tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17173306852103252342024-03-06T02:56:29.063+00:00be a light, be a refuge...Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13502259768807545897noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1717330685210325234.post-62105144991778052072017-01-12T15:56:00.001+00:002017-01-12T17:03:54.841+00:00"Sing some more, and we'll travel on" - a review of David Bowie's Lazarus<div dir="ltr">
In the last year of his life, David Bowie fulfilled his lifelong dream of writing a musical. With the help of co-writer Enda Walsh, producer Robert Fox and director Ivo van Hove, it played off Broadway in New York from December 2015 to January 2016, then moved to London's King's Cross Theatre that November. It finishes on 22 January and is now sold out, but I'm thankful to have seen it twice, and I think it's his crowning achievement. For all that it's inevitably a collaboration with a broad group of creative people, it may even be the best work he's ever done.</div>
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And yet, out of all his works, Lazarus is probably the hardest for me to write about. It's easy to say that it's a sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth, the Walter Tevis novel which was adapted into a 1975 film starring Bowie as the central character. Lazarus shows us the alien Thomas Newton (played marvellously by the American actor Michael C Hall) forty years later. Having long failed in his mission to take water back to his drought-stricken home planet, he's holed up in a New York City apartment, addicted to gin and Twinkies. He's depressed and doesn't go out, reliant on his assistant Elly to keep him supplied and his home in some semblance of order. Deeply depressed because he's unable either to die or to go home, he's haunted by memories of his family light years away, and of his ex-girlfriend Mary Lou, who left him years ago. He's mentally falling apart, until a mysterious fourteen year old Girl, who remembers nothing about herself or her past, inexplicably arrives with her own mission. All she knows is that somehow, she has to help Thomas Newton.</div>
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Lazarus doesn't really have a conventional plot, but it has a story, which you have to kind of piece together yourself as it goes along. The story is Newton's journey from despair to hope, and to a kind of peace. But it's told almost like a dream (with a dream's unexpected shifts of character and mood); and along with Newton and Elly and Girl, there are several other characters with their own stories, who may or may not be real; they could be products of Newton's almost deranged mind. Even Girl may not be real; indeed, she's the character least likely to be, since most of the time only Newton can see her. But the mystery of her presence has another explanation, which she herself only realises near the end - and it's both a tragic and a deeply moving one.</div>
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If this sounds confusing, it is - at first. Several of the actors, in interviews, have suggested that it's best to simply sit and experience the play, without worrying too much about the story or what it “means”. This is good, because the experience itself is wonderful and there's a lot to enjoy. Firstly, of course, there's the music: about ten classic songs spanning the whole of Bowie's career, together with four which he wrote specially for the play (and they're not let downs by any means). The arrangements are crisp and tight, and gloriously sung, especially by Sophia Anne Caruso (still only fifteen years old) as Girl. Some songs, such as the recent Where Are We Now?, are very close in style and sound to the original, while others are so surprising that they sound virtually recomposed (I'd never realised before what a great song This Is Not America is! - or how relevant it feels to that country's situation now.) Like the play, they vary greatly in mood, from the tormented rage of Killing a Little Time to the upliftingly poppy Absolute Beginners. Even the vintage Changes sounds fresh and new, partly by shifting in mood more than the original, but also by being sung by a woman (Amy Lennox as Elly). And rather than sounding shoehorned into the play, each song expresses something about the character, characters or situation, heightening the emotions in the process. This is no jukebox musical; the songs are an inextricable part of the play.</div>
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Then there's the visual element, which is dazzling, considering there's hardly any set. Newton's flat is suggested by an unmade bed, a fridge, and a record player with two stacks of Bowie records! At the back of the stage, in the middle, is a white screen separating two big windows behind which the musicians play (almost unnoticed, the show itself being so mesmerising). The windows often show a New York skyline behind the musicians, at different times of day and night. On the screen in the middle, a dazzling succession of varied images is projected, often seeming to represent thoughts, images and memories in Newton's mind. This visual brilliance extends to the lighting, the colours, everything - it's amazing. I think David Bowie was to a large extent synaesthesic, as he said he could “see” music in his mind - the tone colours and textures automatically finding visual equivalents. Sometimes he even sketched or painted it, to help himself find what an album or song needed. This shows in Lazarus, which is truly a multimedia theatre experience - involving character, dialogue, action, music, lighting, film, abstract art and a rocket which Girl outlines on the floor with masking tape! I've truly never seen anything like it.</div>
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And I've barely yet mentioned the actors, characters, or the wonderful script, which is often moving and sometimes pretty funny. The first time I saw Lazarus I was near the back, and couldn't fully see the stage. I felt a bit distanced from the characters, both physically and emotionally, so much of the impact of the play was of a visceral kind; it was a lot just to take in the visuals and music. Because of this I ultimately decided to see it again, and from the middle of the second row I could see everything. I could see the entire stage, only about fifteen feet away. I could see the faces and emotions of the characters - Newton's torment, Elly's longing and confusion, and the pathetic yet oddly charismatic serial killer Valentine, played brilliantly by Michael Esper. The story made more sense; I could see the significance (not necessarily “meaning”) of events and characters. Michael Esper gave a thrilling performance of Valentine's Day (helped by brilliant lighting, visual and sound effects). Michael C Hall was very moving and, for me, made Newton more sympathetic than Bowie himself did in the original film. And most of all, his developing relationship with Girl was deeply touching. In the emotionally complex staging of Absolute Beginners, Newton sings the song platonically to Girl, while a confused Elly (who cannot see Girl) sings it romantically to Newton. Despite Elly's pain, the song marks a crucial point in the development of Newton and Girl's relationship, which is so central to the story and its eventual resolution. Whether she's real or not, Girl is who and what Newton needs to help him find peace, and once he realises that he has hope. He confesses to Valentine that it doesn't matter if she's real or not - he has something to live for. And I'll never forget the compassion and emotion in Caruso's incredibly expressive eyes, or the poetic strangeness of her vocal delivery at times (almost a little alien herself). Or the sudden expression of love and affection (which I won't give away!) at the end of Life on Mars? Hall is already, justifiably, a star of both TV and stage, and I'll be very surprised if Caruso doesn't have a similarly bright career ahead of her, having seen the depth and variety of which she's capable while still a minor. She brings not only heartbreaking poignancy but also feistiness to the role of Girl - and is as funny in some moments as she's convincingly confused or frightened in others.</div>
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The climax of the play brings resolution both to Newton's conflicts and to his relationship with Girl. It's hard to even give a sense of it without plot spoiling, but I'll try. Girl remembers who she is and why she's there - not only to help Newton but to ask him to help her. Like him, she is lost between two worlds (No Plan, the wonderful new song that Bowie wrote for her, gives an early hint of this). And ultimately, it’s the murderous Valentine who unexpectedly helps Newton to free her. If Valentine too exists in Newton's mind, it's almost as if Newton has to accept and turn towards the rage in himself, before he can truly be free from his despair. </div>
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Although the ending is ambiguous, and like so much else, probably takes place only in his mind, I don't think it matters. What matters is that he finds peace; like the original Lazarus, he is reborn. And at the very end, Girl and Newton sing a song to each other, a very famous song, but completely changed in character so that it brings a feeling of ultimate rest at its close. It’s tender, playful and incredibly beautiful, with an unexpected and deeply appropriate change of two lines halfway through. Before Girl almost literally puts Newton to bed, and a final, very moving image is projected onto the screen.</div>
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Now I've seen a few live operas in my time, and I know that Bowie, for all his talent and influence, was no Mozart. But this ending reminds me of the quiet emotional climaxes (similarly involving the love of two characters) that end two of Mozart's greatest stage works. I was moved by the end of Lazarus just as I was by those earlier experiences years ago. I felt myself choking up inside - and yes, I cried at the beauty of it.</div>
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Lazarus, of course, has added resonance because (along with the album Blackstar) it was Bowie's final creative work. Strangely, it seems to complement Blackstar; while the album is mostly dark and introspective, Lazarus, for all its juxtaposed moods from nightmare to comedy, feels ultimately like a celebration. As I said at the start, it may even be Bowie's greatest achievement. Despite the fact that it's a play, involving many collaborators from the actors/singers to co-writer and director, the whole experience feels like Bowie, as much as any of his albums do. Partly, of course, it's the songs! Bowie worked closely with the arranger Henry Hey, and with the three actors Hall, Esper and Caruso, all of whom came to London from the original New York cast. Caruso says that Bowie gave her advice on the phrasing of Life on Mars?, as he went to rehearsals when he was well enough (the cast apparently had no idea he was ill). So he was closely involved, and it's not surprising that the experience felt as if Bowie was being channelled through the efforts of everyone involved. I've been a fan since 1982, so I should know! :-)</div>
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The play was also imbued with many of Bowie's preoccupations, familiar to fans of his earlier work. Serial killing, and a fourteen year old girl, are the subject of his great 1995 album Outside. Isolation, loneliness and addiction are familiar themes throughout his work, and Bowie's identification with Newton is well known; during rehearsals, he once accidentally referred to Newton as “me”. As in the original film, Newton seems to express something for those of us who are human on the outside but feel alien on the inside - strangers in a strange land. (Many fans felt that way about his work from the beginning; it was as if he gave young people permission to be odd, to be different, and because of the lasting quality of his best music, those fans now span the generations). In Lazarus, I wonder if Newton's retreat from the world reflects Bowie's well known attitudes to fame and celebrity. In 2004, Bowie retreated into ordinary life (he too lived in a New York penthouse!) after a heart attack curtailed an exhausting world tour. He drew and painted, he watched movies, he enjoyed life in a loving family. And he watched and helped his daughter grow up - a daughter who at the time he wrote Lazarus, was the same age as Girl. It was while Lazarus was in production that Bowie realised he would soon have to say goodbye to his own Girl.</div>
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There's a lovely moment in the play where Newton asks Girl (who says she knows everything about him) to tell him about a good memory he has - something he has never told anyone. And Girl radiantly describes him climbing a hill with his daughter (“about my age”) on their home planet, to sit and look at the stars. He'd tell her stories about flying through space. And when he stopped talking, his daughter would say to him, “Speak some more, and we'll travel on.”</div>
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On 7 December 2015, David Bowie attended the premiere of Lazarus at the New York Theatre Workshop. One of the actors described the shining happiness on his face as he joined them to take their bows. It was the final public appearance of a man who loved to work outside of the cultural mainstream (and Lazarus is pretty outside!), yet was only rarely outside of the public consciousness.<br />
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Just over a month later he died, surrounded by his family. Maybe to travel on, or maybe not. If he did, I hope he found peace.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">After the premiere, 7 December 2015. Photographer unknown.</td></tr>
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Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13502259768807545897noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1717330685210325234.post-20371958756055901222017-01-04T14:26:00.001+00:002017-01-12T17:22:02.200+00:00"Something happened on the day he died..." Some Personal Thoughts about David Bowie, a Year after His Death.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A picture from Bowie's last official photo shoot. © Jimmy King, 2015</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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I'm writing this at the other end of the year - actually in 2017, but at the end of the year that's passed since David Bowie died. By common consensus, 2016 was a pretty dreadful twelve months, in which frightening political events and trends seemed reflected by the deaths of so many artists and celebrities who were - are - important to so many of us. In my personal experience, though, the only one of those deaths that affected me deeply, almost as if he were someone I knew, was the first. David Bowie died on 10 January 2016, two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his 25th studio album, Blackstar. Even I, a fan since 1982, was surprised by the media shockwave that resulted, and the genuine grief that it triggered in many, including at least one of my friends. It's almost as if I assumed I was the only one who felt that way about him. And I think that's because when I first discovered him in my teens, I really <i>was</i> the only person I knew who did. I was that socially isolated, although starting to emerge at last from several years of self-protective hibernation.<br />
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Except for the first few weeks, though, I haven't felt as sad about David's loss as others seem to have done. I haven't passed through any grieving process - not unless it's a very unusual one. I do still feel strange when I reflect that there's no longer a David Bowie in the world, because it seems so counterintuitive. There's always been David Bowie; he was always alive, seemed so full of life. Perhaps that's why, during the past decade, I always got a shock when I saw recent pictures of him, and realised that he was looking his age. It must have reminded me that one day he was going to be gone. And that's the counterintuitive part: he seemed eternally young, so vitally and creatively alive. Even if he wasn't always making albums, he was still around somewhere. Mostly he was in Greenwich Village, or in the Catskill Mountains near Woodstock. But he was also in my head, even though I didn't think of him that often. Because he was there - very much so - at the beginning of my delayed social adolescence, when I began to thaw out and live and, to some extent at least, join my teenaged peers in the human race. In the Bowie-shaped cluster of neurons that forms my deepest memories of him, “it's always 1982” ('Slip Away’, from the Heathen album). Or it was until recently.<br />
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The following is a collection of bits I wrote in the weeks following his death - on Facebook mostly, sometimes shared privately with just one friend or two. I hoped eventually to write something bigger about Bowie's importance in my life, so I kept them, pasted into a draft email to myself. They're organised only by chronology, slightly edited, and form the first part of my reflective/celebratory piece about this unique and extraordinary popular artist. The second part will be a personal response to experiencing (twice) his crowning creative achievement: the almost indescribable multimedia musical play, Lazarus.<br />
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But for now, back to the start of that collective <i>annus</i><i> </i><i>horribilis</i>.<br />
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<b>16 January 2016</b><br />
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The memories David's death stir in me are rather lonely ones, I guess. I never dressed as Ziggy, I was never a space cadet, I never went to clubs. But I discovered Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust at the age of 16, and soon after that Let's Dance came out. I was hooked, and rapidly became what must have been the biggest Bowie fan in St Albans. I could not have been more obsessed. Mostly I just listened compulsively to his albums in my bedroom, but I also remember the multiple groans in the 6th form common room every time I put Low or Young Americans on the record player (yes, those were the days of 6th forms, and common rooms, and record players - and people talked instead of being absorbed in their phones!) I remember one girl, though, appreciating it. "Everyone else plays such rubbish, and here you are educating us with David Bowie!"<br />
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I didn't have many friends back then; I was slowly coming out of my shell. Looking back though, it was a time when I was beginning to feel really alive, and Bowie was the soundtrack to that. Whether I was stamping my feet alone at bus stops and singing Starman into the night, or going crazy to Modern Love at the first teenage parties I ever got invited to. Although he's done a whole lot more since then (including much that he's still not given enough credit for), I forever associate Bowie's music with that time, when I hardly listened to anything else.<br />
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After that my musical loves became vastly more diverse. But apart from the classical composers, probably only Kate Bush has struck such deep chords in me, to the point of real obsession. I don't listen to either of them as much now (there's too much other music!), but I would never dream of purging them from my music collection - there isn't a single album by either of them that I haven't bought and played - apart from The Next Day, which was a birthday gift.<br />
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Blackstar arrived from Amazon a week ago; I listened to it once and on a first impression thought it was Bowie's best since Heathen. The following day my partner told me the news of his death. Even though I'd felt he was suddenly looking his age, it was still kind of hard to believe he was dead - partly because he was always moving. Musically, stylistically, physically, in his thoughts, interests and words. Now that he's been cremated, it feels even more final. He's really gone - except for the songs, which are quite a legacy.<br />
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<b>25 January 2016</b><br />
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I was reading his Wikipedia entry last night and it gave me a weird feeling that it was all written in the past tense. Facebook seems much quieter about him now, but he's still very frequently on my mind. Listened to Blackstar again yesterday, planning on Station to Station today. I don't feel particularly sad anymore except when I think of the fear he must have felt at times, and Lexi still really a child. In an interview in 2002 he said that leaving his daughter was one of the things he feared about death. But I just feel like playing his music, celebrating his creativity. Something which I haven't done in a long time.<br />
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His death has made me think of mortality generally, including my own. How little time might be left. I'll be 69 in only 19 years, which will probably fly by. And I'm sure David planned on having a few more years left yet. It's all a bit scary when I think about it.<br />
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<b>“Love me, love me, love me, love me, say you do…”</b><br />
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The Station to Station cover of Wild is the Wind meant a great deal to me as a young adult. I was in love, and so incapacitatingly shy from years of bullying and other stuff that I couldn't say anything to the girl I yearned for. This song was a kind of safety valve for some of my feelings; if not for music, I don't know what I'd have done. As for Bowie's interpretation, I still think it's amazing that he should choose an old standard to close such a modern sounding, forward looking album - and that his vocal is absolutely wonderful! I used to sometimes come across people who said that Bowie "couldn't sing", and I'd play songs like this and think, “<i>wha</i><i>-</i><i>aaaa</i><i>...???</i>”. The album recording is probably the most moving and also the most technically stunning piece of singing he ever did.<br />
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I've been thinking they must surely release the songs he wrote for that hypothetical Blackstar follow up. In his last months he was working at top speed, creating an album and collaborating on a musical, and hoping to finish yet another album. He also curated several records to be released after his death. I'm sure he cared about his legacy, and will have done this with as much care as he could manage, given the limited time he had. But he had so much he wanted to write and so little time. And a colleague of his said that in the last weeks he could occasionally see fear in his eyes.<br />
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<b>1 February 2016</b><br />
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I've often been curious, and a bit confused, about Bowie's spiritual beliefs. Throughout his adult life he maintained an interest in Buddhism - a non-theistic religion, of course. For many people it's not even a religion as such, but more a kind of psychology or way of life - a set of practices and ethics. But Bowie so often contradicted himself about religion, sometimes saying he absolutely believed in God, and then later in life describing himself as "<i>almost</i> an atheist". I get the sense he was often not sure himself what he believed, if anything. I do think he was on a spiritual search for something, even though he had no truck with the dogma of organised religion. But I'd love to know if he finally found certainty or peace at the end (even though it's none of my business, I guess!), because he seemed afraid towards the end. I wonder if Iman, as a Muslim, believes she will "see" him again, or not. Or whether he expected to "see" her again, and if that brought him comfort. Or what his children believe. I would imagine they didn't bring up Lexi as a Muslim, but let her make up her own mind; that sounds like what he'd do. Does she believe she'll "see" her dad again one day? I don't know why, but I've been thinking about these things.<br />
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<b>24 February 2016</b><br />
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Oh, V- ! Of all the people I know who've been affected by David's death, I feel you've been affected the most deeply. I hope it gets easier soon. {{{BIG HUGS}}}<br />
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I'm still very moved by his loss, and sad when I think about it - and sometimes I'm caught off guard by it and find it hard to believe that there is no longer David Bowie in this world. What I don't understand is how and why my interest in him and his music has been rekindled to such an extent. After all, the media hoo haa has died down, so the bandwagon has long passed. Before his death, I had never got rid of his albums, but I listened to them only rarely. I was the most obsessed fan I've ever known at one time, but that was over 30 years ago. Now I'm playing some of the albums again, watching interviews, reading articles... Most days I have one of his songs in my head at least some of the time (at this moment it's Golden Years). I find him gorgeously sexy (at least from 1977 onwards), even though I'm very heterosexual. And for the first time, really, I'm finding myself interested in his private life with Iman and Lexi, which is none of my business. And wondering how he was feeling about dying - someone who seemed to love living so much, and now had an extra person to live FOR. Wondering about all the musical and lyrical allusions on Blackstar and what some of them mean. My friends on Facebook must wonder why on earth I'm sharing so many photos of him. And I'm really not sure myself! Except that I know I'm the kind of person who goes through crazes and obsessions.<br />
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It sounds much more difficult for you, I know. I'm here if you need me, is what I want to say. xxxx<br />
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I'm not sure if I was aware, all those years ago at the age of 17, that he was the poster boy for odd kids. I knew that I was 'different’, that I didn't fit in, but I was too innocent and still coming out of my shell to really be aware of all the things he was kicking against and attracted to. I found that out much more recently by watching interviews. I guess the recurrent themes of loneliness, isolation and alienation in his lyrics must have registered to an extent - but I mean, his lifestyle (sexually promiscuous until his second marriage) was the complete opposite of mine! I didn't even have a kinda sorta girlfriend until I was 27! Perhaps that's partly why I was happy that Bowie had Iman and Lexi in his later life. The longing for fulfilled monogamy and family - that I could relate to. As Joni Mitchell once sang (something like): "fuck your strangers - don't it leave you on the empty side?"<br />
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My obsession, at 17, was the music. I was just thrilled by it. Also, to some degree, that sexual charisma. I may have been responding on some level to the context and subtext too, but if so then I think I was unconscious of it. He was just such a thrilling singer and performer, such an extraordinarily beautiful looking man, and the songs were magnificent enough for me to know them inside out and yet not get bored with them. And to a great extent, they still are.<br />
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It's the end of the year again now, the beginning of 2017, the anniversary fast approaching. And reading that last paragraph again, I'm sure that I always was responding to that incredible sexual charisma of his. I may not have been able to identify with his lifestyle, but there was a big part of me that wanted, however hopelessly, to be David Bowie. His beauty, his confidence… I had no idea, back in 1983, that he was actually quite a shy person - something that still feels unbelievable to me in a way, but which he was happy to admit to in later life, explaining that that was why he initially needed to create personas to express himself, especially on stage. Later on he felt more comfortable with himself and let 'David Bowie’ become one one big persona, separating it clearly from his private life, in which he remained David Jones. During the decade-long sabbatical from his career that was prompted by his 2004 heart attack, for the first time he spent almost his whole time being David Jones again - making charcoal drawings at home, watching movies, walking his daughter to school. He described aging as “an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been”. And in a statement a few years ago which really touched me when I heard it, he said, “Much to my surprise, I'm actually very like my dad”.<br />
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Perhaps my own growing up, together with my alienation from his earlier promiscuous lifestyle, is why I remain deeply attracted to him but to the older Bowie, not the androgynous Ziggy or the sinister Thin White Duke, or even the blond haired, Armani suited stadium megastar of 1983 (he later described the eighties wryly as “my Phil Collins years”). For me right now, Bowie was at his most beautiful fifteen years ago, when he released what I think is one of his best albums, Heathen. That album showed that as he aged he was already pondering the abyss of death, but on stage and in interviews he looked gorgeous, and somehow fully relaxed with himself. He had a new daughter, who he was clearly and touchingly besotted with. And both his thoughtfulness and his sense of humour were as wonderful as ever. That humour is something not everyone knows about, because it's only intermittently present on his albums, but it was witty, quick-firing, free associative, often bizarre, and very, very funny. Check his interviews from the time on YouTube, and contrast them with the awkward, defensive, cocaine-addled interviewee of 1975. It's like two completely different people.<br />
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But now it's 2017, and David has been dead for very nearly a year. I'm still sharing daily pictures of him on Facebook. I still have his songs in my head, almost every day, though I play his albums less often. Blackstar, with a few slight reservations, still feels as challenging and forward-looking as one could hope for, and (especially in the title song) deeply moving as well. I'm still, for some reason, not mourning him in the usual sense, though I do feel sad when I reflect that he's no longer with us. Instead I remain very much preoccupied with him, but mostly in a celebratory sense. After all, I never met David Jones, but David Bowie is in a real sense still alive - in his music, his films, his words, his interviews, and far more accessible now than in pre-internet days. I do wonder why I haven't been as grief stricken as so many other fans have been - what that says about me? But how I feel is how I feel. I love Bowie and I miss his living personal presence in the world; his death was definitely too soon. But he still sends thrills of excitement through me, more than anything else.<br />
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Always a bit ritualistic about dates, for some time I've wanted to round off these twelve months with some symmetry and closure. I could have just written this, played Blackstar on his anniversary, and left it at that. But in his own final year, David Bowie brought to fruition something so wonderful, so fractured and disorienting and glorious and fun, simultaneously forward-looking and also a summing up, that it was almost like looking back at his whole creative development (including his painting, acting and video work) through a kaleidoscope. It was like getting another album to complement Blackstar, yet in some ways it was more than an album - so very, very much more. And when I experienced it the second time I was moved to tears. That, for me, marked the end of the year - both 2016, to which it finally brought a sense of peace, and the year between his death and anniversary. That amazing, tortured, funny, nightmarish, compassionate, joyful and celebratory creation - Bowie's crowning achievement - is Lazarus.<br />
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<i>On with the theatre review!</i><br />
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Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13502259768807545897noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1717330685210325234.post-36113721692219765352015-11-17T18:14:00.002+00:002015-11-17T18:20:01.670+00:00How to Live Well with Chronic Pain and Illness - A Book Review<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0zTa9ay0UsNuiUwTEjegTsIerdnRyaLu4m4HmzvLhWd2jUPFceNdkDp1Xdixu1DhLGYZPnZoO4YM0dmLm4Z4C55eWl3VgaBDaFY1wg-Lif01f7b4j_MDS-clg_Y6GfhLtOp6KYlKpUpI/s1600/2014.00.00+toni+bernhard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0zTa9ay0UsNuiUwTEjegTsIerdnRyaLu4m4HmzvLhWd2jUPFceNdkDp1Xdixu1DhLGYZPnZoO4YM0dmLm4Z4C55eWl3VgaBDaFY1wg-Lif01f7b4j_MDS-clg_Y6GfhLtOp6KYlKpUpI/s320/2014.00.00+toni+bernhard.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Toni Bernhard with her puppy, Scout</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">Toni Bernhard's new book is her third, and I love them all. But this one is my favourite. Even more than usual, I felt while reading it that she was speaking to me directly. Not all writers have this gift.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
Written in the easy, flowing style so typical of Toni's writing, it's astonishingly comprehensive, covering everything from the everyday difficulties of living with chronic pain or illness, to help for the friends and families of sufferers to understand what it's like to live with chronic illness, day upon day, year upon year. This was important to me, as I expect to many other sufferers, because virtually everyone I know in what Toni describes as the "parallel world" of the chronically sick finds it hard to deal with insensitive comments made by (often well-meaning) people who are ignorant of what their struggles involve.</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
As with Toni's previous books, it's clearly written from a Buddhist perspective. Here though, there seems less emphasis on formal Buddhist practices and philosophy, and perhaps a little more on practical ways of coping and "living well". Toni still introduces practices that have helped her to find equanimity and strength throughout the 14 years (so far) of her illness, and she's totally disarming in her openness about her struggles and occasional failures to respond to them with equanimity. There is not a trace of self pity, however. Much of the book seems written with a view to empathising and feeling compassion for her fellow sufferers and their carers. There are also delightful touches of humour. But it remains a very practical book, and she really does show that finding equanimity, retaining the aspects of life that can still give us pleasure even though we're ill, and being compassionate with ourselves (either in response to physical suffering, or when we fail to respond to it in helpful ways), can help to enrich our lives and reduce the mental suffering that so often accompanies chronic illness. Toni's compassion, wisdom and practical experience of living with illness, shine through every page.</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
I cannot stress enough how easy this book is to read. The chapters are many and short, each dealing with a different aspect of living with chronic pain and illness. This may be important for many readers, because pain and illness affect concentration for a lot of sufferers - so the shorter the chapters, the easier the read. Each chapter is also helpfully subdivided. This also has the benefit of making it easy to dip in to the book and pick out sections that may be relevant to difficulties we're experiencing at that time.</div>
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As with her previous books, Toni's loved ones make appearances in the many little stories that illustrate her own experiences and difficulties. Especially when you've read all three books, you may come to feel you almost know Toni's husband, children, granddaughters and even her playful Labrador puppy. These personal appearances never intrude, however. They always help to make some point clearer, by bringing experiences from her real life to show how a life that's been turned upside down can still be responded to in ways that help to reduce suffering. Toni is also honest in recognising that in certain respects she's lucky. Many chronically ill people have no partner, no family, no home of their own, no income, or (in America) little or no health insurance. She recognises that their own experiences may be much more difficult. All this, together with her disarming honesty about her own difficulties, reveal a woman who feels very much a part of the chronic illness community, rather than an expert dispensing wisdom from on high. Although, as I said earlier, she is indeed very wise!</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
This is one of the very best 'self help' books I've ever read. Reading it brought me comfort, help and companionship during a difficult pain flare. I've lived with chronic pain for eleven years now, and Toni's latest book is one of those that will never be far from my bedside.<br />
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<br />
How to Live Well with Chronic Pain and Illness: A Mindful Guide is available from Amazon and all good bookshops.</div>
</span></span>Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13502259768807545897noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1717330685210325234.post-63796261764234620842014-09-12T14:27:00.000+01:002014-09-12T14:27:56.767+01:00Enough<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;">This is different from anything I’ve posted
previously on this blog. It’s edited from a Facebook status update (on 11
September) that grew and grew – surely the longest I’ve ever shared. Some may
even feel that it’s incompatible with a blog that tends to reflect a Buddhist
(though secular) outlook – I don’t know. I just know that I wanted to share.
I’ve seen and read about so much bloodshed in the past fifteen years. Certainly,
I regard the events of 11<sup>th</sup> September 2001 as a terrible atrocity.
My heart tells me that, and international law tells me that. But I am tired of
reading those words, ‘Never Forget’, as if the million or more deaths that
followed, supposedly in response to that criminal act, are less important –
less worthy of remembrance. To me, 20<sup>th</sup> March is the anniversary of
a far bigger tragedy than 9/11, and an even greater crime. So I want to share
the feelings, some of the thoughts behind that remembrance. I also think that
these feelings spring from the same part of me that’s attracted to Buddhist
ethics and practices. I kind of float in and out of Buddhism just as I float in
and out of a very limited form of peace activism. But the source of both in me,
the core values of justice and peace, the horror of bloodshed and inhumanity,
remains constant.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="background: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;">TRIGGER
WARNING:</span></b><span style="background: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;"> Although I’ve tried not to be gratuitous in
describing the visceral effects of war, there may be passages that would be
traumatic or harmful for some people to read. One particular sentence comes to
mind. It was important to me to express, however briefly, something of the
reality of war, as an antidote to the newspeak through which it is often
presented. Clearly, however, I don’t want my words to hurt anyone, so it’s up
to the reader’s best judgement as to whether to read further.</span></div>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;">Thirteen years ago, when the </span><st1:country-region style="color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;"> was attacked
by mostly Saudi Arabian criminals, I tended to see war as something that
happened on the news. I didn't like it, but I didn't feel very personally
involved. By 2003, when mostly American criminals attacked </span><st1:country-region style="color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;" w:st="on">Iraq</st1:country-region><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;">, I was politicised - and like at least a
million other people in the </span><st1:country-region style="color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;">,
I took to the streets.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;"><div style="color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">After becoming chronically ill a year later wit</span><span class="textexposedshow" style="font-size: 10.5pt;">h neuropathic pain, I spent several years campaigning
against various related War in Terror issues, but mostly the war on <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>. I had to
give it up eventually because the continuing sense of horror, and the pressures
I was putting on myself, became too much for me and I broke down. But for a
couple of years I kept myself aware and informed, and I felt very emotionally
involved. When people questioned my views I defended them, arguing often and at
great length. I tried to be logical and I knew I was much more knowledgeable
than I'd used to be, but the passion always came through. And of course, I got
nowhere. People who believed in war continued to do so, and my mind didn't
change either.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></div>
<span class="textexposedshow" style="color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">Now, and especially since </span><st1:country-region style="font-size: 10.5pt;" w:st="on">Israel</st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">'s latest barbaric assaults on </span><st1:city style="font-size: 10.5pt;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Gaza</st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">, I feel like I can
hardly be bothered to discuss it. I've seen and read about so much insanity,
cruelty and horror, that I don't have much respect left for the views of people
who defend, say, the Iraq War, or Israel's slaughter of the Palestinians. I
even find it a bit difficult to want to stay friends with people who espouse
such views. I know, of course, that they have a moral and legal right to
express them, and much of my peace activism was concerned with defending the
right to free speech. I know that it's a fact of life that my friends and I
aren't going to agree on everything, and that in some ways this is a good
thing. But increasingly, I seem to have no respect for pro-war views. I mean,
for frack's sake, have people never heard of international law, or the UN
Charter???</span></div>
</span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<span class="textexposedshow" style="color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">International law is meant to protect all of us
from the chaos, the slaughter and the 'scourge of war'. The UN Charter permits
going to war only in very rare and desperate circumstances. It's not okay, for
instance, to respond to terrorist attacks by fighting a war that causes
suffering and death to millions of people who had nothing to do with those
attacks. That simply trashes the memory of the victims of 9/11 in the worst way
imaginable. And international humanitarian law declares that in those rare
circumstances where war is necessary, it's a crime to target civilians or civilian
infrastructure, no matter what the reason or provocation. It is never, ever
okay to not discriminate between a military enemy and innocent civilians. It is
never, never, NEVER okay to murder children!</span></div>
</span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<span class="textexposedshow" style="color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">In reality, and increasingly it seems, war never
follows the rules laid out in the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. It
sometimes seems to have good intentions, but those are almost always based on
lies, lies used to justify wars that shouldn't even be taking place. And no
military, anywhere, seems to translate international humanitarian law into
practice. Whole suburbs or even towns are flattened in order to kill a few
terrorists. In the case of </span><st1:country-region style="font-size: 10.5pt;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">,
a whole country was virtually destroyed. Large parts of </span><st1:city style="font-size: 10.5pt;" w:st="on">Gaza</st1:city><span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">
look like </span><st1:city style="font-size: 10.5pt;" w:st="on">Hiroshima</st1:city><span style="font-size: 10.5pt;"> after the bomb, and little
Palestinian girls are decapitated (aren't we supposed to be better than </span><st1:place style="font-size: 10.5pt;" w:st="on">ISIS</st1:place><span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">?), disembowelled or, in one photograph that I can't
forget, have the back half of their skulls blown off. Sometimes the military
gets its man (and sometimes not), but it often takes a hundred or a thousand
more people with him. Some estimates suggest that a million Iraqi people died
as a direct result of the 2003 invasion. Women get killed. Old people with
dementia get killed. Children get killed. Babies get killed. It's a wonder that
every single person in those countries doesn't hate us. It would be
understandable if they did.</span></div>
</span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<span class="textexposedshow" style="color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="textexposedshow" style="font-size: 10.5pt;">I'm sick and tired of it. I'm sick of nice, sane,
friendly people defending war in terms of 'security' or 'freedom'. War as it is
fought today is obscene. It is streets filled with burning flesh, blood and
intestines. It is real people, REAL CHILDREN, screaming in fear and pain. It is
never fought with good cause, and is never conducted in as way that protects
innocent people and adheres to international law. There is no such thing as a
‘surgical strike’ - the war on <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Gaza</st1:place></st1:city>
demonstrates that. War is terrible, unjust suffering inflicted on human beings
by other human beings. It is sick and evil and it can almost never be
justified. The pilots who brought down the World Trade Centre thirteen years
ago were <i>criminals</i>, not an army! The
fact that something needed to be done did not mean it was okay to invade,
occupy and flatten countries. It's never remotely okay to kill children, no
matter what the provocation.</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-size: 10.5pt;"> </span></div>
</span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<span class="textexposedshow" style="color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">I can no longer feel bothered to argue with people.
Anyone who thinks these atrocities are justified by 9/11 is either ignorant,
unaware or has no moral centre left. People justify </span><st1:country-region style="font-size: 10.5pt;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">'s actions in the last few
months even though 500 children were killed, and thousands more injured,
hundreds of thousands displaced, orphaned or traumatised. I don't even want to
speculate about the number of kids killed in </span><st1:country-region style="font-size: 10.5pt;" w:st="on">Iraq</st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">
or </span><st1:country-region style="font-size: 10.5pt;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">.
And I am losing tolerance for people who defend these things. It’s not as if
the UN Charter and Geneva Conventions aren't available online for everyone to
see!</span></div>
</span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<span class="textexposedshow" style="color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">Rest in peace, all you thousands of victims of
9/11. Rest in peace, all you millions of people who suffered in the subsequent
War on Terror. Slaughtered civilians everywhere, your lives are all equal, even
though it is constantly implied that they aren't. Your deaths aren't
'regrettable but justified' - they are terrible, wicked crimes.</span></div>
</span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">I’m aware that I need to find a calmer, more ‘Buddhist’ place in me that can
respond to these matters in a more centred way. But this is how I felt on 11</span><sup style="font-size: 10.5pt;">th</sup><span style="font-size: 10.5pt;">
September 2014. </span><span class="textexposedshow" style="font-size: 10.5pt;">This is my 9/11 piece for this
year.</span></div>
</span></span>Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13502259768807545897noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1717330685210325234.post-73654358355399394342014-03-24T19:12:00.000+00:002014-03-24T19:12:25.943+00:00Cunning Foxes and Wily Coyotes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqVXPy_jnzZ5t7l4HtkIpI9NECCbD1Q0KEBOcRbvz_dHyLJgazYYjrNc1YUELudhDeyrbpDrVA-z4bL0iVtdYCzQkehtq3IG8mBghhD52NbYsTSW5GG5dF_uhyphenhyphen8dmXyvIBOjfAFhjA07M/s1600/1afantastic_mr_fox.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqVXPy_jnzZ5t7l4HtkIpI9NECCbD1Q0KEBOcRbvz_dHyLJgazYYjrNc1YUELudhDeyrbpDrVA-z4bL0iVtdYCzQkehtq3IG8mBghhD52NbYsTSW5GG5dF_uhyphenhyphen8dmXyvIBOjfAFhjA07M/s1600/1afantastic_mr_fox.jpg" height="215" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">Lately I’ve been enjoying a film and a book, very
different in character yet united by a common theme. The film is the animated
comedy ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’, directed by Wes Anderson and based on the story by
Road Dahl. The book is called ‘Prodigal Summer’ by Barbara Kingsolver, and
although it’s a novel it cleverly integrates a lot of science, in a way that it
always remains a part of the story rather than as an ‘expository lump’. I’m not
a scientist, but Kingsolver is, and in this book one of her main characters is
concerned with the role of predators in ecosystems. She studies coyotes.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">This character, the aptly named Deanna Wolfe, tries
passionately to explain to her lover, a farmer who hunts coyotes, why predators
are more important to an environment than prey animals. In an ecosystem, there
are relatively few ‘top predators’, such as bears and wolves, but lots of prey
animals, from deer to mice and squirrels. Shooting most or all of the local top
predators can have devastating effects beyond the loss of a single noble
species, because the prey animals then multiply. Squashing spiders causes flies
to increase; killing foxes can cause a plague of rabbits that eat the farmer’s
carrots. The increase of the top predator’s natural prey can also crowd out
other species, causing their extinction. Often we cannot predict the effects of
wiping out a predator population, but it will nearly always cause problems for
a previously stable ecosystem.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Deanna has written a thesis which attempts to explain why
the wily coyote, despite being the ‘most despised animal’ in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>,
killed in hundreds of thousands every year (a horrible statistic), actually
increases in numbers when it’s hunted. Something happens to their breeding. It
may be that when their population is under threat, all of the females in a pack
start to breed, instead of just the alpha female. Or perhaps something hormonal
causes bigger litters. Either way, the efforts of farmers to protect their
lambs seems to make the problem worse. Mothers, fathers, pups are killed for
nothing – except for money: the annual ‘coyote bounty’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">This got me thinking about foxes. Here in a </span><st1:country-region style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">, a lot of
people love foxes, but a lot of people hate them. This hatred and distrust has
been coded in tradition (partly through ritualistic and cruel aristocratic
‘sport’) for centuries. They kill our chickens! farmers rage. They raid our
wheelie bins! townies complain. This hatred is pointless, because there’s
nothing to hate; it’s just a focus for people’s frustration, a scapegoating. In
a touching scene in ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’, Mrs Fox (rather sexily voiced by Meryl
Streep) asks her husband, “Why did you lie to me, when you promised you’d never
go raiding the farmer’s birds again?” Mr Fox (a characterful George Clooney)
replies regretfully that he doesn’t know. “I’m a wild animal”, is all he can
say. And of course, that’s right. How can we hate an animal for doing what it
can’t help? Foxes just do what they do. They can’t make a choice to do
something else.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">In the British countryside and towns, foxes are the top
predator. They are often called pests by angry homeowners, but they are not
pests. By preying on rats, mice, even insects, they help keep down pest
numbers. They do us a great service. True, they also kill birds, just like our
lovable moggies do. But the RSPB insists that the decline of garden birds has
more to do with our own effects on the ecosystem than with predation by cats
and foxes. As so often, foxes are scapegoated for our own failings. </span></div>
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<o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">Going back to the fictional Deanna’s thesis, I wondered if
foxes also breed differently when they’re hunted. Who knows? – it may or may
not be. But when culls have been tried in the past, they’ve always failed.
Killing foxes in towns costs a lot of public money (which surely we can ill afford),
yet despite the killings, foxes maintain a fairly stable population. Numbers
don’t increase, but they stay roughly the same. It seems that foxes from the
countryside or other town areas simply move into spaces left available by
cullings, glad of the opportunities provided. Foxes are a wonderfully adaptable
species, and we punish them for that adaptability, viewing it suspiciously as
cleverness, slyness or cunning. Once again, this is scapegoating; foxes are too
like us humans, the most adaptable mammal species on the planet. And we make
them pay – but for nothing, it seems, than enjoyment, sport or revenge. Yes,
some predators </span><i style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">can</i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;"> be wiped out, and
their loss is devastating beyond their extinction as a single species. But
foxes’ numbers remain the same; coyotes’ actually increase. By killing them, we
cause blood and suffering, and the starvation of cubs, all for nothing.</span></div>
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<br />
‘Fantastic Mr Fox’ ends with the foxes and other animals, having been
persecuted throughout the film by the farmers, making a new home underneath a
supermarket owned by the same farmers. Adaptable to the end, they have lost
their home in the hill under the beautiful tree, but have made a new life where
they can raid an unlimited supply of food every night. ‘Destroy’ them in one
place, and they pop up in another. Mr Fox is fantastic indeed!<br />
<br />
There’s no question whose side the film is on. It celebrates the wit, the
audacity, the adaptability, and the cunning, of the fox. As we should do. And
that goes for the wily coyote as well. We may have to put up with nuisances
from both species, but hating them is just silly, and we need them too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13502259768807545897noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1717330685210325234.post-21933959329771462752013-10-26T17:02:00.002+01:002013-10-26T17:02:51.011+01:00Waking Up to the End of Suffering<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Bde2tdMTUTzq8c1ijfjxwraUL4y5BoZ1ep88jWajTuhYbsK9nOGLgKN6FKJwlxWaIH7QmQqI9cAzjv7dwHNQmsaVMrkPEFICDC813scZz0GaYnlnm9HAVjWeJFSFBS2P880PluE16wU/s1600/131628ebfaa7d8c820aad8a432f6a7b3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Bde2tdMTUTzq8c1ijfjxwraUL4y5BoZ1ep88jWajTuhYbsK9nOGLgKN6FKJwlxWaIH7QmQqI9cAzjv7dwHNQmsaVMrkPEFICDC813scZz0GaYnlnm9HAVjWeJFSFBS2P880PluE16wU/s1600/131628ebfaa7d8c820aad8a432f6a7b3.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Having read Toni Bernhard’s first book, ‘How to Be Sick’,
I was already acquainted with her beautiful and unique writing style. 'How to Wake Up', her
second book, is no exception. The writing is clear, easy to read, almost
conversational – and the content is wise, practical and helpful. Several
friends of mine have noted that it feels as if Toni is speaking to them
personally, and my own experience is just the same. As someone who has suffered
from chronic pain for nearly ten years now, this is exactly the kind of book I
need when I’m struggling with pain or anxiety. I’m used to keeping ‘How to Be
Sick’ near me whenever I’m alone or in a flare-up, and it feels like having a
supportive friend at my side just when I need one the most.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Partly this must be because Toni has herself suffered from
an ME/CFS type of illness since 2001. I’d found the earlier chapters of ‘How to
Be Sick’ almost heartrending to read, because in them she described powerfully
(but without a trace of self-pity) the early stages of her illness, which began
with severe flu-like symptoms during a trip of Paris. ‘How to Wake Up’ feels
less personal, because she has already told that story. But she remains
unafraid to illustrate the wise, Buddhist-inspired practices she describes,
with stories from her own experience and those of her friends. This makes the
book both touching and, in the end, more ‘real’, because you know the practices
as well as the feelings she describes (common to so many of us in life’s
difficulties, not just pain or illness) arise from real, personal experience.
In both books, we feel we know not only her but also her husband and her hound
dog, through so many of their ‘ten thousand joys and sorrows’ (to quote a
Buddhist phrase). We know that we’re not alone in our own difficulties.<br />
<br />
On a personal note, I also like the version of Buddhism that comes across in
this book especially. If I’m a Buddhist at all then I’m a secular one, and
whilst this book is in a broad sense spiritual, it doesn’t come across as at
all religious. Toni doesn’t believe the Buddha’s enlightenment, or ‘awakening’,
as she calls it, had anything supernatural about it, and she doesn’t allude to rebirth
in a literal or religious sense either. So anyone who, like me, feels
uncomfortable with ideas of ‘faith’ and the supernatural, need not worry here.
These are practices that can be followed by anyone, whatever faith or lack of
faith they happen to have.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Kim Stanley Robinson (the science fiction writer, no
less!) endorsed this book by describing it as ‘something to cherish and
practice’. I’d go even further and say that if anyone wanted a book that
explains what the core practices and ethics of Buddhism are (without any of the
religious accretions), they couldn’t do better than to read this book. The Buddha’s
life’s work was about ‘suffering and the end of suffering’ (no matter what pain
or difficulties we may experience), and in beautiful, practical ways, ‘the end
of suffering’ is what this lovely book teaches so well.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13502259768807545897noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1717330685210325234.post-42735908255834301192013-05-31T22:42:00.001+01:002013-05-31T22:42:17.799+01:00Over the Hills: A Family's Odyssey of Healing in Mongolia<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">This is a rather personal review of a film I saw two
nights ago, and am still thinking about.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Kristin Neff is a psychology professor at the <st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Texas</st1:placename>,
in <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Austin</st1:place></st1:city>. A
few years ago she wrote and published ‘Self-Compassion’, a book (or to be
precise, one of three books) which has recently changed my life – not in an
instant, road-to-Damascus kind of way, but by gradually affecting how I see
life, myself and other people. Like many others, I was brought up to have
compassion for other people. I think I already understood that it was okay to
have self-compassion as well – but not that it was so fundamental to health and
well-being, or that there was so much research-based evidence for its
effectiveness. Being given permission to love oneself is a wonderful thing. I
don’t know if that sounds trite or not, but it’s how it feels to me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Watching online interviews and listening to guided
meditations by Kristin has deepened my admiration for her, and been a moving
experience also. Now, seeing the film ‘The Horse Boy’, produced by Kristin’s
husband Rupert Isaacson, has affected me in a different way but possibly just
as deeply. Hence this movie review!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Kristin met Rupert, an English travel writer and human
rights worker, in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">India</st1:place></st1:country-region>
while researching her PhD. They married and had a son called Rowan, who at the
age of two was diagnosed with autism. Hearing this was, in Rupert’s words,
“like being hit across the face with a baseball bat”. After years of suffering
Rowan’s severe tantrums (neurological in cause, so he was unable to help it),
and of encouraging him in vain to speak fully and to use the toilet, they
suddenly discovered that his symptoms diminished greatly when he was with
horses (Rupert has worked with horses all his life, and loves them). What was
more, Rowan and his neighbour’s horse Betsy clearly had some kind of deep
mutual understanding, on a non-verbal level. When he was placed on Betsy’s
back, he spoke his first full sentence (he also said “I love you” for the first
time, to Betsy). And there was something similar going on between Rowan and
other kinds of animals, who would often let him play with them to an extent
that they wouldn’t with neurotypical children. Watching these scenes in the
film was very moving for me, and was the first challenge to my previous
thinking about animals. I know that animals can communicate with humans, of
course (all cat or dog lovers know that), and that they may experience love or
something like it. But this was different. Rowan had a relationship with Betsy
that his dad, a passionate horse lover, had never seen or experienced.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">What Rupert eventually persuaded Kristin to do next was
“something crazy”, as he put it. The family of three set off for <st1:country-region w:st="on">Mongolia</st1:country-region>, and eventually <st1:place w:st="on">Siberia</st1:place>,
to see if the shamans of a remote tribe could help Rowan. They rode into the
steppes and the mountains, on horseback. Rupert had encountered shamans in his
human rights work with indigenous peoples around the world, but this was an
adventure that very few people, if any, can have experienced. The resulting
film, directed by Michel Orion Scott and narrated by Rupert, is ‘The Horse
Boy’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">At all times, it’s very moving. It’s also warm, tender,
upsetting and joyful by turns – and very beautiful to look at, despite the
low-budget photography. Some of the rituals that Kristin and Rupert partake in
are strange, some physically painful. At times Rowan seems to be regressing,
and his parents’ concern and self-doubt are distressing to see. Ultimately the
outcome is exhilarating and happy, however. I won’t give too much away, but
suffice it that while Rowan by the end of the film is still autistic, he’s a
changed boy. And Kristin and Rupert see that change before their eyes, in the
middle of the Asian continent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">How to account for it? Rupert believes without much doubt
that the shamans did it; Kristin is more sceptical but open to that as one of
the explanations. The film’s main effect on me, apart from leaving me deeply
moved, was to lead me to question my assumptions about traditional healers. I’m
a sceptic in regard to methods that haven’t been tested and validated
scientifically, and I have to admit that I admire this trait in myself and
others. But after years of trying every Western medical treatment without
success, <i>something</i> profound happened
here in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Mongolia</st1:place></st1:country-region>
and the Siberian mountains, and especially at the final stage of the journey.
What was it? I’ve no idea, but although I’d like to keep that sceptical part of
myself alive, I’m less dismissive now of the claims and methods used by other
cultures, even if they do explain their success in terms of spirit worlds I
find it hard to believe in.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Other aspects were baffling too, as well as deeply moving.
I’ve mentioned Rowan’s relationships with horses as well as other animals.
These scenes were delightful and mysterious too. What was going on? How did
horses have this incredible ability to calm Rowan’s neurological tantrums, and
how did he bring forth such gentleness in them? In certain moments, it’s as if
we were seeing the animals through Rowan’s eyes, and I felt myself loving the
horses, the reindeer and baby goats, and Rowan too. I feel as if I’d never
realised on such a deep level how beautiful these animals are. The people were
beautiful as well, from Kristin and Rupert to the descendants of the first
people in the world ever to ride animals – the Siberian reindeer people, now
reduced to a tribe of only two hundred. I felt in awe of the beauty of both
animals and human beings – and simultaneously baffled by the apparent fact that
the world is ruled by a handful of psychopaths. I didn’t know whether to have
renewed faith in human nature, or despair at how civilisation is so thin
despite so much goodness flowing from person to person, from person to animal
and back again…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">I was also struck by the beauty and fullness of Kristin
and Rupert’s lives together, and with Rowan. A mysterious scene took place
knee-deep in the waters of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">Lake</st1:placetype>
<st1:placename w:st="on">Sharga</st1:placename></st1:place>, as the married
couple reverently washed each other’s hair. It felt very solemn and deeply loving.
Was it one of the rituals? I don’t think it was said, but it looked like it. Yet
it also looked like a natural expression of a couple’s love.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">I found myself tenderly regretting that I’d never had
children. In years past I wouldn’t have been ready emotionally, for such a
responsibility; now, with my chronic pain and anxiety, we wouldn’t be able to
cope either practically or financially. But seeing Kristin and Rupert, so
patient and gentle with Rowan despite being pushed to their limits both
physically and emotionally, I felt a wistfulness that this aspect of life would
not be part of mine. Not only had Kristin and Rupert had a child (another
mystery: Rowan had been born premature, seven years <i>to the hour</i> since Rupert had first spoken to Kristin!), but they
had come halfway around the world with an autistic boy, trekking on horseback through
the wilderness (Kristin admits to never having been a horse girl!) in search of
a healing which they couldn’t know for sure would even work. To call that a
gamble is an understatement; no wonder it took Kristin so long to be persuaded
in the first place.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">That was another cause of my wistfulness: the fact that
they were willing to take that slim chance. That they engaged with life to such
a degree. Even when I was well, I was never like that. I tended to shy away
from risk, like a nervous horse…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Ultimately, though, this is what makes ‘The Horse Boy’
such a joyful, life-affirming story. A story that began with sudden, premature
agony and then turned to joy; followed by concern, worry and despair as Rowan’s
strange behaviours led to a diagnosis; and then years of stress and often
exhaustion as they battled to cope with Rowan’s affliction, sometimes before
the eyes of misunderstanding strangers… A crazy adventure that would never have
happened without this apparent ‘curse’ (Rupert admits to being a better father
than he would have been if Rowan was a neurotypical child, because he was
forced to listen to what his son needed)… The unearthly beauty of the mountains
and the Siberian taiga… Rupert gently and humorously singing to Rowan as he held
him on horseback: a traditional tune called ‘Over the Hills’, which I know from
‘The Beggar’s Opera’ and Roger Eno’s album ‘Swimming’… Meetings with beautiful
people and animals, the beginning of Rowan’s first ever friendship with another
child, and finally a shaman who ‘worked’ on Rowan without any grand gestures or
showmanship, but simply said that Rowan would be better… And he was.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">I was astonished and affected by the beauty of this film.
Like a quiet hymn to the mysterious wonder of life, of animals, of people, and
of a beautiful, gentle family. It left me questioning what autism really is,
what was special about Rowan’s mind that, even when so afflicted, he had such
direct and loving communication with animals. In fact, I’m questioning a whole
lot of things. The world somehow seems a bigger place, with more mysterious
workings that I’d previously realised.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">I have many friends who love the work of Kristin Neff. She
has brought them (and me) consolation in the midst of severe difficulty, and
the realisation that we have the inborn capacity to give ourselves compassion
through any suffering. I feel sure that they will all love this film. And
anyone who knows anyone with autism, or is interested in relationships between
people and animals, should certainly see it. But most of all, it’s just a
wonderful film.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">‘The Horse Boy’ is available online at <a href="http://www.horseboymovie.com/">http://www.horseboymovie.com/</a>. There
is also a book of the same title by Rupert Isaacson, available at the same website
or from Amazon. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m just about to!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Jockey was
a Piper’s son,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> And fell in
love when he was young;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> But the
only tune that he could play,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Was, Over
the Hills, and far away.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> And I would
love you all the day,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Every night
would kiss and play,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> If with me
you’d fondly stray<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> Over the
Hills and far away.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">All photos are taken from the publicity materials on ‘The
Horse Boy’ website.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; text-align: justify;"> </span></div>
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Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13502259768807545897noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1717330685210325234.post-56424128631309552002013-05-27T13:02:00.005+01:002013-05-27T13:12:39.378+01:00Different Kinds of Nirvana<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One of the things that attracts me to Buddhism is that
it’s not really a religion. It is, of course, but I think I agree with the
secular Buddhist teacher Stephen Batchelor that elements such as literal
rebirth and karma are largely cultural – they aren’t uniquely the Buddha’s
teachings. The Buddha didn’t teach a set of beliefs as such; a study of the
vast Pali canon suggests that Siddartha Gotama was evasive when asked
metaphysical questions. What he taught was <i>actions</i>.
Being mindful, practising meditation and following ethics based on the
principle of non-harming – these are practical, pragmatic ways of living life
without adding unnecessary suffering.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I’m attracted also to a sense of joyfulness, peacefulness
and compassion. Those qualities of equanimity, gentle humour and deep
compassion that the Dalai Lama seems to exude, are characteristic (though to a
lesser extent, perhaps) of a lot of sincere and experienced Buddhists. When I
first joined my local Buddhist group, I was greeted by a lovely, friendly,
gentle group of people – as mixed as any group, but all with a noticeable tendency
not to be judgemental – and a small shrine centred around a statue of a serene
Buddha – a human being with a mysterious half-smile. No almost-naked man
hanging bleeding on a cross. No sins to be forgiven.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I still like this group, although I don’t attend often.
One cause of slight alienation for me is the absolute reverence with which the
Buddha is often spoken of. At the start of every session we ‘salute’ the shrine
- hands together, with a chant and then a bow - and so far I’ve felt a little
too embarrassed to ask what this means. It feels to me almost as if he’s
thought of as perfect – as if his enlightenment that night under the Bodhi tree
(did it really happen like that? – who knows; it’s a lovely myth) resulted in a
uniquely perfect person. But there are no perfect persons. That would make him
a God. And it would make Buddhism a little more like the other religions that I
cannot relate to because of the similar leaps of faith that they require one to
make.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I have a kind of shrine as well – two of them, in fact. In
my bedroom, a rather feminine Buddha rests sweetly with hands and face on one
knee, while downstairs, a more traditional statue sits in the familiar lotus
position. I don’t salute them, though, or revere them as such. They represent
for me a kind of ideal of equanimity and peace with life, which it seems the
Buddha found (at least for much of the time), and which brings me a little more
calm when I gaze at them. As my friend Toni says in her book ‘How to Be Sick’: <i>‘The Buddha inspires me because he never
claimed to be more than a human being. He found pain just as painful as you and
I do. I take this as a reminder that the equanimity and joy we see in the many
images of him are within the reach of every one of us.’<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In a small discussion group I was part of one evening, we
talked about the human tendencies of craving and aversion which, from the
Buddhist viewpoint, cause so much suffering. The group leader said that
experiencing pleasure almost inevitably carries with it a craving to prolong
the experience, as unpleasant experiences create powerful feelings of aversion.
As I remember it, he said that the ideal emotional state would be a kind of ‘flatlining’,
because then we wouldn’t feel craving or aversion and suffering would be
greatly reduced. I found this very hard to accept, and so did another group
member, who said that she could experience pleasure and then let go of it,
because there would be other pleasures to enjoy later. As Toni said to me when
I told her this, who wants to live by flatlining? What mindfulness and other
practices help us to do, she said, is to experience each moment fully, with its
joy or its pain, and then to let go of it. Buddhism recognises that all life,
all experiences, all feelings, all thoughts, are impermanent – but that doesn’t
mean we can’t enjoy them while they’re here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Because my main reason for joining the Buddhist group was
to meet other people in a kind of sangha (spiritual fellowship), and to
meditate with others, I began to attend only on practice nights. I found other
activities hard to relate to; although ideas of literal rebirth and such aren’t
forced on any of us, it feels like a different kind of Buddhism from the one
which I have at last come to accept. If I can find a more secular group, more
based on meditation practice and living in the here and now, I will. But I’ve
made some lovely friends in this group, so I’d like to recognise the beautiful
things we have in common, and take part in it from time to time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Last week was meant to be a practice night, but this was
changed, and I found myself studying the complex subject of the Wheel of Life.
This is a symbolic, pictorial way of exploring the law of conditionality and
its effects on human life. As one goes round the wheel, we see how the course
of an unenlightened life takes us from birth to death to birth again, with
experience, sensation, attachment, craving and aversion in between. I wasn’t
sure about this, either. For one thing, it felt as if we were being taught
doctrine – and after years of Sunday masses full of it, I don’t feel
comfortable finding it again in a Buddhist guise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One of my problems is that I’m a habitual sceptic when it comes
to anything metaphysical. Sure, we have mystical experiences. I have them sometimes
when I listen to Beethoven’s string quartets - but if anyone tries to explain
them in terms of God or whatever, I shut my ears again! Now Buddhism isn’t a
theistic religion (thank God!), but many Buddhist traditions still require you
to believe in something without evidence. This means that they are inevitably
doctrinal in their way of teaching. And in my case, it makes the idea of
literal rebirth a big stumbling block.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Although some of the imagery feels a bit anachronistic, I
accept that the Wheel of Life is a subtle concept; as more than one group
member said, one can find something new in it each time one studies it. I’ll
have to take that on faith, but I do believe them! I wondered if it could still
have something profound to say about life, whether or not we believe in
reincarnation. Well, I haven’t studied the concept before, but it seems to me
that it probably does.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">At the same time, something else bothered me. It all felt
rather negative and depressing – like the idea of emotional flatlining instead
of fully experiencing life. Thinking about rebirth, I suppose I wouldn’t want
to keep being born again indefinitely. It would be pretty tedious having to go
through adolescence and pain and working for bullying employers again – and that’s
if I didn’t end up in a war zone! But then, given that none of the Buddhists I
know seem to remember any previous lives, every life would feel like the first
one anyway. Why was the group teacher, a relaxed, smiling and likeable man with
a sense of humour (and who probably enjoys life on the whole), so intent on
escaping the cycle and floating off into nirvana? (I ought to add that he’s
also one of my Facebook friends!). Is this life really so bad – at least for
many of us in the developed world?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">True, I think the Buddha was right when he said that life
is <i>dukkha</i> (suffering,
unsatisfactoriness) – it isn’t the way any of us would ideally want it to be.
It does include a lot of suffering, and it’s certainly far from perfect. But it
includes a lot of joy as well – and I speak as someone who really would love
life to be different, given that it includes chronic pain and anxiety and is all
too limited by these difficulties. I can’t help thinking that this
interpretation of the Buddha’s teachings is all too reminiscent of other
religions, and their ‘bias against the living world’ (as Tara Brach puts it).
Religions tend to hold that the spiritual world is ‘higher’ and more perfect
than the material one. Hence the need to reject physical temptations in order
to reach heaven (as in traditional Christianity), or to attain full
enlightenment, nirvana and an ultimate escape from the cycle of rebirth (in
Buddhism). The emphasis is a kind of anti-life. And I don’t relate easily to
that, because despite all my difficulties, I love life. Perhaps that just means
I’m not very enlightened – well, I know I’m not, so perhaps the non-secular
Buddhists have a point!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One morning a few weeks ago, I was walking down the street
from my local pharmacy, preoccupied with pain and anxiety – in a flare-up,
family problems, difficult appointment with my doctor… All in all, I wasn’t
very cheerful. And then I looked up, and saw that the trees lining the road had
finally, after a long winter, come into leaf. The leaves were that vivid, fresh
green that they only have when they’re new, and the sun was shining though them
in a brilliant blue sky. It completely took my breath away, and I felt my heart
rejoicing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I hadn’t made any conscious effort or decision. I hadn’t
reluctantly put time and Beethoven aside, and settled down to dutifully
meditate (it can feel rather like that at times). Quite involuntarily, the
physical world had swiftly brought me out of my ruminations and into the
present moment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Isn’t present moment awareness what the Buddha’s teaching
is about? Yet here, in a moment that probably lasted just a few seconds, I was
rejoicing, awe-struck by the beauty of the real, physical world. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It reminded me of a wonderful passage in the final chapter
of Tara Brach’s new book, ‘True Refuge’. <st1:place w:st="on">Tara</st1:place>
is one of the teachers who introduced me to the beauty and consolation of
Buddhist thought, who helped me to realise that here was something that might
actually have a deep meaning for my life. She describes a day when she too was
suffering physically and mentally (like me, she has a chronic pain condition),
and when she too was brought into a joyful present moment awareness by the
beauty of the world around her. I’m quoting this long passage because, while
it’s quite metaphysical and based on something we’d probably need to experience
ourselves to fully ‘get’, at the same time it’s so beautiful and moving.
Reading it gives me hope that I may have the potential to fully love life, despite
the difficulties in my mind and body. After all, is loving and cherishing life
necessarily the same as craving it?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It also raises a question – one which I’m quite willing to
accept may result from my lack of experience and knowledge of the Buddha’s
teachings. This period of scepticism may just be something I’m going through,
before reaching a deeper understanding that others in my Buddhist group already
have.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The question is this: if present moment awareness can
bring the sweetness of life so vividly and joyfully alive, why would one need
to escape this world in order to experience nirvana?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then I paused—the
resentment toward my body caught my attention. As I looked more closely, the
resentment quickly gave way to a familiar grief. Why couldn’t I just walk on
this earth without feeling pain? Tears started to flow as I contacted the
enormity of my frustration and longing. “I want to feel alive. I want to feel
alive. Please. Please. May I feel fully alive.” Naming it opened me to what was
behind the longing: I love life. Embedded in the grief, as always, was love. A
voice inside me was repeating the words over and over, as a delicate, tingling
warmth filled my heart.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I’d been holding
back this love, holding back from fully engaging with life. It was a reaction
to feeling betrayed by my body, a defense against more loss. But in my fear of
being attached to health, I’d not allowed myself to feel the truth—I love life.
Qigong wasn’t about fueling attachment, it was about fully embracing aliveness.
At that moment I decided to stop holding back my love.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As I allowed the “I
love life” feeling to be as full as it wanted, the “I” fell away. Even the
notion of life fell away. What was left was an open radiant heart—as wide as
the world.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This tender
presence was loving everything: the soft streaks of pinks and grays in the sky,
the smell of eucalyptus, the soaring vultures, the songbirds. It was loving the
woman who was standing silently about two hundred feet away, also gazing at the
colors of dawn. It was loving the changing painful and pleasurable sensations
in this body. Now, sending chi to my knees made intuitive sense. It was
awareness’s natural and caring response to its creation. “I” wasn’t loving
life—awareness was loving life.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This experience led
me to see and release a limiting and unconscious belief that I’d held for some
time—a belief that the realm of formless awareness was more spiritual and
valuable than the living forms of this world. This bias against the living
world can be seen in many religious traditions. It emerges in some
interpretations of the Buddha’s teachings as an insistence on guarding
ourselves against the pleasures of the senses—beauty, lovemaking, music, play.
It emerges in the superior status of monks over nuns, in valuing monastic life
over family and lay life, and in the warnings against attachment in close
personal relationships. I now believe this bias comes from fear and mistrust of
life itself. For me, recognizing this in my own psyche was a gift.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We do not need to
transcend the real world to realize our true nature and to live in freedom. In
fact, we can’t. We are aliveness and we are the formless presence that is its
source; we are embodied emptiness. The more we love the world of form, the more
we discover an undivided presence, empty of any sense of self or other. And the
more we realize the open, formless space of awareness, the more unconditionally
we love the changing shapes of creation.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Heart Sutra
from the Buddhist Mahayana texts tells us: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is
also form. Emptiness is not other than form, form is not other than emptiness.”
We can’t separate the ocean from the waves. Our path is to realize the vast
oceanness of our being, and to cherish the waves that appear on the surface.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">During the final
days of the retreat, my willingness to love life unfolded into a very deep,
stable happiness. The happiness wasn’t reliant on things being a certain way—my
moods and physical comfort went up and down. I was happy for no reason. This
unconditioned happiness or well-being is a flavor of awakening. It arises when
we trust our essence as awareness, and know that this entire living world is
part of our heart. Being happy for no reason gave me a kind of confidence or
faith that no matter what happened, everything would be fine.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I returned home and
jumped into a delicious daily ritual of meditation and qigong. During those
first weeks I’d go to the river and scramble down through rocks and bushes to a
secluded beach. Nourished by the sounds of rushing water, the firm sand and
early morning air, I practiced presence in movement and stillness. You can
probably imagine what came next. After I hurt my knee on the small incline down
to the beach, I moved my practice to our deck. Some of the arm movements strained
my neck so I had to minimize them. Then standing up started to strain my legs,
so I began to practice in a chair. Then it rained for a week straight.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And yet, it was all
really okay. More than okay. One of those wet mornings as I was sitting, my
mind became very quiet. My attention opened gently and fully to the changing
flow of experience—aching, waves of tiredness, fleeting thoughts, sounds of
rain. Continuing to pay attention, I felt the subtle sense of aliveness (chi
energy) that pervades my whole body. This aliveness was not solid, it was
spacious, a dance of light. The more I opened to this aliveness, the more I
could sense an alert inner stillness, the background inner space of pure being.
And the more I rested in that stillness, the more vividly alive the world
became.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">After about thirty
minutes I opened my eyes and looked at the lush fern that hangs in our bedroom,
at its delicacy and grace. I was in love with the fern, with the particularity
of its form (how did this universe come up with ferns?), and with the vibrancy
and light of its being. In that moment, the fern was as wondrous as any
glorious scene by the river. I was awareness loving my creation. And I was
happy for no reason. I didn’t need to have things go my way. I was grateful for
the capacity to enjoy life, just as it is.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="apple-style-span"><i><span style="background-color: white;">Adapted
from </span></i></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><i><span style="background-color: white;"> </span></i></span><span class="apple-style-span"><i><span style="background-color: white;"><a href="http://tarabrach.com/products.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: black; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">True Refuge</span></a></span></i></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><i><span style="background-color: white;"> </span></i></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="background-color: white;"><i>(2013)</i></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="background-color: white;">All photos my copyright, except the Wheel of Life image (artist unknown).</span></span></span></div>
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Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13502259768807545897noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1717330685210325234.post-47677889378948630822013-05-27T12:17:00.001+01:002013-05-27T12:27:41.338+01:00How to Be Sick With Grace<h1 style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">For the past five years, since
who-knows-what triggered a nervous breakdown in the spring of 2008, I’ve been
an anxious little bunny. Intermittently, at least. It’s always there in the
background, and it needs careful managing if I’m to keep it there. But it’s
also<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>nine</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>years since I first developed chronic
pain. The anniversary is only a few days away – 24 May. I turn to that thought
not with an eager bunny hop, but a kind of regretful sigh. Very few of us look
forward to our birthdays as we get older, as it’s an uneasy reminder of
you-know-what. But at least with birthdays we have something to actually
celebrate!</span><span style="color: #616161; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt;"><br />
</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br />
Nine years sick – as they would say across the pond. Over here it’s ‘ill’ – or,
if you’re a supporter of the Con-Dem government, or believe what you read in
the shit rags – ‘fraud’.</span><span style="color: #616161; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt;"><br />
</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br />
Imagine the relief I felt when I opened Facebook one day and found that my
friend Toni Bernhard had posted her new blog piece: ’12 Tips from 12 Years
Sick’. When I first ‘met’ her she was just posting ’10 Tips from 10 Years
Sick’, and now I’ve known her as a friend and been helped in very practical
(and spiritual) ways by her work, for two years. That’s a pretty happy
anniversary, even if our mutual ‘sickness’ anniversaries, which both occur at
around the same time (French Open Grand Slam – tennis is one of several shared
interests), are not.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">Toni Bernhard used to be a law
professor at the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><st1:placetype style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;" w:st="on"><span style="color: #616161; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt;"><st1:placetype style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;" u1:st="on">University</st1:placetype></span></st1:placetype><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> </span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><st1:placename style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;" w:st="on"><span style="color: #616161; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt;"><st1:placename style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;" u1:st="on">California</st1:placename></span></st1:placename><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> </span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><st1:place style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;" w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on"><span style="color: #616161; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt;"><st1:city style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;" u1:st="on">Davis</st1:city></span></st1:city></st1:place><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">. In May 2001, on a trip with her husband
to<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><st1:city style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><span style="color: #616161; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt;"><st1:city style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;" u1:st="on">Paris</st1:city></span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">, she fell ill with what she thought was
severe flu. She still hasn’t recovered. Her doctors have classed her illness,
which prevents this life-loving, hard working ex-professor from spending much
of her life outside her bedroom, as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (M.E. in the UK) –
which many people now suspect to be several (or many) discrete illness(es).
Toni sometimes wryly refers to it as ‘Parisian Flu’.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">I discovered Toni’s work while listening to a recorded talk by Tara Brach,
which mentioned a new and remarkable book, ‘How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired
Guide for the Chronically Ill and their Caregivers’. And it</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;"> </span><i style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">is</i><span class="apple-converted-space" style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;"> </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">remarkable: a clear but conversational
self-help book, with an autobiographical thread running through it. It’s so
helpful and at the same time so personal, that when I read it I feel almost as
if she’s talking to me personally. And yet it’s become a bestseller and has
helped countless thousands of people like me.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">Apart from this rare personal quality, other things that struck me in her
writing included a total openness about how it took her years to ‘get it right’
– and how she still struggles with her illness at times, even now. She
understands how it feels to hear the remark that every chronically ill person
has to endure at times: “But you don’t look sick!” And she believes, and more
importantly shows, how it is possible to find joy and equanimity even when our
lives have taken a drastic turn, and left us with something painful and
lifelong (possibly) that we didn’t ask for. She’s one of the least judgemental
people I’ve ever known – a wonderful expression of Buddhist practice in the
midst of very difficult circumstances.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">I wrote Toni a ‘fan email’, and she responded quickly with just the same caring
and friendly tone as I’d found in her book. We then connected on Facebook,
which in a way has become an extension of her work, as her page attracted
thousands of chronically ill admirers of her book, all seeking a connection
with fellow sufferers and wanting to apply the Buddhist-inspired ‘practices’ in
‘How To Be Sick’ to their radically changed lives. Another page, also inspired
by Toni’s work, has a much smaller membership and is very important to me
personally. All of us in the group are struggling at times, and we all express
so much mutual support and caring that it’s a beautiful experience – a kind of
model Buddhist ‘sangha’ (spiritual fellowship) for people with chronic health
problems. I’ve made some very, very dear friends through Toni’s work, and of
course Toni is one of them.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSZsszJe2HVqVtmKxMXDHfwROfznTAvSG_KSpf1bILTolFyAem1V-UNQZh2qWxfpRQf-TtDEf9ZIcbm2OSIx02IzQuy9zxsdjpYSsDQM4N4mx-3DCqBNZurRz7vr1-wmt3PkQ_MhfqTfk/s1600/2013.04.27+bedroom+buddha+(2).JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSZsszJe2HVqVtmKxMXDHfwROfznTAvSG_KSpf1bILTolFyAem1V-UNQZh2qWxfpRQf-TtDEf9ZIcbm2OSIx02IzQuy9zxsdjpYSsDQM4N4mx-3DCqBNZurRz7vr1-wmt3PkQ_MhfqTfk/s320/2013.04.27+bedroom+buddha+(2).JPG" width="235" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">When I first met Toni I wasn’t a
Buddhist, although I did try to apply practices such as mindfulness to help
cope with pain and anxiety. Now I think I</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;"> </span><i style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">am</i><span class="apple-converted-space" style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;"> </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">a Buddhist, albeit a secular one with
an attitude towards this ancient ‘faith’ very similar to that in Toni’s book.
Whatever her private, personal beliefs, her book doesn’t mention rebirth in a
literal sense, for example. It’s a purely practical approach which can be
applied to anyone’s life, whether they consider themselves Buddhist or not.
Toni has helped me resolve more than one confusion about Buddhist thought, and
is one of the people who have helped me to accept that I can try to follow the
Buddha’s core teachings without a belief in anything beyond the material
universe. I’m very grateful to her for this, too.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">So I can safely say that she’s one of the teachers who, in recent years, has
helped to change my life. Like her, I find refuge from my difficulties in the
music of Mozart and Beethoven, and the love of our partners and pets – we
already had those things in common. But I also find it in the friendship and
support of people I would never have met without her – giving me the
opportunity to give to others with similar struggles in life, and to receive
from them too. And now I can also find refuge in the teachings of the Buddha,
which Toni has helped to clarify for me, and who (in her words) ‘never claimed
to be more than a human being. He found pain just as painful as you and I do. I
take this as a reminder that the equanimity and joy we see in the many images
of him are within the reach of every one of us’ (from ‘How to Be Sick’).</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9rBqE88gMuPdrG6jqxys7GTB9wcPjuf2Uq7p7a0C64FktTrz28kM0mo01uaRdA-fIARGK6VvhiM0pi2xjp9npZrph9xfM8FNDUvm_aXacKppc3dPy1iskZMhrGTIv77RqXmi8MRi-DsA/s1600/25791_1352050798018_7682317_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9rBqE88gMuPdrG6jqxys7GTB9wcPjuf2Uq7p7a0C64FktTrz28kM0mo01uaRdA-fIARGK6VvhiM0pi2xjp9npZrph9xfM8FNDUvm_aXacKppc3dPy1iskZMhrGTIv77RqXmi8MRi-DsA/s320/25791_1352050798018_7682317_n.jpg" width="284" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">In September, Toni’s second book, ‘How To Wake Up: A
Buddhist-Inspired Guide to Navigating Joy and Sorrow’, will be published. I
wish her all possible success with it, all the more so because I can only
imagine how hard it must have been to write it while suffering with severe flu
that never goes away. And I’m having to apply a little Buddhist equanimity to
manage my own craving to read it! Meanwhile, here’s a link to Toni’s latest
blog post, for any of my followers who haven’t discovered her regular
‘Psychology Today’ blog. Of her ’12 Tips’, I especially like No 2 (I know I’m in
pain, I know I’m disabled, and that’s good enough for me); No 4 – which
redefines the concept of work and usefulness to society; and No 7 – after all,
where on earth would I and many of my friends be without the internet? Our
hidden ‘culture of the sick’, unobserved by most of the rest of the world, has
a vital and compassionate life in the world on our computers – and my, do we
need it!</span></div>
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<span style="color: #616161; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;"><a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/turning-straw-gold/201305/12-tips-12-years-sick" target="_blank"><span style="color: #9ad175; font-family: Verdana; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">12 Tips from 12 Years Sick</span></a></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11.5pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 15pt;">Thank you, Toni, for everything else you’ve shared with so many of us. My
chronic illnesses are still difficult to manage, but you are one of my
treasured guides on how to live with them easier. There are joys in life which
I would never have discovered, if I hadn’t been nine years sick.</span></div>
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Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13502259768807545897noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1717330685210325234.post-18791947665758799702013-04-08T02:16:00.004+01:002013-04-08T02:17:28.784+01:00Wild Geese<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYta1Vtrwaf7xfSJWPHILhrsGAJa7scHJn4Z3gO917NkPnyWbxZUkJEQl-5buTC_bRhq8Nvlrg3AVG8mPfe8ipI7Vbw3BC1FRr_BCkunM0Nsk6T2xKx25varFMccBOrf4h9h03-imLS80/s1600/383564_473690075998701_424800460_n2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYta1Vtrwaf7xfSJWPHILhrsGAJa7scHJn4Z3gO917NkPnyWbxZUkJEQl-5buTC_bRhq8Nvlrg3AVG8mPfe8ipI7Vbw3BC1FRr_BCkunM0Nsk6T2xKx25varFMccBOrf4h9h03-imLS80/s320/383564_473690075998701_424800460_n2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Photographer unknown</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In the
past five years or so I’ve done several MBCT (Mindfulness-Based Cognitive
Therapy) courses, and this poem by Mary Oliver always seems to come up in them.
I fell in love with it immediately; even the first line is a revelation. For me
it says something about how our conditioning complicates our life with
unnecessary struggle and suffering. It feels like a window into another life I
previously never knew existed – full of light and air and movement, and of
course freedom.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Having a chronic
pain condition and spending much of my life these days indoors (no longer able
to run, let alone fly!) gives it an extra poignancy for me. But the world still
‘offers itself up’. The cry of the wild geese may be ‘harsh’ at times, but it’s
still life – and all of us, whether we feel we belong to it or not, we really
do!<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Wild Geese</span></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You do not have to be good.<br />
You do not have to walk on your knees<br />
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.<br />
You only have to let the soft animal of your body<br />
love what it loves.<br />
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.<br />
Meanwhile the world goes on.<br />
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain<br />
are moving across the landscapes,<br />
over the prairies and the deep trees, <br />
the mountains and the rivers.<br />
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,<br />
are heading home again.<br />
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,<br />
the world offers itself up to your imagination,<br />
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -<br />
over and over announcing your place<br />
in the family of things.</span>
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Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13502259768807545897noreply@blogger.com4