Hello beings
I have been trying to absorb (or meet?) my time at Adhistana on Friday and Saturday. It was such a beautiful, and cold (!), event, with the rain largely stopping and the sun coming through as we progressed through the metta bhavana.
Anyway, as well as writing a shabda report today after I’d got the kids off to school, I wrote a poem, which I thought I’d share.
With love from Sussex.
Subhadassi
Pilgrim
He looked lovely, I thought, unconfined by a coffin,
his nose even nobler in death.
Every bit of him there: a real person in socks.
It was cool in the room to stop the body rotting.
Someone broke out into mantra.
After a night in an odd B&B
we came back to mark a hero’s passing.
The funeral was long and cold, out in the open.
On a trip, mid-way, for a pee and some tea
I filled-up with grief.
Oak leaves were piled against a wall.
I scooped some, guilty as a thief,
knowing they’d adorned the trees
through this year’s long spring;
shaded him in its fierce summer.
Mourners cast exotic petals at his coffin.
The air was filled with chanting
and a scent I’ll say was Frankincense.
The sun was bright between the clouds,
hung low, a golden yellow.
For a moment, it lit up the oak behind us.
Light and tree and leaves refigured him: a glory.
Brown now, and actually quite small,
the leaves sit, uncertain, in the kitchen.
And me, awkward pilgrim.
Beautiful Subhadassi. That light and the trees and the smoke and the petals. I was there too, sorry not to have picked you out among the crowds. x