis and ear infections that made his life just that bit more challenging. I mean terrifying and confusing. And, in his typical fashion, though terror and confusion, still gracious, grateful, kind and wise. Home now, and a small channel of hearing has returned to one ear. New hearing aids with high tech capabilities must be adapted to. We, I mean us three, and it seems the world beyond, live on an edge much of the time, not fully understanding why. Taking small steps, oh so infinitesimal, to hold on to that tenuous and very human thing we call faith. What is faith? What is the sacred and good in us when the big evidence of who we are points so much to the contrary? 

Have you heard of the Japanese practise of Yutori? It is the art of spaciousness, of the unhurried walk through life (rather than the harried clambering up the ladder, or across the treadmill). Do you have spaciousness in your life? I have spent my life in houses with many rooms which I fashion into complex worlds, but also am daunted by the gathering of 'stuff'. 'Stuff' can be a treasure trove, and that can be a dangerous slippy sliding ground into a nostalgic hoarding of possessions.

It’s a weird thing to ‘still’ be living with my parents, ‘still’ be stuck in illness, ‘still’ be ‘at home’ rather than… where? Sometimes very famous and influential people say, ‘If I can help one person…’ or ‘If I have made one life better…’ but isn’t this the truth of who we really are? That each of us in our small and vital ways have made one life better, have held faith, kindness and joy, for one other life than our own? At least once a day for a parent, a child. Even, once a week, for a little curly coated dog? Even that seems beyond us sometimes, stretched as we are by historical and present day personal suffering. And still we return, represent, remember, recover. And occasionally, rejoice. So I go on, so you probably do too. I hope we’ll be alright. Time is moving us on regardless, the calendar turns to 2025. Happy New Year? From our Moominvalley to yours, may we remember what is good in each other. 

Images of Fillyjonk, and Moominmamma by Tove Jansson)

NEW NORMAL, OLD NORMAL

My cousin Barbara asks me if I have been writing lots of poetry. It struck her the other night that there was poetry in this, this time of strangeness, of discovering one's ability to adapt, perhaps - the beauty inherent in that. And indeed, Carol Ann Duffy has just initiated a project titled 'Write Where We Are Now', gathering the thoughts and feelings of her fellow poets on our global viral tidal wave. We surprise ourselves with adaptation, and it thrills us to discover - still here, still here. No matter what. Tsunami, earthquake, the plague, coronavirus. The Great Depression, Wall Street Crash, demonetisation. The end of circuses, the beginning of Tiger King. The end of letter writing, the beginning of emoticons. Lose limbs, become an Olympic athlete. Hospital a dangerous place? Self inject.

What gets lost in the adaptation? The transition. The nuances within those transitions. My anxiety before the sub cut training, my sleepless nights. My terrible sense of the cold once I had penetrated my flesh, in two different sites, slowly, each ml a painful new reality. 'You'll get used to it.' 'Some people love it.' 'You won't even feel it.' Later, someday. You'll be like the others. Who smile and laugh and brush this off. It's nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

The extremely vulnerable must continue to isolate. It is for their own protection. Meanwhile we rush to open our vital economies. Our schools. Life must be returned to normal. Meanwhile there is a rush on Hydroxychloroquine. India closes her borders to exporting the raw materials. Poor lupus patients. Meanwhile it's possible that doesn't matter because being on immunosuppressive therapies may explain why auto-immune patients aren't dying en masse. You're fine, lupus patients. Your cytokine storms aren't as wild and intemperate as ours. As you were. But all the same, stay home afterwards. After our storms subside. Our bodies are the frontlines. We will protect you. We may also infect you. Just stay quiet. With that needle in your flesh. It's for your own good. The front door is your safest bet. Behind that front door... well, never mind that.

That sense of cold I mentioned? It is the place of loneliness, of abandonment. Of being protected for one's own good under strictly controlled guidelines. Of the new normal being the old normal, only with an edge. An edgier edge. But it must be contained, or else our little cup of sunshine will be consumed with the single thought that threatens to destroy us on any ordinary day. The lupus patient was never meant to survive.

And yet she does, with a paintbrush in her hands. Where poetry fails me, I paint my reality. Back and forth. Wax on, wax off. Until I become something akin to the Buddhist novice, who, in elevating a simple monotonous task with consciousness, finds nirvana.