August

I’ve been wondering what spirituality means. I don’t see how I can possibly know; which is odd considering how I spent the last thirty years. Religion has become opaque to me, for I feel myself to be an animal: maybe a puppy not properly trained. I have only to leave the confines of Indoors to wag my tail in ecstasy. Finding myself tailless, I must let these words do proxy for wagging.

It’s August. There was rain but now the sun has warmed every surface. Fences are steaming, undergrowth exhales heady aromas. Lazily, I don’t want to go anywhere or do anything in particular. It’s enough to just be, soaking up the surroundings, whatever they are, exactly as people do on a beach. As I say this, memory presents various sense-inputs from adolescence: decaying seaweed, ice-cream, sun-tan oil on young women and muscly young men, sweat, cigarettes, decaying crustaceans, hot dogs, dog-dirt, damp sand. That’s just the smells.

Add a backdrop of glittering ocean in the setting sun, mournful cries of seagulls wheeling overhead. I hear the constant ebb and flow of waves on shingle, sounding like the very lungs of creation. Wafted on the breeze are distant children’s cries, sharp, ecstatic. If you are prone to synaesthesia, they’ll remind you of shards of coloured glass endlessly shifting in a kaleidoscope, never the same, never different. What I’ve touched and sniffed is more real than topics of the day chewed over on the radio, the tedium of committing to work, deadlines, meetings. So I’m drawn to spending my Saturday on an actual beach. But then I realize that it would entail more of the same: more planning, traffic queues, compromise and constraints. Let me go where all is wild and everything is possible, in flights of fancy and remembrance.

Above all, let me walk and feel the earth under my feet, with the force of gravity making sure I don’t float away.
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In daily respite from office craziness, I spend my lunch-hours exploring the neighbourhood. Eight months I’ve been working here and still not gone back to the place where the crystal therapist lives. Someone had recommended her for my illness, given that all else had failed over the years. I could say that those visits had no lasting effect; or I could point out that three years later I was miraculously cured in a moment. Cause and effect is notoriously hard to prove, so who knows? She may have set something in train—along with everything else. Her core therapy was to select crystals and line them up on my chakras. I’d lie on a massage table and she’d balance these semi-
precious stones on my abdomen: all very pretty and harmless.

But I best remember a meditation she gave me to do at home. Draw up energy through your feet from the earth as if they are roots, she said; let it disperse through your branches and twigs, that is, your arms and fingers. Feel your leaves grow; provide roosting for birds; absorb the sun’s rays and atmospheric carbon dioxide; release oxygen. Remember you don’t have to do anything to make these things happen.

Nature takes its course, that’s all it does. This too is your nature. Don’t stand in its way. I only did the exercise consciously a few times, but that’s the whole point, I think.

“You don’t have to do anything.”

Here’s her house, not far from where I’m currently working. Now I don’t know why I came. Perhaps it happened naturally.

Knock on the door, say “Here I am, came to say thank you for having possibly helped”? No, I could send my thanks in an email. I only came as an excuse to walk the earth, and make this journey in memory at the same time. There is nothing grand about the houses in her suburb. They are merely immaculate: complete, as if their owners have
finally arrived, and have nothing left to do in life but stay that way, like swimmers treading water. I’d find it stifling to live there. One might as well settle into a silk-lined coffin without waiting to die first. I’ve always felt this way about bourgeois comforts. My life is perennially half-finished, with scaffold-poles still in place, piles of bricks and sand alongside.

Like a gypsy or an Aborigine, I feel imprisoned within four walls. Outdoors, I’m a player, a participant in—all this, regardless of what this is. I pass a currant-bush and tear off a couple of leaves, to crush them and sniff their distinctive aroma. I can imagine nothing better than to lose myself in this moment. In such ecstasy, I need nothing and no one, not even a house to live in. I could be a tramp, a choiceless beggar.

Every situation has its special charms. People have hearts of gold, some anyway, and the others can’t help being what they are, or perhaps they can, but in any case I can’t help them being what they are. I feel like someone in a lucid dream, able
to float anywhere and do what I want.

Now I am at the Great Hollands Shopping Centre, a modest square of grass with its modest local shops, a pub and a National Health clinic. This is where nobodies, elderly and unemployed descend from the local bus to potter around for a while. Here the graffiti give the main hope of artistic creativity, and dropped litter is a pathetic form of defiance. Is this the world as it is, or merely its dream of itself? In either case I’m part of it. I shall not stay aloof, for who am I? a mere wayfarer passing through, striding over the earth’s crust like the giants, or indeed the dwarves, of old; like everybody else.

At the back of the Shopping Centre, at the far corner of my picture below, there’s a pervasive aroma of smoked red-pork: star anise, cassia, citrus rind, ginger. Like an orang-utan sniffing a distant durian-tree, I search my memory for its source—the Chinese stalls in Kota Kinabalu and Kuala Lumpur. Durian and
red-pork, both.

I periodically renew my resolve to write a coherent memoir, but get distracted by the beguiling flavours of the moment. Nothing is more important, nothing touches me more. And everything arrives mixed with everything else. Needless to say, I acknowledge with thanks the blessedness of this hour. Blessed art thou amongst hours!