By the River’s Light
I’ll Live My Life
out of sight of Babylon
A Note From Me: I can’t tell you who wrote these words. Maybe I did; maybe it’s a song lyric; or maybe it’s a quote from someone famous. Whatever the case, a half hour internet search failed to come up with anything even close. So, The best I can do is thank whoever did bring these beautiful words into the world. I hope you are pleased with how I’ve made use of them.
Yellow-Golden sands
carpet the floors
of tidal rockpools,
home to crustations and seagrasses.
And the coffee tasted like medicine.
What a piece of magic this is!
No, it’s not a quote from Shakespeare. Mind you, now I think about it, there’s a line in Hamlet, where the man himself is monologuing about the human condition and declaims a strong-felt sentiment:
What a piece of work is man! [sic]
The reality is that first quote is from someone far more mundane than the bard: me. The occasion on which I uttered this equally impassioned statement was as I sat holding my smartphone and listening to the music flowing from it through bluetooth fairy land and into the headphones I was wearing.
The truth is I was at that moment just awestruck and a bit overwhelmed with what I was hearing, and just as significantly, with how I was hearing a particular song.
Not being a materialist by any measure, my phone and headphones are nowhere the latest or top of the line models, but still, to me, what I was hearing was magnificent. It’s the only word that fits really.
Anyway, that isn’t exactly what I want to write about today. Reflecting on the experience described above, got me thinking about the actual song I was listening to. And that’s what I want to write about now.
The song in question is written and sung by Australian singer-songwriter Cyndi Boste (died 2018) and is called Cry Down on Me. Here are the lines that have struck me particularly:
I’m not afraid of your tears.
Cry down on me
I’ll make sure nobody hears
Cry down on me.
Before we go on, a short note. Until I started research for this post I had my own idea of what ‘Cry down on me’ means. Seems I got it wrong. However, for this post I am choosing to believe that the songwriter agrees with me. If you look up the meaning and then listen carefully to the lyrics, you’ll see that perhaps I didn’t get it wrong after all.
Essentially here we have the singer/protagonist reassuring another person (friend? lover? sibling? We don’t really find out, but if I had to guess, I’d say they are lovers) that they are safe to share their tears, their sadness, anger, fears and so on. Most of us at some time or another (or always?) have been afraid to express or share our emotions, to show our tears.
So, why is our protagonist going to make sure nobody hears the other’s tears? Well, she is obviously aware that the other is at the very least embarrassed, perhaps afraid of being ridiculed, rejected, or perhaps they’re worried about appearing ‘weak’ or making themselves seem vulnerable.
And how did she come to that awareness? I think she has seen this other with the eyes of her heart, seen their need. And now she’s telling them: ‘Look don’t worry, I am listening to you with my heart and I can hear you.’
We are exposed to so much ‘noise’ from everywhere all the time. Even the tears of a loved one can be lost in the overall din that sometimes threatens to smother us all.
And of course we’re not just talking about literal tears here, and the sound the shedding of them makes: anything said, written or otherwise made known that is of substance, or real importance and meaning, is threatened with annihilation by all the trivia, gossip, advertising, round the clock news, and what I often call the general blah blah, that passes for life in the modern materialistic world.
Of course to protect ourselves from all that noise, it’s no surprise that we so often only listen with our physical ears, see with our physical eyes. Actually having said that, I know from my own experience that even that level of engagement and attention can be a struggle sometimes. And doesn’t that struggle sometimes lead us to closing down altogether?
I guess the answer lies in what Buddha call The Middle Way or Path: The bottom line is that we can choose what we listen to (or look at) and what we don’t. No need to switch off and isolate ourselves completely from the ‘outside’. Nor is it necessary to leave ourselves wide open to all that noise.
Like our protagonist in the song, we can listen with the ears of our hearts; we can see with the eyes of our hearts. It is in our hearts that love lies, where Truth lives. We can say to that other that we are listening and seeing with our hearts, while at the same time reassuring them that nobody, including us, is going to simply be hearing or seeing you only with physical ears and eyes.
The last time I listened to the song (yesterday: it’s become a big favourite) I had the thought that maybe our protagonist is reminding her Self that she’s listening. Sometimes our ‘real’ self can feel like a stranger, as if that Self is someone unknown, and living as a separate entity outside of us can’t it?
It’s at that heart level where we can truly listen, truly see, the other. And whether that other is one’s Self or another person, the truth is there really is no difference: your heart is truth, the other’s heart is truth, and it’s the same Truth.
Namaste friends
Welcome again to my blog. It’s always a good feeling when I sit at the keyboard to begin a new post to you.
And for this post,I have some news: this hermit is back on the road again. But, I hear you asking: aren’t you as a pilgrim always on the road, on the move? Yes all true; a pilgrimage like mine (life) is never-ending, permanent. Just a state of being you could say.
So, after a few months in the desert hermitage, we felt lead to move to Sydney, to another cave; another safe haven by the side of road.
This move has felt right and gone smoothly from the first thought, the initial feeling, to the actual trip here, right down to the comfort and contentment we feel in this new hermitage (in reality a small apartment beneath a house with a lovely garden, in a quiet street).
My second piece of news is that I have made another blog, one just for my pictures. Of course my posts here are always illustrated with my photos, but after deleting all my social media accounts (another bit of news I suppose) I felt the need for an alternate place to share my art. It’s on a different platform and it would be terrific if you could follow me there.
The blog is called Pictures from the Heart of a Pilgrim, and you are invited to visit, to follow, to comment. to connect. Just click on the link here.
There are only a handful of pictures on that site so far, but I’m working on expanding it, so please make sure you visit more than once. Better still, subscribe so you can be notified whenever I post.
I think that’s it. Maybe I will post about deleting social media accounts. But, somehow I don’t think I will: they’ve gone and I’m happy about that. I’m not alone I know in making that decision.
So, till next post, thank you for your support.
Love and Peace
Paul
This morning as I do most mornings (trying to make it every morning) I sat for my practice starting with some prayers and reading a a few random verses from Bhagavad Gita.
Then I settled to spend some time in devotional chanting of mantra. For a change this morning, while chanting I listened to a lovely album of devotees chanting the Hare Krishna mantra:
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare.
Hare Rama Hare Rama,
Rama Rama Hare Hare.
I reached for my mala (prayer beads or rosary) and as I mentally repeated these holy names in accompaniment to the recording, I held a bead between my fingers for each repetition, focusing on the chant.
Now, chanting is much like any other human activity: that is to say, the mind is always there. Usually it manages to bring up all kinds of irrelevant fears, memories, questions, you name it. Today, however, one of those supposedly random memories actually caught my attention in a good way and took me along.
As I continued handling my prayer beads I thought about a story I read in India nearly 15 years ago now. The story concerned prayer beads as it happens. Buddhist nuns, imprisoned in Tibet, were forced to resort to making their own rosaries in secret after their meagre belongings had been seized.
Almost ten years later, after another extended stay in India, I finally was able to write about this story. In this instance it came into being as a poem I called Homage to Holiness. May I share it with you here?
Homage to Holiness
Threads harvested from threadbare clothing.
Pea-sized bits of bread, sliced from meagre rations,
secretly hoarded for sacred purpose.
Mala makers work at night
in the dark of the stinking and freezing stone cell.
Chewed bits of bread become dough again,
and, by feel, frozen fingers knead the dough
until tiny beads are created.
An even tinier twig, again by feel, pierces each bead through.
Then in solemn prayerful silence and focus,
the nun passes her harvested thread through the first bead.
She ties a knot, no easy task with freezing fingers in the frozen dark.
And so it goes; all sacred duties take their own time.
One by one; one bead of bread threaded; one knot knotted.
The nun nears collapse. But now, at last, her task is done.
As the last knot is knotted, the last bead in its place,
the nun sighs and mutters, whispers, a prayer of thanks.
One hundred and eight beads – plus one – made, and strung
Her Mala
Om Mani Padme Hum
Probably the most sacred and significant of all Buddhist Mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum, means something like ‘the jewel is in the lotus’. But many would say it goes a lot further than the mere literal translation of the words; It is said to be the actual path to Enlightenment. There is a huge amount of information on the Internet about this mantra, so if you’re interested a good place to start is at this link.
Whatever the actual literal meaning, interpretation, or who chants it, I think we can all agree that the intent of this mantra is to have us focus on the divine, or on the Ultimate or Absolute reality. The same as any mantra one might choose actually. Remember last post? God is.
in any case, I think somewhere above I’ve used the word random. Well I should know better by now: no such thing as random. One of the Bhagavad Gita verses I read – in fact the final one I left marked with my bookmark – seems to me fit very nicely with that ‘random’ memory of a story read years ago, and my humble retelling of the story in a poem many years later
One who knows the Absolute and whose intelligence is fixed on the Absolute is not moved by pleasure or pain, pleasant or unpleasant happenings.
Bhagavad Gita 5:20
Did that nun imprisoned as she was in the dark and the cold feel that pain? Did she feel fear? Of course she did. The thing is, she was, as constantly as her circumstances allowed, fixed on the Absolute: the activity of making the mala, the intended use of the mala, and her prayerful attention and devotion as she worked, all enabling a complete fixing of mind, heart, and attention onto the Absolute.
The cold was still there; the hunger and fear too. But this nun was able to remain centred, you might even say calm and content, despite the dire situation.
Actually content was a word I read in relation to this nun and her sisters (she wasn’t alone in that prison cell): From what I read they were released after some time, and eventually escaped to India where they rejoined friends, family, and of course their leader the Dalai Lama
At the time the story was being recorded for posterity, the Mala Maker reported that she was happy and content and leading a full and fulfilling life. I imagine her as still being fixed on the Absolute.
Thank you for allowing me to share these moments with you
Love and peace
Namaste and Welcome to you.
I can’t remember when I wrote my last post. And of course it isn’t relevant at all is it? I mean to say that in the contemplative life, time sometimes seems to take on some other kind of character.
Or at least I should say that one’s perception of the passage of time shifts; nothing unusal there I hear you say, and of course you’re right. Just thinking out loud I suppose.
For me, having a right perception of time is an important aspect of my Sadhana, my practice: yes, it’s true: time is seen to fly, or it is frustratingly felt to drag. But my aspiration is to see time as simply a human construction that we use to limit, structure, bind, define, and place all kinds of restrictions on our lives.
Which for me, simply means that there is only presence or Presence; only the ongoing continous moment (what we often call The Now). Easier said than done mind!
In any case, here I am, just where God would have me be. Feeling strongly to reach out to you, I remember the poem (it’s not really about time in the sense we’re discussing it so far) that emerged the other day after reading a quote from Swami Ramdas that seemed to be an answer to some thoughts I’d been having.
I’m grateul for this, all of this. And for you too, the reader of these musings offered with humility and thanks.
Peace and love from me to you.
Thinking thoughts
as if battered by demons.
Memories arising of my own evil deeds, selfish and cruel.
Right away I turn to God:
God is my all;
Hare Krishna
Forego repentance,
relinquish regrets;
you are filled with God,
the supreme essence of life.
God is my all;
Hare Krishna.
Through Papa Ramdas
I hear the Universe speak:
Forgiveness is from God;
and it has been granted.
God is my all;
Hare Krishna.
Broken Hill, Australia
9 July 2022
Welcome to another musing from the hermits’ cave. It’s been a while hasn’t it?
Mind you, I’ve been busy: settling into the new hermitage here in the desert. Actually, it’s been cloudy since we arrived, and raining sometimes. It’s as if the Subtropics have followed us here, except that it’s been freezing.
And I’ve been busy colouring in as well. Not as in filling in a picture book designed for colouring, but in making my own patterns and shapes with the one aspiration of making colour happen.
Japanese calligraphy masters will tell you that God is in the ink, or in my case in the pigment of the colour pencils I use. I draw designs, sometimes complex, sometimes simple, then fill the spaces with colour. Sometimes just one or two, sometimes multiple colours.
Why? Well, the simple answer is because I like doing it. I like to see colour covering the page, seeing it slowly fill that empty space. I’m not good at ‘drawing’ and painting in the traditional sense, but one thing I can do is make colour. So I do.
And it’s a sacred act: God is in the ink remember? It’s the making of beauty. And that is a holy act. There’s that aphorism isn’t there? It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness?
Or, I could say that it’s better to make colour and patterns than it is to be swamped by the darkness.
There’s a Bhagavad Gita verse I like that I came across again the other day:
If one’s thoughts are fully absorbed in the Absolute all his [sic] spiritual offerings also become a part of that same Absolute
Bhagavad Gita 4:24
In other words, all our actions – and we never cease from activity while we dwell in a material body – are not only prayers or offerings to that Absolute (or you can say to God, to beauty, to art, to love, to the universe, to life. Or you don’t have to name it at all. None of the names and forms are relevant) but in fact become that Absolute.
I am a hermit pilgrim, living a contemplative life devoted to the Absolute we just talked about. I have little to offer, but I offer all that I am. And with my photographs, and with my ‘colouring in’, I try to create a little bit of the sacred, a lit bit of colour and beauty to keep us all away from the darkness.
Peace and love
Greetings and Welcome after what feels like a gap of forever since my last post.
Two weeks today since I moved into a rented house way out here Outback in the mining town of Broken Hill, on the traditional lands of the Wilyakali people whose ongoing presence on this country I acknowledge and give thanks for.
And now, it is the location of my hermitage, my safe haven and refuge. But, no, therein lies the conundrum: I love it here; I know I’ve come to the right place to which I’ve been called. But after two weeks, I’m still not feeling grounded; I’m not really here yet.
Culture shock, fatigue, new environment, excitement; call it what you will; something has me not yet settled and in place. Yesterday a small poem came to me that I think expresses exactly the problem.
And now I’m sharing it with you as a way of explaining why the gap, why the block.
Peace and love from me to you.
The call to the desert
has been answered.
And now, I am here.
No, to tell the truth, I’m not actually. Here I mean.
So, where am I?
Not there, back there
where I came from.
Not even sure if ‘there’ really exists,
if you know what I mean.
Mind you, when I said ‘here now”
I meant it’s been a short now:
Now that I’m here. Just.
A short stretch – so far.
Here; there; now; so far;
it’s all too much.
And you know what?
It’s all in my head.
In my mind I mean.
A wise teacher once taught:
First thought, best thought.
But for here and now?
As in being here now?
No thought, more like,
is best thought.
Eventually.
Greetings friends. I welcome you from my new hermitage in desert country.
You know, it’s an old idea, a cliché even, to say that we, all of us, are on a pilgrimage called life, a Hero’s Journey as it’s called by the Mythologists. And, on any such journey there is what those same scholars call a Call to Adventure.
They are the times when we are challenged by life to commit to an action that will stretch us somehow, take us out of our comfort zone, change our life; to make a move; take a risk; embark on a journey either internally or out in the physical world.
So, when I tell you I got a call to come out here to the desert, and that I answered it, why the necessity to add ‘eventually’? What happened to delay that journey? Well, that’s what our Mythologist friends call The Refusal of the Call.
They’re the times when, once we’ve heard the call, and when we’ve felt its rightness, we still say no. Not now. And we come up with all kinds of perfectly reasonable explanations for our refusal.
In my case, I said, hey, it’s fine here; I’m near the beach; I really have no reason to move; there are plenty of ‘other places’ to check out first. The excuses went on and on.
All along though, there was this place, this country, calling. Of course ‘the desert’ isn’t always or for everybody the literal sand covered land, that gets very hot, and is generally thought of as barren and even hostile. It can also be a metaphor for any place – or no place in particular – that is a place of retreat, a quiet place, a place for living apart from the mainstream of human life.
For some people inclined to a life of contemplation and solitude, this place might be a small hut in a forest or a wood, or a camp on a remote beach on an even more remote island. Then there are others who are called to an actual cave high in the mountains, or on the banks of some sacred river somewhere.
And, equally, the desert, the place of retreat, quiet, solitude, and living apart, may well be an apartment or house in a suburb, or even in the centre, of a big city.
Then there’s me: called to this desert town of Broken Hill, almost but not quite in the centre of the continent of Australia. It is deep in the arid zone: it’s very far out back here in the Outback, 1500 kilometres inland from the east coast to be precise.
Yes, well this is all well and good, but shouldn’t I be answering my own question: why eventually? Well, we’ve covered the excuses, but really isn’t that just plain old procrastination? Yes indeed. If we get back to our Mythologist friends once more, we learn there is a stage in this Hero’s Journey that follows on from the Refusal: The Supernatural Act.
These are the times when things happen that seem to come at us out of the blue, from no rational, logical, or explainable source. Something that we might find hard to beleive at first because it’s way out there; supernatural like it says.
But that supernatural bit doesn’t have to take a spooky form, it might be that the ‘supernatural act’ is an internal insight or realisation triggered by a perfectly natural occurance. That’s what happened for me. What was this non-spooky, natural event that prompted such internal insights and realisations in me and got me moving?
Rain. Yes, rain. It rained almost every day for over six months. I am very very blessed that I wasn’t affected by flooding as so many in nearby area were, and I am thankful for that. But it’s safe to say that rain, mud, no sun, and limited or no access to the outside for days or weeks at a time, soured my romance with the coastal lifestyle.
You could say that through the sound of rain on the roof, I could still hear the call of the desert. In fact it got so loud that, eventually, I could no longer ignore it.
So, eventually, I answered the call, and here I am. Here is a small miner’s cottage and my new hermitage, my new safe haven by the side of the road. The cottage is situated in a mining town that sprung up in the 1880s. So this cottage has been home to miners and their families for generations, including the current owners.
In a sense it’s quite likely that I am the first occupant who hasn’t been or isn’t a miner. Though you might say that my excavations, rather than being in the dark underworld beneath the surface of Mother Earth, are taking place in the equally dark, hidden interior places of Self. A mining of another sort you might say.
Before flying out here, I was thinking about what was actually calling me to the desert (putting aside the rain for a moment). After all, I lived in a small cabin in a park like setting literally five minutes walk to a pristine Pacific Coast beach; I had trees and forest like spaces all round, as well as a small river two minutes walk. And that’s not even thinking about the abundance of wildlife.
And it occured to me that it is the stillness of the desert that was calling to me. This town of Broken Hill is a mid size town (actually a small city with about 15000 people), with the usual shops, cars, people, and the rest.
Yet there is a stillness. No longer can I hear the constant sound of seawaves crashing. No longer can I sense the never stopping coming in and going out of sea tides. And out here, it seems like even the people are moving quite a bit slower too. I’ve yet to see a single person rushing about. And they seem to smile a lot as well.
The street I live on is extremely quiet, and even on the so-called ‘busy streets’ there isn’t the mad acceleration and braking we’d see everywhere on the coast. Of course there is the odd driver who thinks every car is a racecar, but where don’t you get that?
But, actually it’s more than this. There is, beyond the actual literal quietness, a silence that seems to exist as an entity or state of being in its own right.
A stillness that is a solid thing, just as on the coast there was (is I suppose) a constant frenetic atmosphere that seemed to overlay everything. People rushing – on foot or in cars – even when there seems to be no reason for hurry (though of course you can never tell can you?). And not so many smiles either.
Contemplative people, those seeking solitude, and peace and quiet in which to pray, to live slowily, and to explore the divine, have been drawn or called to deserts (in all its forms) for thousands of years or longer. And I am fortunate enough to have finally (eventually) heeded the call myself.
Here, away from the incessant acceleration and braking (I do like this expresion), and in that stillness that envelops this land, perhaps I can dig a little deeper, uncover a bit of quiet, and discover a piece of solitude.
Out here, in the Outback, life can be harsh for all living beings, often dangerous in its aridity and isolation. It’s a long way from major cities, food and supply chains are extended to extreme limits, and the human hold on the land is precarious at best.
Yet, the paradox exists: out here far from the fertile coasts, the soft sandy beaches, the major urban centres where the mainstream of (human) life goes on, there is a quiet, a peace, a stillness that seems to pervade the very air one breathes.
A wise person wrote something short and sweet that sums all this up for me:
There is a stillness in the wildness.
One week today and I will be there. In other words, this time next week at this time I will have arrived in the desert city of Broken Hill. Almost in the heart of the continent and right in the middle of the Outback. In fact they call that whole area The Big Red after the colour of its tens of thousands of square kilometres of desert sands.
It’s about 1500 kilometres from the Pacific Coast where I am right now. I’d like to write about the ‘call’ to the desert, which I am finally answering, but maybe I’ll get to that in another post.
Right now I only want to say how excited I am to be going. A bit anxious too (I’ve been there before, but still …), and plain and simple looking forward to getting there.
Acturally, to be perfectly clear about it: I can’t wait to be there. But, you see, herein lies the problem: I am so keen to get there that I’m feeling as if I am no longer here. I am not present; I am not living in the moment and in the place I’m in (which I love by the way, the place I mean).
I don’t mean to say that I am some sort of Buddha who is usually fully present in each moment; or who is serene and calm when he knows change is coming. Any reader of this blog will tell you that presence isn’t necessarily my greatest strength.
But, I must say that lately I have improved (slightly) my living in the moment, being here and now, way of living. It’s just that I’ve been longing for this particular change (and all that I anticipate will come with it) so much that I just can’t help myself.
Did I mention already that this is a problem for me? Well, yes, I did, and it is. I prefer very much to be where I am and when I am and fully in the flow of the ongoing present.
Of course there is nothing wrong with wanting something to happen. The problem arises when one is so anxious for whatever it is to happen, that what’s happening here and now ceases to be where one is at—in other words: the trouble is that I stop being in the present.
Buddha taught what are called The Four Noble Truths. (which pretty much form the core of Buddhist teachings) The second of these Truths says that attachment is the cause of suffering. Suffering here means anxiety, worry, regret, fear; all those kinds of things. Whenever we say something like, ‘I can’t wait to…’, then it is a sure sign we are attached to that want or desire.
By the way, the First Noble Truth is: Life is suffering. Suffering, The Buddha taught, is simply the price of being alive. We get hungry, we are conscious of pain (in all its guises), we grieve; we grow old; we get sick; and we die.
But, right now, I want to talk more about Noble Truths three and four. Number three says that suffering can be overcome. Nice clean, clear, and not to mention, succinct little statement. Of course, it’s easy for him to say isn’t it? He is Buddha after all.
Perfectly reasonable reaction from us suffering humans. But there is hope and we will find that in Noble Truth number four which gives us the how to overcome suffering. There are quite a few ways to put this Truth into words, but the one I like best says:
The way to overcome suffering is to sit.
What? Sit? Yes, sit. Be still; stop moving. Of course if we relate this Truth to my little dilemma for wanting to so badly to be somewhere else that I’m not able to be where I am now, we can expand this Truth to something like this:
Focus your full attention on what you are doing now, and where you are now as well. As much as you can, be open to change, but be less attached to the nature or timing of that change. After all, you can make all the plans you like, but who knows what’s really going to happen—you won’t know that till it actually happens.
So, that’s what I am trying to do. Instead of saying stuff like ‘I wish I could go sooner’, or ‘it’s only x days till I go’ (yes I know, that’s what I said way up there at the top of the post), I am going to ask myself, ‘What am I doing now?’, and I plan to look around me, and engage more with the reality of this moment. And try hard to realise the ongoingness of that everlasting moment.
As Ram Dass said,
Be Here Now.
Hey, that’s a great mantra isn’t it? Chanting it whenever I start getting out of the here and now mode, might just put me back there again. I mean here—and now. You know what I mean!
Love and blessings from me to you
Paul
Notes from the Hermit's Cave 