Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 63

Over my morning coffee I’m scrolling through Facebook. A friend has posted pictures of himself and his wife restoring an old chest of drawers. I remember my dream from the night before and it occurs to me that the treasure I sought wasn’t hidden in the chest of drawers.

It was the chest of drawers.

My mother’s last hobby before she got sick and died was restoring old furniture. She used to spend her weekends driving all over the state to collect pieces that had been tossed out, or had been sitting abandoned for years in someone’s basement, attic or garage, collecting dust.

During the week she would studiously scan the ads in the newspaper for garage and yard sales, circling them with a red pen (car boot or jumble sales in Britain). Then she’d plan her route based on their location.

She’d come home with one or two pieces that looked like shit. She would have gotten them for free or practically nothing. They were often covered in layers of paint, cracked and peeling, stained with water marks, edges knocked off, scratched and with broken handles.

She knew how to see the beauty in things hidden deep within, or underneath whatever lay on the surface.

She’d spend hour upon hour in the garage returning them to their natural beauty, taking them apart, scraping, sanding, re-staining and varnishing before putting them back together again and replacing any broken parts.

Afterwards it would be thrown into the back of my Dad’s Isuzu Trooper and hauled up to Maine to furnish the house he was building. My parents dreamt of building a second home on a lake in Maine where we could go on holiday and where they might one day retire.

Sadly, my mother’s illness coincided with the purchase of the land and building of the house so that, once it was finished, she only managed to enjoy one summer holiday there before dying.

The whole house is still furnished with pieces my mother found and restored. It’s like a museum to her passion.

Instead of fancy holidays on the beach I usually spend my vacations in Maine. I won’t be going there this summer. In fact, I don’t know when I’ll make it there again, if ever.

I spend the morning messing around online and doing a bit of writing. I’m confined to the bedroom because my partner is doing their counseling course all day in the front room. During their mid-day break we head to the West Hackney Recreation Ground for another walk in the labyrinth.

It’s Sunday and there’s a line all the way down the sidewalk along the northern edge of the park, stretching from the High Street to Rectory Road. There is a free food takeaway for migrants, asylum seekers and refugees running out of St. Paul’s Church, which sits on the High Street side of the park.

Volunteers are working the line, ensuring people are maintaining social distancing guidelines and letting them know how long they might be waiting.

We carefully cross the line and go through the gates into the park. There are groups of mostly men standing around talking, some drinking, all not following social distancing. As we begin to walk the labyrinth I can hear one of them commenting on us.

We must be a strange sight to see. I assume not a lot of people come to the park to walk the labyrinth. We walk it slowly. When we finally get to the centre we kiss. More comments.

They aren’t heckling us, exactly, but they also aren’t being particularly nice.

We sit on a bench and talk about what bits and pieces we need to pick up from the shop on our way home. We don’t have our bandanas on us so, after thinking better of it, we decide to wait until later in the day.

I take a moment to appreciate the privilege of having enough money to buy food, while others wait in line. I get to choose what I eat, while others have no choice but to take what they’re given.

I do a bit of on the spot, in the moment tonglen. Breathing in my own and others’ suffering, breathing out relief, ease, quenched thirst, full tummies, a good night’s rest somewhere warm and safe.

On the way home we walk past the Hackney Care for Kids Nursery. A mural along the exterior wall of the property displays cartoon animals on a train. They’re gorgeous and I can’t help but take loads of pics, thinking they’d make really sweet cards.

We get home and I decide to listen to a talk by my friend Viveka on the Buddha as Social Revolutionary. It’s inspiring and also affirming of my own practice and teaching.

I believe deeply that the transformation of greed, hatred and delusion begins in our own hearts and that it’s critical we do that work in order to respond effectively to the world from a more awake place.

She is talking about dancing at the birthplace of emergence.

I feel like that’s what I’ve been aiming to do since the beginning of the lockdown, and before. Let things unfold, enjoy the uncertainty and discomfort of letting go of plans and control.

Trust that life simply happens, doesn’t require a me to make it so, and as long as I’m in touch with intentionality and energy, letting it flow in the directions that inspire, things can’t go wrong. Even when they feel they have. It’s all there to be turned towards, examined, and learned from.

After listening to the talk I call my Dad. I’m pretty sure his Facebook account has been hacked but I also want him to give to my fundraiser so I’m trying to make it easy for him through other means.

I’m also hoping to interview him about his life and have sent him some questions to reflect on. It’s a project I’ve had in the back of my mind for years and I finally have the time to make it happen. And he also has the time, and I can tell his mood’s been low and am hoping it will lift him up a bit.

He’s in the middle of getting dressed and can’t talk. I give him a quick reminder about the fundraiser and the questions I’ve sent. He’s going to try to spend the day in the garden. Good, I think to myself.

“Don’t work too hard,” I say.

“I never do.” He replies.

I have to smile at that. My dad is the hardest working person I’ve ever known.

In the late afternoon we go for another walk to Hackney Downs. Our plan is to sunbathe but the sun’s not cooperating. Long, low clouds hang above us, moving slowly. The sun only emerges for brief periods and not very brightly.

We make a quick Happy Birthday video for my ex-wife who turns 40 at the end of the month. She had been planning a big trip to the USA complete with a beach holiday on Cape Cod. Now she’s stuck at home in Manchester.

On the way home we stop at the shop. I’ve forgotten my bandana so my partner goes in while I wait outside. When they come back out a few minutes later they are not wearing theirs, either, even though they went through the effort to dig it out of the bottom of their bag before going in.

I ask them why they weren’t wearing it and they said they forgot but it didn’t matter because there were hardly any people in the shop anyhow.

We have ordered pretty, handmade masks online that should be delivered early next week. The seamstress is part of a team of volunteers helping make scrubs for the NHS and the money from the purchase supports her work.

I’m hoping that having new, pretty masks will be enough of an incentive for us to remember to bring them with us and wear them in the shop.

When we get home I try to call my friend who I usually speak with on a Sunday evening but she’s not available. She’s preparing for an exam to qualify as a dietitian. She’ll still have to take the exam in person, but with bigger spaces between her and the other students. Afterwards she’ll be able to relax after 8 years of full-on study.

I’m so proud of her. She’s someone who jumped feet first into her mid-life crisis to make the career shift from photographer to nutritionist, her passion. She’s going to be great at it.

For dinner my partner’s made a delicious red sauce. We eat and then waste time trying to find something to watch that we’ll both enjoy. We have very different taste in TV shows. We finally decide to watch a Finnish crime drama, but it’s dubbed and daft so we stop five mins in and instead put on David Attenborough’s Seven Worlds, One Planet.

We watch all of South America and start on Australia before my partner finally announces they need to get into bed. They’ve already been asleep on the couch for the last hour, me periodically poking them awake during the particularly dramatic scenes.

I fall asleep remembering the pumas in the south of Chile hunting guanacos. It’s a tedious, dangerous business, risk of injury and death high. It takes one mama cat thirty-one days and two failed attempts before she catches one.

Exhausted from the hunt she’s still not done. In order to feed her three hungry cubs, she now has to drag the carcass, which is three times her size, a whole mile across a rugged landscape.

I’m struck by the urge to live, even under the most adverse circumstances. May we all find such courage and strength.