Red Again

Back in Beijing... more updates on the way

Road to Vipassana

I'm sitting right now at a bus station at 6.30 a.m. in Surat Thani. Bus station in this case means a cluster of rough stone seating in what looks like an outdoor market closed for the night.



As far as local bus stations go, this one is a dream. No one is selling me anything, no one is scamming me (that part of the morning was over with the buying of the ticket), and really, no one cares i'm here. It's early, and people have their own problems.


I forgot to mention my actual destination to the driver of the overnight bus I took from Bangkok, so we drove right past it while I slept. The other passengers had ongoing transit planned, so I was left roadside at 5.30 a.m. on a minor road with only local traffic.

30 minutes to get a ride, 30 to the bus station, and now a 30 minute wait for a bus, and then an hour's drive.

Perfectly normal morning.

My destination is Suan Mokkh monastery (The Garden of Liberation), where I am entering a 10-day Vipassana. They call it a 'solitary meditation retreat' because everyone there maintains noble silence, meaning we refrain from any form of communication, including eye contact.

From tomorrow morning at 4 a.m. until September 11th at 11 a.m., not a word will be spoken, no eyes shall meet, no meal will be eaten after 12 noon, no books will be read, and no words will be written.

my room

The idea, as far as I can understand it so far, is to deprive myself of all stimulation that comes from outside of my mind, leaving me to face to face with that which comes from inside my mind.

The 17-hour (4 a.m. - 9 p.m) day consists mainly of sitting and standing meditations, so we're talking discomfort, boredom, illumination, frustration, memories, desire, clarity... these are the kinds of things I imagine i'll contend with.

my pillow

I cannot wait to go inside. To live inside of consciousness, and nothing else. To look my mind in the eye. To begin to know it. To deepen the work I did in Kopan monastery in Nepal last year.

When I get out, only 10 days – a vast 10 days – away, I will hop onto a boat to Kho Phanghan and return to a beach on its east coast, my happy place. That will be a good day.

the bungalow that waits for me... second from the right

And while it is only 12-days away from this moment, I have no sense of how I will feel on the other side, no insight into the insights I will have, no heart for what my heart will have felt, and no mind for who my mind will have met within itself.

I am saying that as I enter Vipassana, I am perceptive of how little I know about what “I” is. Not the “I” you know of me, but the “I” of the self, of consciousness.

I want to meet my mind. The motor in the funky machine. The wizard behind the kaleidoscope curtain. The thing that wants something. What does it want?

I enter now open to everything. In 12-days, I don't know what I will have seen and felt. This not knowing is excruciating, and electric.

postcards

a cat barked at me just now.

i swear. it barked.

Ode to the Moon

a slab of the moon
between two trees

fireflies impersonating
stars

light
tangled in the branches of the night

on this road by the riverside
where did aloneness end
and loneliness begin

Tabish Kair
(Printed in the menu of Casa Luna, Ubud)

Boundless

a beautiful friend sent me some beautiful words just now, and her timing caused my eyes to burn. i will share two fragments here, because they have spoken for me today.

my journey resonates with this friend. she has been Questing alone on the road for decades, and is a veteran of my spirit.

thanks, Elly, for making today bigger than me.

... I hope for your journey the sweetest fruits, the most intense of aromas and the softest of breezes. Alas, these breezes can sometimes come in gusts, but fuck they tear through us and frighten, and thank god for these emotions, for the sheer opportunity we have given ourselves to know them, to feel them, make love to them and then to sit, silent, just being nothing and everything...

... I think now of holding a little hand, walking down an ancient cobble stone street telling this little person, whom we have made out of love, that this life is here for the living. That there is no such thing as cannot, but only 'can'.

That if they wish they can touch the wet, cold nose of a lion, and walk up or around each and every mountain they see, and taste the most exotic of fruits, straight from the tree, and show themselves, time and time again that their spirit is larger, more limitness and more beautiful than they could ever imagine, and that if they look long enough, in the detail enough, within the setting sun they might see their spirit, their own colour in the palette of the sky...

... That there is only "I can...". That there are no boundaries.

That life is BOUNDLESS.

Nyoman Lara

I really only noticed Nyoman Lara when I climbed into the front seat, after we’d dropped Luca at the airport and the Russian couple in Kuta. It was just me and him in the van now, with an hour’s drive ahead of us.

I actually didn’t feel that much like talking. These were the first minutes of my aloneness on this solo journey. For five weeks, first Dejana and then Luca had kept me company. Now a new phase of my trip was beginning, the one I had envisioned. But I knew it would be a while before I eased into it; a while before alone wasn’t a feeling of missing something.

Maybe I needed to fill the space, so hesitantly I began. As he answered my questions, Nyoman Lara became the first Balinese to break down the wall between tourist and friend.

It was the story of his wife that did it. Things weren’t okay at home, he told me.

“My wife, she is depressed,” he said.

Depressed? He knows what depression is?

After the Bali Bombings in 2002, Nyoman Lara lost his job at a Kuta hotel. It was a good job, and his wife and three children had been above water. In the years after, they had all struggled. Nyoman began working long hours as a taxi driver just to afford food and school supplies.

In the past two years, the price of rice tripled, while his salary stayed the same, and become more unstable.

Then Nyoman’s wife began to experience mood swings. She wore her deep frustration in private and in public, and was despondent, bitter. She felt Nyoman was responsible.

“She is angry all the time,” he says with a gentle Balinese smile, not complaining. “I come home late, and she yells at me.”

“What does she want?” I ask.

“She wants a divorce.”

Not the answer I was expecting. Just a few years ago, divorce was a dangerous taboo in Bali. One with serious consequences in the traditional family compounds in which husband and wife live, together with several other generations, and a few dozen chickens.

I proceed carefully... “And what do you want?”

“If she was healthy, I would say... pause, sigh ... 'okay'. You want divorce? I want you to have what you want. I want you happy,” he says with resignation, with love, even. “But... she is sick. My wife, she is sick. Maybe she doesn’t understand. Maybe, she needs me..."

the red lotus, a symbol of Compassion

When Nyoman dropped me at home, I couldn’t help but hug him.

Maybe she does need him, maybe she doesn't. But I did feel that Nyoman was a man who wanted to do the right thing; and that he in past six years he had spent much less time than me thinking about his own feelings.

Good luck Nyoman. I hope your happy nature and your kindness bring you the love you deserve soon.

postcards

today i saw a man light a cigarette from a burning trash heap.

that's all.

Trail Through July, 2008

THAILAND
Bangkok

CHINA
Beijing, Shanghai

INDONESIA
Ubud, Seminyak, Gili Meno

Julia and Anne Marie

When taking a walk with no destination, along paths with no markings, in villages with no boundaries, on mornings with no expectations, there is a chance that you will come back a slightly different person than when you left.

I said I’d be back in 10 minutes.

But Julia and Anne Marie were out there beyond time. So when I came back 45 minutes later, Luca didn’t ask any questions. He knows when a short walk becomes a long walk, that a journey is unfurling a petal.

The forest behind the rice paddies is thick and overgrown, with crevices plunging into dark green water and palm trees rising up at unpoetic angles. But the green of it is so rich, and the rustling of the wind speaks so reassuringly of peace, that what is wild becomes beautiful, and you walk into it wishing that by loving this tangled mess of nature, that you might come closer to self-acceptance.

“Prophetic Healing – Massage”, and a handprint and an arrow. It was so deeply engraved into the rock that I wondered how it could be, how the rock was once so soft; how the healing hand had been so strong.

When taking a walk with no destination, along paths with no markings, there is a chance that you’ll come across a thing placed there by a person who knows that such walks happen. This is a patient person, and one who either believes in chance, or that there is no such thing.

I turned up the stairs.

They were thick and steep, and heavy with cement and the miles of earth and rock and molten core beneath them. The first pathway appeared to the left, and I paused to make my decision. Tilting my head backwards I saw where the stairs peaked, 10 or 15 stones ahead. It is unlike me, it is unlike most people, to stop so close to the top of something. We all have our reasons to go on. We all crave stories, and courage, and for fate to take our hand.

At the top there was nothing. A long house framed in white with windows instead of walls, all of them dark, and firmly closed. There was no one home, or if they were, they weren’t taking visitors.

I paused again, because when you have time, all moments should be given the chance to be remembered.

Descending I arrived at the first path, which was now on my right, and turned slowly but without hesitation. I was walking softly, not wanting to make more noise than the rustling through the trees. I like this intimacy with nature, and struggle to tolerate those who have no admiration for silence.

Gentle voices and a small Balinese house lay immediately ahead. I turned my head around the corner, saw two women and a deck of cards, and quickly withdrew. Perhaps it was a tarot reading, and I should come back another time. But I didn’t move, realizing of course that I would not come back. I stepped out into the clearing.

“Hello… I’m sorry to… “

Julia and Anne Marie have been following unmarked paths for 50 years. Originally from Melbourne, they now are one of the 200 families or so who live in a sub-tropical town outside of Byron Bay, Northern Queensland. Between them they have been a nurse, a midwife, a teacher a public servant, a medical anthropology PHD, a consultant to NGOs in Papua New Guinea, and an naturapath. They say “we” so often that I know they have been loving and supporting each other for a long, long time.

I turned down tea, but drank up their stories.

They have a spa bath in their back yard, and a few times they positioned everything they might need within reaching distance, and stayed in the bath the whole day.

Julia likes to write, and when she moved to Queensland wrote a column reflecting on life’s big questions for the local newsletter.

They love the diversity of their town, and have never encountered homophobia there.

Anne Marie was recently head hunted for her dream apprenticeship in Melbourne, so they got into their car and drove, and now they are house sitting because it is too expensive to rent.

Julia lived in Papua New Guinea for eight years, and now feels more at home in the tropics than in the city. She heard about this little house from some friends of hers who are building a bungalow next door. It is deep in the forest, and surrounded by paddies. ‘You’ll be in the tropics,’ they said.

And we are, sitting on their open porch, hidden from the beaten path below, where only locals make their way from where they are, to where they need to be, and back.

The locals, and today, me.

I ask them if they’d like to have dinner with Luca and I tonight. They can’t. They have been invited to the house of the local Balinese family who does their laundry.

I thank them for inviting me to sit with them.

Julia and Anne Marie laugh easily, and whenever they look at each other, they smile.

“If we don’t see you again, have a beautiful quest, Ilana.”

They must know, now, that they have become one of my stories. I know I have become one of theirs. The girl who appeared in their living room, and emanated all her dreams. And they, the lovers who lived a life they could believe in, and emanated all their love and intelligence everywhere they went.

This morning, when I decided to cede to my urge to go for a walk down that path I had not yet walked, outside my villa, past the restaurant, and to the right, into the rice paddies, into the green, into the shadow curve from where local women carrying water bottles and cement and cardboard boxes on their heads seemed to stream… when I stepped out into the world in this way and felt a tightening in my chest, I knew I was looking for something.

I found it in Julia and Anne Marie. They have fortified me, at least for this day. And in case I start to forget, I am writing this story.

There are reasons to live with compassion, and reasons to wait for love, and reasons to believe in the magic of the world.

There’s no guarantee that when you open your eyes each day, that you won’t close your eyes a slightly different person that very same evening. And when you go for a walk on a quiet, overcast morning in Ubud, you have to be prepared to let the potential for change trickle in.

First Post: Where am I?

I start this journey on a different footing than those first steps I took on October 1, 2007. Perhaps because my pain is less, the questions that drive me seem to have less justification. Perhaps because the pressing absence of career, home and partner were brought into focus during three months in Melbourne, my spiritual longings have come into question as a form of escape.

I did not mention my reservations to anyone back home. Why add fuel to such a typical and convenient point of view.

So I bound my volition to a memory of certainty, and then with characteristic debilitated determination, I packed my backpack and boarded the flight.

first stop, thailand

And now from the road I must ask, is this a continuation of my Journey Always Waiting, or is this a somewhat separate Part II? Am I starting up where I left off, or has the dilution of last Journey’s lessons by the ordinary life in between deposited me at a new drop-in point, a place somewhat estranged from the fertile grounds I was ready to harvest?

Does this Journey need a new name?

I have friends who would tell me to stop thinking about it. That it’s really of no consequence whether I am continuing, or starting again. That these are technicalities, and distractions from the only reality of true importance here… that I have taken off on a personal journey of one year, and that I am free to make of it what I wish.

They would say that the best story is the one that lies ahead, and that I do not need, nor should I want, to define it now. That I should realize what a rare and incredible gift I have given myself, and that I should walk forward with eyes and heart open, and not look back.

They are right, of course, although in an idealistic, liberated from the bench, sort of way.

For all its exhilaration, unlocking the potential of a year’s growth at this stage of my life is no trivial thing. Taking a year out to Quest is an uncalculated risk, with uncertain outcomes on the other side. I step into the light of possibilities prepared to accept that what I learn may influence the rest of my life. I realize that what I am looking for out here, may guide, or confuse me, forever.

But, why must I take it all so seriously, my friends would ask.

second stop, china

Obviously, I have a tendency towards serious analysis of almost anything. I also skew left brain in my weaknesses and right brain in my strengths. I am also overly hard on myself, and tend to feel gravely responsible for faults and offences that most others simply write off as par for the socio-emotional course.

Guilty.

But knowing this about myself gives me something valuable to work on. Acknowledging how I am feeling, particularly when the reasons for these feelings are self-defeating, is a form of self-awareness that provides a baseline for development.

And that’s why it’s important for me to understand why I feel like I do, as I start this next phase of my Journey Always Waiting. In part – in large part – so I can chart my progress.

Last year, this was somewhat easier. I set out on October 1, 2007 in total possession of my moment in time, and with acute awareness of what had passed, and why, and of how much I wanted to feel and learn of myself and of the world. For these reasons, arriving at my Final Post five months later was one of the most significant crossings of my life.

third stop, indonesia

This time, things are a little blurrier. I have a nagging sense of skirting professional development. And am anxious that after two years of living in this way, that I will have become irreversibly unconventional, horrified by the sham of work with weekends, and unable to commit to a job or a city for long enough to become stable.

There’s really no reason to disagree with me. These are all highly reasonable outcomes.

However, I am not driven by a desire to be highly reasonable. And I am also not interested in acting out of fear or insecurity.

The unknown is only frightening because it is unknown… not because there is really anything out there to fear.

So, while it’s fair enough that my social conditioning is doing what it is programmed to do, my impulse to pacify it is not more valuable than my impulse to ignore it.

Because what I learned on my last trip is that what I do with my vast range of impulses, is entirely up to me.

I can choose.


And so I have chosen to continue on this Journey, to deepen and expand the lessons of my last trip; which through their deep impact on me, have already begun to change the authority from which I operate...

• i alone am responsible for my thoughts, for my actions (including reactions), and for the life I choose to live.
• the deepest and most lasting happiness is the experience of serving others, not yourself.
• compassion is without any doubt the path to happiness, and away from anger.
• the peace that I seek will elude me for as long as I lack loving kindness for myself.
• it requires discipline, hard work and deep honesty to understand the mind, which is for me the most interesting subject in the world.
• oh… and I should take it easy, because there’s really not much in this world I can predict or control.

and so, with trust in myself and love for the unknown, I open myself to the road once more.

and in writing all this down, actually, the answer to my question has emerged crystal clear.

this journey does not need a new name. it is my Journey Always Waiting.

really, all of it, even the time in between. it feels so natural, I must have always had it coming. but that’s a different conversion…

so, welcome back to my Journey Always Waiting.

now I know where I am. now, I can go…

Final Post: The Journey Never Ends

1978

today is the 18th of february, 2008. a little over three months since my last post. it seems entirely impossible, like something i would comfortably deny were the calendar not here before my eyes.

but it is february 18th, 2008.

so...

where have i traveled in this time? where have i been? and where have i arrived?

almost 10 years ago i did a road trip across america, crossing from the east coast to the west coast and back again in an enormous circle with two girlfriends. to keep expenses down we drove other people's cars, delivering vehicles to their owners who had moved interstate. each place we dropped off a car, we picked up a new one.

for one month we drove, and the road was almost always straight. sure, there were turns we took, there was some weaving, some wavering as well. but the experience was one of driving always onwards, and the pervasive image in my mind of that trip is of a straight and endless open road, wide beneath our wheels and narrowing out somewhere far in the distance, at a point which we never reached.

perhaps the seed of an insight was planted then and is only ripening now, a decade later. the insight that while life seems to be a linear journey, that in fact it is a circular one.

that just as i left new york city and drove in a straight line only to arrive back in new york city one month later, so it is with all our journeys, internal and external, large and small. even the wildest road trip of all - life itself - is a journey like this, seemingly progressing through age and time, but in reality moving always from dust to dust.

for a couple of days now, T.S. Elliot's words have been purring in my chest:

we shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time

and so it is.

every journey, and every experience within that journey, is not a departure from where you were or an arrival to somewhere new, but rather it is an awakening to something you always were; and at its best, it is a becoming of something more that you could be.

we leave home and become a stranger until on some distant shore we feel at home again; we leave love and survive loneliness and fear only to recreate love anew; we travel far and go deep only to arrive back at a place we never left... our own selves.

in the past four months, i have been in nepal, thailand, vietnam and america. i have lived in a monastery, a hostel, a bungalow, a luxury resort and a white picket fence house in suburbia. i have walked, climbed, rafted, peddled, jumped, danced and sat very still. i have studied yoga, studied tantra and studied buddhism. i have renounced sex, drugs and other distractions, and then un-renounced them all again in one day. i have spent precious time with close friends, and precious time with strangers, and precious time alone. i have experienced new levels of happiness and contentment, and i have fallen from grace and into instability. i have made many plans, and some of them i have forgotten, while others may change my life yet.

i have traveled far in the world, but much further in myself. and while i set out wanting every day to get further away from where i started, i see now that my final destination was inside me all along.

and so as i walk through these final days before i return home, i feel unbelievably blessed to understand that i have ultimately arrived exactly where i started...

and know the place for the first time.

because here, at the beginning, there is a new possibility to merge who I have been with who I could be. to infuse the creative and the practical, with the truth-seeking and the spiritual.

and to for the first time truly acquaint myself with, well, my self.

and at the center of all my development is a new awareness of my relationship with my mind.

through teachings, meditation, reflection and some field testing, I understand now that my life will be what my thoughts make it. i don’t mean I understand it with my intelligence. i mean my whole being has understood it, and a new destiny for me now feels possible.

i can see now how my thoughts, which i habitually worship and then dismiss, are actually the vehicle to every place I do, and don’t, want to be. and that understanding where they come from - the mind - is the key to everything mystical and everything practical, at the same time.

and so, knowing my mind is the greatest influence I can have over my destiny. and it is also the closest I can come in this life to the divine.

this is what traveling has taught me. this is what love has taught me. this is what the buddhists have taught me. this is what my divorce has taught me. this is what retuning to australia has taught me. this is what starting a company has taught me. this is what fear and joy have taught me. this is what yoga has taught me. this is what the sea has taught me. and airports. and the himalaya. and hedonists. and shamans. and taoists. and the ordained. and the completely lost. and the seekers. and the drifters. and the nihilists. and the believers.

and my reflection in the mirror.

because some days i feel beautiful, and others like a wilted flower, like something to put away. some days i am brimming with promise and plans, and others i feel destined for an average, pedestrian existence. some days i meditate peacefully and fruitfully, while others i wrestle with shadows and emerge exhausted, having lost.

everything, all of it, comes only from my mind.

meaning as i emerge from these travels, i no longer blame my skin, or my body, or my meditation pillow, or the DJ, or Thai airways, or my health, or my parents, or my failed marriage, or anything that exists outside of my own thoughts, for what I make of my life.

i would like, without judgment, to take responsibility for all of it.

but please, do not misunderstand me. i am not (by a long shot) suggesting that i am no longer susceptible to external forces. i absolutely am, and pathetically so. like a leaf in the wind, i will allow myself to be pushed around by all manner of things.

but what i am suggesting is that maybe i have found a way of binding that leaf more tightly to its stem, and so maybe now, although that leaf still flutters and tears, it is no longer so easily blown away.

maybe.

and also, maybe not yet.

but it is a great journey i have traveled to understand that this strength can come. and that i need nothing and no one else to create this change in myself. that the two things that i want most in this life – to find peace inside myself, and to live in a meaningful way – rely not at all on external forces, but rather in entirety on how my own mind works.

T.S. Eliot continues…

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

"not known, because not looked for… but heard, half-heard… in the stillness between two waves and the sea."

so much for me has been half-heard. but I am looking now. and what I see, is beautiful.