A Hopeless Case?

Meditation has been almost hopeless, just too many children.  I woke with a sentence in mind, it said get up and meditate.  As I clambered out, No 8  grand daughter woke and knowing that the parents were asleep and I was up, getting her up and taking her out in the garden was a no brainer.  And so it went on, like a paper bag in the water, I just go with the flow.  By now I am thinking that I will just start over again when the holiday is over.  So the blog will be mostly about failed meditation but a really good summer holiday with the family.

Another conversation about Death with Sebastian

If I died Granny, you wouldn't just bury my body, couldn't you keep it somewhere?
See below for Grandpa and Sebastian (in specially designed trousers! by Sebastian).
I will have to meditate on this question to come up with a good answer.  And he will have to work a bit to come up with a better design for trousers.

A little Ramayana Drama in East Anglia

It is going to be hot and I am up early.  It is a wonderful dewy time to walk the dogs before meditation but they see a beautiful deer and take off across several fields after it.  They are in unknown territory and there are roads although as it is so early there is no traffic.  Three quarters of an hour later they return exhausted!
In the tale of Rama and Sita, it is a beautiful deer which attracts her attention, sending her protector searching for it giving Ravana his opportunity to capture her and take her to Lanka.  This deer certainly captured our attention and meditation was seriously delayed.

Meditation and mobile phones

You think that I am going to say that mobile phones disturb meditation don't you, but I'm not going down that track.
If you see someone taking out their mobile phone, they will all put their hand in their pocket or in their handbag and pull out a piece of metal and glass and start talking to it as if it were a real person!!!  How interesting is that?  It could be their bank manager, it could be their mother, their girlfriend, their lover, even their teacher or guru.  Same device, same ear but watch how the face changes.  Delight in the lover, fear of the bank manager, irritation with their mother, awe at the guru.
What's more, the mobile phones belong to all sorts of different people: I expect that the Pope has one, and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland plus Buddhists in red robes, swamis in orange, others in all white, people in suits, in skirts, in bathing costumes and I just can't imagine where a nudist keeps their mobile phone, but probably they have a rucksack they carry their sunglasses and mobile phone in.  So, out of all these different pockets come the mobile phones and to a Granny like me, it is a wonder that there are no wires connecting people, just the voice into the device and a voice coming out of it.
If mobile phones weren't explained to us, we would think it was magic to be able to talk to someone in Kuala-Lumpar or Singapore from the windiest corner of East Anglia.
People who believe (like me), that meditation connects you with people everywhere else who meditate, know that it is a fact.
But of course all facts are magic aren't they?

Meditation brings life to memory or memory to life

We walk to the beach along an old familiar track.  The crops change a bit over the years but the dykes and the path are the same as ever.  Richard remembers blackcurrant jam sandwiches and wasps!  I remember people.  The people who surrounded our Suffolk holidays who are, like the old uncle and aunt, long gone are as present to me as you are to yourself.
There is Billy Wright, driving the old tractor down to the marshes early in the morning with all you children balancing on the back and there is Peter Buck, the butcher with his sad-eyed wife Hazel, running the shop despite losing their one well son and being left with Michael, disabled and tiresome, who would swing endlessly on the noisy swing outside Rumpty's house.
There is Basil, the handsome older widower, bringing up his three children in the old Post Office which he bought with the old stock on needles and cottons.  All the single ladies in the village loved him!  He is especially present to me.
Then Rumpty and THE GREAT GAME in the woods.  Holding the big oak tree with a stash of pine cones while all of you tried to creep up on him.  He left us that game and Zulu too.  We are going to play that game and watch that film while we are here and feel we are still young
And in my mind, we are here with them alive and us the same as ever.
I really believe that meditation collapses the walls between the past and now, and maybe it even throws its magic on the future.

Returning home

We have come back to the house where his grandparents lived.  The house they bought in 1933!  It is an Old Rectory, so English and so full of memorable items and places.  The library has the books they put it, the furniture is the same and he, my husband, spent most of his summers here with his cousins who now live in it, letting it to help keep it going.  His uncle, a war hero, married a Belgian Resistance heroine who was a staunch Roman Catholic and whose faith was central to her.  The first time I stayed here, there was a book of Letters from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Priest who had been accused of plotting to kill Hitler.  This was a milestone book, I was 24, with 2 children and had never really considered the importance of life really, it just rolled along happily and certainly I had never thought of spiritual life being something more than going to Church.  I had never considered that each individual must stir themselves at some point and decide if they are spiritual beings or just human beings.
We are in the dear old aunt's bedroom which looks out over fields towards the sea.  It is open to the outside and that is a characteristic of the house, it seems to have grown from the outside, it doesn't resist it, it somehow exists together with it.  I love to think of the aunt rising each morning here and looking out at the same view.  She didn't have an easy life in many ways but this view and her spiritual life were her comfort.

Meditation, an every day story of country folk!

There is a conversation recorded as part of the Geeta, a central part of Vedic Philosophy which has given me enormous encouragement as a hen-owning grandmother who lives in Cambridgeshire.  Real scriptures span all religions and are universal so this one, although Indian in origin, is as pertinent today and to me as the Bible.

see hens!

Why do I like it so much?  Well, there is a good questioner in it, a questioner who never gives up and he definitely knows that controlling the mind is about as easy as holding onto an umbrella in a high wind.  (He doesn't use that analogy but then he didn't live in the flat lands of East Anglia!)  He, the questioner is questioning the Lord Krishna who is both Lord of all but also his esteemed teacher, companion and I would say, true friend.
Arjuna, the questioner, rather like Max, really wants to know about the big questions, he wants to know if there is something beyond the world of the senses, he REALLY needs to know because he has a big battle to fight which is going to involve death and destruction and he doesn't want to fight, no, not a bit. So, he wants to know WHO are the best of the spiritual practitioners.  He, the Lord Krishna, says that the ones who can fix their minds fully on him as without a body are really good , but if this is too difficult for us, he says that a person who offers all his actions to the Lord will succeed.   BUT, if even that is too difficult, we should seek to be united with the Lord and the way to do that is to become so like Him that we are indistinguishable in our actions even while we are in a body. That is why meditation is so good, because each time we meditate, we stop the feeling of the body as the most real thing.
Then these are the things we need to remember.  To be always contented, no matter what happens, to be kind and compassionate to ALL beings, to do no harm and not allow anyone to harm you, not to get carried away by too much joy or anger or ever get depressed.  Not to favour a friend above a foe, not to mind if people say horrid things about you and certainly never to say anything horrid about them.  This, he says is spiritual wisdom and the person who does this is the most beloved to the Lord.
What is for sure, is that if you turn to meditation and feel your way towards the perfection of God, then, your path will be smooth, you will feel as if your very  best friend is beside you and that there is no difference between you and him (or her!).