It says in my diary that I need to write a blog post today. Fortunately, this has coincided with a 6-week course of Thursday mornings spent volunteering with The Telling Room. 

I got a ride at 9:30am with a poet in a Mini Cooper. We went to a school in South Portland, to get a bunch of middle schoolers to start writing their stories. It had been months since I saw this lady, and the drive down there was inspiring. Talking of writing. Talking of how the hell we are meant to get our own stories out. To focus on the scene. To not get lost in the big picture. To start from the tiny details.

An hour was then spent with about a dozen students. We all sat there with pencils and were asked to smell things (cinnamon), taste (cocoa powder), feel silky objects in bags, and use these as prompts to get writing. It was amazing to watch how one sensation could usher in a place, time, an entire scene.

It made me think of the huge landscapes we have within our minds, endless corridors leading to hidden rooms. In an instant we can time travel, feel emotions rise up. One boy remembered the sight of his father, and it was the last moment he ever saw him. One of the volunteers spoke of lying in a boat under the sun, with a friend who had just lost her mother. My moments took me to red sky sunsets, Portland cafe scenes. But I also saw how quickly I wanted to comment on the scene as I described it. How difficult I found it to strip myself back to the mere sights, mere smells...

Is the writer's job to time travel, to note down every aspect of that moment... Is it our job to just notice? To not comment or teach or explain, but to just clearly show these moments? I think about what Debra Spark says at the end of her trailer for her new book. She references Chekhov. It's been in my mind for weeks now... what does she mean by this? And how do we do it?


(Photo credit, an illumination of St John writing his Gospel from the Lorsch Gospels,  Wikimedia Commons)

It's New Year's Eve, Chinese-stylee. 

I've spent the morning reading through a notebook, and came across my scrawlings from December 31st 2011, a few weeks ago. I was struck by this writing, a kind of stream-of-consciousness. I'm not sure what it is. So I've decided to type it here.

I've included above an image of Budai (or Hotei), the Laughing Buddha, to remind us all that my thoughts and experience are entirely subjective. This is not Buddha-nature. This is my personal, gut reaction, streaming through pen and ink, trying to name a sensation permeating the air around me.  


New Year's Eve 2011
With Avalokiteshvara Prayers in Three Sittings


White light and tactile effects, like a dimension itself has entered the room. Brings tears, washing through my eyes. Brings confidence, outer manifestation. Compassion takes an actual form. How rare.

It strikes me that all I need to do is work with the crystal that is my mind. Sharpen it, purify it, work off all those fragments, dirt. That is all.

Build the inner city of enlightenment.

Literally, spend every single day polishing this jewel, training it in concentration, kindness, the ability to care more for others, the ability to lift the hyper focus off self, off this one illusive self, and onto all beings. To bind my mind to breath and to virtue, and to hold it there with alertness and mindfulness.

To give, joyfully, and to only live to give - my time, joy, help, money.

With time, with purification, the Buddhas will sit around me and share their light and fill this body and mind so it becomes like the moon, a reflection of their light. So that it may benefit all those who are lost and need to find
the way.

There is such warmth and such a vast scale to the mind that ushers all beings into its care. Such soft friendship, love, this tactile thing like golden string hanging in the air. Making everything connected and hopeful.

I am blessed to have the opportunity to sit at a holy shrine, before the field of merit, with instruction and lineage transmission. To sit on a purple rug folded and a ratty purple cushion, with its imprints of folded legs and lotus time.

With its image that has shone in temples of Tibet, before rows of gleaming candlelight. And we beseeched the Buddha of Compassion to heal our world, our family, our friends. All the animals, lower realms. All the separation and confusion, disease, death, violence, loneliness and grief.

To beseech the Buddhas to hold their hearts, lay peace into their minds, and transform us all.

I am beginning to see this path, how it winds to the land of compassion. How the lotus awakens by releasing it's knot, it's clutch at self. How it opens by pushing its petals outwards, to face the rest of the world. To witness and offer absolute openness and say, I hold nothing back for myself.


(Photo credit: Wikki Commons).