from BARDO

The stars are in our belly; the Milky Way our umbilicus.

Is it a consolation that the stuff of which we’re made

is star-stuff too?


– That wherever you go you can never fully disappear –

dispersal only: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen.


Tree, rain, coal, glow-worm, horse, gnat, rock.


Roselle Angwin

Friday 16 September 2011

from Babeny Tor


I've lived on the south, east, north, west and now again south prospects of Dartmoor – that wild hinterland of 365 square miles, microcosm of the Celtic granite uplands of Britain – for a total of 30 years. It's not quite but is nearly a substitute for the long, empty (in the winter, anyway) beaches of the Atlantic of my youth.

Crossing the moor is like a tryst with a lover. Something of my ego dissolves, and out here in everything elemental and of the earth, still I can slip the ties that bind me to earth for a little while. So driving across the beautiful snaking road past megalithic sites with the moor's heather and gorse, rowan trees, shaggy black Galloway cattle, hardy sheep, wild pony herds and space I am in paradise, and every time it's different.

And now, a weekday evening, with a huge wind coming up from the west and an autumnal chill, I need to get out with the dog and storm up Babeny Tor, be stripped by the wind and this wild light of the shadows I carry, of the white noise in my head, of going to visit the shadows that are now my parents. My heart in a very un-Buddhist way is raging at the seemingly-insoluble nature of our relationship to the four entrapping truths that the Buddha identified. (His journey started when, as a privileged prince, he met for the first time, out in the world, suffering, sickness, old age and death, the four primary conditions which we all try to resist and which cannot be resisted.)

In ten minutes nothing of 'the human condition' has changed, but my relationship to everything, briefly, has: the winds of the world can now blow through me rather than dragging me off with them...


2 comments:

  1. There's nothing like it. Yesterday, Rima and I took off up Yes Tor to get wilded. It doesn't take long to return to a more essential sanity that knows nothing of philosophies and everything about rock, grass, yellow flower and sky, with room for all the rage and joy and none of the static. We're mighty fortunate to have ended up in such magnificent surroundings.

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  2. Tom I love the way you express this. And yes! (Yes Tor) - 'to get wilded' is just it. Thank you for this, and for the poetic and simple beauty of this statement 'It doesn't take long to return to a more essential sanity that knows nothing of philosophies and everything about rock, grass, yellow flower and sky, with room for all the rage and joy and none of the static...'

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