Author: Karen Richards

In the last of our posts on the theme of Lost and Losing, Anna Aysea describes her experience of training with pain. This post, which is a little longer than our usual, recommended word count, first appeared on the blog Jade Mountains and has recently been republished in the Portland Buddhist Priory Newsletter.

Due to orthopaedic surgeries and treatments, I have been dealing with long periods of excessive physical pain. Because of my body’s condition, being without pain is a rare thing in general. So training with pain is a necessity. The following is an excerpt of sorts, some bits and pieces on my personal dealings with pain. I guess what I am learning, in the process is, in essence, applicable to any form of difficulty or adversary we may encounter in daily life.

Unbearable?

When in hospital, several times a day, you are asked to assess your pain level by giving it a rating between 0 and 10, zero being no pain, ten being unbearable pain. This made me reflect on the meaning of unbearable. There have been times when  the agony I was in completely filled the whole of consciousness, excluding all else, and I felt it was utterly unbearable. But having reached unbearable nothing much happens really, you do not drop dead, you do not explode in pieces, you do not vanish out of existence. Having reached unbearable you just continue to live, your heart simply continuing to beat. The truth is, despite the agony being unbearable, you continue to bear it, anyway. So, however excessive, I thought it would be contrary to the truth to rate my pain a level 10, since if it was truly unbearable I reckon I would have dropped dead. I think this is an important distinction to be aware of when dealing with all kinds of stuff: to see clearly how something feels, how your experience of it is and then how that relates to the truth of how things really are, the bigger reality.

Room for complaint

There is a difference between mild to reasonably severe pain and truly excessive pain in the way that  it affects the mind. With excessive pain there is no escape. It nails your consciousness immovably to a single point, the now, The Reality Of Pain, that reality excludes all else. One has no option but to face it without flinching and to endure it, whether you think you are capable of it or not. With milder forms of pain, there is more room for distraction, room for escape in familiar forms like being grumpy, feeling sorry for oneself, complaining. When I catch myself complaining, sometimes, I smile and think “Actually, if I have room for complaint, I am doing not too bad!”

I should say that the above way of differentiating is for internal use only. I don’t think you can reverse it to make inferences about someone else’s pain based on their “complaint level.” That would be trying to step into another’s shoes, which — apart from being impossible — does not really help and can lead to a judgmental attitude, which is bound to heavily tax whatever is going on.

Preserving resilience

There is nothing that drains your energy more than chronic pain that lasts and lasts without giving you a break. This can be quite exhausting and depressing. What helps me to get through bleak times is to find helpful distractions that lift the mood, like watching movies and television or chatting to friends and ways of relaxing the body as much as possible to minimize the accumulation of tension and stress. But by far the main thing that preserves your resilience in a situation of ceaseless pain is to not give in to gloomy thoughts, to stay focused and to keep looking at the distinction between the feelings, the experience of the now and the truth, the bigger reality of how things really are. Not losing sight of the bigger reality prevents the mind from getting into isolation where you feel all alone in your agony. I guess that loneliness is the most unbearable of all and can make you apathetic or spiral you down into the pits of depression and despair.

Endless night

When dealing with pain, the night-time forms the biggest challenge, since for some reason, everything is multiplied: the pain, the isolation, the loneliness, the arising fears. The nights in the first week after a major surgery, for instance, seem to last eternally.

I remember one such night about two years ago after a particularly extensive operation that took 8 hours. I think it was the third night after the operation. By then, the pain is not only from operation wounds and fractures, but every bone, joint, muscle and tissue hurts after lying in the same posture for days on end, because you cannot move and bedsores start to kick in. Any sense of time completely lost in the mist of the morphine haze from the two morphine drips, I spend the time subsequently by dozing off a little and then looking at the clock on the bedside table, hoping maybe it has advanced at least half an hour, but always to find that it is only a few minutes later than the previous time I checked. Time has become like a rubber band, every minute stretches and stretches and stretches, to infinity, making the dark night last forever. A little after 1:00 am, when the pressure on my spine from lying on my back for days has become terrible, I tried to shift, turn a little to one side, but impossible, I cannot move. I decide to call for the night nurse and see if I can perhaps manage with some help.

This human being

It takes a while before the nurse answers. Must be a busy night. When she finally comes, she enters the room only halfway, staying at a distance from the bed. Not a good sign. It’s dark in the room. Out of the corner of my eye I can only see her silhouette against the light from the open door. I sense agitation emanating from her. Something is not right at all. Throat bone dry and sore from the respiration tube, my voice is a hoarse whisper. Trying to over bridge the distance, I ask if she can help me shift a little to one side. She snaps: “You are not allowed to turn!” This is not true. She knows it and I know it. She is flatly refusing to do something. I’ve been on this ward frequently due to the unending schedule of operations. Notwithstanding the understaffed situation that seems to be common for most health-care institutions, usually the staff here is friendly and helpful, including this nurse, but she has the tendency to become snappy when she is stressed. It is a big ward and there is only one nurse during the night, and a lot of patients recently operated on at the moment, so gathering from her reaction, things must be rather tough tonight. But right now this nurse is the only human being in the whole universe that I’ve got to be there for me in some small way in this dark night, and yet she is not able to. She is very stressed and annoyed; her agitation fills the single-bed hospital room like a dark cloud, intensifying the shadows. I remain silent; I know I am in no position to argue the situation. She hesitates, not quite sure how to read my silence. She then turns abruptly and leaves the room.

Expanding awareness

I am alone in a hospital room 900 kilometres from home in a foreign country. Everything and everyone familiar is far away. It is just over 1.30 am, the worst part of the endless night still to come. A feeling of utter loneliness and abandonment engulfs me like a huge wave. My mind is trapped like a caged bird in this terrible now without escape. I focus to prevent it from being hurled into dark pits of desperation and existential fear opening up all around. The flat rejection of the nurse when I am most vulnerable and helpless is spiralling my mind into withdrawal, into isolation from sheer panic. I somehow need to find my way back. To reverse the withdrawal, I use all the willpower I can summon to focus and to expand my awareness. First to the hospital bed: I feel its size, its robustness, how it supports my aching body together with all the many tubes coming in and out of it; I then expand to feel the space of the room — it is pleasant and spacious; expand to its walls and beyond, to the ward, the fellow patients — lots of them, no doubt in pain and without sleep like me; to the whole hospital, the city, to my friends far away. When my awareness expands to include it all, I become suddenly aware of this stream of love and care coming towards me from all those thinking of me, wishing me well. They may be far away and at sleep now and yet this stream is still pouring forth from them like a river of light. The stream simply leaves no room for feelings of entrapment, despair, loneliness, abandonment, such powerful emotions a moment ago, and yet where did they go? They have simply evaporated in the light of the stream when I was able to reverse the isolation and reconnect. The darkness that fills the room. Where does it go when you turn on the light switch? Like darkness, these feelings, despite their all powerful and overwhelming appearance, don’t seem to have a real substance in the end.

Nothing has changed: the lonely hospital room, the excruciating pain, the endless night ahead, the terrible weariness and exhaustion, all still there. And yet my experience of it now is very different. There is a sense of being carried, being embraced, me and everything I am going through. It is all right to just be and endure without flinching or needing to escape.

This week, Karen Richards writes about her Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) in the second in the series Losing and Lost.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is the feeling of apprehension that one is either not in the know about or missing out on information, events, experiences, or life decisions that could make one’s life better. It was, according to Wikipedia, first identified by a marketing strategist, called Dan Herman, in 1996 and has since been exacerbated by the use of social media. But, the fear of missing or losing out is not a modern phenomenon, though it may have an acronym, now.

I have suffered from a fear of missing out since I was in my early teens. I remember being in awe of the different roads that it was possible to take in life and wanted to take them all!  There were so many subjects that one could study, craft skills that could be acquired, books to be read, and careers that could be had. It caused a sort of existential anxiety that I may die not having experienced all that could be experienced: that I may inadvertently take the wrong path and end up in a dead end, from which I could not escape. I was, passionate and enthusiastic, inquisitive about many things, had a capacity for hard work, and loved to be around interesting people but alongside this passionate enthusiasm was a deep sense of dissatisfaction and an underlying fear that by doing one thing, I was losing out on another.

This often led to me taking jobs that ultimately did not satisfy me and starting projects that I would later abandon, not through boredom but because of a nagging feeling that this was not ‘it’. I remember, at the age of nineteen, when I decided to leave nursing, before completing my training, the Head of the School of Nursing told me, “Nurse, you have the capability, just not the ‘stickability’. How right she was. Ironically, her words ‘stuck’ with me. They helped me to begin questioning why I was not satisfied. So, when I first encountered Buddhism, in my mid-twenties, I was ‘ripe’ to begin discovering, for myself, the root cause of my dissatisfaction, why suffering exists, and how to be still in the midst of it. It takes a lifetime to answer these questions but being willing to meet the fear, head-on is the beginning of understanding.

Like most of us, I have had many challenges in my life, not least of which has been the restrictions that come from being a carer for my invalid husband. As his illness and disability have progressed, both his world and mine have reduced, in the physical sense, to the extent that he is all but housebound and within the house, his world has been reduced to the few meters of space between his bed, the bathroom, and his chair, in the living room. As his carer, this has reduced my world, too. There have been times when that early existential fear of losing out on life has risen within me. The dreams and ambitions of my youth, are still there, in some measure or other. At times, I have been gripped by the claustrophobia of not being able to leave my house and simply walk as long as I wish to, jump on a train, or take a holiday. But this is a distorted view of reality.

Whilst any of these activities can be vehicles for training, they are in no way the goal. They are not the ultimate experience and cannot of themselves bring true satisfaction. The practice of meditation and Buddhist training provides the remedy for existential panic. The medicine for dissatisfaction is to meet life right where it is.

As the late Thich Nhat Hanh has said, ‘The way out is in’.  The reality of this is that no career, hobby, or visit to far-flung countries is as satisfying as the adventure experienced on the journey to meet the True self. The more I get to know myself, the wish to escape lessens and the present moment opens up and offers the True jewel.

This week, we begin a series of posts on the theme of Losing and Lost. Our first contributor is Chris Yeomans who writes about her lived experience of the slow loss that occurs when a partner has Alzheimer’s. It is both moving and relevant.

Alzheimer’s seems to me to be predominantly about loss. And so, to a lesser extent, is old age. I look at myself. I am not that young woman who lived a life decades ago, not the child that young woman once was. And yet of course there is a continuous thread in my brain, and in the brains of those who know me, which are the memories of some of those times. Selective of course. Defective certainly. But there is a certain consistency and some agreement with friends and family that they broadly represent a shared reality.

Dementia disrupts that thread. Memories are simply lost, never to be recovered. And with those memories also some recognition of patterns of behaviour. I behave in the way that I do because I have a memory of how I have behaved in similar situations, that behaviour born of genetics, circumstances, and conditioning. I can modify it to a very small extent, but I am unlikely to be able to change it completely.

The challenge of relating to someone with dementia is that those patterns no longer exist. The brain changes mean that the very person changes and seems no longer to be who they once were. That is loss of course. The loss of a person. Except that it is difficult to accept the grief of the loss because that person is still here. That body/mind continues to live a life, but the brain, which controls all things, has changed. The loved physical manifestation of that person does not now represent quite what it did. And that is a hard thing to get your head around.

I have changed too. I am not that young woman from way back. My body doesn’t do anything like the things it used to do. I am slow. I am stiff. I have lost youth and flexibility. My husband now looks like an old man in ways that he didn’t ten years ago. Change. Loss. The basics of human life.

Change is hard. I find myself caring for someone who is no longer the person that he used to be. That person has changed into someone that I wouldn’t, sometimes, necessarily, find it easy to be with or relate to. And so I have to deal all the time with the question of acceptance. And that too is quite tricky. In relationships, there are lines to be drawn. There are things we can accept and things that we challenge. But in a relationship with someone with an impaired brain, there is no point in trying to challenge, as there can be no learning or changing without memory. The person I live with has changed but is not yet a complete stranger. And even with increased mental impairment, that body will continue to remind me of the person who once engaged with me. It will be hard, I’m sure.

This week, Karen Richards explores the reasons that we have borders and boundaries and what life would be like without them.

My neigbour brought me samosas and birthday cake, left over from a party. We chatted, by my open front door, on a warm September evening. I invited him in and he thanked me but did not cross the threshold.

Instead, we ‘put the world to rights’, on the doorstep. He asked after my husband’s health and I about that of his mother and father.; an exchange of pleasantries. sincerely meant, we turned our talk to food and family, hopes and fears.

He told me he dreamed of a community in which we all came together to pool our resources in a common space, with a commonly shared garden in which to grow things, to sit and take time to talk to one another.  I smiled and said I had the same vision. That, when I look out of the bedroom window, and see the little patchwork squares of garden, each one sectioned off by larch lap fence panels, I sometimes want to rush out and flatten those boundaries to make one great quilt of land; to say, ‘Hey, let’s share this space, arrange it with benches and a communal vegetable plot, flowers beds and a little firepit to sit around, fairy lights and a games area for the kids”. A place to talk and laugh and not be islands, sufficient only to ourselves but to enjoy our oneness and interdependence.

We basked in this possibility for a while, as if we had just discovered something new and achievable but, when I eventually thanked him again for the food and closed the door, I went once more to my bedroom window and gazed on the very different plots of land below me. It was a nice idea but perhaps an unobtainable ideal. For, without boundaries, my wild, cottage-style patch would creep out into next door’s neat, minimalist garden and my energetic lurcher dog would torment Ruby, the cockerpoo, that lives at number 4. Watching the children playing and digging in the dirt would, perhaps, be an idyll to some and an annoyance to others. Would we live in utopian harmony, or would we come to resent that we did not have a space to call our own, unique to us, to express ourselves on our own terms?

Across the globe, there are bigger patches of land, each with its own borders. The inhabitants of these patches mostly live in harmony with those on the other side of the fence and some, sadly, do not. Some share the same space but are so different from one another that finding common ground is difficult. Others see beyond the differences and try to make it work.

Borders and boundaries have their usefulness. There is a protective nature to them that provides us with the privacy and peace to be ourselves. At the same time, they can compound the notion that we are separate from one another, becoming a barrier to seeing life as it truly is and enjoying the fruits of our oneness with all life. It is a lifetime’s work to flatten our own fences and enjoy that oneness. Better to start sooner than later.

I hope you enjoy this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugrAo8wEPiI

This week, we begin a new series of posts on the theme of Borders, Boundaries, and Barriers. Our first post is by Chris Yeomans who writes about the dilemma of knowing when it is good to set boundaries and look to our own needs.

When I saw the headline in a Sunday supplement ‘Ten Ways to Improve Your Life’, I immediately turned to the article. I’m always up for ways of making things better.

The central advice seemed to be to learn to say no, or, as the author put it, to ‘focus on your non-negotiables.’

It sounds so easy. Ring-fence what is important to you and don’t allow others’ demands to impinge on those things. But the reality is that I struggle with this. I struggle to work out exactly what is important to me and whether it is worth making a fuss about. Is it more important to finish something I’m doing, or to go and help my husband sort out his computer muddles? Would it be good to cook something I like for dinner, even while knowing that other members of the family like it less?

Of course, what eventually happens is the build-up of resentment, which results in irritability or bad temper. It is all too easy to think ‘What’s good to do here?’ but to ignore the fact that meeting my own needs might be just as good to do as meeting the needs of other people.

Then there is “Do the next thing’ or ‘Do the work that comes to you.’ And this encouragement seems so often to be calling upon me to be endlessly unselfish and compassionate and to set my own needs and wishes aside. Because when I look at them closely, often what I want doesn’t really seem to matter that much. It doesn’t much matter what I eat, if my television programme is turned off or if I am interrupted in a task. In the big picture, none of it is really that important. Or is it?

So then we come to boundaries. I’m not sure that I’m terribly good at keeping my boundaries. I try so hard to be accepting, to be tolerant, to work on my ‘opinions’, to try not to have expectations. These are all good to do, of course. These are all fundamental to our practice.

But sometimes, perhaps I could reflect that, in order to be able to keep on giving out and doing things for others, I need occasionally to do things for myself. To feed my soul maybe. To give myself the strength to keep on keeping on. “Always going on beyond…’

 

The Dew on the Grass team has taken a break, during the month of August. Now, as a rather overcast summer turns into a spectacularly beautiful Autumn, it is back with another post, on the dual themes of Darkness and Light.

On rereading Chris Yeomans’s July post, in which she explores her sense of being “a terrestrial, and part of this creation”, leading to a realisation of having “no separate existence”, I was reminded of my own experience of Oneness, which occurred in a dream not long after I had begun practicing meditation some years ago. Although the circumstances and background ‘scenery’ are different in these two accounts, I believe that what they point to is the same. See what you think.

I sit in an empty space, with no sense of material substance around me. There is no light and no darkness, either. Simply, there is an endless absence of anything. As I sit in this emptiness, I suddenly become aware of myself as a separate being and I panic.

After some time in a state of sheer terror, I begin to steady my breathing, calm myself, and settle back into meditation, but this time I am meditating as an act of will in full acceptance of what appears to be empty, grey nonexistence. The premise of my acceptance is that if all that exists is the mind of meditation, then I will meditate for eternity, be content with that, and want nothing more. As I sit with this newly found acceptance, something miraculous happens; the hitherto empty space fills with light – it shimmers with a brightness akin to stars and mirrors but are not stars and mirrors but something unique and I am in joyful awe.

To some, this account may sound ‘off the wall’, but when I awoke, the next morning, a change had occurred. I was still me, with all my own biology, opinions, and difficulties of daily life. I still had all the attributes of a quite separate human being and at the same time, I knew with certainty that I was not separate from anything in the Universe.

Knowing this transforms the way we view the world. It does not make us immune to suffering, our own or other people’s, if anything, as we soften up and develop awareness, we feel it all the more, but we begin to understand the heart of it and the compassion within it. And this makes all the difference.

*****

 

 

This week, as part of our “Where I Sit” series, Karen Richards takes us with her on her ‘Respite Day”, which she sees as a gift.

It is respite day. Not a whole day, but my son and daughter-in-law come and look after my husband for a few hours so that I can get a break.

I head off in the car, free to choose where the tyres tread, unsure of my destination. In my rucksack is my laptop and a notebook and pen, a gift from a friend. Its virgin pages have been calling for some time. I have the need to write and walk. I will do both.

Still unsure of where I will end up, I have a thought, and pull up in a lay-by to check my purse. It’s there. My National Trust card. Half an hour later, I arrive at Attingham Park.; several acres of sprawling fields and woodland, with the River Severn running through them.

It is still only 9.30 am and already the carpark is filling up with vehicles, from which emerge couples and families and, from almost all it seems, a dog. It is buzzing. Is this really where I want to be? I think so.

I head for the coffee shop; the walking will come later, but for now, I will write. I buy a large mug of coffee – the price of a seat at a table, and a welcome pick-me-up. A sip and then I flip up the screen of my laptop and open up a document that I have been working on for some time.

It doesn’t take long to slip into the zone. All around me, people drink and eat and talk but I am cocooned in a cave of creativity, and an hour and a half passes, almost imperceptibly;  just the thread of thought that flows through my mind, my fingers, the tapping of the keyboard and other people’s conversations, like swarms of half-muted bees about my being. They are reassuring. I am alone in my industry and yet not alone. It is a good place to be.

Time for a walk.

I head off, through fields of deer, along the side of the river, and then another choice: the shorter but busier route or the longer one, through a wooded wilderness. I opt for the latter. As I walk, all thoughts of what I was writing slowly diminish. Other thoughts push their way in and then exit just as quickly. I become aware of my feet, how they move, how they connect to the earth. It is warm but every so often, a shower of rain. A breeze picks up, rustling branches and the grasses along the path. Occasionally, people pass by me and we exchange a word or a nod of acknowledgment and then walk on.

An expanding awareness of my surroundings draws me into a thicket, where I am alone, except for the birds and the breeze and that sublime odour of wetted leaves and decomposing wood. I press my back against a tree trunk and let my body relax. A joy springs up and I am grateful for this time, this place.

And then a prompting to move on. Don’t stay, keep moving. Soon, I meet the river again, and three carefully honed and placed logs, invite me to sit. I meditate.

 

 

The gifted notebook calls from my rucksack and I reach in and take it from its little bag. It is quite beautiful, with its cover of purple and pattern of sea creatures in turquoise, orange and yellow. As I open it, a previously unseen card falls from between the pages. The beautiful head of a Kanzeon* on one side and a message from the giver, on the other. I am moved to tears.

I look up. People, children and dogs cross over the river, via a bridge. Someone asks me the way to the deer park and I point, with some scant instructions and a nod. Time to move on. It is idyllic here but an inner prompting calls time.

As I walk, I realise that I have joined the main path and it becomes quite crowded. A children’s playground is to my right and to my left, small clearings where benches have been placed. I begin to take photographs of these sitting places – lots of them! All are thoughtfully positioned to give rest to weary walkers. I sit on some but not for long. I need to eat.

Returning to the coffee shop, I order lunch and take a long slow drink of water. I chat to the waiters and smile at the children of a family, across the way, all restless to be somewhere else other than sitting at a table.

 

Out in the courtyard, a choir begins to sing contemporary songs. People stop to listen. For a short time, so do I but it feels like it is time to head home, where I am greeted by cheerful voices and a hot drink. Stepping out for a while makes it easier to step back in. This is my life. It is good. It is the place where I sit. It is a gift.

* Kanzeon (Japanese), also known as Avalokitesvara (Sanskrit) or Kuan Yin (Chinese), is the Bodhisattva of Compassion, in Buddhism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week, under the theme of Wiki -What I Know (or don’t know) Is – Karen Richards recounts an ancient tale about a Buddhist monk and a strawberry and what the story means to her.

A friend once told me a story about a Buddhist monk who, in ancient times, was chased to the edge of a cliff, by bandits. At the very moment that the monk fell, he spotted a  wild strawberry, growing from the cliff face. He reached out, plucked it, and smiling to himself, ate it. “Ah, what a delicious strawberry,” he said. Then fell to his death.

When I first heard this story, my initial response was one of awe at a strawberry growing out of a rock face. Arguably though, this is not the meaning that either the author or indeed the teller of the story was pointing to!

Indeed, it is an interesting tale and, unpicking it a little, one which has layers of possible meaning. Perhaps, if a snapshot of the falling monk, picking the ripe strawberry, were to be circulated on social media today, for instance, it might have the caption, ” Eat the strawberry while you can, life is short!”, in the style of many such parables attributed to different celebrities and commentators from Keanu Reeves to the Buddha, himself. To relax and enjoy all that life has to offer is not bad advice but I’m fairly sure that that isn’t what is being pointed to, either.

Then, there is the possibility that the story is about ‘being in the moment’. For although, when the monk fell from the cliff there was the potential for his physical death, as he saw, plucked, and then ate the strawberry, he was still very much alive. These were the moments before his death; the death moment was yet to come.  Expanding a little further, even as we approach the end of our lives, when death seems all-consuming and inevitable, each moment is a moment unique to itself, and is as bright as the strawberry, a jewel shining in the outwardly barren and desolate rock face.

To quote Eckhart Tolle, in his book “Oneness with All Life”,

“Time is seen as the endless succession of moments, some ‘good’, some ‘bad’ – yet, if you look more closely, that is to say, through your own immediate experience, you find that there are not many moments at all. You discover that there is only ever this moment. Life (and death) is always now”

Yet, even this profound explanation is not quite ‘it’ for me. Initial responses, though sometimes seeming superficial, often hold what is true for us at the time that we hear a teaching,  a line of scripture, see a piece of art, read a poem, or get some friendly advice. So, going back to my more visceral reaction to the complete awesomeness of a strawberry growing on a mountainside, it feels to me that the strawberry, with its bright burgeoning potentiality, encapsulates that which lies both within and beyond all concept of now, then or maybes. It is the eternal nature of all things, the universe itself; ripe and shining. I like to think that this is what the monk saw in that strawberry and that is why he took the time to appreciate and consume* it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It had been “a bit of a day”. My husband, recently discharged home from hospital, was “all at sea”. Impatient with himself for not being able to do the things he wanted to do, hot and bothered by the June heatwave, frustrated by failing eyesight and gradual hearing loss, his mood was low. For my part, my usual patience was wearing thin. Moment by moment, trying to fix things that could not be fixed – our voices, flowing back from one to another, sounded tetchy. Each time we spoke, we missed each other’s meaning by a mile.

And then, as the day was closing and I had helped him back into his bed, I stepped out into my backyard in the fading light of evening, and there I saw it. That, which only a few hours ago had still been green in parts, was now a fat red strawberry, in the shape of a heart. I instantly remembered the story of the monk on the clifftop.

It was a beautiful fruit, full of brightness; complete of itself. I took my phone and photographed it before gently plucking it from its stem. I took it indoors and, collecting a small knife from the kitchen en route, I went into my husband’s room. He was still awake. I held up the strawberry and he smiled. Then, taking the knife, I split it down the middle and gave him half.

He took it from me. “You shared it with me!” he said, before eating it.

“Yes”, I said “Good night!”

 

* Consume, in this sense, is to hear the Dharma.

 

 

 

In our final post, on the theme of Bright, Karen Richards reflects on why she does not share the view of TS Eliot when he claims that “April is the Cruellest Month” in his poem, The Wasteland.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

Thomas Stern Eliot

Eliot’s opening lines of The Wasteland have been ruminating in my mind, recently. It is April and, as suggested in the poem, the life that has been slumbering below ground, and on bush and tree, have stirred with the ‘spring rain’ and life, that was out of sight, during the winter months, is well and truly visible, again.

The statement, ‘April is the cruellest month’ has had literary commentators discussing its meaning, for decades. When I first read it, back in my English A level days, I took it to mean that April is full of promise, with lighter days, buds and fruit blossoms, camellias in full bloom and cheerful daffodils and tulips but that it doesn’t always deliver the brightness that we have been craving, with its rainstorms and cold winds, as in our present April.

This is as good an interpretation as any, although it is generally accepted that, written in 1922, it is essentially a poem about the spiritual state of Europe, where people prefer to be asleep to their spiritual nature, to live their ‘little life with dried tubers’, enjoying the winter, which ‘kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow’ because they don’t have to take spiritual responsibility for themselves. If this is Elliot’s true meaning, I find it rather harsh and judgemental. I see people taking responsibility and revealing their True hearts, all the time.

If you enjoy poetry, particularly the art of poetry, it is well worth reading The Wasteland in its entirety, if you have never done so – though I suggest you do it with your feet up, a mug of brew and an open mind. It is technically brilliant, though strewn with puritanical judgements, which reflects Eliot’s tortured state of mind, during its writing, following the breakdown of his marriage and committal of his wife to a mental institution.

So, why is this poem in my mind right now, apart from it being April, of course? And why has it dominated my thoughts, whenever I have come to write on this month’s theme of Bright? Perhaps, because there are times when the world, nations and individual people appear to live in perpetual winter and it can seem like we are existing in the Wasteland, where compassion, love and wisdom have been buried deep beneath the ‘forgetful snow’. Times when all seems lost and there is no hope. Or times when there is hope but we haven’t the physical capacity to fulfil our heartfelt dreams. The world is in such a state as this, right now, don’t you think?

Yet lilacs do breed ‘out of the dead land’. Lotus blossoms flower because their roots are nourished by the mud into which their roots are secured. And when we are personally in despair, the simple act of looking up at the sky can change our viewpoint, both physically and spiritually. If you have never tried this, it is highly recommended. In winter or in spring, our spiritual ‘blossoming’ is in our own control. So, I am sceptical of Eliot’s Wasteland imagery and, great though the poem may be, I find its bleak despondency and moral judgement not to my taste.

Because for every dark night of the soul, there is a bright awakening. For every dark winter, there is a spring. And, come to think of it, whatever the weather, April is not the cruellest month, at all, merely a state of light and darkness, of warmth and cold. The bright nature of things revealed.

Following on from our tribute to Rev. Master Saido Kennaway,  this week, we are publishing the transcript of the eulogy spoken at his funeral, by Karen Richards. At the end of the post, is the youtube link to his funeral, which was held at Telford Crematorium, on Saturday the 18th of March.

I knew Rev Saido for over forty years, as a teacher, fellow Trustee of Telford Buddhist Priory and as a friend, not only to me, my husband David and our family but to the whole Telford Community. Some memories of him stand out like polaroid photographs, with little details still sharp. In others, there is just the sense of a person who truly knew what it meant to be human.

He once explained the process of entering the monastery as a postulant. The trainee stands at the gate, head shaved, new robes on and asks to be let in. He or she is left there for some time, with their alms bowl in hand, as a test of their resolve to train in monastic life. At the end of their wait, they are asked on three occasions, why they wish to enter the monastery. David Kennaway’s answer was. “I wish to live with integrity”. I was impressed by that answer because it struck me that he wasn’t asking for anything. He wasn’t asking for shelter from the world or Enlightenment or anything for himself. Rather he wanted to take an honest look at himself and take responsibility for his life. This pledge, his pledge, has affected us all.

I first met him in the early 1980s. at a weekend retreat held at the home of the late Vajira Bailey, in Bearwood, Birmingham. I was not attending the retreat, myself, but dropping off David my husband. I had made a cake, with dried fruit in it, which, to my horror, had all sunk to the bottom of the tin, during baking. I was prepared to drop David off and duck out as quickly as I could but when she saw the cake, Vajira insisted that I give it to the monks, in person.

She invited me into a room, where R M Daishin and Rev Saido were seated, eating their supper at the table. They made an immediate impression on me – one of those polaroid moments that you never forget. I was introduced, we exchanged a few words, I placed the cake on the table, and left.

At the end of the weekend, I returned to pick up David, this time waiting in the car, outside. As we drove off, I asked how it had all gone. Good, apparently and oh, the monk sent a message for you, “Tell your wife she makes good cake”.

Now, that cake would not have won any prizes, but, the message was a kindness, pointing towards the offering rather than the cake itself and that first meeting set the course for the rest of my life.

We met, on many occasions, in the years that followed, particularly in his role as Lay Ministry Advisor. However, It was when, in the year 2000, when he came to be prior, of Telford Buddhist Priory, that I got to know him well and had the good fortune to learn from him. He had chosen Telford, in part, because it was centrally situated to the places he needed to get to, to continue his work for Angulimala, the Buddhist Prison Chaplaincy Organisation, and for his work for the Network of Buddhist Organisations, as well as his work as the Order’s European Advisor.

He loved the priory building itself and saw it as a great treasure, with its large garden and garage big enough to become a workshop for projects, its light and airy mediation room and the kitchen’s in-built, deep fat fryer, which he soon became very skilful at using. So he introduced a ’Chips and Chat’ evening into the schedule. Those chips were very, very good.

Alongside the usual schedule, Rev. Saido introduced sangha walks, days out, gardening days and canal trips. These events brought our community together so that we weren’t merely ships that passed on a meditation night but true Dharma friends and we thrived on it.

He liked to do things a bit differently, not too differently, just enough to point beyond the outward form and would often comment, “I’m probably a heretic!” And chuckle, to himself. For instance, he liked the altar to be full and burgeoning, more in the Malay style than the Japanese Zen, which is much simpler. And he didn’t care to be called a Master, though he surely was a Master.

He rarely gave formal talks. Rather, his practice was to teach by example and by bringing the Dharma into group conversations. When he did give a talk it would usually involve diagrams or unusual teaching aids, such as Newton’s cradle to teach the Law of Karma.
Mostly, Rev Saido’s teaching came through his actions, the way he lived his life, his sense of humour and direct way of speaking and his willingness to talk one to one with someone about their difficulties, for as long as it took to help them.

He was also a practical and creative person who would make or fix things, rather than throw them away – and sometimes he didn’t fix things and still didn’t throw them away. Like the time he offered to fix my indoor water feature. He took it apart, decided it was beyond him and then left me with a pile of bits.

The garage was his happy place, where he could be creative and in which, over a period of time, he made his beloved Stupa, which now stands outside the French Windows of Telford Buddhist Priory and into which his ashes will be interred.

These past months, however, his health began to fail him, and, on the official day of the Buddha’s Parinirvana, in the Buddhist calendar, he got his cancer diagnosis. And, it was The Festival of the Buddha’s Parinirvana, held at Telford Buddhist Priory, that came to be the last ceremony he ever officiated at. He was frail and wobbly on his feet but he still did full bows and would not accept a chair to sit on for the duration of the ceremony, when one was offered. I knew in my heart that this would be the last time that he would be our celebrant. I stood close by, in case he should fall and, in so doing, I noticed a sizeable hole in one of his white socks. I thought about offering to mend it but I knew it wasn’t necessary, not because he wouldn’t wear them again, that I surely knew, rather, just like that cake, all those years ago, it was his offering that mattered.

When it got too much, Rev Kanshin, to whom we are eternally grateful, came to help him and we did what we could.

For those of us fortunate enough to be around him during those final weeks, we witnessed a person still giving everything he could. He took care of as much business as his body would allow. He meditated through the pain and called those around him Bodhisattvas.

One cold Saturday morning, Rev Kanshin and I set out to rearrange the garage a bit, so that we could move some furniture out of the common room, into there, to make space for Rev Saido’s bed.

I was shocked that Rev Saido came to help us because he seemed so ill and frail. I urged him not to come out in the cold but he insisted, “I can still point!” he said and point he did.

There were remnants of his personal projects everywhere and we were instructed to relocate them and not to damage anything. At one point, I picked up a little bundle of what I thought was misplaced recycling – two margarine cartons and a yoghurt pot and I asked if I should put them out in the recycling bag. He looked at me and said, “No, those can be used again” We stood in silence for a moment, looking at each other. He had been busy for days, signing off on legal papers and letting go of his worldly responsibilities, but there, in that cold garage, it seemed to me that letting go of these simple, cherished objects, which perhaps no one else but he would value in quite the same way, was the greater challenge. He almost crumbled at that moment and so did I. Then, accepting what needed to be done, he said, softly, “Yes, OK” and let me take them away.

Reverend Saido, Thank you for your life of training and dedicated work for us all. We are so very grateful for it. You did indeed fulfil your first intention, to live your life with integrity.