Dear friend,
Weather delayed our journey home.
The plane seats are designed for someone with a smaller physical frame than mine and a larger one than Chiara’s. The head rest pushes Chiara’s head forward at an uncomfortable angle, and there’s not a great deal of room for my legs.
I’m no fan of cramped spaces.
Our time in the winged tube extended from two to four hours, during which I read Thomas Merton’s autobiography, which is an immense pleasure for my mind and soul, but my body was getting pretty twitchy waiting for another half hour for the ground crew to bring a ladder and for the doors to open. The majority of our fellow passengers are now stood up and cramming the isle.
The air becomes even more sticky and close and for a moment I can feel Looney Tune’s Tasmanian Devil grunting and growling someplace deep off inside of me.
The false self flashes an inner image of me yelling something like “Let me out!” or words to that effect and somehow thrashing a route off the plane, forcing the crew to open the door.
Presumably I’d jump to the tarmac and outrun airport security.
Taz is spinning out, so it’s back to the breath, deliberately relaxing twitchy muscles, refocusing the mind on trust and Spirit. Listening to the false self complaining and realising that’s what it does.
Taz, shrinks and pops out of existence.
The false self is still grumbling. The human side, doesn’t have to go away to experience inner peace. It’s more how you relate to it. I listen to it, dodging tentacles as they wave their hooks searching for an eye to latch onto.
Same practice.
Listen.
Observe.
Breathe
Relax
Stay present.
The flight being late means we’ve missed our train back from Gatwick and the trains behind it are cancelled for lack of crew.
Yep.
So it goes on.
The inner monologue.
The state of the infrastructure.
Politicians.
Lies.
The end stages of capitalist culture.
It feels like I’m standing too close to the fire and getting singed.
So I step back.
The complaining voice is aided and abetted by the fiery itching in the insect and bites that cover my ankles, calfs, wrists, and a particularly splendid ruby red jewel of a spider bite on the little finger of my left hand.
That’s how it goes when I help out in Angelo and Bettie’s garden in the summer heat. The biting insects get to you through your clothes.
We book an Uber and I’m thankful we speak the language and have the money for the fare. The driver is lovely and turns up laughing. I’m feeling empathy for the sizeable crowd of people now crammed around the entrance to the orange, level three carpark.
Phones in hand.
Kids, luggage, confusion. Fatigue.
I don’t know how we got a ride so quickly.
But we do.
Mohammed our driver is pretty upset about gender issues and we talk about it for a lot of the journey. We can see it from multiple angles. He’s thinking about it from the point of view of being a parent to five kids.
You realise how complex the world is.
His sat nav goes on the blink and we end up driving through the Blackwall Tunnel twice. It takes another two hours in the cab to get home.
I have a note in my wallet and I give it to him off app. Just to say thanks.
It felt right.
We got home.
The plants are alive.
The magnolia in the blue pot out back has had a hard time with the heat, but everyone else seems okay.
You just have to keep coming home to the present moment and deepening your trust in the loving intelligence beneath the surface of the world.
Inside you.
The closest thing to it you can imagine is your breath, the beating of your heart.
You don’t even have to imagine it.
You can feel it now.
The life inside you.
Make it as simple as you can.
Listen to the birds.
Or the jet engines.
Or the rubber sucking up the road.
Or the grumbling fearful false self.
Be the observer.
The witnessing consciousness.
That’s who we are.
It’s that simple.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey