Raised Atheist

My father was raised Jewish, my mother was raised Protestant and they raised me Atheist. Somehow as a child I had interpreted my parents’ well-meaning teaching as “religions are interesting cultural practices but really intelligent people don’t believe in God”. That wasn’t the message they intended, but it’s the one that stuck.

Despite this apparent conflict between intelligence and faith, the search for something to believe in has woven through much of my life. Unfortunately, although I wanted to believe in God, repeated disappointments made me feel that I simply was incapable of it. Like children of vegetarians who grow up without eating meat and find themselves unable to digest it when they want to, I felt as though the part of me that could be capable of believing in God had been starved out of existence when I was little. I felt like I just didn’t have the enzymes that could activate faith if I chose to, that I lacked a space inside me where God could fit.

I was attracted to my Jewish heritage but didn’t know any Jews who weren’t secular. I never saw inside a synagogue until I was in my thirties. Our family and community's Jewish religious observances were mostly fun parties which commemorated Jewish history but had no spiritual content that I could discern. So I don’t remember even searching for God in Judaism when I was a child.

There were plenty of Christian churches in the neighbourhood though, and they attracted my attention with their interesting architecture and pretty stained glass windows. Not wanting to deal with my parents’ reactions (which I imagined would be condescending at best) I sneaked off to a few church services on my own one winter in middle childhood. I did not find the spiritual epiphany I was seeking in any of the churches I visited, just a sense of being very out of place.

Another summer my grandparents visited us for a couple of months and were delighted to take me along to their adopted Baptist church every Sunday. Unfortunately, the puerile Sunday School homework just seemed a tiresome burden and I stopped attending after Grandma and Grandpa went home to the US. I was relieved to be free of the uncomfortable feeling that I was a freak for not being Christian, not being part of a church-going family and not believing in God but I also regretted losing my tenuous connection to a practice that might bring me closer to a faith of my own.

An excerpt from my memoirs

My earliest visual memory is of being in the womb: a warm red light all round me. I remember seeing a little pink hand with stumpy, finned fingers glowing in the light.

Around the same time had my first awareness of being a separate entity, of realising that the whole universe wasn’t me and I wasn’t the whole universe. Prior to this awareness of being separate I had a sense of oneness so total that concepts like ‘belonging’ or ‘connection’ seem heartbreakingly isolated in comparison.

* * *

I don’t remember anything about my birth. I was my parent’s first child, and the first grandchild on one side and the first legitimate and acknowledged grandchild on the other. I was born very early in the morning 6 December 1966, in Winnepeg, Manitoba, Canada. I imagine snow falling through the streetlights outside the hospital. While my mother laboured my father told her jokes, keeping her laughing so hard that the midwife wouldn’t believe her when she said she was ready to push. When she did check and see that I was immanent dad was banished to the waiting room until I had emerged, too soon for any interventions.

Moving On

Bonnie tries to delay our packing by sitting in a box.

Despite practicing non-attachment and impermanence with the Sand Mandala, it was still very difficult to leave Mt Tiger and move on to our next housesit. The steady cold rain intensified my gloom at leaving Bonnie, cosy book-lined rooms, organic garden abundance, peace, quiet and general rural idyll. As is usual for me when making a move like this I barely slept, just enough for disturbing dreams to add to my anxiety.

So, I wasn't surprised to arrive in Hukeranui and realise that it sucked! Fresh paint and polyeurathane fumes filled the house. Once I'd unlocked 42,000 windows and doors to let the damp icy breeze through, the smell wasn't quite so overwhelming but by then Al had a terribly headache so I did most of the moving in that afternoon. In retrospect, my snarling temper of that evening was almost inevitable given lack of sleep, fumes and coldness. Though if I was a more advanced bodhichitta I'm sure I would have handled all these changes and challenges with grace instead of grumbling.

Two days later, the sun is shining into almost every room including the lovely space I've claimed for yoga and art, I've managed to connect to the net some where other than at the kitchen counter and I've decided I quite like it here after all. It's a ridiculously big house, especially for two people. The owners have had it rented out but are now getting ready to put it on the market so it's not really furnished which makes it feel like a motel unit (albeit a 3000 square foot unit).

I've managed to make at least one corner seem a bit more
homely by lining up my library books and
displaying some of my artist's books.

Mandala Dissolution

It was a completely different atmosphere at the Sand Mandala on the afternoon of its dissolution. For one thing the room was over heated and stuffy with the smell of too many bodies, both the unwashed and the overly-perfumed varieties, crammed into a small space. Small children grew fractious at being held back from destroying the completed mandala ahead of schedule.

Once everyone had admired and photographed the finished mandala there was a lengthy session of thank you's, speeches and presentations of mandala posters and long silk scarves the colour of french vanilla ice cream. The youngest monk, the one with the sparse but lengthy handlebar moustache and the heavy gold watch, pulled out a tiny video camera from the folds of his robes and surreptiously filmed the audience before tucking the technology away.

Geshe-La gave a talk about the meaning of the mandala, mostly recapping what he said at the opening ceremony, and about the ritual about to commence. To make, and to witness the making of the mandala is to accumulate merit by imprinting loving-kindness and altruism onto our minds and remove obstacles to compassion. The dissolution rituals energise the Chenrezig mandala by giving the sand to running water. The spirits are made happy by this gift, Geshe-La said. He also said that even though these aspects of Buddhism sound like imagination and mythology, if you study Buddhism seriously you will find it is rational and logical.

Then the monks launched into a comparatively short session of deep droning chants punctuated with bell ringing. This is the third time I've listened to them chanting and it is starting to sound pleasantly familiar so my perception of brevity might be influenced by not feeling so alien. Anyway, it didn't seem like long before the three of them stood up and stood at the north side of the mandala, did a bit more chanting and began to break it up. I was watching the faces of the two monks who had spent the past three weeks creating it and I saw no hint of attachment to their work nor reluctance to destroy it. I thought about my friend who said she wouldn't attend the closing because she would be too upset by the dissolution.

First they scattered grains of polished rice across the intricate face of the mandala, then using first their hands and then big soft paint brushes the monks swept the coloured grains from the edge into the centre in a more or less symmetrical process. Their paths blurred then obliterated the monkeys chased by dragons, the little goats and green horses, the cloud patterns and lotus petals, the dancers and meditators, the fountains and flames: all the details that I'd watched emerge as the design grew ever more complex as it expanded out from the relatively simple central shapes.

A pile of greenish grey sand grew up in the centre of the platform and was finally dispersed into the monk's special vessels and a hilarious assortment of containers presented by members of the audience. Glass jars and metal bowls, ziplock baggies and leather wallets, paper bags from the shop downstairs and a special little box: no one was turned away without a small handful of the grains charged with all the compassion of the mandala.

Then we all drove out to the boat ramp at Onerahi (a harbourside suburb) and there recreated a ritual space on a blue tarpaulin facing the sea. Once everything was in place (including a huge photo of His Holiness the Dalai Lama) and everyone had a smouldering stick of incense, another round of chanting began, enlivened this time with not only bells but drum, cymbals and a conchshell horn.

During this part of the ritual a motor boat pulled in and was hauled onto the back of a trailer right in front of the monks who didn't seem to miss a beat. A few minutes later, behind them a big and beautifully carved waka (Maori canoe) drove past on a trailer and our little crowd was expanded by a few of the interested waka ama crew and their families. Then the monks led us all in a procession down the boat ramp while they continued to ring bells, bash cymbals and blow the horn festively.

Geshe La waded into the water and ceremoniously tipped all the remaining sand mandala grains into the harbour turning the water the same greenish hue for a moment. Finally everyone threw flowers in after the sand and watched them float out into the harbour. I felt sure the spirits were made as happy by receiving our gifts as we were by giving them.

Parihaka Poem

I would have posted this poem earlier but I had it entered in a competition. Since it didn't place there, here it is for your delectation.

High above Whangarei

the mountain tells a story

of a settlement overgrown

by nikau and ferns,

a story elusive as dreams are

after a new day has begun.

Where only birds

hunt and sleep and sing today,

hundreds of people long ago lived inside

village palisades spiking every ridge line.

Huge pits, now shallowed by generations of leaves,

were filled with kumara grown

in the rich alluvial valley below.

Cold mossy stone squares

mark hearths that glowed with warmth and light,

at the centre of hapu storytelling.

Their mokopuna’s mokopuna

tell stories in other whare now,

still remembering battles on the mountain.

The slick white clay tangata whenua

carved into pits and terraces

was built up over millennia

by the bodies of ancient kauri

transformed with infinite slowness

into a substance so dense

that the earthworks stay true

centuries after the final fleeting

generations were driven out by muskets.

Thus the earth also holds their memory

in the shape of the land

still beneath young trees

as the mountain returns to itself

from a dream of human habitation.

Flashdancing the length of New Zealand

Workplaces in Northland are being encouraged to 'Walk the length of New Zealand' in 10,000 steps a day. Walking the length of New Zealand has been a long time dream of mine, so I was quite excited when I first heard about it. Unfortunately, the idea isn't to take a few months off work and follow Te Araroa , the long path, from Cape Reinga to Bluff. But still, just keeping track of the number of steps and pretending that you've walked from one town to another seems like good training for the real thing, so I'm quite keen.

The catch is you need a pedometer and the official ones cost $40! which I don't have spare. I'm bidding on a $3 version on Trade Me but lucky Ashleigh was given one. So today she set off on her journey without the rest of the Narnia staff. Though because it's a virtual jaunt we all get to watch her from the sidelines. She kept us entertained with experimenting how to maximise recorded steps. Turns out that dancing round the kitchen, particularly her favourite Flashdance routines, is a great way to accumulate steps (and gets her much further along the virtual road than dancing on the street would). Remember Flashdance the 1983 movie? Welder/exotic dancer wants to go to ballet school? Lots of sexy dancing in water spray and grungy clothes? That's Ash in the kitchen at Narnia!

Sand Mandala Detail

Most of the green garden's circle is laid down now and being populated by fish and fountains, clouds, elephants, horses, goats, meditating people, flames and other less identifiable images like this one. This design is the most '3-D' element on the mandala so far, the centre of each circle rises up spherically and the stripes in the middle are also quite high. I don't know if you can tell in this close-up but there are two grades of sand being used, coarse and fine.

It's the final week now, next Sunday they will sweep up all the sand and offer it into running water nearby. I'm finding it very helpful to be focusing on the impermanent nature of all things. Even though pleasurable things like the mandala are short lived, so are sucky things like PMT.

Love Child

As the eldest child of parents who didn't listen to pop music I came to the sounds of the sixties in the eighties, in my late teens. My political feminism (mum may not have listened to cool music but she made sure I had access to Ms Magazine) took as it's cultural soundtrack the girl groups of the decade before I was born: the Shangri-Las, the Ronettes, the Shirelles, the Marvettes and of course the Supremes. I played the Supremes the other day for the first time in years and had a rush of memories both silly and poignant. Love Child had particular resonance for me when I found myself pregnant and single at the age of 18 and I used to listen to it over and over again feeling a maudlin combination of self-pity and defiance.

I've noticed that as I get older I listen to music with decreasing intensity. I rarely make an effort anymore to seek out new music or follow up things I've heard and liked on the radio. What I do listen too tends to be pretty random- what I've held onto or picked up in bargain bins or am given by friends. I often don't even know the names of the songs or the singers. This casual relationship to music is mostly due to the painful lessons in non-attachment learned early by having three successive vinyl collections stolen and then the final collection made obsolete by CDs when I could no longer afford to buy new music. It's easier not to care so passionately about what I listen to.

Sand Mandala Two Weeks

Sand Mandala Day Twelve

Back at the Sand Mandala yesterday: the monks had taken off for Auckland after lunch, and for once I was not rushed. I had a long leisurely visit, chatting to the nun in attendance downstairs, experimenting with the sand and funnel put out for visitors to try, reading more of the interpretation available on the walls. But mostly, I just circled slowly (clockwise) around the platform on which the mandala is emerging, looking and looking and looking.

As you can see the house of compassion is almost finished: the central square and the gates or foyers coming off in each of the four directions. I worked out that the blue quadrant not only represents North but faces it as well. The yellow is to the East, white to the South and Green is West. And the centre is down. This last was a significant realisation because I had been trying to interpret the shapes and symbols as though they were oriented to my view from the outside of the mandala. But the reverse is true and once I adjusted my perspective it became much easier to see faces and figures.

Lots of people came through during the 45 minutes or so I spent there, many of them clearly on return visits. Strangely, almost every group of visitors asked me a question about the mandala. I must have looked like I belonged there and since I was able to answer most of the questions easily, I didn't fight that impression.

Just a dream

As I write this Bonnie is lying across my arms and drooling on the keyboard which gives posting a surreal difficulty and should explain the typos. She just came in from the garden and has covered my pyjama lap with mud from her paws. We are both watching a fantail do aerobatics outside the window, each with our own kind of stimulation from this entrancing sight.

I realise that I haven't written anything for a while about my book/arts work. This morning I dreamed I was in a car mechanic's workshop and decided to make a book. I took a beautiful sheet of handmade white paper, thick and creamy and textured like a cloud, and started folding and tearing it to make small sections of pages for a simple codex book. Suddenly I realised that my teacher had given me this special sheet of paper to make a different kind of book with fancy folds. I stalled, filled with concern for how to fix up my mistake, but of course once paper is folded and torn there is no going back.

Lucky it was just a dream, eh!

Sand Mandala Day Seven

The first of the three weeks of sand mandala construction comes to a close with the central square almost completed. Next they will make a big green circle to represent a garden and populate it with elephants and horses. Finally, the whole thing will be enclosed in an elaborate border to be about 1.5 metres in diameter.

Finally I got to see a monk at work when I visited yesterday. Ven. Karma Geysen scraped a infinitesimal stream of coloured sand out of his ridged funnel, filling in blue and red shapes on a white background, then working on a panel that I had thought looked like ribbons or dragons wings. Watching him begin by drawing the central figures that will be surrounded by flowing curves I realised that they are actually little stick men with staring eyes and golden crowns. Looking at one of the posters of the finished mandala (here's one I prepared earlier...) I could see that the figures were like lamas dancing with long shawls floating around them. Looking at the poster made me think that the panel that reminded me of fountains last time also had eyes and so maybe the 'fountains' are more like beings, emanating a spray of something from their heads?

I noticed that while the monk was working, other visitors would stay longer and look more closely at the mandala than they seemed to do when I visited during their breaktimes. It was fascinating to watch shapes appear under the tip of the funnel, especially as the stream of sand is so small as to be almost invisible so it's almost as though the mandala is being created out of thin air. Every now and then he would sit up and empty his funnel into a bag or jar of sand, and refill it with another colour, which always appeared a much lighter shade in the container than it did on the mandala where every colour is incredibly intense.

Another moon

This doesn't really look like the moon, but it is, rising full and fat over Whangarei Town Basin (marina). I took lots of photos in which the moon appeared twice before I tried resting the camera on the hatchback of my car to hold it steady for the long exposure. That's why it's on a funny angle and looks like a completely different celestial body. As a sci-fi reader I like to imagine that this is the kind of image one could take from a planet with a gaseous moon or perhaps a space habitat near Saturn?

Sand Mandala Day Five

Yesterday afternoon the Sand Mandala was no larger than on Sunday, but much more complex. Many of the flat panels of colour (stripes in the corners) have been covered with detail in bright contrasting colours: only the right foreground corner is still mostly blank. I particularly like the panels with a flowing design, like ribbons in the wind or dragon wings. The black stripe you can see in the right foreground will be, as in the other three corners, covered in little white dots like drops burbling up from fountains. It's easy to imagine that wherever the embodiement of compassion resides, there will be fountains and dragons too.

On this visit my aspiration to develop compassion was most easily found for the monks who are doing this, though they were on break again during my latest visit (surely one day I will get to see them at work!). But I imagine them as they sit hunched over for hours on end, repeating the same small motions endlessly. I noticed that on one side of the mandala the panels of colour are as smooth as velvet, the boundaries between different colours are ruler staight and the curves swoop elegantly to fill the available space with balance and poise. On the other side of the mandala, some of the large surfaces of unbroken colour appear a little rough, some of the boundaries are blurred or a line is minutely uneven, and the curves a little turgid. I hasten to point out that it is all remarkable, and my awareness of these variations has only arisen by spending a very long time looking very closely.

I wonder if one of the monks is less experienced, or more impatient than the other? I fill my heart with compassion for them both, from my own memories of collaborative work and their challenges for those who like to go slow and those who like to speed; those who prioritise the perfection of every detail and those whose vision is expansive. In a shared project it is not always easy for participants to relax and appreciate the diversity of the contributions that each one brings.

Horsey Gossip

Most days on Mt Tiger I walk to the end of the road and back which takes about 70 minutes if I don't dawdle too much. Dawdling is most often caused by the thrill of receiving a text in one of the three places in which there might be sufficient coverage for text messages: if the satellites are lined up, the wind is blowing in the right direction and the moon is in the seventh house. (If you are one of my texting buddies and are wondering why you don't hear from me much or get responses promptly, this is why).

There is one spot on the road where there is reliable enough reception to even talk on the phone. Fortunately it coincides with a wonderful view to enjoy while I am chatting, unfortunately it is a very exposed spot where the wind cuts through any number of layers of polar fleece and thermal underwear.

Sometimes I dawdle to enjoy a patch of sunshine (sun disappears from our house at about 2 in the afternoon) or a lovely scene like my favourite corner pictured here where an old stock yard has become overgrown by young nikau trees. Most of the road is tree-lined, the original farmer(s) obviously decided to leave a couple of metres of bush growing between the road and their paddocks, something I wish was more common. Not only does it make for pleasant walking but it's an ecological corridor for birds, more of whom seem to live on Mt Tiger than just about any other rural environment I've spent time in. It is probably also a defense against erosion as the road is carved into the steep sides of the valley that pocks the centre of the mountain (a big old volcano crater methinks).

My dawdling is occasionally due to a couple of friendly horses, one roan and one chestnut, grazing the crater slopes. Today I could hear one of them neighing long before I reached that stretch of road and soon found out why. The roan mare was being led away along the road by some young women. Turns out that Isis was staying in the paddock in order to breed with the chestnut stallion. They didn't know yet if she had gotten pregnant, but she certainly had gotten muddy! Almost her whole coat was covered in mud (though I don't think horses roll around on the ground while they are Doing It) obscuring the delicate mottling of reddish spots on her creamy coat. She's a lovely gentle horse who didn't seem bothered by being taken away from her paramour. He, on the other hand, seemed quite heart broken and his loud cries echoed round the valley for most of my walk.