Mellow, sort of

It's been a stormy week but things have begun to calm down a bit today. I'm getting used to the weather here, slowly, and apart from a sort of on-going low level concern as the wind gets up and branches start to fly I'm adapting very well. Our gas lantern won't move from the landing for a couple of days yet, but I'm reassured to know that if the storm blows up again we've got enough milk/bread/baked beans/coffee/chocolate/alcohol to keep us going for a few days! You know, the essentials...





This has been the picture looking back towards the hills for the last 4 days - sadly the camera couldn't record the lashing rain





It's been a good day, though, today. For example, in the aftermath of last night's champagne I slept deeply and woke up voluntarily at about 9:20 this morning, MUCH earlier than normal on a day when I am usually allowed a lie-in! And I have managed to achieve a long bath AND an hour's peace and quiet reading the weekend papers...

While in the bath I was catching up on a couple of chapters in Sarah Napthali's Buddhism for Mothers.

I find myself feeling slightly self-conscious about my continued reading about Buddhism, which probably has to do with a fear of ridicule from my friends and family who might - in my fantasy - look down upon me for being needy and insecure and trying to 'find myself' in some sort of mumbo-jumbo Eastern philosophy when I am a product of the Western world. Or is that how I secretly despise myself? I'm not sure. But you know, the more I read (from the select and very limited little pile of books I've accumulated) the more Buddhist practice seems to relate to my experience of myself and to provide insight and techniques that I am actively finding valuable. I'm not about to shave my head and don a saffron robe (well, I might shave my head if more hair departs it, but that's another story!), but I am trying to learn something about myself through what I'm reading about Buddhism. Perhaps somewhere down the line I'll learn to be a little less apologetic.

Anyway, the end of the chapter Finding Calm was a good one to read this morning, not least because while running my bath I managed accidentally to put my hand on the controls for the water jets, which projected hot soapy water all around the bathroom and everything in it, which included my husband and a selection of previously dry towels. Napthali presents Buddhism as containing an 'uplifting message... that everyone is a Buddha at their core, with a Buddha's love and wisdom - this is our true nature. We are already complete, whole and good, but we obscure this fact with our fears and desires.' It is an attractive contradiction to the Christian tradition in which I was brought up, which emphasised man's essential sin and the need for the redemptive intervention of Christ in our lives in order to become 'whole'.

I notice myself walking around looking outwards. I don't like to look inwards particularly; I caught myself recently imagining myself as a walking 'hole', an emptiness, with the implication that I can't stand what's inside. And I do have enormous difficulty with that, finding it impossible to value myself. It's been the long-standing struggle of every counselling experience I've ever had, and it's a battle with myself that I can't win from the point of view of just somehow magically being able to like myself. The idea that somehow within me is everything I need, is challenging but also incredibly attractive. Napthali says, 'We don't need to travel the world, collect impressive experiences or achieve endless milestones in order to feel complete. What we seek is within us. The answer is to change where we look for it'.

Recently I've found that if I am mindful of myself I can take a breath, consciously relax a bit, and take a few seconds in which to give myself some 'room'. It's like meditation for 30 seconds or a minute, and it's incredibly useful. If I manage it, I experience a moment's clarity and recognise, sometimes, that other choices are available to me in addition to the ones that present themselves from a lifetime's habits of thinking and reacting. 'Buddhist teaching has been summarised with the phrase 'stopping and realising', which among other things refers to the ability to be aware of a negative state of mind and to realise on a deep level that a clearer, more constructive mind is available.' I think it will take years of practice.

Rain, rain, go away...

You may have seen on the news or indeed read on my other blog, Double Elephant, that the Coffs Coast Region has been declared an emergency zone by the New South Wales state government owing to the enormous quantities of water that poured out of the sky on Tuesday/Wednesday of this week. Well, it hasn't stopped raining yet and apparently we're due for more deluges of monsoon-type rains this weekend and particularly heavy rain next Monday. Hoorah! I hadn't appreciated quite why the city centre flooded as badly as it did (I seem to have driven through the area about 15 minutes ahead of the flood waters!), but the backing-up of the storm drains and creeks around the area coincided with a high King tide (King tides are equinox tides), so that water flowing out to sea was met by extra high tides flowing in towards the city and the outlying regions, hence the floods.


Gurdial standing on the plank across the crater






Anyway, so far so good, until Jake (the headmaster who recently built a house near to our block) sent us some photos yesterday. King tides aren't to blame, instead the valley is a huge water catchment area and as it came down off the hillsides it slammed straight into an inadequate culvert under the main access route up to our blocks... and washed the road away, leaving a crater impassible by vehicle and only just navigable over a single plank on foot. Jake's family couldn't get back to their house after work and school and have had to decamp to his mother-in-law's house (with five kids!) for the duration. Adam, who built his house right next to our boundary was lucky that he was at work while his wife was at home, so they were able to park their cars on either side of the gulf and have been ferrying children/food/adults back and forth between work, school and the shops via the rickety plank! Gurdial, whose blueberry farm is two blocks away from ours, on the other side of Adam's house, hasn't been able to get up there. We finally got all our boxed up goods into our new shed last Thursday and haven't been up there since so we have no idea if the rain water was able to drain away from the concrete foundations or whether our carefully stacked boxes (which were on pallets, luckily) have escaped the flood waters or not...


Gurdial's brothers standing on the plank. You can see the 3 large concrete culverts from which the road surface was washed away



Thanks to Jake sending us the photos we were able to go up to the crater this evening for a meeting to discuss what happens next, although they were all still arguing when we had to leave to collect our daughter from after school care, so I don't know the outcome. But the options are to spend $2,500 - $3,000 on a more-or-less well done 'bodge job' which would see large rocks placed down the sides of the re-positioned drains and topped off with water-repellent clay soils covered in gravel, or to invest more like $10,000 on doing the job properly which will include digging out a drain in order to divert the water flow while proper concrete pads are put in for the culvert and retaining walls built before a contoured slipway is incorporated into the road profile above... Clearly the latter idea is sensible, but apart from the time it might take to do and the fact that no work would be able to start on either option until the water flow has considerably reduced, there is of course the question of cost. It's likely that the bulk of the costs would be shared between Gurdial, Jake and us, and I have to say that we hadn't planned to spend a big lump of money on the road right now.


It's quite a large gap!







I do think that all the Buddhist reading I've been doing recently has had some effects. I am making a conscious effort to examine how I'm feeling, to recognise the signs of becoming stressed and to calm down, to relax more, to forgive myself more, to be more realistic, to encourage myself to exercise and to quell the nagging, critical inner voice. It's not that I'm embracing Buddhism so much as that I'm acknowledging the sense in what I'm reading and trying to apply it to my situation in a practical way.

Buddhism for happiness?

I wonder if Buddhism has occurred to you as a possible exploratory route to happiness? It's certainly occurred to me many times over the years, although I've instinctively shied away from anything that looked too much like hard work. I'm also unsure if I am or if I want to be someone who 'aligns' myself with something. Many years ago I knew someone called Anton Wasilewski (I think that's the spelling) at university and he pronounced that I was a person with no morals but plenty of underlying principles, and I think it is principles that have got me through life in the absence of anything like faith. I have no faith. I joke about having had the 'faith bone' removed, but truthfully I don't have any faith. Internal searching hasn't even disclosed to me the part of my mind in which faith would reside if I had any. I've read research that suggests people with faith are physically and mentally healthier so in some ways I feel as if perhaps an absence of faith in my life has made things more difficult, but I've also felt glad to be the author of my own misfortunes and I am reluctant to describe any part of my life or myself to something other.

So anyway, back to Buddhism. I'm interested in the fact that some of the people who've published research and written books about happiness and how to achieve it are practicing Buddhists, but with my Bachelors degree Christian theology behind me I am crushingly ignorant about Buddhism and I'd like to know more. One thing that's confusing me is that there are so many variants of Buddhism, different schools, although with my knowledge of the history and practice of Christianity perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.

I don't know that I'm about to embark on a personal journey into Buddhism, but I do think that meditation, mindfulness and compassion in particular may have important things to teach me about being less stressed, living now rather than in the past or in the future, and forgiving myself - all of which would do me a lot of good. So I'm reading two books at the moment, which are at different points in the plethora of western interpretative literature about Buddhism: Sarah Napthali's Buddhism for Mothers and Matthieu Ricard's Happiness: a Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill.

The Napthali book is (so far) amusing and relevant in that its author is not a guru. She's a time-poor, frazzled mother with a supportive partner who is otherwise uninterested in her spiritual journey, and she's an ordinary, mistake-making, non-academic student of Buddhism who isn't claiming to have all the answers. If nothing else, reading the book makes me realise I'm not alone! Ricard's book claims a lot more authority, if only because of its weightier prose and the fact that its author is a fully ordained monk and a science graduate with amazing parents and a fabulous education who could probably have turned his hand to anything and been an outstanding success but instead has devoted his life to Buddhism and specifically to the interface between Buddhist teachings and modern physics... Intellectually it's a lot more interesting, but less sympathetic. Indeed, having been brought up in that very British way of understating achievement Ricard's calm and dispassionate recital of his successes makes him sound a bit smug when it's supposed to showcase his Buddhist non-attachment to wordly things and his lack of delusion about his place in the world. I'm hoping that as I read more I find something more fallable about him and that I'm able to avoid schadenfreude. That wouldn't be very Buddhist, would it?