The Silent Sunset and The Strange Symmetry of The Three Signs

TONGUE SOMEWHAT IN CHEEK

I want to take you back, dear reader to a past tale from my time at the Jikoji Silent Meditation Retreat way back in June. You might remember, that we left off with me walking at a rather determined pace up a forest trail that led to the top of a ridge, diligently meditating all the while, trying to catch up with the rest of the group. I've been meaning to tell you about what happened after that for some time now but never quite got around to it. So here's the rather curious tale.

As I mentioned, I kind of ran meditatively up the trail. But partly due to the uphill climb and partly because I couldn't convince myself that running and meditating really went together, I slowed down soon enough. And as I slowed down, the silence in its varying degrees, became noticeable. There was the muted crunch of the dew-damp fallen leaves under my slippers. The whispering of a gentle, still-warm breeze as it weaved its way through the upper layers of the forest canopy that fully sheltered the trail from the setting sun. The sound of a deer's half-step - as it stopped momentarily upon spying me coming up the path and then placidly rustled its way away through the shrubbery. The sunlight only filtered through a couple of feet through the leaves - turning the upper layer an early autumnal red-brown and the lower layers a deepening, darkening shade of green. I felt the calm seep into me...even the rather meditatively-unhelpful sign warning about itinerant mountain lions only caused a momentary flutter in my pulse. My steps slowed further.

Three quarters of the way up the hill, I stepped into the sun, as the canopy gave way to knee-high sun-dried grass glowing warmly golden-brown in the sun. With another few steps I turned a corner so that the crest of the hill lay directly behind and above me. A vunderful (Yes I'm Indian and proud that I economise on my v/w sounds) vista opened up before my eyes. A grassland stretched lazily rampant across the landscape, covering rolling hills and dipping valleys - besieging the occasional clump of trees before itself being restrained in its reach by the forest that formed its irregular border. An Olympian discus-thrower's stone's throw away from the freeway - I had reached a sanctuary seemingly untouched by civilization. The quiet of the surroundings stilled my thoughts. I spied the dark-tan silhouette of a deer against the grass on the opposite slope - his antlered head turned towards me. Still. Unmoving. Which is when I saw the first sign - of civilization. A weather beaten bench just the right shade of dark brown - the kind that one would pay quite a handsome sum for in Crate n' Barrel. Placed at the center of the ridge - capable of seating up to three (Vegan...read malnourished) meditators - it was placed at just the right angle for watching the sun as it set in the western sky.

I sat down and as I turned to look at the great big ball of fire in the sky - that had obligingly hung around despite my tardiness - I saw a slow-moving, red-bellied SouthWest Airline plane making its way to San Jose airport. I continued to contemplate deeply about nothing and sometimes about whether this was the wrong ridge - because I couldn't see anyone else there. Soon the rest of the group file silently into view. It seemed, I had beaten them to the top. The realization, that they must have had a short meditation session in the zen temple before starting up the path, wafted into my conciousness. There were more than 20 people in the walking meditation procession. None of them acknowledged my presence. Each one silently found a vantage point from where to see the sun finally set. Some sank into the inviting grass. Others joined me on the bench. Others still, stood scattered across the slope. Look, I wanted to say - Isn't that setting sun beautiful. But I held back. Look there, I wanted to point, at that unmoving deer - providing the relieving speck of fauna to the flora-rich landscape. My hand stayed by my side. Gathered together on that ridge - each one alone - we watched as the sun completed its descent below the distant horizon. I'm guessing some of the others saw the deer and some didn't. I'm guessing some of them saw every change in colour that the section of the sky hugging the horizon went through. While others missed some of the transitions because no one pointed them out.

Let me ask you, dear reader, is a sunset beautiful if no one watching it says it is? The answer I realized that evening is of course, a definite maybe. The twenty of us watched a beautiful, beautiful sun set without once commenting on how beautiful it was. How purple the sky was right at the end. How, the unnaturally still deer, looked more like a shadow in an Indonesian puppet show than a living, breathing being. Or how the landscape, brown grass and green trees, took on a deep cool blue hue once the sun had set. It was a bit of a strange, and strangely fulfilling, experience.

Without a word or a sign to one another, we started our way back down the trail. I felt engorged and sluggish with all the beauty I had taken in. As I savoured this new way of feeling full - I spied the third sign - a white plastic bag - caught in the upper branches of a tree - fluttering noisily in the cold breeze that had now started blowing. I hadn't truly linked the bench and the plane in my mind beyond making the connection that they were the two man-made things in that otherwise natural scene. But seeing the bag - brought me another realization. This one didn't waft through - more like rushed in and screeched to a halt in my mind. I realized that the three signs were not a coincidence. That I had gone beyond communing with nature - to communicating with nature. The signs - in their weird symmetry - contained a message. Just for me. For only I had seen all three - the Southwest flight having disappeared before the others arrived.

I understood what the elements, the powers that inhabit the ether, were trying to tell me - I was neither the well-grounded bench nor the crimson aeroplane that had already attained soaring heights. I was the plastic bag caught in a limbo - struggling to rise sky-high but in just as much danger of falling into the mud below. What finally happened to me would depend on whether I was able to figure out what the branches of the tree represented - for that was what was restraining me. And what I did to free myself. I had another day of silent meditation to do that. I was thrilled at having had Mom Nature or other higher beings take it upon herself/themselves to personally deliver a piece of zen enlightenment to me. And that she was sophisticated enough to use a riddle that needed to solving versus an akaashwani that spelled it all out. (Plus I wouldn't have understood Sanskrit anyway!)

We were back under the canopy on our way back to the lodge. The air was considerably cooler now that the sun had fully set. I saw the T-shirt clad guy ahead of me shiver slightly in the breeze. I hadn't noticed the cold myself - warmed as I was by the cloak of narcissism that had fallen lightly over my shoulders.

You Know You're Addicted When...

A few weeks back I was reading a newspaper…or maybe it was a magazine…and came across, as one does so often these days, a reference to a young blogger who apparently was gaining a lot of readership for the things he was writing about and the interesting way in which he was writing about them. An Indian blogger based in the US.

Finding a fresh, new blog with its own unique mix of topics that the blogger’s chosen to write about, is, I now find, very similar to discovering an author that you’ve never read before. Except that a blog unlike most good books generally go on and on without end, and if you’re lucky will be updated, multiple times, on a daily basis. I made a note of the website address and later that evening I typed in the blog’s address and with a short pause designed to heighten the anticipation, hit enter.

The browser page rolled itself up, held its breath for a couple of seconds and then unfurled a new look…The virginal white expanse of the google page replaced by a page with two broad blue borders and a white center with words running across it in neat black type. I don’t quite remember all that I read and saw on the page, but I do distinctly remember liking the writing style, finding the choice of subjects eclectic and the overall aesthetics restful on the eye. Some of the posts were accompanied by photographs…and were all so clear, they looked like someone had taken a scrubbing brush to them…so clear that the edges seemed to have a faint glow around them.

One particular photo-post caught my attention. The title said simply, “My Brother”. It showed a curly haired guy sitting intently at a desk, in front of a computer. He wore specs and was smiling…something on the screen was evidently funny. It was a pleasant smile. The brother. There was another guy standing to his right, leaning in towards the screen, one hand on the edge of the desk, the other on the chair that the first guy was sitting on. Also smiling. While the post didn’t say so it seemed clear that the guy standing was the blogger himself. His features are vague in my mind.

Even weeks later the picture is fresh in my mind, though I’ve forgotten virtually everything else that I saw and read on that site. For two reasons, primarily. One, There seemed to be an easy camaraderie between the two brothers. It had a rather cosy feel to it. You wanted to get to know these guys…you kind of knew they’d make good friends. The second reason was the caption. It said: 48. Kill at 48. I saw the caption before I saw the picture because I had started reading the blog from the earlier posts and was scrolling up the site versus down. The caption sent a chill down my spine…and the lack of congruity with the picture itself was puzzling. Even more than that, it was disturbing. Suddenly I became aware that night had fallen outside…that I was now sitting in the dark leavened only by the glow from the laptop screen. I looked at the picture for a long time…trying to figure out whether the caption was a joke or a declaration of malicious intent…trying to get my rising dread to settle back down.

That’s when I woke up…with a start...and an aspirated "phew!". I’d been holding my breath in my sleep out of sheer tension. I was back in the log-cabin-like living room of the Jikoji Zen Temple and Retreat Center, at the bottom of a valley in the Santa Cruz mountains…having fallen asleep helped in equal measures by enervating heat, a surprisingly sumptuous lunch of marinated and baked tofu squares sprinkled with crunchy sunflower seeds.

I was on a two day silent retreat – having committed to not speaking during that period in addition to not reading, writing, watching TV, listening to music, surfing the web or doing anything that might distract me from my conversation with myself. Sleeping, however, was acceptable and I’d managed to do a lot of it that first day. And apparently the withdrawal symptoms from not having web-surfed for a full 24 hours had, unbeknownst to me, so ravaged my subconscious in that short time, that my superego had given into my id and manufactured a fantasy blog for me to read in a place where no Ethernet port had gone before.

Dusk was falling outside – just as it had in my dream and that told me that I had missed the mid-afternoon meditation session, on top of the mid-morning one – both due to the soporific nature of my internal conversations. It looked like I was already late for the final session of the day – a walking meditation that was supposed to take the group up a dirt-path to the top of a nearby ridge to watch the sun set. I scrambled up from the couch; wondering what I could do to redeem myself – my fellow retreat-ers couldn’t scold me without breaking their vow of silence but they were still allowed to glare. Seeing the sun was still hanging around on the horizon – I decided to try and catch up with the rest of the group- of course to truly redeem myself, I’d have to meditate my way up (versus just run up) to the ridge-top and hope the sun hadn’t set by then. The philosophical riddle (wikipedia’s description, not mine) – If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound – seemed particularly apt in this situation. Perhaps if I was quiet enough no one would notice that I hadn’t already been there when they arrived – and that would make me not-late.

So, I started up the hill at a determined trot, meditating furiously all the while.

Mile-High Vipassana

My friend Robin RedBreast who's as feather-footed as the name implies told me recently that he doesn't read my blog much because its not personal enough for him. So this post is also for him.

I recently flew to Japan - only my third international flight since about July last year - (believe me I'm not complaining about not travelling cattle class more often). On the flight out to Tokyo, I realised that these long flights can have an unintended side effect which can be salutary or stressful, depending on one's relationship with the truth about oneselves. They can create the conditions for a (sometimes involuntary) bout of introspection.

On a ten hour flight, once you've been forced to switch off the phone, the movies are ones you've already seen or - if its United - ones you wouldn't ever want to, when the laptop battery runs out having lasted only half as long as you thought it should and when you've run through that wonderfully interesting book twice as fast as you hoped you would, there really isn't much to do other than switch on your thoughts. Some people can get lost in music (the iPod's battery can generally last an entire flight) but I find I do a lot of my thinking when the only distraction is music.

There are other uses of an iPod too of course. I use mine to ward off surprise attacks from your friendly-neighbourhood-seat-extroverts. You know. Those people who think that nothing could be better than to have perfect strangers belted into place next to them for hours on end. All the better to get to know them and make-new-friends! Yay! Don't get me wrong, I'm mostly a friendly guy but I find starting a conversation with strangers on flights is rather like the Chinese saying about a rescuer becoming responsible for a rescuee for life. Most people assume that because you said "Hi" to them at the beginning you've effectively promised to engage them in conversation through the rest of the flight. So having been burned by such strangely social souls a few times, I now board planes with my earphones in place and keep them firmly plugged in for the duration even if the iPod isn't on.

Given that the iPod doesn't help me prevent one-ness with my thoughts, I've had a couple of fairly big epiphanies on my international flights. Last year after a 10 day stretch of flying London-SF-London-Singapore-London-SF I found myself sitting up in my business class sleeper bed, staring into space and realising that I needed time off to think about what to do about my job and the absence of any life in my life. Sometimes weekend long clubbing just isn't enough :) It led me to taking 3 months off from work and eventually changing jobs.

This time when my computer unhelpfully died within the first hour and the latest installment of the Tales of the City novels proved to be a fast and slightly disappointing read, I was again left with nothing to do but switch to my iPod...and my thoughts. Thankfully my life's a little more interesting right now so the conversation with myself didn't involve as much of a scolding as last time. The result of the enforced introspection was that as I stepped out at Tokyo's Narita airport I was resolved on a few things...I won't tell you what conclusions I came to about myself and what I needed to change...thats way too personal for me...but will leave you to deduce what you may, dear reader, from the resolutions. My three mid-year resolutions are to force myself to sit down to write even if the story is not clear in my mind (waiting for it to reveal itself has led to a 8 month hiatus!)...to buy myself a silver thumb ring to wear sometimes without waiting for someone to buy one for me...and to start making plans to visit all those places that I want to go to but have been putting off for when I have someone special to see them with. Nothing life changing - thankfully. Of course that may be a sign that the flight-enforced self-discovery needed to go on longer...but for now I'll just take it as a sign that I'm no longer cursed with an interesting life and its attendant melodramatic subscripts.

But Yeah. It is funny how my introspections seem to lead me towards more vacations. :)
Maybe I should take a more serious look at one of those Vipassana courses - the voluntary, on-ground kind...?