Just asking questions.

At work today, in the bookshop,  I was updating the display in the popular science section.  We have some books with striking covers at the moment, lots of stars and galaxies and bright lights on the front. Books that are asking questions not only about where life comes from, and where it goes, but also asking what does it all mean?

One of these books, about life and death and what might happen after, had a quote from atheist par excellence Richard Dawkins. He expressed how good it was that people were finally facing up to existential issues by using the answers science has to offer.

I was struck by the irony of being a person of religion recommending a book that Richard Dawkins commends.

If my experience of being a young Christian, and then an avowed atheist, and now a Buddhist priest, has taught me anything  - it is that there is no final word on these questions of meaning, on these issues of life and death. What is important to me now is not having an answer that I can rest upon in moments of crisis, or that I can tweet to all my followers, but to try to live in the question.

Struggling on alone vs working together.

First thing in the morning, the front room of our house is a shrine room for our Buddhist practice. During the day it's a consulting room for Fiona. One evening a week we open our doors to anyone who wants to join us for a Buddhist service.

Once a week we wipe away the muddy foot prints from just inside the door, make sure the sitting room doesn't have too many cat hairs floating around in it, and make sure we have some nice biscuits for after the service.

We also manhandle the two Poang chairs out of the front room and into the sitting room, to create more space in the shrine room. The chairs are a hairsbreadth narrower than the door way, and there's the corner of a sofa one one side, and the shrine and bookcase to navigate past on the other. For weeks and weeks Fiona would pick up one chair and I'd pick up the other, and as mindfully as possible we'd navigate from one room to the next. Just a little scrape here, or there, along the way.

Last week Fiona was inside the shrine room as I was moving one the chairs back in, as I approached the door she naturally took hold of the other side of the chair. With her being aware of the front, and me being aware of the back, we had the smoothest journey ever.

Sometimes it is good to be able to do things on one's own. Sometimes it's really good to have someone else to help. 

Those Crazy Poets - Artists and mental heath

(poster for 'Asylum' from The Morpheus Collective)

On the BBC today: Poetry, the creative process and mental illness.

Despite this article I'm still not convinced by the myth that an artist has to be on the edge of crazy to produce great work. Perhaps it's because I don't want to be crazy myself - but I think it's more to do with how we think of mental health...

I think there are two quotes in the article that are very telling:

"Creativity is certainly about not being constrained by rules or accepting the restrictions that society places on us," chartered psychologist Gary Fitzgibbon told the BBC earlier this year.

"Of course the more people break the rules, the more likely they are to be perceived as 'mentally ill'."

I think it's true that people who don't follow the crowd are often seen as odd, or crazy, but I don't like it.

This quote by artist Laura Wright really hints at the truth of what's going on for me though:

A lot of creativity comes from a conflict somewhere in your mind," says Wright.

"I don't think you have to be 'mad' to be a poet but if your mind is alive, then it can produce both positive and negative responses. It can mean wonderful things but it can mean that fitting into 'normal' life is difficult."

The article then goes on to say that "Some see expressing emotions and experiencing the highs and lows of life as positive things."

There is something depressing when the norm is to not experience emotions and the highs and lows of life. Literally depressing. Look up a definition of clinical depression and you'll see it described not as sadness, but as a flatness - not experiencing the highs and lows.

I spent much of my life avoiding feeling. I think I'm much saner now that I'm am feeling.

Happy Chinese New Year

Happy Chinese New Year!


Yesterday was the first day of the Chinese New Year. Millions of people in China went to Buddhist temples to make offerings, in the hope of a happy and prosperous new year.

The time of a new year is naturally a time for reflection and aspiration, and here in the UK the Chinese new year was greeted by the first day of sunshine for a long time.

Yesterday someone close to me gave birth to their child, and a friend reminded me that it will soon be the one year anniversary of a funeral I arranged and helped perform at this time last year. That funeral was for a Chinese Pureland Buddhist whom I visited several times in hospital. Her  English was very poor, and she was very ill, but she would listen to me chanting and sometimes chant a little herself.

The first time I went to visit was with Prasada, who was the regular Buddhist chaplain at that hospital. We chanted in the presence of the patient, who was unconscious at that time, and watched as the heart-rate on the monitor dropped, and her face relaxed.

This relationship between life and death, and love is at the heart of my practice. At the heart of living.