CD#12 Going solo in the bush
Sculpturist Paula Gilbert tells her story of going solo in the Aotearoa New Zealand bush, register for this month’s online event with Sydney artist Jacqui O’Reilly, Brad Parks discusses metaphor in meditation, and watch ventriloquist Nina Conti meditating with Monkey. All in this newsletter.
OUTWARD BOUND
Going solo: an experience of being alone
by Paula Gilbert • Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
My journey of self-discovery began after my career had paused following the birth of my three children. People take this step in many ways. For me, it was ‘Going solo’ with Outward Bound in Anakiwa, a small coastal village at the top of Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island.
It was an opportunity to combine the physical with the emotional in an outdoor setting. Women and men over 30 from a range of social settings, we introduced using first names, learning about each other through our interactions. This allowed each of us to rediscover who we are – or were – without the stories we tell ourselves.
This lesson of opening your heart and mind to others from how they react to you, and to what you feel and experience, is one I applied to my work with people with learning difficulties. So often they told of being judged and misunderstood, rather than embraced for their strengths and differences. This notion of the world telling you who you are, what you should be, and what you can do, comes to mind when I reflect on ‘Going solo’.
Each of us was given a sack (to make a shelter) a shovel (to dispose of waste), a torch (that’s the Kiwi word for a flashlight), limited food and water, plus pen and paper. Watches, radios, and so on were removed.
Our locations were carefully chosen with safety and security in mind. We all wondered how four days in isolation, away from home comforts, would pan out. I found it hard to imagine not being controlled by time or others, no contact with technology, confined to only a small area. But we were in the bush, which in this country we think of as a peaceful, natural setting.
What transpired
With no time restraints or schedules, it was an opportunity to become in tune with body and mind. Meals were no longer a defining part of the day’s structure.
As the main food provider in our household, I reflected on the time I spent thinking, planning and preparing food for the family, as well as my responsibility to do so. I am not a creative cook, so not having to shop for and create meals was a relief. I felt free. At times, this attitude felt self-indulgent, but on ‘solo’ there was just myself.
By day three, I had become familiar with my new place. I’d reached an equilibrium. I began to trust who I was. I wrote poems, put them to music which I sang, and drew pictures on what I had written. I began to like myself.
Creative impulses and self-reflection arose naturally. It took time to empty the mind and allow other processes to begin, and then register. In the city, the spiritual part of my soul was unattended. I’d become a creature of habit. It was just too easy to say, ‘I’m too busy to have time out’. Other people’s demands filled up my time. Alone in the bush, though, my time was my own.
I find myself wondering how families cope when there’s not enough food to go around. This arose after I’d divided my small supply of food into daily portions. Usually I have a cupboard full of food, but now I had to ration it. Thoughts like these rarely surface when so much else is going on.
I write down the idea of food and families, and hunger, so that when I get home I can be active in this area.
One of the joys of going solo is watching how the mind drifts between thoughts. Thinking about food, my elderly mother, who was in a retirement village where meals were cooked for her, came to mind. I became aware why her cognitive processing skills had declined! She had time to think, but limited stimulation. She no longer went shopping or interacted with the world outside of her bubble. She was no longer thinking about preparing meals. Yes, she did eat with others, but she ate what she was given; she’d lost the power of choice.
Without clocks, our sense of the time of day comes from the movement of the sun, along with the needs of body and mind. I snacked; it felt better that way. So, am I eating three meals a day, plus morning and afternoon coffee, as a habit? Unusual reflections for me.
Since going solo, I’ve tried snacking, but found myself in conflict when social opportunities demanded sharing food and drinks, and meeting people. Meals are often for social interaction. When out dining, there’s an expectation that you eat what you’re given. How do I integrate what I’ve learned?
Plants and animals became my friends. They were the ones I talked to and interacted with; the ones I wanted to preserve. I related more deeply to my surroundings, connecting with what I smelt, watched, heard, felt and saw.
I experienced myself as part of nature and this world, rather than as a visitor, realising that what I did, where I sat, where I trod, what I disturbed, directly impacted plants and animals. We can so easily deny the impact we have on this delicate world. I began to think of the arrogance of humanity at the top of the food chain. What should I do?
⬆︎ A bushtail possum by Andrew Mercer (baldwhiteguy.co.nz)
Being alone, I surprised myself. Entranced by so much around me, like a child, I watched ants carry away small bits of my apple, all following the same track. Were these ant roads? How were they communicating with each other? There were wasps on the sticky sap of tree trunks. Fearful of being stung, I soon realised that as long as I didn’t interfere I was in no danger. The wasps and I lived happily side by side.
My most fearful moments came as darkness fell. Exposed to the weather in a sleeping bag on the ground, with the wind in the trees and possums screeching, my sense of being alone was heightened. This was tested when possums decided to investigate this new creature.
On that first night, my scream was all that was needed to frighten them away, though as each night passed and I learnt to be still and calm our relationship became peaceful. We gave each other space. We were different, but the same. We were both animals, fearful and curious.
In ‘Going solo’ I began to understand who I am, and to recognise that person. Time alone allowed my inner senses to be processed, interconnected and expressed. Seeing my strong desire to please others surprised me – whether it be sharing my apple with the ants or feeling remorseful when scaring off the possums, and making sure the next night I change my behaviour.
A sense of freedom began to emerge. This freedom, enriched by the experience of feeling at one with nature as well as by a newfound sense of who I am, was challenged upon my return home by the pressures to conform to city life and the expectations I encounter there.
It takes courage to stand up and say: ‘I am different now’. Shall I change my name? What do you think? ⁂
– Paula Gilbert is a sculpturist in kauri and old corrugated iron in Wellington and the Coromandel, Aotearoa New Zealand, a grandmother to 4, mother to 3+1, a wife, vege grower, and one who enjoys sport
CREATIVE DHARMA ONLINE EVENT
Creativity and contemplative inquiry – a conversation with Jacqui O’Reilly
Join us on Zoom in October
16 Oct – 5 to 6pm EDT (North American Eastern Daylight Time)
17 Oct – 8 to 10am AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time)
Artist Jacqui O’Reilly, recipient of the first Creative Dharma grant, will be in conversation with Ronn Smith. Originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, Jacqui is an artist and musician who now lives in Sydney, Australia. Her art practice includes experimenting with sound, video and installation as artistic intervention within the ecological crises of our time.
⬆︎ artist Jacqui O’Reilly
Her installation, A bird’s got to sing was exhibited online at the Listening in the Anthropocene Exhibition 2020. The work is a tribute to the silvereye or tauhou, a bird that is found in both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In order to communicate and survive, this small bird must sing louder and higher to be heard over urban noise.
As a result of receiving the Creative Dharma grant, Jacqui is continuing her practice-led research for work in progress Into the River. This project is about the Te Awa Kairangi Hutt river where she grew up. Jacqui describes the river as ‘the most significant symbol of the beauty of life and existence for me in my early years’.
There will be ample opportunity to enter into conversation with Jacqui and other attendees during the second half of the event.
While this event is free, registration is required.
➡︎ Register for this event HERE
To find out when this will be taking place in your time zone click here
5:00-5:05 pm … Welcome by Ronn Smith
5:05-5:30 pm … A conversation with Jacqui O’Reilly
5:30-5:50 pm … Open discussion, Q&A session
5:50-6:00 pm … Closing remarks
Times above are North American Eastern Daylight Time.
Those who want to mingle and talk, share ideas or contact information, and more, can remain in the Zoom room for a further 30 minutes. ⁂
Among the unvaccinated, the virus travels unhindered on a highway with multiple off-ramps and refuelling stations. In the vaccinated, it gets lost in a maze of dead-end streets and cul-de-sacs. Every so often, it pieces together an escape route, but in most scenarios, it finds itself cut off, and its journey ends.
– Craig Spencer, in The Atlantic magazine
OPENING SPACE FOR IMAGINATION
Metaphors in meditation
by Brad Parks • Associate editor
I want to reflect on metaphors, since they are one of the languages of our experience. Not the only language, but one we speak fluently, even if we don’t always realize it.
The three experiences I want to investigate from the standpoint of their imaginative resonance are holding our experience, befriending our experience, and walking a path.
We often use metaphors in our ordinary, everyday speech. For example, we joke about going down a rabbit hole when we’ve followed some thought to the point of obsession or when we end up in an endless tangle of ideas. I resonate to this idea because I have two rabbits of my own who do go down holes all the time – when they’re frightened and want to hide. It’s cool and dark and they seem to think no one can find them. They’re safe.
And we often say or hear about how we’re hardwired for one thing or another – competition and aggression, for example. But of course, we aren’t hardwired, despite how scientific that sounds. We’ve got billions of neurons which connect in billions of transactions, generating electromagnetic fields. No matter how hard we look, no wires show up.
We live – perhaps much of the time – in our imagination.
Sometimes when we are sitting quietly with our eyes closed, a vision or phrase or landscape will seem to appear all on its own, without our having summoned it; a word or image from the world outside is taken up. At such moments we might be puzzled, delighted, dismayed or simply curious. This experience may be momentary or it can capture our attention and hold us in a kind of enchantment.
When these images or phrases point toward something different from or something more than their literal content, their usual significance, to something we resonate with at a personal level, we’ve entered metaphor.
Let’s consider metaphors that are so familiar to us that they may not seem like metaphors at all. Here we can explore some of the words, concepts, experiences that meditators speak about with each other routinely and which we may take somewhat for granted.
At a deep and foundational level, we frequently describe meditation as holding our experience or holding a space for our experience. Of course, we can’t literally hold our experience, since it is usually changing, shifting and sliding away in the face of our efforts to catch it, know it, name it. And – more to the point – experience isn’t a single thing which we can literally grasp. Much of the time, we hardly know what it is at all.
But we do hold it, in some mysterious way. We do hold a space.
We know what it is to hold things, since we’ve spent much of our life doing just that – holding toys, holding tools, holding hands, holding steering wheels, holding the people we love. We can discern so many ways we hold something or someone – tightly, gently, passionately, aggressively, tenderly. Our holding tends to express our intention or desire or mood, which may be conscious or unconscious.
One teacher offered the idea of meditation being a slow cooker, which provides a reliable container in which the elements of a recipe can intermix, blend and evolve over time into something surprising.
⬆︎ Max Pechstein, Ein Sonntag, 1921
In our meditation practice we are encouraged to develop the capacity to hold experience with gentleness, patience and care. If we’re able to do that over time, we’re likely to encounter all the other ways we hold our experience – impatiently, dreamily, restlessly, etc. – as well as the many ways our experience holds us. In that process we begin to know ourselves a little more fully, a little more intimately.
Another suggestion in the practice of reflective meditation is that we befriend our experience. Here the metaphor is friendship.
Our thoughts, emotions and perceptions are not literally friends, but we are familiar with friendship and the rewards, obligations and challenges it can provide. We know that often we are able to relax and flourish in the company of our friends. Sitting in meditation, wouldn’t we like our own company to offer those same satisfactions?
What does it mean to befriend our experience?
Most essentially, befriending another person involves building a relationship with him or her, a relationship of trust. In that process, we are asked to be honest, to be forgiving, to listen and to respond, to understand.
Friendships are – usually – not without conflict, without injury and repair. Our friends do not always conform to our expectations. Even with people closest to us, our judgments and reactions can strain the bonds of trust. And no one is closer to us than our own experience.
Befriending what we discover in meditation poses those same challenges and requires of us the same skills. We develop the capacity to be there, to show up, to listen with attention and care, to let things be or to dig deeper as the situation demands. We learn to be honest and vulnerable with ourselves. We hold our experience in a friendly embrace.
⬆︎ Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
And here we are: friends walking the path together.
The metaphor of the path – like all metaphors – starts with something outside of ourselves, something we know from our encounter with the world around us. And this apparently external fact – a path – becomes something we take inside, an invitation we accept. We discover that others have gone before us, their footsteps have opened a way to proceed, the forest around us is less forbidding. We are not alone.
And, of course, paths diverge. We come to junctures where we’re confronted with a choice: which path do I follow? The path we’re on may become overgrown and indecipherable and we must either return the way we came or forge on ahead in the hope of finding it again.
Some paths are deeply familiar while others present unexpected challenges and vistas and uncertainties. Some paths may seem permanent, unchanging, but each is subject to the conditions of its time and place: water, wind, the seasons, light and darkness, human intervention.
Our path – an eightfold path – is right under our feet. We have come this far and the path has served us well. And this one path is in fact many paths – yours and mine, his and hers. We can each go at our own pace, follow our own best instincts, rely on a little help from our friends, arrive at our own destination.
The path is something we create together. ⁂
⬆︎ photo Avrom Altman
remembered moments
lustrous as a string of pearls
on an ageing thread
– Avrom Altman, from his forthcoming book of haiku, Flirting with bliss
GIVING IT ALL AWAY
Who will decide?
Each time we offer a grant, two out of the three who put together Creative Dharma – Brad, Ramsey and Ronn – will be deciding who will receive it. It’s with tremendous pleasure that we announce that subscriber Christian Raymond will go onto this panel for a period. If you’ve not yet seen his article in newsletter 03 – Adventures in creativity and interactive VR filmmaking – do please take a look at it:
https://creativedharma.substack.com/p/cd03-meditation-inspiration-and-virtual
Every dollar we receive as subscription income we will be giving away to support events, communities and individuals that have an approach which fits broadly within the arc of a secular dharma.
Our intention is to offer grants to both meditators who use creativity in their meditation practice, and to creative artists who bring a meditative sensibility into their art practice.
As well as an annual grant of USD $1000, we will be giving out smaller grants of USD $200, which could go to a creative artist or to a secular dharma community. In the dharma space, a grant might perhaps go to:
support a secular Buddhist teacher for a specified purpose;
help to pay someone’s course fee at Bodhi College, BCBS or Spirit Rock;
help get a local sangha off the ground by paying the first 6 weeks’ room rent;
cover the cost of hosting a sangha’s website for a year.
If you consider that you, your community, or the work you do may be a worthwhile recipient of a small grant towards the end of 2021, we encourage you to apply for one. Your short email or single-page letter should include the following: a brief description of your project, why it is important, how much you need, and the impact this grant will have on what you are doing.
Send your request to ask@creativedharma.org. Recipients of grants will be announced in newsletters.
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RETURN TO THE BREATH
Ventriloquist Nina Conti meditates with Monkey
AN ONLINE BENEFIT FOR GAIA HOUSE
Community and care in challenging times
with Martine and Stephen Batchelor
Saturday 9 October 2021 • 15:00-18:00 BST (UK time)
Timezone converter – worldtimebuddy.com
An opportunity to explore the importance of community and care as we face the challenges that present themselves to us, both personally and collectively, in today’s troubled world.
Martine will focus on how meditation can help us to listen to and speak with each other more skilfully, bridging differences and working together.
Stephen will explore the central Buddhist idea of care – appamada – as a unifying principle that animates our practice of the dharma.
Our time together will include talks, meditation, breakout groups, and discussion with Martine and Stephen.
To register, and to donate to Gaia House, go to
https://gaiahouse.co.uk/dharma-fundraising ⁂
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