Category: mind-forged manacles

Posted on

Split shins?

I’m so unfit that I’m stiff as a board and can barely hobble.

After my rather severe shock and general gloom on Friday I decided (after a delightful Saturday and Sunday with various friends) that what Maizy and I needed most in the world was a trip to the seaside. Because we are both, if the truth be known, salty sea dogs bitches and I at least begin to pine if I don’t get salt air in my lungs on a regular basis.

A combination of advice and research led to the chosen destination – train tickets to Seaford are cheap and there’s great walking along the coast towards Eastbourne. We got as far as Birling Gap in the time available – see the map below.

The arrow marks Seaford station, plumb in the middle of a slightly grim seaside town. Not as grim as it would be if infested with amusement arcades, vendors of seaside tat and over-oiled fish and chips but grim in a rather grey down-at-heel way.

But hiding behind that first white cliff on the edge of town is a wonderful, if rather steep in places, walk towards and over the famous Seven Sisters, a series of chalk cliffs.

some sisters

They start just east of Cuckmere Haven. Which is all well and good – the path runs obediently along the cliffs from Seaford to the aforementioned Haven. But obedience there expires and in order to cross the River Cuckmere, which flows fast and deep into the sea, it is necessary to walk a mile inland along the west bank to Exceat, risk life and limb on the busy-but-single-lane road bridge there and then trudge a mile back down to the coast. Look at it on the map if you don’t believe me.

raging torrent

Since I’d both failed to look at anything other than a google map and had got very distracted on the beach of the west bank by groynes and their protruberances this major detour came as an unwelcome surprise.

another old screw

Thank goodness I’d packed a large bottle of water and Maizy’s folding bowl.

I’m not quite sure why the cliffs are called the Seven Sisters when there appear to be eight peaks. I’m glad Wikipedia (at the link above) has confirmed this suspicion because I counted them as we went, oh so slowly, up and, slightly faster, down and arrived at a total of eight too. I thought the unaccustomed exertion and heat had addled my brain. This is the view from Short Bottom (the first dip) looking back at Haven Brow (the first Sister) and the coast towards Seaford.

looking back

Fortunately there was a bus from Birling Gap back to Seaford and enough time for a huge ice cream before it left.

I dragged my camera and lenses up and down the cliffs and not only did I not change the lens once, I left the settings from its last outing (the nearly pitch-black Joan As Police Woman gig) unchanged. Result? Crap pictures. How stupid can one get? Those I have put up have had to be thoroughly laundered through photoshop elements with the resultant tragic loss of already feeble quality. Still, I hope I shan’t forget to check the ISO setting again.

And today, oh, the stiffness. The ancient, bow-legged gammy hobblingness. Why on earth do we have muscles on the front of our shins anyway? (that’s a rhetorical question, by the way). And to add insult to injury I’m puce with sunburn. But I feel virtuous for getting some exercise, and it was worth it. Maizy appears entirely unaffected and just as bouncy and energetic as usual.

The entire slideshow of the day is here. Split shins are, apparently, more widely known as shin splints. I obviously don’t really have them, merely some rather shocked and horrified muscles.

Posted on

Macro

frost bitten

I wept last night alone for loves lost, missed chances, hopes unfulfilled and those who I have known who are now dead. For the grey grief of the turning globe.

old and new

It is not wrong, I think, to mourn. To deny would be to cut out half the world.

highlit

What is sad, I think, is not to move the mind from loss to life.

budding

To miss the thrust of winter into spring.

drops

We are as fragile as the raindrop on the petal. It is our curse to know. And perhaps our consolation.

goldfinch

So when from grey sky and black branches there falls a shower of song we bathe in the bliss that is the blessing of our death.

Posted on

A loop in the fabric of time

Those instances where, when you’re in them and realise it and think, through the delight, that this moment, this particular configuration of the universe as apprehended in this instant is so exquisitely beautiful that it will live in me and be a constant source of joy available at will, like a rare scent to be unstoppered from the bottle of memory and stroked on the pulse points, conjuring on the brain’s skin and in the brain’s eyes and ears a waft of re-being in that pure ecstasy.

Or (of course a poet says it so much better) a Wordswothian time spot:

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence–depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse–our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

Thus early this morning when SecondSpawn sat cross legged on my bed, the diffuse brightness lighting his cheek and brow and lips and features of solemn concentration as he bent over his knitting, I curled and warm beneath my duvet gazing gazing gazing and so full of love that time and space and every dimension and all meaning converge and are held motionless in that moment.

Posted on

Form filling

Today is my birthday.

morning flowers

To mark both the occasion and the rather unusual fact that I feel good about it I have filled in and will today despatch two sets of forms.

The first is an application to train as a listening volunteer for the Samaritans. The second is to submit a photograph to the selection process for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

Apart from submitting forms the day may include coffees with friends, stroking yarn at the new I Knit shop, lunch with a friend, post-school tea and cake with the spawn and in the evening (so I was told last night) friends have organised a small supper-and-get-together, babysitter included.

Gift to self? Neither an iPhone nor an Asus Eee, sadly. Not this year. But a ticket to Speed Dating for Artists at the ICA:

Those taking part talk to someone for four minutes at a time, the crucial difference is that each of you will bring a piece of your own work – a drawing, a sculpture, a design, an mp3, anything you can carry in to the ICA – to talk about.

How superbly thrilling/appalling might that be? I may or may not be moved to give an account of the experience after it’s happened.

And just in case anyone’s in any doubt on the matter, pisceans absolutely totally rock. Starting at the beginning of the sign and working through we have, in my small personal sample of gorgeousness:
FirstSpawn – polymath etc;
Friend T – architect, photographer etc;
Dave – writer, poet, photographer etc;
Friend F – painter, sculptor etc;
Krista – rhetorician, writer, photographer etc;
Dale – writer, poet etc;
Ivy – poet, artist etc;
Jeff – rhetorician, writer, photographer etc (and my twin – happy birthday!);
Me – etc 🙂

Have a wonderful day whatever date you were born on!

Posted on

Some words of explanation

… as to why I found Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk so powerful.

You see (she says, getting a bit pink about the cheeks, gazing at the ground and shuffling her feet in an embarrassed and highly British fashion), you know that experience she talks about, of being at one with the universe an’ all, having no boundaries, cosmic peace love and understanding etc etc?

Yeah, well, I’ve had that experience too. Luckily I wasn’t having a stroke at the same time. As far as I know.

Once only. While meditating. Apart from the visual stuff – I had my eyes closed. But otherwise pretty similar. No me, no you. All me, all you. The kind of experience, as her extremely compelling retelling indicates, that you don’t forget in a hurry.

This raises, of course, fascinating questions about meditation, neuroscience, phenomenology (thanks Jeff), metaphysics, religion, spirituality, morality and no doubt many more.

Unfortunately my brain is currently tired and slightly depressed and my body has reluctantly to haul itself to the sorting office some distance away to pick up some parcels. But since the above issues have been of considerable interest to me for a good few years perhaps I’ll get it together to expatiate upon them some other time.

Posted on

From the ridiculous to the sublime

I would say even if he’s not the love of your life, make sure he’s someone you respect intellectually, makes you laugh, appreciates you … I bet there are plenty of these men in the older, overweight, and bald category (which they all eventually become anyway).

If you’re doing some sort of exercise regime any doctor will say a brisk walk of 22 minutes is a good thing for everyone to do once a day, so if you do a brisk walk to this, that will have served its purpose no matter what words have been heard. It is only the story of a large overweight Englishman trying to go round a boat and breaking his arm. That’s really all there is, there’s no philosophy, no history, there’s no social truth to be extracted from that melancholy experience. It is what it is.

…we live in the past or in the future; we are continually expecting the coming of some special hour when our life shall unfold itself in its full significance. And we do not observe that life is flowing like water through our fingers, sifting like precious grain from a loosely fastened bag.

The grand ideas and the despair at being nobody all belong to that world where nothing ordinary has value, that world of flickering Ahrimanic desperation.

From the blinkered space between sleep’s hangover and the numbing cold of a grey morning, look up… and up, and back and see the ordinary, extraordinary patterns on the sky. Zoom lens: eyes, then feet float up towards the tree-tops. Cool, dreamy clarity of Winter shapes.

And so the answer I’d give in response to Annette’s request that I describe my life in six words or less would be the following Zen-inspired definition of consciousness: an endless series of random stimuli. Some folks wait until their dying breath to see their life flash before their eyes, but I say watching your life is as easy as walking down a graffiti-covered alley or flipping through the virtual pages of an electronic photo album, the accident of your life appearing in all its random glory.

Deep down, can we know ourselves to be cut from the same cloth as the blue of the sky, the purple of twilight, the liquid gold of setting sun?

Posted on

The eye with the thousand arms

So the Canon camera was named after Chenrezig! (the latter being the Tibetan name for the Bodhisattva which has, let’s face it, a serious multiple-manifestation situation):

In 1933, when Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory was established, the name given to cameras manufactured on a trial basis at the time was Kwanon. This title reflected the benevolence of Kwanon, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, and embodied the Company’s vision of creating the best cameras in the world. The logo included the word with an image of “Kwanon with 1,000 Arms” and flames.

It’s an interesting assumption that “creating the best cameras in the world” is a reflection of infinite mercy.

I sometimes wonder, vaguely, about the nature of my compulsion to take photographs.

walking the dog

How the desire to capture, preserve, reproduce, hold on to something of a moment might be a form of grasping, in the sense of the second of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths:

Suffering’s Origin (Samudaya):
“Now this … is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there, that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.”

Is it grasping, I wonder, to remember and regret the time when there was a Tunnocks Tea Cake wrapper flattened onto the pavement in the shape of a ballerina swirling long red and white striped skirts and I didn’t have my camera? To remember and regret that I could not hold onto that moment, skewer it with a lens and pin it in the display cabinet that is flickr? Was it not a moment, like all other moments, to be lived in fully and succeeded by the next moment of the present continuous?

Then I looked at this teaching of Ajanh Sumedho on BuddhaNet, part of a series on The Four Noble Truths:

For example, I’ve always liked beautiful scenery. Once during a retreat that I led in Switzerland, I was taken to some beautiful mountains and noticed that there was always a sense of anguish in my mind because there was so much beauty, a continual flow of beautiful sights. I had the feeling of wanting to hold on to everything, that I had to keep alert all the time in order to consume everything with my eyes. It was really wearing me out! Now that was dukkha, wasn’t it?

I find that if I do things heedlessly – even something quite harmless like looking at beautiful mountains – if I’m just reaching out and trying to hold on to something, it always brings an unpleasant feeling. How can you hold on to the Jungfrau and the Eiger? The best you can do is to take a picture of it, trying to capture everything on a piece of paper. That’s dukkha; if you want to hold on to something which is beautiful because you don’t want to be separated from it – that is suffering.

And there’s also this:

When you really see the origin of suffering, you realise that the problem is the grasping of desire not the desire itself. Grasping means being deluded by it, thinking it’s really ‘me’ and ‘mine’.

Now we’re getting somewhere. This reminds me of something Tom Montag wrote recently about making music with friends:

I am playing music and sometimes the music plays me… And if we’re lucky, the songs will play us.

And, if I am luckier still, that bass will play me, and I will have found the last instrument I’ll ever need to buy.

When the music plays you, there’s nothing you can do but keep on playing, keep on playing, and hope it doesn’t end.

It is that magical limen of un/intentionality where the conscious mind seems to cease operating and a synthesis occurs between the internal and external, when with sudden sharp hot stink of fox It enters the dark hole of the head.

Or the dark hole of the camera. The boys call my camera the “black hole” because, they say, no light escapes from it. I prefer to think of it as a conduit porting light from one place to others.

That is how it is, sometimes. The world in all its infinite infinitesimal glory. “Look, look at the beauty. Love it. Rejoice, revel, revere.” That is how it is sometimes.

Posted on

This is not a prayer flag

blue and white

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

I revisited the video of the talk Mindfulness Stress Reduction and Healing given by Jon Kabat-Zinn and discovered, under the “related” links, a guided meditation session he also gave and was filmed at Google – Mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn. He recited the above poem at the end of the session. Highly recommended.

So too is the talk by the extraordinary Buddhist monk, scientist, philosopher, author, photographer, humanitarian activist etc Matthieu Richard – Change your Mind, Change your Brain: The Inner Conditions for Authentic Happiness. Much food for thought and hope.

Posted on

Momently

I have finished my jaywalker socks. Hurrah!

on foot above

I was showing them off to Secondspawn this morning. “Will they shrink if you put them in the washing machine?” was his first and rather unexpected reaction, but probably prompted by the recent deliberate shrinkage of the so-called rasta hat to more beret-like dimensions. Having been assured that they were made of special non-shrinking sock wool he then advised me to wear them today. “Oh no”, I replied, shocked at the suggestion, “they’re far too special for walking to school in”.

WRONG.

Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

This is something I’ve been doing all my life. Saving things up for the “special occasion” which very seldom, if ever, manifests itself. Is this the right occasion? is it really, truly going to be special enough? am I sure? This results in cupboards and drawers and boxes full of things waiting, gathering dust, decaying gently, utterly unused.

There is, as my father still says with annoying frequency, no time like the present. He generally employs the term to persuade me to do something I’d rather not. But it’s just as applicable to other circumstances. Why is why I’m wriggling my toes inside my lovely socks right now, as I type.

Next project onto the needles is a pair of thick hiking socks for J who also sent me this, which I feel is appropriate.