T’ai Chi has been good for me in different ways, but at this late stage in my life it mostly serves to reveal the state of my physical, mental, and emotional health: it’s all there, the good, the bad and the ugly, in the three rounds I do that close my morning sesshin. On very occasional days cohesion between mind and body is seamless, but more usually my concentration drifts in and out of focus; regardless, I do my best.
A few days ago as I was doing my rounds something surprising happened: out of nowhere a wave of nostalgia washed over me and I was flooded with a sense of loss, a feeling of certainty that I would never again experience the liberating upheaval of my middle years when the spiritual work I did with the Arica School broke open the depressive dam I was imprisoned behind. I was suddenly afraid that something vital in me had withered and died.[1] After my final round of T’ai Chi I checked the plants near the living-room window to see if they needed watering; they did; I watered them; I gazed abstractedly at the trees swaying in the wind along the back lane; then I re-filled the water bowl belonging to Xuan Zhang and Sun Wukong and the one belonging to the three Buddhas gracing the butcher’s block table in the hallway. After putting a load of laundry in the washing machine I made some breakfast, read while I ate, and as I read I became aware that the force of whatever had brought me low had begun to fade.
*
Although I am an ordinary man, all my life I have harboured what I think of as an extraordinary longing, but I am unable to describe what it is I long for, or even if it is “extraordinary” in the normal sense of the word. This longing has no substance, no qualities I can identify as exceptional; it is without form and is entirely subjective. Nevertheless, it exerts a powerful hold over me. There is a tantalising reference to this kind of yearning in Peter Matthiessen’s book, The Snow Leopard, where he says:
In the longing that starts one on the path is a kind of homesickness, and some way, on this journey, I have started home. Homecoming is the purpose of my practice.
Matthiessen’s words suggest a gravitational pull towards something that may not be anything more substantial than a feeling. Something like this touched me just before I reached adolescence: witness a child kneeling silently at the altar in St Vinnie’s, bell in hand, waiting to signal the consecration of the bread and wine in the Roman Catholic mass. I was born and bred a Catholic, as were most of the other children in the parish, and the Latin mass was just one strand in the fabric of our indoctrination, or faith, which we knew it as then. Apart from serving at mass and an occasional Benediction, orthodox religion played only a very small part in my life, but here, on the high altar, I was a bona fide actor in the transfiguration of the wafer and the wine into the body and blood of Christ, the magic moment declared to the sparse congregation by the tinkling of my bell, a tiny sound that breached the early morning silence of the church. Afterwards I returned home and got ready for the long journey to school.
As I near the middle of my eighth decade and memory grows more unreliable I fret whether the tableau I am describing may be defective in some way, even untruthful. Yet there isn’t a great deal to depict: what I see in my mind’s eye is as composed and motionless as a still life, and as there’s almost nothing going on, there is barely anything to embellish. Yet the memory evokes an inexplicable feeling of tenderness towards the little boy in cassock and surplice, sticking up out of the past like a solitary flag flapping in the wind, his heart moved by an impulse that wrested him out of bed at an unconscionably early hour each weekday morning and propelled him through empty streets to a near empty church to tinkle a little bell in a cold stone space where no one took any notice of him. I think of the small events of these mornings as the inklings of a nascent spiritual energy which hasn’t changed a great deal in the intervening years; its emergence so early in my life is a glimmer of “the longing that starts one on the path”, and it has been tugging at me ever since.
*
Each day I woke up with a thick head and aches in my neck and shoulders from sleeping on the earth. After climbing out of my sleeping bag I peed in the long grass before brewing up some coffee. Wrapped up well in the comfort of a camping chair, hot coffee to hand, I scanned the heavens for breaks in the clouds being blown about by the Atlantic winds; there wasn’t a lot of sun to be seen here in late June. Mercifully, the rain, when it came, fell during the night, its noisy pattering on the sides of our canvas tent usually enough to wake me. I left Sophia and Owain undisturbed while I drank my coffee and debated whether I had the energy to do some calisthenics.
Despite a pre-bedtime, 10-minute session with a eucalyptus infused inhaler, slatherings of vapour rub on his chest, and Chinese cough sweets filled with honey, Owain’s coughing fits – along with his hay fever induced sneezing and nose blowing – mangled our slumber every night. None of the medication his mum and I plied him with seemed to have much effect, and it was only on the last night of our two-week sojourn in the Highlands that he slept soundly, due, he insisted, to quaffing three bottles of beer around a dying campfire before retreating to his sleeping bag.
But I wasn’t doing great. My addled state stemmed from the disappearance of my meditation practise after arriving on the island; I didn’t do any T’ai Chi either, and virtually no calisthenics. In the past when we’ve been travelling I’ve usually been disciplined enough to keep some remnants of my morning routine going, but on this trip the props supporting my inner life dropped away: the challenge of keeping to a meditation regimen with a sleep deprived brain and body in a tent on a cold and blustery hilltop in the Outer Hebrides defeated me; as the days went by my head became a sealed, fog-filled room with nowhere for light to enter. This is normal for me if I don’t meditate or practice T’ai Chi, the lucidity of a clear mind vanishes in the tumult that passes for ordinary consciousness. I didn’t talk with my wife or son about how beggared I was feeling; I didn’t know what I could I have said; best to just get on with stuff that needs to be done, I thought, and try to resist the lassitude creeping over me.
Our tent was pitched on a croft belonging to my wife’s younger brother, Calum. At this time of year he operated an open house policy to allow people to camp on his land who had come to celebrate the Summer Solstice at the 3,000 year old Callanish Stones situated hard by his croft. There were a dozen or more tents set up, most of them occupied by young potheads. Spliffs were shared in a capacious, tent-like structure referred to as “The Bender,” which had been erected by Calum to function as a social space for visitors. The Bender loosely resembled a large bell tent, with a drystone dyke where the skirt would be; its circular roof of overlapping canvas and plastic tarpaulins held up at its centre by a shaved tree trunk, with the tarpaulin drapes sloping down over the dyke and secured with stout rope and big stakes.
The heavy odour of marijuana was ever present in the Bender, or so it seemed when I passed by to fill up our water bottles or retrieve Caoimhe, our collie, who liked to hang out near the croft’s gate, watching the camper van dogs running around outside.
Being forced to inhale tobacco and drug fumes is repellent to me, so I was reluctant to socialise with the stoners in The Bender or when they were getting high around the campfire at night. The odour of marijuana has become so noxious to me I flinch if I catch a whiff of it; ironic really, given how attached I was to smoking dope when I was a young man.
The discomfort I feel if I involuntarily inhale dope fumes originates in my mid-20s when I attended a two week-long Transcendental Meditation retreat at the University of Birmingham. In one of his video lectures the Maharishi explained that it is impossible to meditate if you have been consuming drugs such as marijuana and that it takes two weeks to flush the residual effects of the drug from the body. I never forgot that: so I hold my breath if I catch the smell of hashish or marijuana somewhere around me: I don’t want that stuff entering my body, even in micro amounts, because of my fear of it impacting on my meditation practice.
But I was not insensitive to my anti-social behaviour on the croft, and more to mollify my sociable wife and son I found a spot around the campfire once or twice. But there were no cordial interlocutors to spark off, and I failed to strike up a conversation with anybody; the potheads must have had me down as a dreary old fart. As well as continuous drug consumption a lot of alcohol was being guzzled by the clannish potheads; there was no place for a sober old guy in their boozy, drug soaked community. On one evening I depressingly observed a young fellow selling a different, more potent looking drug from an eye-dropper to one of the visitors; I left the campfire and returned to our tent, pitched about 100 metres from The Bender, as far away from Dope World as it was possible to be.
On Midsummer’s Eve I retreated to my sleeping bag early. It was unseasonably cold and I was listless and bored. Sophia and Owain had joined the late night revellers collecting around the Stones to celebrate the Solstice, and most likely were enjoying some drug and alcohol fun into the bargain. Don’t get me wrong: neither of them are drug abusers; they partake occasionally, but when they’re at it I stay out of the way. I don’t know when they returned to the tent but I was woken up in the night by Owain coughing.
*
It was scary: the tent had turned into a tumble dryer and my head was rolling around inside it. I needed to remain absolutely immobile, I knew that as I’d endured a similar, more intense experience of paroxysmal positional vertigo once before, a few years ago: as I rose to get out of bed one morning for a pee the bedroom suddenly unhinged from its moorings and I was overwhelmed by an uncontrollable dizziness; it took some time before I was able to get to the bathroom – by holding on to the walls. This crazy loss of equilibrium took hours to sort itself out and it was several days before I returned to feeling normal.
I lay motionless until I felt composed enough to climb out of my sleeping bag and ease my way into the fresh air; I sat in a camping chair and began taking deep breaths. I was shaken, no doubt about that.
We had come to a campsite in Morayshire the night before because Owain’s Edinburgh pipe band were participating in the European Piping Championships in Inverness the following day, and I had to take him to the venue. Given what had just happened, driving was definitely unwise; but where was the choice? I couldn’t not take the boy to an event he’d been anticipating with excitement for months. I explained to my wife what had just occurred and how unsteady I was on my feet, and now it was her turn to be worried. We decided not to tell Owain, still sleeping, about the events of the morning. It was a nerve wracking trip for the driver, but I was on high alert and drove very carefully; and the boy was none the wiser about his chauffeur’s shaky condition. After dropping him off we picked up some supplies at a supermarket and drove to a hill on the edge of the city, Craig Phadrig (Patrick’s Rock), where we climbed and walked contentedly in the sunshine. When we picked up the boy at the end of the afternoon I was much recovered. We spent a couple more days exploring before breaking camp. Owain and I said goodbye to Sophia at the city bus station – she was away to spend a few days with her 80 year-old mother, who was recovering from a mild stroke – before setting off on the long drive home.
Not for a minute did I anticipate being near felled with exhaustion after returning to the city; I wanted more than anything to take to my bed, but I couldn’t; there was too much to do: the hire car needed to be cleaned and returned, our damp canvas tent had to be unpacked and draped over the stairwell balustrade to dry out; the myriad bits and pieces of camping gear had each to be stowed away; the fridge was bare and I needed to go out and get groceries; there was a collie that needed to be fed and walked and meals to organise for a boy; and never mind the mountain of smelly laundry demanding attention. I was in a wretched state and needed to sleep so much I thought I might have been ill.
*
For the first few mornings at Calum’s croft, as Sophia and Owain slept, I drifted, my “journey” ditched temporarily. It was like being disconnected from the fountainhead, but I had no option but to wait out the time until I was in a position to tap into it again. I thought I would resume my morning routine the day after returning home, but three days went by before I was able to return to the mat.
After my wife came home from her mother’s I mentioned to her I had a tickle at the back of my throat: her too, she said. Soon afterwards the pair of us were coughing, infected with the same virus that had afflicted Owain. Four weeks of coughing, coughing, coughing ensued, in tandem with the raft of unpleasant symptoms associated with bronchitis. In the middle of the second week I tried meditating again, but it was impossible: I was too sickly. I returned to the mat at the beginning of the third week, resolving to sit, regardless. It was a challenge, the mechanical reaching for tissues to wipe away the snot leaking from my nose; the fogged brain that wouldn’t clear as I argued with myself about why I was turning meditation into an endurance contest. “This is absurd,” I thought; nevertheless, I persevered. At the end of each sesshin I remained on the zabuton for a few minutes more to gather my wits before clearing up the mess of tissues around my feet. Even though I had a thick head, a dripping nose, and a sore chest, I felt psychologically fitter from returning to the mat; there, the vexation of separation fell away and I felt at least that I had “started home,” albeit with clay feet. [2]
*
Last night I dreamed I was visiting the Samyê-Ling Tibetan Centre and was in conversation with Akong Rinpoche, the senior monk there. He was sweeping leaves along a culvert and as he swept I asked him: “Why is it, when I think of Samyê-Ling, I cry?” Before he was able to reply I woke up. A year-long sojourn in my early ’20s at his meditation centre in the Scottish Lowlands had been a life altering experience: I was young and wanted to meditate, and here I was, living cheek by jowl with Buddhist monks and meditating three, sometimes four times a day; I worked selflessly for the Samyê-Ling community and lived in an A-frame hut – with a woodburning stove – within gurgling distance of the River Esk, and for the first time ever I could identify and pick wild flowers. It was a nourishing life, radically different to what I had left behind. Living and working at Samyê-Ling, as with the Arica work, fed into my craving for a spiritual life; my imaginary tears are simply a clue to a hunger I have never been able to assuage. The nostalgia attached to my remembrance of how Samyê-Ling and Arica changed my life points to a sense of loss, the realisation that those liberating times won’t ever be revived.[3]
*
Loss has no end or limit; disturbances of all kinds swirl with the weight of hammers; worries and anxieties fall like rain; knots and afflictions sometimes seem ever present. I have never found meditation a straight or even an easy road. It’s not even a road; there is no direction as such. It’s taken me a lifetime to learn how to be satisfied with simply sitting: the mundane, quotidian problems that beset aspirant meditators such as myself cling like chewing gum to the sole of my spiritual shoes.
Buddhist monks don’t have to answer the doorbell for a mail delivery when they’re meditating, but they might hear builders nearby, busy hammering or cutting or sanding, or there might even be a police helicopter hovering somewhere round about; there will be dogs barking, for sure, and random shouting, or the hubbub of fellow monks chatting outside the meditation hall. On some days they might have to absorb the clatter of a refuse truck emptying the monastery’s rubbish bins, and there’ll be the noise of cars driving by. Presumably they sit through the din with customary stoicism. Though I am no monk, this is what I have been trying to do for years, the difference being that I am easily distracted by neighbourhood noise. It’s a mystery to me why I waited so long to rearrange my morning routine to address this. The solution was surprisingly simple: start my routine when the streets were empty and everyone still asleep.
When I wake up, if I have been plagued with bad dreams the nerve fibres of the adrenal glands – which are tied to the solar plexus and react to stress – will have contracted into a knot, and this makes diaphragm breathing during meditation difficult. Untangling this snarled bundle of nerves requires sustained mental relaxation; by consciously allowing such longings as the desire for calm, inner space, stillness, to drop away, the breath, though initially frustratingly shallow, is allowed to be how it is. There are no short cuts: one proceeds gently, then more gently, then even gentler than that, until inhalation and exhalation become effortless, by which time the adrenal glands will have untied themselves. I’ve had a lifetime of bad dreams and this process of letting go is what I do on many, many days. But not every day.
Sitting so early, as I do now, the only noise to be heard is the cooing of the pigeons on the roof and the occasional shrieks of passing seagulls. My wife doesn’t understand why I have to tumble out of bed at such an unconscionable hour, and I don’t really get it either. I am consumed by a propulsive longing I cannot quench, whose origins and purpose are beyond my ken.[4] Here I am, with a steadfastness birthed eons ago in a child’s cold bedroom in a third floor Council flat near the docks: a little boy become an old man who is still piling out of bed before the crack of dawn – full circle, eh? – on a mission to sit straight and count breaths.
Everything falls away, everything ends, including the body perched on the zabuton. There might be other ways to look at this austere reality, but I confess I know of only one way, to stare it down from the mat.
I met a famous poet once on a visit to Samyê-Ling who, at the age of 65, was ordained as a Zen monk and spent five years at the Mt Baldy Zen Center in Los Angeles. Leonard Cohen wrote of that time:
“Sitting in the meditation hall for four or five hours a day, you kind of get straight with yourself.”
Cohen’s modesty is very appealing and his orientation chimes with my own: nearing the end of all things I have ceased to aspire to anything more than getting straight with myself.
[1] The word “nostalgia” is composed of Greek words for “homecoming” and “pain.” The Swiss physician who first used the term, in 1688, considered (nostalgia) a serious condition, a disease of the mind that weakened the body. The physician’s case studies included the story of a girl sent to a faraway hospital to recover from a bad fall. That girl began to refuse food and medicine, and would only repeat, “I want to go home.” The physician recommended treating the early stages of nostalgia by distracting the patient, inducing vomiting, and opening a vein for bleeding. If all that failed, the only option that remained was to return the patient to their native land. This, he observed, often resulted in a full recovery.
For hundreds of years, nostalgia continued to be considered a mental illness or a neurological disorder. Anyone could suffer from nostalgia, but it particularly plagued the displaced, and as late as 1938 it was described as an “immigrant psychosis.” Even now, nostalgia remains a pitiable condition in the popular imagination – not dangerous or life-threatening, but sentimental and backward-looking
Eula Bliss; “The Theft of the Commons”; New Yorker magazine; June 8, 2022.
[2] As it turned out, I was struggling with the onset of pneumonia.
[3] See post: “3 Monks, a Fraud, & a Coalminer”; November 11, 2014.
[4] Scottish verb meaning “Beyond one’s range of knowledge or understanding”.
Endless Buddhas 
Lovely writing Mr. A.
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