The Adamantine Wisdom of Buddhafield Festival 2022

It looks like gold nail varnish and like my natural nails and the memory of gold nail varnish that a future me will see when they look down at my fingers.

It sounds like the rattle of sleigh bells in Kirsten Kratz's hand because no one could find a singing bowl, and it sounds like my own singing bowl just a few meters away in my own tent that I didn't think to offer.

It feels like the patch of too warm sunlight creeping up on me as time unfolds and angles change and I sat here to be in the shade and there's no where to move to right now because the tent is too full.

It sounds like my voice chanting Oṃ Bodhicittam Utpādayāmi and wanting to chant faster and trying to keep slow and other voices around me chanting the same or chanting Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ and we're weaving in and out of each other and my shoulders are against your shoulders and your back and this is the closest I've been to this many people for over two years. We're practicing the mantra for the ritual the next day and when it is the next day I can only hear one other voice chanting Oṃ Bodhicittam Utpādayāmi, and I try to join in when I can remember the melody. Everyone else is chanting the Avalokiteśvara mantra, which is the bass line and lovely of course but I want the whole thing, and it looks like the hundreds of tea lights we offer at the end of the ritual, one after another kneeling and bowing and lighting the candles from one another and making space for each other and then slowly drifting into the night leaving the statue of the mother of all wisdom surrounded by light.

Photo by Khemashalini

Putting on my new so called women's watch as I look at the first pictures from the new NASA Webb Telescope

I remember picking up the folded up copy of The Sun from Pop's side table and flicking through and pausing at the horoscopes and reading what Mystic Meg had to say and paying special attention to my own sign (Pisces) even though I would have told you I didn't believe a word.

Was Mystic Meg even working for the Sun back then? I wonder. But that's how memory works sometimes, filling in the gaps of what we don't quite know with something that feels close enough. We are unreliable guides to the past.

There has been a health warning issued for this heatwave. Yesterday I swam in a river and today my shoulders are red. One star has a big impact on how we live our lives. Who knows how other rays of starlight change the future?

I nearly stayed up last night to see the first image from the Web Telescope. Instead it caught me by surprise today, interrupting my usual doom scrolling. Such a small fragment of sky filled with so many galaxies, each filled with stars and some of them with worlds and billions of years of history.

Around nine o clock yesterday evening the moon was low in the sky, big in that way that it's big when it's close to the horizon and almost full. The sky was still pretty light and the moon looked almost translucent against the pale sky. A few wisps of pinkish cloud floated past

I need to loosen the watch to almost the largest size it will go. I thought I had small wrists but I guess it depends where you are looking from. It's funny the stories we tell ourselves. 

I thought Moreno said anything new was God coming into the world

blown air cools down hot coffee
the bubbles flow from nothing into the shape of a tree

and keep moving into nothing again

I spent half an hour this morning typing prompts into craiyon.com
watching the algorithm bringing new images into life

Suda the elephant paints the same thing over and over again
following instructions from her mahout
what kind of instructions was Picasso following?

My friend sits down opposite me in the café and places an old book on the table. It's green cover is the texture of canvas. They open the book and the pages are yellowed and full of small grey text in a serif font describing how to draw circles and squares and cubes and spheres and what kinds of pencils to use and we talk about art classes at school. I can't remember anything until they start speaking and suddenly I can smell chalk dust and feel it dry on my hands and see Miss Bagley approaching to peer over my page. She noticed everything, I think, but I don't remember her saying very much at all.

three bows

 Three leek flowers on stems as high as my shoulder

Three bees crawling across the small white flowers

Three white porcelain offering bowls on our shrine, each with a thin pale green coating of limescale and almost full to the brim with water

Orpheus

1. An ache curves through my side and back. My mouth and eyes are gummy. I notice my hot breath, the dark, and no memories of dreams just consciousness floating up like a free diver from the dark.

I peel off my eye-mask. The weak afternoon light is fighting its way through our thin blinds. I listen to my body adjusting itself to the first few moments of being awake.

2. My nearly white dog tumbles across the muddy park for the half rotting stick I have thrown for her. She races away into the shadows of evening and into the mist and trots back, brighter and easier to see with each step.

Even in this half-light the autumn leaves of sycamore and beech stand out. They are the hot colours of clay pots glazed with antimony, cadmium and selenium.

3. Out here there are no electric lights. I stretch out my hand in front of me and it disappears. The clouds have taken away the moonlight. There is nothing but the sounds of the wind moving a few leaves, of a car on a distant road and of a few drops of water from a broken gutter.

 4. I once sat with a woman who was dying. She asked me where she would go after death.

5. The world tips back towards dawn.

Aiko puppy

When I write I like to slow down. It’s easy for me to write about watering orchids, or the quality of light first thing in the morning as the mist glows softly in the valley.

Today Aiko the puppy raced around the garden. She bounded after her ball, all four paws leaving the ground in between each step. Her tail wagged as she panted in a tongue-lolling happy way.

I slow down to read poetry. What does poetry sound like when it is a fast moving blur of fur and teeth and excitement?

the sound of joy
racing back towards me
with her small blue ball

Now she’s fast asleep. She was so excited and overtired that she was gnawing at the sleeve of my jumper. I sat still holding her softly and making quiet sounds and she relaxed in my arms. She can be just like a human-animal toddler that’s been awake for too long. Now, in her sleep, she’s suckling on her blanket. I guess she’s dreaming of mother.

Puppies in the wild do leave their parents at a fairly young age. Not this young. The first night she was here I slept with my head on her bed until she fell asleep.  I’m sure she remembered me from all the visits we had.

first cry of the day —
old cat, new puppy,
the echoes of dreams?

Conflict changing to taking a step

Having received hexagram 6, changing to hexagram 10, from the I Ching

the hands inside my neck grip tightly
a moth flickers in my stomach
and there is something tight just under my belly’s skin

someone is rushing me forward, through and away and don’t stop to look
someone is covering my eyes and whispering stay perfectly still

Today I met a man who recorded the silence in a prison cell at the National Museum of Justice. I remembered Palden Gyatso. He took refuge in his Buddhist practice as days and years of torture and imprisonment rolled by. 

Outside my window the small white blossoms on the weeping pear tree are giving way to silver green leaves. A small robin disappears into its tangled branches.