Summer 2009 - Feels Like the End, but It's Just Beginning

Wow, have I had a busy couple of months. Well, if you're actually asking that question, the answer is that it depends on what you mean by busy. I've been travelling a lot. A lot more than usual. It's actually getting pretty tiring, but I know I can't complain.

United Kingdom, We Shall Miss Thee

I believe the tale last left off with me staying at a hostel in Elgin, preparing for a few days of peace at Pluscarden Abbey. Peace I did find, but much of it in sleep. I had a good amount of energy starting the week, but definitely caught a couple of days' worth of sleep during my 4.5 days there, just catching up with myself and taking it easy. I did manage to make it to each of the hours of the Divine Office at least once, but didn't make it to Vigils & Lauds more than once.

The meals were lovely there and there was a great group of gents for fellowship. There was Pierre-Louis, the geneticist born in Benin who grew up in France and was now working in Glasgow, for instance. I have to do some journalling, though, before I can pull up more details from my memories for you all.

After seeing Pluscarden, it was back to Oxford to see Ashley again, and we went to Cardiff for the day that weekend. Why Cardiff, you ask? Simple: Doctor Who & Torchwood. We geeked out pretty hard at the Doctor Who exhibition and grabbed lunch at Old Orleans and went for a walk by the bay before heading back to Oxford. Lovely ^^

What's a Woodenfish?

The flight to Taiwan was fairly uneventful, though the airports provided a surprising amount of free internet access along the way. I'm actually using a public computer at Taoyuan Int'l Airport (in Taipei) at the moment. I do recommend both British Airways and Cathay Pacific as pretty good airlines in terms of service.

I'm sure the most surprising thing to anyone who really knows me at this point is my mere survival of the past month. For those of you not so in the loop, the Woodenfish Program I just completed was a month-long program on Chinese Buddhism and Culture based in Taiwan. Doesn't sound so bad, I know, even when you throw in the seven day silent meditation retreat or the three hours of class a day or the (relatively) strict discipline and requisites of punctuality and organisation, but the real killer for someone like me was this: being a Buddhist program, I was required to become vegetarian for a month.

I'll give that a moment to sink in...

And what's more: I loved almost all the food I was served!

::another pause for you to pick yourself up off the floor::

Prior to this program, I was essentially meatatarian: meat, starch, dairy, etc, were the totality of my diet with rare exception. Yes, I've always enjoyed fruit, and of course my parents would occasionally subject me to butternut or peas, but I basically did not eat vegetables until a year ago. Even since then, my diet has remained largely unchanged, with small additions here and there: peppers and onions in some dishes, salads at formal events, etc.

What most surprised me about this experience was the fact that I didn't feel any different. People always talk about what a difference changes in diet make, switching one way or the other. I felt little if any difference during the course of the month, but I suppose this could've been influenced by the fact that my diet at Iona and Pluscarden Abbeys had increased vegetable content. Still, I ate my first meat again last night and found no ill effects, though some had warned me that a mere month might be enough to lose the necessary digestive enzymes.

Anyway, I'm sure you'd rather hear about the program than my health, so I guess I'd best move on to that. But now that I reach the topic, I'm not at all sure what to say. I realised during the course of this month that I need a break. I've been going and going and going since about the start of my sophomore year at UGA, and, yes, this summer is about giving myself time to think and reflect and catch up with myself, but I may have stumbled a bit in that design. In particular, my experiences to this point have been rapidfire, one after the other so quickly that I don't have sufficient time to reflect on one before beginning the next. Fortunately I'll be in France in a few days, visiting a Trappist monastery at Flavigny for a couple of weeks, so with some luck I'll have a chance to journal and meditate and process it all.

My real clue that I need time was the meditation retreat, in fact. Our accommodations at Fo Guang Shan were quite nice--think more hotel than hostel, even though we were four to a room--but for the week of the meditation retreat we moved into a few bunked dorms in the meditation hall (about fifteen to a room in four separate rooms). I struggled a lot just to get still during the retreat, as we were expected to maintain one of two meditation postures, each of which required a not insignificant amount of exertion on my part. That having been said, I reached a point where I realised that I also just tend to fidget too much, that I wasn't necessarily moving all the time to avoid a painful position so much as for the sake of moving. With a week of silent contemplation (more than the emptiness of meditation) I started to get vivid mental images of all sorts of things. Random memories of childhood dreams and experiences as well as (more relevantly to the original subject of this paragraph) recollections from the past couple of years. I was in France and Japan again as last summer, I was doing many of the things I'd done recently--in the quiet of this week, my brain began to unpack, finally getting a chance to process all that I've been doing.

As much as I sometimes feel I'm not doing enough and need to do more, I need to remember that the downtime I give myself is indeed valuable, but also to realise that time for relaxation is not necessarily time to catch up on movies and shows and reading and gaming with my friends.

One last note on the program before I kick myself off the computer so another can use it: I've learnt a lot about Buddhism and have a lot to share with my fellow Fellows from the South Korea trip--I really feel like we missed the point on a few topics (though that's just my initial impulse).

Peace

I don't know when next I'll post, as this has been a rare activity for me this summer, but hopefully I'll post again from France or London, because if I don't post again by the end of the summer, you're liable never to hear about the rest of my trip (at least on this blog).

I've got a few postcards to send but haven't sent nearly so many as I would've liked to. If you want to reach me for anything in particular, or even just to chat, I do enjoy responding to emails as I travel, though you must of course know that I may not respond if time does not permit.

Thanks for reading.

Amituofo! (Amitabha)

Love and Peace,
Dave