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.