Embodiment
Content to escape;
more subtle politics here,
Nature democracy
The most embodied thing I do each day is walk. It starts with my morning stretches primarily to get my stiff lower back into gear, loosened up and awakened for the day, then my 2 mile morning walk, up the mountain road and back. All of our getting around on a day to day basis is on foot, whether it’s going to the clinic, or to the coffee shop, or for Nancy (or both of us) to go see Ama and Akka, or for kora, or to the monastery office, or the green houses to visit old Annamarie, or to Bir (the longest distance we would do, an hour+ or so), which we haven’t done yet, and may not do at all this time. Or maybe I’ll do it when Nancy is busy with the teachings from 8 thru 12 November. Easy to walk a few miles a day that way, and a lot of it is up hill……..of course the rest of it is down hill. There isn’t much flat ground here abouts.
The notion of driving here is unthinkable. I could probably learn to do it (or maybe not??), but there isn’t any reason to, and it wouldn’t be enjoyable in any way. Cycling is impossible, what with all the hills, and for going any longer distances there are the very affordable taxis at our disposal. Leave the driving to them.
The only energized walking is my morning walk, where I get a little bit of an aerobic workout. Otherwise it’s slow walking, in harmony with the local culture, usually with a mala in hand for telling beads and keeping the body, mind and heart focused on the inner realms of awareness and prayer, thanksgiving and surrender.
There is a way in which being in Asia is far more yin….expansive, receptive, accepting….than being in the West is, and this can lend itself to certain potential “dangers”, from the most simple level of dietary changes and “exceptions”, to the subtler and various levels of denial or denigration of the material dimension. This is India after all, with a several millennia old culture of emphasizing in one way or another the spiritual (non material) over the physical/material. Nowadays this is waning, but the roots of these biases run very deep and are not easily or casually eliminated or shifted, nor should they be, altogether.
For example, when Nancy broke her arm here in 2018, and required surgery in Delhi, she experienced some severe post surgical pain which required medication, of course. This was to be expected. The bias against…..oh, let’s call it the indulgence of, the needs of the body, in this case of the amelioration of pain, was clear, if unrecognized or un-named by the medical staff. The default attitude was one of expectation that one should be able to bare a rather high level of pain without much complaint, and without very strong medicinal intervention. It necessitated my verbal intervention with the young doctor in order for him to agree to increase the level of pain meds Nancy was given. This example illustrates what I would call a very old and very pervasive attitude that still exists, just as the outlawed caste system still exists and is alive and very well, throughout Indian culture.
So the point is that just being here might (does, in my opinion) by default lend itself, automatically and unconsciously, to certain kinds of abandonment of care for the body, and if that is the case, a raising of consciousness and an intention of will is needed in order to disallow that abandonment from going too far. It remains a dynamic and ever shifting equilibrium, and one of the, perhaps primary, challenges of being here.
Turning seventy
I vow to watch the sky more
sign of surrender
Since the entire world has lost its way in the over emphasis of the rational/material at the expense of the wise/natural/spiritual, bringing us past the brink of climate collapse and species extinction …… hey, even the UN scientists are on board with this assessment now …… an effort to find and sustain a (not merely) personal, deeper equilibrium is about the only effort that now, or, I would go way out on that exciting beautiful limb and say… ever, makes any sense.
Oops! Not much time left.
Mountain fog tells a story -
Be here now! Don’t grasp!
May all beings be happy. May all beings be free from suffering, and from the causes of suffering.
