Aching, floating, suspended in illness
Illness of body and mind
Words do not mean too much right now,
nor the ripple of thought undulating through mind

There is only this moment,
and this moment,
and this.

Restaurant walls, pagoda, kanji writing,
cartoon images of Japanese heroes and heroines,
and Lesley’s face.
Give care to Lesley. She needs care too.

Breath breathes the body in space,
as each experience slides into the next

Many people around me in the restaurant; they seem fine

It’s ok to be hurt
It’s ok to be confused

White rice and black seaweed on my plate
The Rising Sun in the East
Blood-red Amitabha glows with compassion

Hakuin and Dogen on the Triratna refuge tree
Hakuin’s focus on artistry
Dogen a symbol of non-duality

A monk asks Master Joshu in all seriousness:
“Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?”
Joshu replies:
“Mu!”
The sound “Mu” swallows all concepts

Kusalasara’s face comes to mind
Her face is not conventionally pretty but it contains a spirit
Why have I been swayed by conventional prettiness all these years?

Her spirit transcends the movements of health and illness
It penetrates depths

Drinking from the borderline cocktail for a decade
Unbeknownst to the drunkard

Dharma on an IV drip could not quell the agitation

The sea speaks in capricious tongues
Hums like velvet, then sharply stuns
It kisses the rocks, then claws them apart
A fickle companion, a mercurial heart

A slimy thing upon the slimy sea
An ancient mariner lurking at the weddings of newlyweds
A zombie-like fragment of the Real

One of the many escape attempts
Was into the ADHD amplifier,
Algorithmically slashing attention spans across the planet
The machine distracts from emotional contraction
While annexing the territory of executive function

When vodka enters the picture,
The chest puffs up
But smoothness sharpens into spikes
The pufferfish bloats into a thorny sphere
Feisty misfirings
Synapses failing to pass the torch of Caliban’s wrath
The archipelago is ravished by a tsunami,
Leaving no bridges in tact
Between islands of information

All the while, the Scottish lumberjack
Runs up mountains,
Along forest tracks,
Around football pitches,
Physical strength
Containing glitchy nerves

Even as the world is travelled
Explosive energy is not steered or transmuted
But pings like a pinball
Across the pages of Lonely Planet
Movement seduces the stuck one with delusion of escape

Wildly oscillating dopamine
Weakens the mind’s ability to settle

Stillness and hope are what the heart yearns for

What would you hope for if you had hope?

To grow a garden where the flower flourish
And life is given the conditions and care
To unfold their natural beauty

To participate as a living agent
In a living world,
Relating to strange strangers

To build pockets of community in the sliding sludge of the 21st century
A new neighbourliness
Communion at music jams
As the stained glass window behind the altar
Pulls each individual out upwards of their enclosure

Berlin: a live wire
Berghain clubbers
Frankfurter Allee, drug addicts
Neukölln, mad zombies

Expression of beauty and ugliness –
preferable to repression

At summer solstice,
music emanates from every nook and cranny

Drawn here like a moth to a fermenting orchard,
to the Dionysian underworld

The underground man,
utilising jouissance,
compelled by the possibility of destruction

Yet speed kills,
and he began to recognise limits

The teacher of chill shows him a different way

Broccoli Soup at her flat on Worther Strasse:
we eat it together, looking out the window,
zoning out,
stress and worries
dissipating like vapour in a calm breeze

Tension eases in the shoulders,
breathing slows down,
the 10,000 things rise and fall

Wholesome habits pump the breaks
to regain control of the wheel

Circadian rhythms,
flowing conversation,
domestic Zen,
a home in the sprawl

We meet the musician Seth Faergolzia,
who is playful, handmade, unpretentious,
close to ordinary life

A mighty oak!
His cockatiel whistling is hilarious and joyful

Hulk to snail
jouissance to nature
cat to dog

Peace is possible

The garden at Metta Vihara is a Möbius strip
Winding tangent arcs through flower beds
A dynamic regenerative balance
Opposites fold into one another

The eco spaceship is about to take off
It’s so real, it’s unreal

The retreat centre sits amidst Dutch fields
Windfarms nearby
megalithic steel giants
gathering renewable energy

Artifice + “nature” = True Nature

Many hands reach into the earth
They turn the compost,
where decay and birth unite

Peaceful, co-operative idealists
work in harmony with the elements

Watering the plants
while practicing the Metta Bhavana
A torrent of love
streams forth from the heart

Raindrops gathered in the well
hydrate the soil

Cornfields define a natural edge
Porous cell boundary

Letting go of control
enables contact with the source

A butterfly with flourishes of orange and white
flutters among the flowers
Grace defies gravity

I greet a mosquito, which draws blood from my toe
A fellow being needs nourishment
I forego aversion

Solar eclipse –
Heavenly bodies changing places

The moon blocks the sun’s rays

A planet in peril
A lunar period

But the luminosity of young gardeners shines forth

Flies, who strap in their doubt:
the motorcyclists in Thom Gunn’s poem “On the Move”
the Boys

I have been such a fly,
buzzing around the globe,
afraid to grow roots,
strapping in fear, angst, and emotional instability

It’s been an effective strategy for coping with distress
the only one available to me at times

But a rolling stone gathers no moss
and doubt is the opposite of faith
and the wheel of samsara keeps turning

How does faith grow?
It’s not something one can will or think oneself into

It whispers in the background
It has stillness and expansiveness

Doing “the work” takes you to a clearing
As does personal responsibility
Then der sprung in den glauben must be taken

Next week I’ll be on retreat in France with LBC friends,
all seeking faith in their own way

I haven’t severed ties to Triratna yet

My friend from Belgium, Steven,
sent me a picture of his robes recently

I have been moved by his evolution
His robes are for his ordination

“I can’t stand this king treatment! It’s not good enough. [snaps fingers] Evelyn, get the social service involved so that someone can clean this flat. It’s a tip. I haven’t done a day’s work all week, and I’ve only had one massage.  I’ve got my gorgeous girlfriend waiting on me hand and foot, and I’m still miserable. I’ve only had one two-month excursion to Asia all year, so don’t get on my last nerves. My mental health condition is that I’m not handsome: it’s a painful and difficult disease, so give me some credit for my resilience. Get me the ritalin and the ketamine immediately.”

…

This has been a great work  of my imagination. I fell for it, and roped everyone else into believing it too, including two psychiatrists, my family, girlfriend, and friends, the NHS mental health team, the job centre, and a few Triratna Buddhists. The only issue that people have drawn the line on is the nose thing. They’re like,  “cosmetic surgery? No, you can keep that delusion to yourself, thanks.”

Hanging onto the umbilical chord
In utero
Submerged in the amniotic fluid of the womb
Entangled in yin
Paul Celan’s reflections on *negativity*
My father’s repeated statement: “consciousness is divided from being”
The mirror stage compounds the rip
I’m in need of symbolic identity
but I’m lamenting the coldness
An exposed nerve
could do with being earthed
Being alive is the trauma
There’s no way back
Though Being surrounds, always!
Forwards – to where?
To nowhere
The end of the video game is death
So make the game as fantastic as possible
I want the weighted blanket of nature
Without being devoured by the mother
Undifferentiated oneness
becomes differentiated manifold
Torn between ideals
And an impulse returning to an (imagined?) wholeness
Pull yourself out of the fetal position
The man within
must hold woman, child and animal

No need for weed
No need for speed
No need for elvanse!
I just want to breathe
Through the saxophone reed
And listen to Ween
‘Cause I’m a liver
(Not a spleen)

Dogs are good-natured humanists with healthy egos
Cats are unbalanced Buddhists who dissolved their egos into emptiness
Dogs are warm-hearted hippies offering a wholesome meal
Cats are Berlin nihilists on ketamine
Dogs are solar, springtime
Cats are lunar, winter
Dogs are a green park
Cats are a postmodern sprawl
Dogs are honest, redneck farmers in the heartland of America
Cats are the metropolitan urban elite
Dogs go hiking in the lake district
Cats journey to the Himalayas
Dogs are bodhisatvas
Cats are arahants
Dogs are organic, acoustic and embodied
Cats are cerebral, shimmering shadows
Dogs have sincere sympathy
Cats have ruthless compassion
Dogs are Seth Faergolzia
Cats are Josh Gura
Dogs are worldly
Cats are ethereal
Dogs are analogue
Cats are digital
Dogs are prose
Cats are poetry
Dogs are comedy
Cats are tragedy
Dogs have souls
Cats are soulless
Dogs are Aristotelian
Cats are Platonic
If you’re suffering and you want comforting communion wafers, go for a dog
If you’re suffering and you want nirvana, go for a cat
Dogs are Bob Dylan
Cats are techno
Dogs are dwarves
Cats are elves
Dogs are terrestrial
Cats are aliens
Dogs are straight
Cats are gay
Dogs are wounded
Cats are free of suffering
Dogs are naive
Cats are calculated
Chris is a dog
Lesley is a cat

Every cat is a dog

Every dog is a cat

Enveloped in the ring of glowing green squidfisher boats
fluorescent extra terrestrials skim the horizon
wizard oil pastels seep into the ink well sea

Alien robot man and honeysuckle lady
two artists fabricating Maya on a pilgrimage

The crystal mermaid invited us to follow the path to serenity and beyond

Blood red sun sinks beneath wisps of carebear clouds
concentric arcs slice the water in an elongated wifi pyramid

Floating over the globular ocean of Solaris
heading towards heaven on a ship of faith
Ahab’s goin’ fishing

The earth rises to hold us on a platform of hardened lava
a temporal beacon of light

Beneath the gentrification, something of the island’s magic remains

Frankenstein’s monster constructs his DIY rehabilitation clinic,
offering breathwork and abundance seminars

Too much voltage in alien robot man is a symptom of a cancer,
malignant fear that needs to be excised immediately

Honeysuckle lady rolls around in digital ferns,
at peace with the gross, decaying mass of slime and sludge

Together they compose the cyborg songs of interconnectedness,
inspired by Queen Mab’s fiddle at the seed of dreams

John Coltrane kicked the heroin habit to find a love supreme
so do we, through rolling saxophone medleys, free ourselves of fixation
rationalizing about meaning is useless unless you feel it
Saint Jerome’s lion needs to go walksies