3 deaths in life

24 hours, 3 deaths brushed by me and made me think.

The turtle that got caught in the nets at Porto Heli. The poor creature, my sister said, was tangled in the fishermen’s net and must have frantically drowned. Do water animals drown I wonder vaguely, whilst my soul registers the waste of decades and decades of a life and regrets its agony, despair and pain. 

The almost dead fish in the tank last night- ailing amidst his fellow prisoners, all waiting to provide sustenance and pleasure, at the whim of a diner’s pointing finger like mine. The sick creature agonisingly gasped for air, sank in the bottom corner of the tank. Its grey skin greyer still, its eyes clouded and unseeing. There was consciousness in his eyes-milky as they were-despite his tiny brain. Lucky taught me to see Consciousness in animals’ eyes…even in the brilliantly cold serpentine ones of the cobra I showered with in Wat Koh Tahm. Through loving him I learned to see the Light reflected from their eyes, to see the joy and the pain and to recognise that they too have a Mind. I silently wished him fast liberation onto the other side. Now I wish I had the forethought of mind to buy him and set him into the inky black night sea to die.

And my friend’s aunt; a human being. She passed last night after a long illness that indecently robbed her of any quality of life. A liberation too. Yet my mother’s death taught me that this consolation is no consolation at all to the living. The person she was will be sorely missed and her pain will be mourned. I pray for her spirit to soar where there is no pain, in the eternal Light.

3 deaths: A majestic ancient animal of the seas, a humble fish whose purpose was to end up on a plate, a human person whose life we understand the most. For whose pain, agony and death to grieve more? I know the conventional order of things.  Still, these days, I am finding the sorrow lines blurred more and more. After all, they all are creatures of the divine energy we call Life.

Seeking the Farther Shore

The Farther Shore

I settled myself on my beach lounger and opened a new book, a novel, a trashy one at that, picked up at Bangkok airport and I read:

" Few are there amongst men who go to the Farther Shore; the rest of this mankind only run about on the bank. By Gautama, The Dhammapada”.

Karma? Yet again the Universe sends me a message at just the right time. I have recently been challenged by a wise man to decide if I am a Seeker or if I want to be “normal”. My wise guide said he senses an ambivalence in me: To Seek or to have an easy life?

There is no ambivalence. I know I am a Seeker. I know an easy life is not an option -  once you start Seeking there is no going back. It is not ambivalence. It is a reluctance to give in. To let go and see where it takes me. The Farther Shore. Where is that? What state of being is it and what sacrifices are needed to get there? Being on the bank is comfortably depressing - or is it depressingly confortable? You kind of fit in, tread water, move up and down the scale of satisfaction and dream of the Farther Shore; the Shangri La of being, the state of Grace in which no worry reaches your soul, where the answers to what this life is about are irrelevant and superfluous because you can just be; where you vibrate in tune with the Universe, all-knowing, whole in the light of just being.

I hold onto the bank knowing already that this is a lost battle. Knowing that I will let go; and if I don’t life will push me into the deep anyway. Still, I cling on and ask for assurance in the same breath that I ask for answers.

I stopped writing and I stopped meditating in the effort to stem the flow that inexorably draws me to the Farther Shore. I make believe that I must first complete my day job. That I believe it is doing good in this world. And it does. I know it does. But it also holds me back from growing into who I need to become.

The harness I am attached to is born of fear. What if I let the safety slip and quit my job to just write? What if I just go travelling on a spiritual quest with no destination, no predetermined goals? What would happen to my life as I know it? Sure I’ll be happy to let go of the stuff that cause me strife. But does it also mean I might have to let go of the happy things in my life too? This is the fear that keeps me tethered to the bank. Someone once said that I was looking for quarantees in life... and that there are none. You just have to trust that as you close one door another opens. That life gives you what you need. You have to have faith that your soul, in its eternal form, designed this existence of this here and now and that every thought, feeling, action and reaction, every misery ad every joy is tailored to compel it onwards in its evolution towards Nirvana. Or something like that...

It is easy somehow to become aware of these thoughts sitting on this deserted beach, with the vastness of the ocean overwhelming my vision and the waves’ powerful roar bringing equilibrium to my mind. It is as easy here to sense my soul’s yearning as it is feeling the breeze on my skin. I look across the water to the wide arc of the horizon. I see the white violence of the waves as they break nearing the shore. I see the greeny-blue water graduating to a deep inky-blue line where it demarcates itself from the soft-blue of the sky. It seems such s a long way away and I first need get over the powerful turbulence of the ocean as it meets the bank that I am sitting on safely, gazing to the Farther Shore.  I see no-one else in the water; it seems such a long way to go on my own to the egde. And still, I know that I have no choice but to step in.