September 28
Kathmandu, Nepal
Evening
After a long day’s walk – in navigating waterfalls and human relations – I returned to the monastery to say my goodbyes and to share one last Dal Bhat with the students and volunteers. It was there that I met Caroline, from Germany, who had arrived the hour before my departure.
The system of replacement was well-oiled and coordinated. Despite my first few days spent alone in the monastery, now there was a regular carousel of volunteers; the availability of which only seemed to pick up in momentum with every rotation. In short, there were many of us now – more than I could count on one hand – and it was getting a little too crowded for my liking.
The day was an open escape hatch, and as I packed my bags, Caroline overheard me remarking on the library steadily growing within my rucksack: the weight of which had already split an integral lining inside the bag.
Somehow, I had developed an uncanny ability to collect books with little to no seeking on my behalf. I mean, obviously, I perused book-shops where I found them to plug my own sense of comfort – and occasionally returned home with more children than I could attend to – but the majority of books were donations, passed on to me by fellow travellers, handed over intuitively, without my lips ever flapping.
The plan had been to read a book and once I felt the relationship had truly ended to give it a new home with someone else. The situation as it stood, however, was that I was accruing books at a faster rate than I could absorb and pass them on.
Caroline divulged there was ‘a book on Hinduism’ she did not feel she could give her proper attention, one she wished to give away, but on hearing my brief tirade, she suggested it might be better for the long-standing health of my rucksack that she not offer at all.
It was already too late for that. My curiosity was twigged – the integrity of my ruck-sack be damned – hers was an offer I could not refuse: for as it turns out, she was only offering me a copy of the bloody Bhagavad Gita!
I suspected I knew more of its value than she did - this was not just a book on Hinduism: it was the book - and I thought of my friend who finds hidden gems in charity shops, price-tagged woefully under their real value, buys them and sells them on for considerable profit. Likewise, in a similar fashion, I felt I could not help but take advantage: the potential spiritual profit was too high to resist.
In both occurring and post-review, the brief encounter was strange and blessed.
Somewhere, in the back-sides of my mind-scape, I had once whispered aside to myself that I will doubtlessly acquire and read the Gita. There was no plan as to how it would happen – it simply rested in my head as a water-tight assurance beyond question and trust – I simply knew it would happen.
I had spoken it once and left it to fate.
A simple wish once uttered, never returned to again, and delivered in due time. No rigorous attachment, no desperation or strained effort, no need to force anything. No need to intervene, only to be present and available, so that at the opportune moment, I could take full advantage of the universe’s mysterious delivery system.
It is one of the rare times in which I possessed a completely blind confidence that something would happen with my barely having to lift a finger.
This above example is just one of the many instances in which ‘that something’ winks at me, forces me to stop in my tracks, witness and consider – that nameless thing which has been named so many names – that demonstrates there is something going on far beyond that which the purely rational mind can grasp.
At the risk of indulging in navel-gazing, I have to admit such instances are only increasing in frequency on this life’s journey, instances that tend to suggest there is some larger script being writ – the many scenes of which are glued together in a way I might never fully perceive from my vantage point. All I can do is wander through the scenes as they occur and gather the narrative as it unfolds.
Some Considerations
There are two things I considered when writing the first and the second half to September 2; the day spent with the Tibetan community in Pokhara, Nepal.
The first is simply that I have decided there are no such things as accidents.
No such thing as wrong places. No such thing as chance timings. Though it appears as though anything can happen at any time, at random, originating from nowhere - this is all just part and parcel of the greatest show ever conducted. This notion of random or accident, it might just be one of the most compelling illusions we contend with, but it is an illusion all the same.
Lightning strikes with the same incomprehensible ferocity as any human being might suddenly lash out one day, hit their breaking point, snap at another’s ill-placed word or action. Typically, the outburst is disproportionate to that which provoked it (the provocateur often holding no conscious intent to provoke at all) but, being human ourselves, we are wise to the fact that there is more going on behind the scenes that can be readily observed.
When someone snaps, we understand that a storm has been brewing within for some time, that the pressure has steadily been rising, and all it has taken to be unleashed is for one provocation to trigger this pressure point.
Likewise, we understand the violence of lightening - awesome enough to have once been considered the temper tantrum of a wrathful God pissed off at an unfortunate time – also arises out of a series of preceding causes and events. As shocking as lightening is when it occurs, we are not entirely surprised, for we have noticed the omens in the skies, observed the weather’s mood-swings, watched as the storm-clouds approached.
This is the first thing I consider.
The second I cannot yet so neatly present, but here it is:
That five minutes before sitting down to dutifully hammer at the keyboard, to revisit the memory banks of that day in Pokhara and to coax whatever comes, I heard a song playing in the distance. Not just any song, but a specific song, one that has been following me ever since I left England for Nepal.
Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish you Were Here’ has been played across countless bars, regaled by young men and women on hostel rooftops, underscored blurred sessions of shared joints, and just now, its familiar finger-plucking sounded through the distant window of an unmet neighbour as I stared into the bathroom mirror at the face of another morning’s loneliness.
‘Wish you Were Here’, as much as it has regularly pockmarked junctions of my existence (a choice favourite in my late teenage years on the bus-ride to work at a horror-show) was most significantly played as the opening tribute to my late uncle Barry’s funeral.
Barry’s unexpected departure happened only three weeks before I departed from England. His leaving the physical world marked indelibly the serious playfulness with which we should treat the gift that is life. That perhaps we need not understand the dance, maybe it is better we just dance, for in any instant our moment to do so can end.
It also served as a reminder of the true nature of beginnings, that they are inseparable from endings; it is only in our words that we imagine they are not the same thing.
The reality is that Barry’s final exit – just as the many final exits of human beings worldwide – provided many sobering realisations; no doubt a bottomless list I’d barely touch here.
On a hotel balcony in Pokhara, amidst three fellow travellers, I made the observation aloud for the first time that the song seemed to be dogging my footsteps. The song was playing through the phone speaker of Taufiq, a local from Kathmandu with a calm and easy disposition, who became an artist in the act of rolling spliffs.
Fleur, his good friend, a young backpacker wisely experiencing the world before fastening herself to university, concernedly remarked: ‘Do you want us to change it over?’
I shook my head. The truth was it did not bother me at all.
On the contrary, it was a comfort. I had only voiced the observation because I couldn’t help but divine that there must have been some other reason beyond coincidence. At least, this is how I chose to interpret it - as another telling wink from a cryptic universe.
In death, it is strange how many things we can learn of a person we may not have known before. Possibly we did not ask the right questions (though there’s bound to always be a backlog of unasked or unanswered questions) or perhaps we simply weren’t looking close enough.
People gather to recount stories of the passed loved one, and in the amalgamation of these anecdotes, you start to compile a larger picture. The human being you knew was not just one character but many: a different image or role to every person they came in contact with.
Barry, as it turns out, was drawn to Buddhism. He even admitted his interest was such that if he were to have another time around the planet, he would have looked more into it.
I could not understand at first why he would not investigated further it if it captured him so. Though soon I realised I was judging him by a double-standard: I too understood what it was to hold back on impulses, to experience hesitancy for reasons deeper than the conscious mind could presently decipher.
I too, gradually, over the last two years, have become increasingly drawn toward Buddhist philosophy. Consequently, how could I not take this synchronicity as a message?
The first part of that message: don’t hold back on your passions, to your interests, to where you feel drawn. There is likely a force at play beyond your comprehension, a force that is drawing you out like venom from a wound, toward a fresh supply, ensuring you don’t remain stagnant.
The second part of the message is more of a nudge.
On the eve of my travels, I discover my uncle’s unrequited passion for Buddhism, twinned with my own fascination, and I am not ashamed to admit that I have felt charged and significant enough to carry out further study not just in my own interest, but in the name of my uncle.
It appeared to me as an unavoidable sign:
You are going into the region of world where the Buddha was born, where his teachings were first seeded and indeed blossom to this day. You leave behind one chapter and start the new. One door closes and another opens. You carry your uncle with you: may the memory of him spur you on.
Now, after having spent some time with Buddhists, and having had the privilege to live amongst monks young to old in a monastery, I have returned to a poem which seems ever more appropriate and relevant at this time.
We sent Barry out to Bowie, Pink Floyd and Eric Clapton – but we also sent him out to a Buddhist poem. This is written by the late Thich Nhat Hanh, who also passed in this same year. A little reminder that physical death does not relate to total death – that total death is the illusion, a figment of the imagination – just as surely as I carry good old unconventional Uncle Barry with me wherever my travels take me.
Contemplation on No-Coming and No-Going
by Thich Nhat Hanh
This body is not me. I am not limited by this body. I am life without boundaries. I have never been born, and I have never died.
Look at the ocean and the sky filled with stars, manifestations from my true wondrous mind. Since before time, I have been free.
Birth and death are only doors through which we pass, sacred thresholds on our journey.
Birth and death are a game of hide and seek.
So laugh with me, hold my hand, let us say good-bye, say good-bye, to meet again soon.
We meet today. We will meet again tomorrow. We will meet at the source every moment. We meet each other in all forms of life.
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