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Friday 11th: Everything is okay
...I have been looking forward to this trip for so long; for some reason, I just feel extremely confident that fate is not going to be cruel enough to me as to make me miss my flight...
12 a.m. My plane to NY is due to leave in seven hours.
I’m
sitting at my office in college, trying to produce some nice pictures
to show my supervisor before I head off. I reckon if I work the whole
way through and then sleep on the plane it’ll help a long way with the
jetlag. One of the supercomputers is down. That’s right, the one with
all the code I had written to get these pretty pictures I'm looking
for. Wonderful. Now I have to write a program from scratch in the small hours
of the morning.
Fortunately, writing code is always easier the second time.
4.30 a.m. I have only generated one picture, but it’s good enough to illustrate the general idea. Time to down tools. Meditate for a half an hour. Just in case I don’t get the chance later.
5 a.m.
Phone call
from my brother Colm. He’s back at the family homestead in Co. Meath;
my sister Louise is dropping him to the airport. Are you on a bus
yet?he asks. No, I reply, I’m still printing out this thesis and it’s
taking forever. Well get a move on, he says.
5.10 a.m. I am
to be found pegging it down O’Connell Street with a 20kg
rucksack on my back. No traffic; the bus will only take twenty minutes.
Everything is okay. I once read a book
about life in a Zen monastery in which one of the monks had been
meditating on the same koan for years; the koan roughly translated as
“everything is okay”. And it's true: everything is okay.
Conk out in Dublin; wake up in Paris. Just
a simple matter of calling at the relevant desk to collect our
connection to NY, we are told. It isn’t. Complete lack of signposting,
and an airport that seems to consist solely of dead ends. And
of course somebody put the flight details in the bag he checked in in Dublin so we
don’t even know what time the flight leaves. It is half an hour before
we find out that our desk is in a completely different terminal. And
the bus there seems to take forever. But I just feel that, well,
everything is okay. I have been through a lot these past couple of
weeks, and I have been looking forward to this trip for so long; for some reason, I just feel extremely confident that fate
is not going to be cruel enough to me as to make me miss my
flight. And sure enough, we arrive at the desk just in time. Everything is okay.
Arrive on the plane; fasten my seatbelt. Conk out. Wake up. Movie looks terrible, I don' t even need the headphones to tell me that. They won’t serve us vegetarian meals because we didn’t order them beforehand. Instead, an extra portion of salad and chocolate cake. That’ll do. Drag out a screenplay I was writing but which has lain dormant for months due to the PhD. Will I ever get it finished? I don’t know. I’m not good at finishing things sometimes. Stick it back in the folder. Conk out again.
Immigration.
My best smile. We’re here for a yoga and meditation convention. Staying
with friends.
Good, that was painless. Next. Pick up the bags. Then the train to
Queens. Some Australian friends of ours won't be travelling and have
kindly suggested we use their accomodation; we need to pick up an email
from them saying how we
can get the keys, so we stop by the library first. Closed. Veteran’s
Day today, whatever that is. Okay. Let’s just walk in the general
direction of where we think our house is and see what happens.
Through
the park. Sitting at a computer back home, I have missed out on Autumn
completely. Fortunately, New York autumn is behind our autumn; leaves
are still on trees here. This park is more pregnant with silence than
any other green space I have ever known. It’s so beautiful here.
Ah, there’s Rastio from Slovakia walking down the street. He asks where we are staying. Australian boys’ house. But that’s where he’s staying. Yaay! And just a couple of minutes walk away from meditation too. Finally; a chance to get bags off weary shoulders. Good, there’s keys for me and Colm. And the showers are hot! Too hot, nearly scalded me. In the bedroom, I spot a book I have been wanting to read for a long time: The Life of Sri Chinmoy, a biography written by Madhuri, a long-time student of Sri Chinmoy's and an extremely talented writer. In particular, the book has many interesting anecdotes about the early years of Sri Chinmoy’s service in the West, of a time long before I was born.
I take the book down to
meditation. Most of the meditations are held in Aspiration-Ground, a
converted tennis court. A tent has been put up in the court area to
hold everyone during the cold rainy autumn months; inside is decorated
with fabrics, floral arrangements, and statues of spiritual figures;
the end effect is an atmosphere permeated with peace and soulfulness. I sit down and lose myself
in reading Madhuri's book. One passage describes a moment where Sri Chinmoy is
meditating on Madhuri's soul...
…his features reflected a repose so
complete and a compassion so profound that my only thought was of
immeasurable vastness. The bottomless depths of the ocean, the infinite
reach of the starry skies, seemed limited by comparison. His eyes were
closed, but to my wondering gaze they seemed open, revealing the
endless vista that is seen beyond the stars, beyond all points of
measurement in time and space. Suddenly his expression changed, and for
a brief moment he smiled, his eyes fully open, enormous, stunningly
brilliant, radiant with delight…
The
room has suddenly gone quiet; I look up. There he is. You know, there
were nights
last week where I was up with the Ph.D. until ten, eleven o'clock,
staring at the
computer screen, nothing going right, not making sense of anything, but
it was okay, it was all okay, for I my entire being could somehow feel
that I would be soon returning
to what I consider to be my spiritual home; yes, there was some part of
my
being, like a dog sniffing the air, sensing that it was soon to return
to its place of nourishment. Because it knows, it knows that every time
I see my teacher for the first time and meditate with him, I experience
what can only be
described as a
bath for the soul. The surface film of inner grime accrued during
the
time spent away, the negativities the the world has thrown into me, the
negativities that I myself have colluded with, they peel away, they
just peel
away. Maybe I'm wrong, but I always feel like somehow it's a little
like a doctor preparing the area before surgery; here, with the first
meditation, the spiritual
teacher removes the negativity that collected around you since he last
saw you so he can then take on the much more difficult task of removing
the
negativity ingrained within you.
