Category: Travel

Mindfulness – the Ladybird way

Predictably – and happily – I was given Mindfulness in the new Ladybird series for adults for Christmas. Only 54 pages – and sometimes it misses the mark, and sometimes if gets it spot on.

Clive practises loving-kindness meditation – and it ‘finds it easier than bothering to meet his friends and lending them money’.

‘In ancient times Guru Bhellend entered a state of mindfulness that lasted 35 years. During this time he thought about everything.’ When he’d finished he writes ‘the answer on a grain of rice’. ‘He never married,’ it concludes.

(In Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the computer Deep Thought comes up with 42, as the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, after a 7 1/2 million year search.)

The easy way and extreme way, and both miss the path. The good old middle way.

Though even that may not work out. Last week walking on Offa’s Dyke we took the middle way, and ended up in a field looking east when we should have been by a stream looking south….

Country notes

The early sun below the hill was turning the dawn clouds orange as I ran down the hill this morning. The electric fence has been moved and the cows, Belted Galloways, now graze the eastern side of the common, whereas before they roamed more widely. I have to avoid cows pats and there are big dents in the hoof-trodden earth.

Back Saturday from three days in the Welsh borders, near Oswestry. Oswald’s tree: named for the defeated king and saint from whose dismembered body a bird picked an arm and where it dropped it a tree grew. I’m sure they have dismembered bodies in Game of Thrones, but do trees grow from arms? (Please advise.) We’re back in 642AD, so all things were possible then.

There used in the first half of the 19th century to be a racecourse on Offa’s Dyke above Oswestry, and the stone foundations of the grandstand still sit there, on the edge of the woods, a local equivalent of a Mayan ruin on the edge of the jungle…

Adjacent to the grandstand a common stretches east along the hill, and scattered across it last Friday were the remnants of a multitude, a small army, of snowmen which the locals must have had great fun building a day or two earlier. Now the snow has gone, but the snowmen remain…

I mentioned Game of Thrones. Also on TV, BBC TV, another army will be gathering, the Russian army, to face Napoleon, as the battle of Borodino looms. We’re back in 1812, and it’s War and Peace.

No Martians on the Camino

I haven’t see the movie of The Martian. It came out while I was walking the Camino. But I’ve now read the book…

Mark Watney, left behind in a Martian sandstorm, drives his Mars rover 3200 km to get to the MAV – Mars Ascent Vehicle, which will be,  he hopes, his escape.

What I love is the guy’s cool. An engineer and a botanist he comes up with strategies for everything that hits him, sometimes literally, and has the technical nous to tear apart and rebuild and concoct out of nothing on seemingly endless occasions. He grumbles about the audio books – including Agatha Christie – that are all he has to read, and he survives on Mars-grown potatoes. But he stays on course, remains hyper-normal, and mindful. Staying on task is what it’s all about. After a short which ends his communication with NASA he’s in his own, works out his solutions – but guesses rightly that half  the world is watching him on their TV screens.

We sit here in our comfortable chairs reading, entirely passive save for a few firing synapses and he’s taking on the universe, or if not the universe a sandstorm or two, a decidedly oxygen-free world, a surfeit of CO2 (his own fault – he shouldn’t breathe) and a few more problems.

But … seen from another perspective he’s almost an automaton, there’s awareness of his predicament, and a dry (appropriate given where he is) sense of humour but little awareness of self – no emotion, fear, anxiety – no sense of wonder. He’s grateful to Phobos as a navigation system, but decidedly rude about Mars’s smaller moon, Deimos. Maybe after so much time out in space he’s simply inured to it all.

That said, as an inspired problem-solver, he is a wonder in himself. I’ll be interested to see what the movie and Matt Damon make of him.

I first walked on Mars in my imagination when the BBC conjured the planet Hesikos in a TV series, The Lost Planet, when I was all of … maybe 7 years old. It wasn’t Mars – but close.

Mars was a morning star last autumn, innocent in the pre-dawn.

And that takes me back to the Camino, where there was only the day’s walking to plan, the route was more or less pre-ordained. We were solitary, but we were aware of self, and others, and landscape and history, and the wonder of God’s creation.

Two different worlds.

 

Woodpile revisited …into the darkness

Out to the woodpile again. I’m reminded that the wood out there, though under cover, is damp with all the rain and wind and muck there’s been in the high Cotswolds recently. So bring it in, leave it in the garage for a few days, then by the fire for a day or two more. Then on to the fire and watch it burn. That at least is the theory and tonight it’s been more than theory. The room heated, and we did with it, to new levels.

A pub meal this evening. No street lights round here and heavy cloud cover and somehow the lights on the urban horizon which normally take the edge off the dark sky perfection I love weren’t there. So we had a dark dark sky. But no stars. Just the wind and the blackness and rain whipping in.

Darkness. There’s a marvellous exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, Tibet’s Secret Temple – Mind Body Spirit in Tantric Buddhism. Hold onto your seats. What follows may be unsettling.

The temple, the Lokhang, is on an island behind the Potala Palace in Lhasa, built by a Dalai Lama in the 17th century, as a refuge and to propitiate the ‘elemental serpentine forces that Tibetans call lu’.  Wall-paintings in its uppermost chamber illustrate the Dzogchen, or ‘Great Perfection’ teachings of the 8th century Tantric master, Padmasambhava, and they are the subject of and inspiration behind the exhibition.

And they set me thinking – and take me to the darkness.

The high mountain light in an often treeless terrain has sharpness and brilliance and a stillness I’d associate with transcendence, but the rapture we’d feel as Westerners in that landscape isn’t the rapture of a Tibetan Buddhist. It’s no more than a stepping-stone: to move beyond the dualism of light and dark we have to experience dark as well as light. The darkness of a temple. And the darkness of Tantric practices associated with death, making us aware of the transitoriness of existence. Skulls and thigh bones feature. The Tibetan Book of the Dead focuses on experience in the bardo state between death and reincarnation.

My instincts rebel against this, but there’s a strict method in this apparent madness. To move beyond dualism we have to experience and move beyond fear – we have to transcend all human existence, and that takes us down to the depths and up to the heights of experience – the high mountains may open a door, but they’re not sufficient in themselves.

I’m only here touching on ideas of light and dark, no more than scratching along the surface of Tantric Buddhism. It encompasses so much more – stillness and movement, the trul khor and the six yogas – including the Yoga of Radiant Light.

Having started this post in the darkness of a Cotswold night I’ll end here – in the transcendent light of the Himalaya.

You can’t ask for more than that.

Norwegian wood 

And when I awoke I was alone, this bird had flown/ So I lit a fire, isn’t it good, norwegian wood? (Norwegian Wood, The Beatles, Rubber Soul)

One surprise Christmas bestselling book in the UK has been ‘Norwegian Wood’, which has the great virtue of being exactly what it says on the tin, or the book cover, ‘chopping, stacking and drying wood the Scandinavian way’, and more particularly, the Norwegian way.

I knew I must have a copy. Why? In my partner Hazel’s Cotswold home there’s a woodburning stove, and a stack of wood outside, under cover, partly seasoned – that is, partly dried, and I have the regular and rather enjoyable task of bringing it inside and keeping the log basket by the lounge fire well-filled. Sometimes the wood – I believe it’s all local beech (though we have some old indeterminate wood recycled from the rebuilding of the house next door) – flames up and lights the room, and we damp it down, and the room warms quickly, other times it’s slow and we open the vents and still it’s reluctant to flame. It has a mind of its own. But then of course  – it doesn’t.

Read Lars Mytting’s book and all will be revealed. Wood as a highly practical activity, but also pastime, mindset, lifestyle, craft and (check out some of the woodpiles illustrated in the book) art form.

‘Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection.’ (Henry Thoreau, by Walden Pond, in the 1850s.)

I remember my step-mother’s father, in his 70s by the time I knew him, building his woodpile along a garden path facing south, several hundred feet above Lake Lucerne, where his family had lived for generations. The woodpile may also have been there for generations. I was 13 years old, and impressed. I watched a total lunar eclipse from the same path, the woodpile, maybe I should call it a woodpath, behind me, the lake below, the mountains reaching up beyond, and the moon a deepening shade of red above.

‘The ideal way to dry wood is to stack it as loosely as possible.’ 

Keep the surface exposed to wind and sunlight. ‘Logs dry best when the surface contact between them is minimal.’ And I love this quote:

‘In Norway, discussions about the vexed question of whether logs should be stacked with the bark facing up or down have marred many a christening and spoiled many a wedding when wood enthusiasts are among the guests.’

There’s the sun-wall woodpile, the firewood wall, the round stack, cord stacking, the closed square pile – just a few of the stacking options.  There’s a wonderful photo in the book of a stack in the shape of a fish.

‘Splitting the wood is the part of the job Arne enjoys most.’ (Arne Fjeld, quoted by Mytting.)

And there’s sawing and chopping and splitting, though all are pretty much denied me. I don’t have a chainsaw, or a trailer, and that’s what you need in the Norwegian birch woods. But I do have memories of hand- and felling-axes from my Boy Scout days. How did we get away then with wielding such dangerous items? I loved the big felling-axe, lifting it up and bringing it down from well above my head, sliding my hand down the shaft, the smooth and mighty downstroke.

‘I don’t think people in the old days had a particularly personal or romantic attitude toward wood.’ (Arne Fjeld again)

These days it’s different, in England as well as Norway. Wood is a source of comfort, where once it was simply a matter of life and death over the long winter months. Piling and chopping and feeding the flames are these days recreation as well as necessity.

‘Wood is best when dried quickly.’

Drying gets conversations going. Cut trees down in the winter or spring, before the sap rises (and fungus and mould can’t get established in the cold) and let the wood dry during the summer for next winter use. And keep the leaves on! Strip the bark in two or three places and let the logs breathe. All apparently arcane but in reality hard, practical and close-to-the earth advice. (But not too close to earth – stack your wood off the ground.)

But many argue that you should leave it two summers. I guess it has much to do with space and time (a touch of relativity here): if you’re well set up, as a Norwegian farmer would be, then one summer’s drying may be enough.

‘Wood is the simplest form of bioenergy there is.’

Each wood burns in its own way, but what matters in the end is the density. An oak log will generate 60% more heart than an alder log of the same size, but ‘pound for pound (they) produce the same amount of heat’. The hardest wood makes the best firewood, but quick-burning woods may well be better for chilly early or late winter days.  Mix them with a harder wood of beech or oak.  For kindling use pinewood or twigs from deciduous trees. And there’s coppicing: ‘birch can have a rotation period of fifteen to twenty years and more.’

You can calculate how many kilowatt-hours of energy a tree can produce, and put a financial value on it.

Birch is ‘queen of the Norwegian forest’, not least because it grows tall and straight, with obvious advantages for felling and stacking. Ash is tough and strong, and ‘regenerates from the stool, and therefore is ideally suited for coppicing’. It’s also, for many cultures, Yggdrasil, the tree of life, so the symbolism as well as the reality of the threat from ash dieback is powerful. Green pine is almost impossible to burn.

I remember as a Boy Scout going on many a ‘woodfag’, and building fires for cooking that sometimes flourished and sometimes struggled. And with them the evening stew, and the immediate welfare of the small patrol of four boys in my charge. I’d have done well to know more about the kinds of wood I was collecting. But I do remember – we didn’t starve. The main criterion then as now is – collect dry wood. If you can break it with your hands, or it breaks easily under the axe, that’s what matters.

‘… thick woollen socks hung up to dry dripped and hissed onto the woodstove.’

Back to Gersau on Lake Lucerne, and my Swiss step-grandparents’ house on the hillside. Everything was wood-fired and there was a fine traditional stove in the sitting-room. (The earth closet extended a long way down into the ground, and was regularly emptied into a neighbouring field. But that’s another story!)

Modern clean-burning stoves compared to old-fashioned stoves have an extra supply of heated air. There are different kinds of stove: closed iron, soapstone, kitchen, tiered, tiled …. each with its own story. In so many areas of life we have lost touch with story, or we have story without history. Wood in Mytting’s hands, beneath his axe, is all about story, all about history.

‘Even in oil-rich Norway an astonishing 25% of the energy used to heat private homes comes from wood.’

Here in the UK woodstoves will never be a way of life as they are in Scandinavia. We’ll never have stacks of wood decorating our landscape. But as one source within an energy mix of renewables, with renewables part of wider mix of oil, gas, coal, nuclear, with the former growing as the latter diminish, wood could have a big future. Time is on its side, as stoves become more efficient, and if we take on board all the wisdom in Mytting’s book renewable woods might be more part of our own landscape, and carefully planned they wouldn’t need to be the scars on the landscape that pine forests have been.

And finally, there’s a poem I wrote a poem (The Woodman) two years ago, inspired by the sound of someone chopping one early morning, and that’s how I’ll end:

Across the field the woodman drags/ The log he would reduce with axe/ Raised high above his head it falls/ A wrench of sound breaks the still/ Of morning and there’s a rhythm/ As each repeated stroke is given/ A little extra force or thrust 

For he who cuts alone would still be best/ Of all the woodmen, though no-one knows/ But he how so sharp blade so cold/ Could cut to such design/ Or how he to such contracted space/ Could aim his axe and lay to waste/ In single moments a century of time 

New Year – Vienna comes to the Cotswolds

New Year’s Day, and I’m celebrating gently at this moment listening to Strauss waltzes, polkas and marches from the Musikverein in Vienna, always a wonderful way to start the year. Full of optimism, music with a spring in its step, an abundance of gold, not least the coffered and corniced and painted ceiling, everyone super-smart dressed, the secretary-general of the UN in the audience, ballet out at Schoenbrunn, and even the occasional touch of calculated lunacy in the orchestra.

Back when I was 10 years old my soon-to-be stepmother brought me back from Vienna an EP, which I still have, of the Vienna Boys’ Choir – children’s songs, including Trara die Post ist da, which I used to sing to my children. And there they are this morning, high above the orchestra, singing in that same crisp and mannered style, and looking terribly smart.

The whole occasion is a throwback to the high days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when emperor and court would attend such events. There’s a strange sadness interwoven with the exuberance, a sense of the old Vienna, in its heyday, one of the world’s great cities, full of self-belief, with no sense of a future which took out Hungary, the Alto Adige and more from the old empire and left only Austria, and a Vienna which had to suffer the Anschluss before reinventing itself post WW2. Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes tells the tell through one family quite brilliantly.

Should we lament this world, its elites and arrogance and gilded Baroque grandeur? Of course not. But … if you get carried along by the waltzes and the dance and the ambience you can imagine it as some kind of a lost paradise. Imagine it. A little bit of Ruritania, a world of childhood and make-believe fashioned for adults.

We can’t escape ambivalence. All that pleasure, and a touch of guilt. Somehow adds to the enjoyment.

And what of this New Year? It starts as always with a bounce and optimism, probably all too quickly undone. There will be celebration, it’s an Olympic year, and triumph, the human spirit proving itself in adversity – and new crises, and the old crises – refugees at this moment waiting to cross from Turkey to Greece, and IS still working its evil.

Will the world solve old problems more than create new ones? Shift the balance of the scale a little?

I will live in hope.

Last night, half-past midnight, I looked out across the valley, from our New Year’s party, hardly a light amidst the fields and woods, but above a half-moon, last-quarter, climbing the eastern sky, and to the south Orion, and the air cold and turning frosty – the first frost of the over-mild December just expired, and the first of the new January.

Come the morning, three hours ago, pulling the curtain back, all was grey, the east now delivering a chill wind as I ran along the lanes and across the common, ahead of the promised rain….

But, damn it, there is an extra spring in my step, then, and now, a few hours later, after a village walk and Christmas cake and mince pies.

I had literally waltzed in my heavy walking boots down the hill, humming the Blue Danube, and adapting the Radetsky March. Hazel, my partner, didn’t know what to make of it, or me. I didn’t get beyond two disastrous dancing lessons in my teens, but I almost floated this time, in a clumping sort of way.

I will probably clump my way through 2016, but I will aim to do so exuberantly.

The Pope and the Emperor

This subject is a bit of a minefield, and I may tread on toes as well as mines…

The title of this post sounds like the old Investiture Contest revisited, with medieval Pope pitched against medieval Emperor. But before that, in 800AD, in Rome, the Pope crowned Charlemagne Emperor, and now  – a kind of role reversal – the city of Aachen, Charlemagne’s capital (all of 1200 years ago), has awarded this year’s Charlemagne Prize (given for contributions to European understanding) to the current occupant of the Holy See, Pope Francis.

One problem of course is that for many the papacy is a tainted source. Polly Toynbee (Guardian columnist in case you didn’t know!) for one: she took exception to the Pope’s comment that someone insulting his mother could expect a punch, in the context of freedom of speech and cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed, all in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings. ‘Every religion has its dignity… In freedom of expression there are limits,’ had been the Pope’s response to a journalist asking him about the cartoons. ‘Punch’ may have been the best choice of word. But I wouldn’t expect the Pope to do other than argue for the dignity of his religion. Nor would I expect for a moment that dignity to be in any way enshrined in law, or even in convention. We need, on this as in so many things, to find a middle way between apparent opposites.

For good measure there’s this, going back 400 years, from Shakespeare’s King John (Toynbee keeps good company):

‘Thou canst not, Cardinal, devise a name/so slight, unworthy and ridiculous/To charge me to an answer, as the Pope.’

Vituperation against the Papacy would fill many volumes.

On the other hand… Pope Francis has been a powerful advocate for compassion at the heart of the Christian message, and has broken ranks with the old hierarchies in a remarkable way. There’s much I may not support or agree with, but I’m on his side.

I was reminded of his work in the slums of Buenos Aires, when archbishop there, while watching David Beckham’s TV documentary, For the Love of the Game, which follow Beckham round the world playing a football match on every continent. In Buenos Aires it’s a priest who works with disadvantaged youth who helps Beckham set up the match. There’s a remarkable and radical worker-priest tradition with the Catholic Church, especially in South America.

Back to the Charlemagne Prize. The citizens of Aachen would have had in mind the Pope’s address to the European Parliament just over a year ago, when he encouraged MEPs

‘…. to return to the firm conviction of the founders of the European Union, who envisioned a future based on the capacity to work together in bridging divisions and in fostering peace and fellowship between all the peoples of this continent. At the heart of this ambitious political project was confidence in man, not so much as a citizen or an economic agent, but in man, in men and women as persons endowed with transcendent dignity.’  (Source: The Economist.)

And also the Pope on the European refugee crisis: ‘Who has wept for the deaths of these brothers and sisters? The globalisation of indifference has taken from us the capacity to weep.’

The Economist reminded the Pope that creating strong job-creating economies has also to be a part of the European project. I’d agree – jobs and wealth creation at an individual and national level are an integral part of man’s dignity. We shouldn’t disparage man as an economic agent.

But the Pope’s vision, for man and for Europe, is one I’d share.

I’ve tried to tread lightly through this minefield, where politics, hierarchies, dogma, personal faith and experience, and much more, are all confounded – more maybe a battleground than a minefield, where everyone has an opinion, and some opinions are held with a partisan passion. And I’ve probably failed.