I spent the weekend with my fellow students on our Buddhist psychotherapy course.

On the drive home, the jeep in front had a sticker on its back window which said, ‘One life. Live it.’

How do we do that? How do we live our one and only life?

The weekend had its share of difficult conversations. Sitting around in a group with people you care about in a safe environment seems to give us all permission to take risks we don’t take in our ordinary lives.

Much of this process is unconscious. I find myself in familiar dynamics, yet again. I feel bruised. I bruise others.

We let our our anger. We get into tangled conversations that go round and round and get tighter and tighter. We play our usual role in groups (in life), and have this reflected back to us by our fellow students. We feel vulnerable. We feel misunderstood.

We uncover our hunger, our fear, our jealousies, our sometimes brutal impulses.

There is a saving grace.

It is that we care about each other.

Many of us have shared previous weeks of fumbling towards understanding each other, towards seeing each other as we really are. We welcome the new members into the fold. We want them to experience some of this grace. It is so delicious. It moves me to tears as I write. It is how we manage to love each other, despite everything.

THIS is how I want to live my life. Fumbling. Human. Trying to love each other.

Things you might be interested about

Reflect on the fact that we have just this one life. Stay with this thought for as long as you can bear. What is important to you? What do you want to do about it?

Quotes

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
~Annie Dillard

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may;
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
~Robert Herrick

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This morning, Kaspa asked me what the meaning of life was.

Earlier I was grumpy, and I so I retreated to bed to read.

When I was ready to face the world again, I thought it might help to make some biscuits for our Buddhist service later (the bit afterwards, when we eat biscuits). (NB, American friends, biscuit = cookie)

I found my old favourite recipe, written out for me by my ex-neighbour many years ago. It’s creased and stained and the ink is running. She mistyped ‘cooking chocolate’ as ‘cokking chocolate’, and so I know the recipe fondly as the ‘white cokking chocolate cookies’.

I made the cookies.

And then I said to Kaspa, ‘the meaning of life is to make white cokking chocolate biscuits for your friends’. He agreed that it was a pretty good answer. Especially as he wanted a cookie.

I’m much less grumpy now. Just vestiges remain, which will be helped by my eating another cookie or two.

Here’s the recipe, just in case my stained and ancient bit of paper ever goes missing, and so you can make some for yourselves.

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Pre-heat the oven to 170 degrees centigrade. Grease baking trays.
Mix up 3 oz caster sugar, 3 oz soft dark brown sugar, 3 oz butter (must be real!), 1 egg, 6 oz self raising flour and 4 oz of broken up white cokking chocolate.
Put them in balls on the baking tray and cook them until they’re golden (12 – 15 minutes).
Eat. Yum yum yum.

Our shy cat Silver often misses out on strokes because Fatty is so noisy and demanding and needy.

Silver is the cat who gets trapped in rooms and sits and waits there quietly until we open the door and find her three hours later. Fatty’s the cat who demands to be picked up like a baby and who announces his presence whenever he comes through the cat-flap (whatever time of the day or night).

She used to love curling up on the bottom of our bed, but she hasn’t been near it for months.

I want her up there with us. I know she used to love being close to us at night. I’ve plonked her up a couple of times but she’s jumped straight off as if she’s frightened of something.

Yesterday night, for no apparent reason, it was the place she wanted to be again. She jumped up while were talking and went to sleep on Kaspa’s legs, purring like a motor. She’s been sleeping there all day.

Another reminder.

Other beings have reasons of their own, which we know little or nothing about. They will come back to us when they are ready.

Things you might be curious about

Who are you trying to plonk or to manipulate at the moment? Is it for ‘their own good’? What have you tried? What would it be like to let them go? What would it be like to trust that they have their own process which you know nothing about?

Quotes

I’m not wise, but the beginning of wisdom is there; it’s like relaxing into – and an acceptance of – things.
~Tina Turner

The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather what he does not say.
~Kahlil Gibran

Postscript

You might want to try our free e-course on paying attention. You might not be. I don’t want to plonk you. You’ll come to it if and when the time is right.

Yesterday’s small stone:

We are discussing blueberries. Lucas (4) likes ‘any food that is squishy’.

We had a lovely visit from Lucas and his dad Patrick this weekend. It’s interesting to be reminded of the world through a child’s eyes. So many things you want and can’t have. So much new. So much adventure.

We ate Patrick’s sour-dough bread, toasted, for breakfast. Crispy around the edges, splintering into crumbs when you bite through it. Moist and chewy. That sour-dough tang. Sunflower seed pockets of flavour. Stunning.

And especially-tasty when we remember that Patrick made it for us with his own hands, and that a flour factory milled the wheat, and that a farmer sowed the wheat, and that the sun and rain spent months making sure the wheat grew.

I hope you can find something wonderful to give praise for, to start your week as you mean to go on. Do share in the comments.

“…Ndwali drew my attention to the swirl of multi-coloured butterflies in the bushes beside us. As they examined the car he turned and caught the wonder in my eyes at the beauty of the landscape, and the banana trees that still fascinate me, their fruits always look to me as if they are growing upside down! There is so much beauty here if only we can see it…”

This is Modgala Louise Duguid – a Buddhist nun with the Amida Order. I first met Modgala in Sukhavati in London, and she was incredibly supportive towards both myself and Kaspa as we negotiated the early stages (and the complications!) of our relationship.

Modgala has spent time overseas as a part of her work for the Amida Trust. “You might as well die here as anywhere” is her account of the time she spent in Zambia working on a health project.

I had no idea of the kind of things she’d been witness to during her visit. This book is full of human suffering – of a lack of resources, of the ravages of HIV and AIDS, of a community battered by malaria and hunger. It can be tough reading. But the book draws you in – through the lively descriptions of the people she meets and lives with, and of the African landscape and culture, and of what she is able to learn from each human encounter.

What is most amazing is how life-affirming it has felt to read it. In amongst the extreme suffering is much laughter, much deep love and friendship, and much hope.

I have been intensely moved by reading this book. Do consider buying it. You will learn much about Zambia, and you will put the book down feeling that you too have spent time in this community yourself, and made friends of your own.

You will also learn much about how we can be humble, about the central importance of holding onto our groundedness (and what a huge difference this can make to the people around us), and about how we can be human beings in the face of intense suffering.

Deep bow, Reverend Modgala, and all the other people involved in the Tithandizane project. Thank you for sharing this time with us. I am so grateful for what I have learnt. Namo Amida Bu.