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Published: August 4th 2016
Sojha, Inner Seraj Valley, Himachal Pradesh, India
August 2016
“Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us.”
Nietzsche “So what is the essence? What matters.....what really, really matters..... is it giving love? Is it procreation? Is it knowledge, is it finding truth? The struggle to overcome, relief from pain? Is it stillness? The scraps of nirvana? Perhaps it's connection. Visceral connections and part of the journey together and touching soul. We.”
Kate Richards: 'Madness' Awakening is Emptiness Awakening to Emptiness
Ama Samy, Zen Master I arrive back in my leased house in the Himalayan foothills. It's been 7 months since I was last here. Meanwhile I have just again spent 3 months living with my aged mother in Australia (progressive dementia). I spent a month getting here from landing in Hyderabad: one week in Bhubaneswar... then a train to Varanasi (with Gladys the wonder bike) .. two weeks Hindi lessons in the pre-monsoon heat( the rains started just as I
left and the Ganges began to rise fast). I then rode to Rishikesh.... spent two weeks just resting up there in the relative cool and the rain. Then the gorgeous ride via the mountains (Nahan to Shimla and then Shimla to Bilaspur). The final stretch after another relaxing few days in Rewalsar is from Mandi to here. This has to be one of the best bike rides in the world (as if I would know). All good but my body has some aches and pains.
Living here in the house is about filling the gaps with meaningful emptiness. I go over and over my Hindi lessons. My Varanasi teacher Raju has given me voice tapes we recorded on my phone which are great .. just stopping each sentence and trying it ... then correcting with his translation. Excursions into the valley push me to practice my spoken Hindi with the locals. An American friend and his wife (Indian origin) lives just down from my house for 6 months of each year has a great library, so I am enriched with things to read. My guitar is here and I plan to relearn 'Asturias' (Spanish classical piece I
used to play when I was young). Writing this new blog after months of nothing is reassuring ... a sense of creation.
But my biggest aim is to recapture something I remember well but which has somehow eluded me these past months: waking up in the morning with a smile. Knowing, just knowing, that I am so lucky to be wherever I find myself (and particularly in this place), and full of unconditional acceptance that 'this too is a good day'.
I have a month of solitude here before I am inundated (nicely) with visits from a number of friends (Canadian, Spanish, French, and possibly American) during September and then hopefully my best friend who I have not seen for 15 months (French) is coming in October. So it's going to be a full house (it will not take much to fill this house) which might challenge my habitual ways. I am creating a new window in the spare bedroom for all this to work. It had one once that for some reason was closed in, making that room dark and stifling. Getting a carpenter lined up is perhaps as difficult as it is
in Australia to get a tradesman. There is a guy in the next village and he promises to try and source the wood and get onto it (I am living next to a forest but taking wood is highly regulated).
Somehow this coming and going has inevitably began to feel like more of the same, even though I am so glad to be here again. My stops along the way getting here are becoming common place... not bad but just so familiar. But here it's always still refreshingly beautiful. Now it is the monsoon and so while there are no snow caps in sight (that treat will greet me in about 6 weeks from now), the rising mist in the valleys is mystical and magical. Occasional storms are powerful, sobering, and speak of forces that emanate from beyond the mountain tops behind the house, far away midst distant and remote snow peaks with their imagined stillness and aura.
So, does one ever crack it really? This play with trying to be fully conscious of the illusion that is a life? Even to describe it in a way that does not sound mad or sad
or just plain self-indulgently morbid? To actually relax for extended periods with the nothingness of meaning... the emptiness of the miraculous which is our lot..... the ever-approaching and unavoidable death we all face, which puts everything into a perspective that one cannot explain, or escape the existential reality of.
In my first few days here (and this is not new to me at all) there is a crisis of meaning. Like an old friend (well, arguably an enemy, but the smile on my face as I consider this familiarity and knowing too how to deal with it, does seem to suggest 'friend' in the sense of bearably amusing), I am stalked by those 'same same' questions: What is this all about? What am I doing here anyway? Is it the right thing? (is there ever a 'right' thing?). Am I good enough for anything? Predictably the ideas of intimacy and solitude rattle inside my brain as I again go through the dynamics and meaning of past and current relationships.
I (as always) wonder if I am alone in all this. Of course I am not alone. Existential angst is notably commonplace in world literature
and other artistic expression of all kinds. And yet I continue to look at the seeming 'happiness' of others leading 'normal' lives. Of course, scratch the surface and all is not as it appears in those lives. All is relative.
Thankfully for me, it does settle, but never disappears. There is solace in my routines. Call them
dharma practice or
sadhana or, depending on one's mood and viewpoint, obsessive distracting behaviour. I know the drill... and it does work for me: Watch, embrace, be aware, let go, stop the chatter, and act. You see, I have no illusion about lasting happiness. I believe in happiness and it's pursuit and yet..... the pursuit is not the thing. Happiness seems to me to be a by-product, a bonus, for the doing and not-doing that brings an inner calmness; a confrontation with the unknown or unimaginable or unexpected. I am 'happiest' when I 'find' myself in situations that just are.... not planned as such.... not constructed as such. Sure this too cannot always be the whole story. We act in this world... we put ourselves into situations we believe to have more chance to make us happy (but funnily, or not, we also tend to put ourselves again and again in situations where we just know if we stopped to think about it, have almost no chance of making us happy.... so go figure).
My view from the house down the valley is somehow timeless, and at the same time ever changing. Straight across from me the steep escarpment is thick with texture and hue. I never seem to tire looking into that richness. It tells me of my fortune to be here. It shames me for my moments of panic. I have so much. My material welfare is seemingly assured. I am healthy. All can pass of course. But for the moment I am a king here.
A prophet in the middle of a desert tells a traveller who is dying of thirst that all he needs is water. There is no water, replies the traveller. Yes, the prophet agrees, but if there was you would not be thirsty and you would not die. So I will die, says the traveller. Not if you drink water, replies the prophet. From 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' by Richard Flannagan
This morning I woke up with a smile.
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Marguerite
non-member comment
Brilliant
I wagged class to read this blog :).....................and it is, as the title states BRILLIANT - with hugs!!!