life and death – WELL WORTH BEING

“Please speak of how you view the possibility of attachment to non attachment,” I ask the dharma teacher.

I am at Kopan Monastery to heal my body and mind from resonating at the frequency of the fatal diseases I might have contracted from the dog bite, and to recover from setbacks encountered on the home front. On a three-day water fast, I travel the darkened tunnels of a healing crisis with fever and fitfulness and I find the comforting containment of 700 monks and nuns chanting and performing pooja to be instrumental in my wellness.

I notice, as I ask the question, my hand running fingers through the thin blonde hair I have always equated with femininity as I admire the teacher’s beautifully smooth-shaven crown. I am drawn to life in a nunnery and commit to shave my head on my arrival in India … yet I also know how fickle I can be. Life as a renunciate mocks me as I consider relinquishing the bower bird aspects of my identity … the beautiful shiny objects I have around me, even on my travels.

I sit each morning as an observer, an outsider looking in on the monks as they arrive dressed in robes that simultaneously shed their identity and give them one. They prostrate and take their seats. They are vessels, showing up in service to the prayers; chanting for others what others can’t do for themselves.

I sit and contemplate on no more than what I witness. The pooja, the music, the clapping away of evil spirits. When a British Colonel arrived in Lhasa after gunning down thousands of Tibetans, he is said to have felt great pride in the Tibetans clapping for him on his arrival, mistakingly believing their attempts to dispel evil as their celebrating his prowess.

The opposite of doing is not apathy; it’s allowing … a yielding rather than a seeking. Meditation is an action. It is a deliberate and intentional allowing of all that is, in order to practice not attaching to any of it through the sense organs. Gathering to wash the plates and utensils from food preparations, the chatting and community is as profoundly important as the nourishment from the simple food. Quality of life is expressed through moving hands that find their intelligence in ordinary tasks. Is this what malas could be used for? I wonder.

As the fever passes, I feel both relief and disappointment. Relief that I may have healed myself from potential suffering. Disappointment that I may have saved myself from dying. If you know me, you will understand that this is not in fact a depressed dig in the darkness, but a lightening of something quite liberating. Regardless, a little more context may be required for those who don’t know the true meaning of the word GuRu and may be more attached to just the one syllable without considering its counterpart.

I have never felt fully committed to this incarnation. Call it trauma, abuse, nervous system dysregulation … no matter … contemplating death these past days, I recognise that I am more attached to death than I am to life. So the tears I shed are related to feeling that dying from a dog bite in a country that honours death as much as it honours life would be a better fate than ultimately taking that long walk into the ocean when I am done with this so-called me I am becoming less and less identified with as I travel to integrate the past five decades of my fabrication.

There is a middle ground always: not attached to either life or death but fully committed to and incarnated in both. Like a suspension bridge that must be fully rooted in both banks. Straddling. Clinging to neither … and also to both.

My writing habits have gone into holes and tunnels and transcended the notion of linear time. There are gaps … chasms. And, as with my meditation practice, I have to keep coming back to the cushion to start again.

I am in India now at Deer Park Institute in Himachal Pradesh. So much life has happened between my time here in February, and this time now. I have written less than I aspired to, traveled and explored way more than I imagined, connected, studied, expanded (and also contracted), integrated and shed so much of who I believed myself to be. To honour this new version of myself that can’t recognise myself in the mirror anymore, I travel to McLeodGanj, two hours each way by cab, to a hairdresser I met in February. My instruction to Mukti back then was still my usual, “Just the ends off please; I’m trying to grow it”. This time I am not bold enough for the full head shave—yet—but I flick through Pinterest to show him some images that match this new Penelope V11.9 and tell him to work his magic. I close my eyes and breathe.

This is the only death I need right now.

Monsoon season is a flushing of all the rubbish; a cleansing of the earth and a transition into autumn. India has six seasons instead of four … six opportunities to adapt or die.

Some people travel to find themselves, some to lose themselves. I travel to discover that which brings me to life through confronting death and adaptability. Travel wakes me up from the narcolepsy—and also the more generalised sleep—it informs me; wisens me. It opens the portal to the writer in me so that I can write out into the world that which I most need to learn … so that what needs to live through me can fill my vessel and reweave my narrative.

It’s the movement of travel that I most adore. The momentum, the dynamism … the swings and spirals to find that sweet spot of equilibrium and poise. Balance is an unnatural state—a new age erroneous desire—it alludes to a state of stagnation. Sitting at a desk in front of a window to write, the curtains are drawn on my mind. But put me next to the window on the backseat of a taxi on a bumpy, windy road under construction with an uncomfortably full bladder and an ache of hunger from a 7-day fruit fast, and I am instantly inspired.

Triggers confront me—consume me—as I am forced to work cell-by-cell on past traumas to remind myself that I am truly free and that I can finally write without fear of recrimination. I lean in deep enough to touch into the fears, the anxieties, the debilitating threats I faced of getting thrown out of home or losing custody of my child if I spoke my truth … if I shared my reality. Courage walks hand in hand with fear. I am known to overshare if given the chance.

The barrier on a bridge has been opened like a gate. A rusted reminder of mortality lies in the riverbed beneath. Giant stairways and planted beans stretch to the giant in the sky. Departing souls have easy access to high places. Also a reminder that first one must fall to rise. Death feels easy here. Heaven and hell are only as far apart as earth and sky. There is no separation, only perceived segregation. There is no ‘other’. The inner child takes the crone by the hand. They jump and skip. Heads thrown back, they laugh at the sky. The sky knows change. It is unmoved.

Houses retreat into rubble and dust, making way for a new highway. Memories of a Yangtze River trip invade my mind as people are displaced to higher ground. The road becomes like a river washing away houses … an unnatural disaster; a crime against humanity. It looks like a war zone; it’s difficult to breathe. My eyes seek attainment and attachment to the next dopamine hit. A bus with DELUXE emblazoned across its front is being worked on by two bare-chested men exposing cages of ribs. Deluxe is just another word—a branding that has no intrinsic meaning value.

I am reminded by rivers of rubbish down hillsides and in forests that there is no such thing as away. Like the tongue that keeps seeking the broken tooth, the psyche will consistently and obsessively keep seeking the wounded parts again and again. We think we can throw certain things away whilst accumulating other things when in reality everything always exists and it is simply we who are shifting in and out of the objective reality of those very things we believe we are either discarding or holding onto. So I discard words and, in deleting sentences and paragraphs, I detach also from the meaning they hold.

The silences between musical notes are what frame, contain and make the songs possible. The weft and weave of story is the same. It’s the spaces that allow the piece to breathe, that give it both life and death in non-dualistic harmony. Words are plucked and rewoven, always leaving a knot untied or that one loose thread as a reminder that nothing is ever complete or perfect.

As I learn to write again with honesty and authenticity from that fierce place in my core, I write away all the shields. And as I learn to cease the word vomit that perpetuates my narrative, I learn to re-create spaces between the words so I can steep myself in the breath of the present. I pour words on my skin like nectar until they wash away—slowly, slowly—the outer layers … until my armour can rust and fall away.

The aim is not enlightenment; the aim is truth. My voice and my silence is my message.