Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 71

I wake up remembering another story from my Dad, passed down to him from his mother.

Someone had recently died on the farm. My father can’t remember how.

It’s a dark and stormy night. My grandparents and various aunts and uncles are up late playing cards. All of a sudden they hear the big bell in the middle of the farmhouse courtyard ringing.

Usually the bell only rings to mark the beginning and end of the working day. Only occasionally is it used to signal an emergency.

They all throw down their cards, jump up and run out of the room and into the courtyard. There is no one there.

My great-aunt, who is also considered psychic by some, says it’s the ghost of the recently departed. They all laugh at her. So she puts her arms in the air and yells out through the wind and rain, “If the spirit of so and so is here with us now give a sign by coming back and ringing this bell at the stroke of mid-night.”

They all go back inside and resume their card game. They keep drinking and smoking and talking and playing, getting more and more engrossed in the game and forgetting all about the bell.

Then, all of a sudden, they hear the sound of the bell ringing, loud and clear. They check the clock, it’s midnight. They go rushing outside to find no one there, not even a footprint in the mud.

Just the bell, swinging slowly and sounding deeply.

We used to console ourselves by telling ourselves it must have been the wind. It was a stormy night after all. But my Dad insists no gale could move that bell. It was too big and heavy for that.

This psychic great aunt of mine also predicted many things before they happened, including accidental deaths. She used to call people to tell them not to travel or go to work that day.

I’ve always wondered what the ghost was trying to warn them about.

I get up and spend the morning writing while my partner organizes their files. We have a plan to take our bikes to Springfield Park for a picnic. Time gets away from us and we end up leaving a lot later than we’d planned.

I decide to cancel my regular Monday afternoon commitment. I don’t want to be rushing back home to get on Zoom. Also, there’s a heat wave and my partner’s off work for the bank holiday and I just want to be lazy and relax in the grass for as long as possible.

When we get to the park it’s absolutely packed. We head back to the same spot we were in on Saturday, under a red maple on the northwest corner of the park. We set up in half sun/half shade and tuck into our salads.

This park is pretty mellow compared to Hackney Downs. There are no ball games, just people sunbathing and picnicking. Its bordered on one side by the canal and marshes and on the other by a mostly Hassidic Jewish residential neighborhood.

Hackney Downs is in a much more densely populated part of the neighbourhood with its own stop on the overground trainline. There are also a number of large housing estates in almost every direction from the park, so it’s essentially the back garden to hundreds of Londoners.

After eating we hear a father yelling to his son to brake, brake! The next thing you hear is the kid screaming and crying. Having lost control of his bike he’s fallen off at the bottom of the path. It’s not that steep, but steep enough.

The same incident plays out a few more times with different kids, some on bikes some on scooters but always the same warning followed by tears.

I name this corner of the park the crying corner.

We laze about for a couple more hours and then decide to head home. I want to do a bit more writing before getting on FaceTime with a friend in San Francisco.

On our way out of the park we spot a huge rhododendron bush. I immediately remember my adventure with my friend in northwest Wales, hopping the wall into Portmeirion and the amazing rhododendron forest we discovered there.

When we get home I get on my laptop and inadvertently do a bit of Facebooking as a way of getting ready to write. Someone has posted this quote by Bertrand Russell:

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

All of a sudden I remember something I hadn’t remembered before about that trip to Wales. My friend, the one who lives in an annex to a bigger house, had put me up in the main house, as otherwise I would have been sleeping on the floor of her very small lounge.

And that house once belonged to Bertrand Russell. In fact, he died there.

I quickly google it and to my delight, discover my memory was correct. The house is called Plas Penrhyn and Russell described it like this:

“It was small and unpretentious, but had a delightful garden and little orchard and a number of fine beech trees. Above all, it had a most lovely view, south to the sea, west to Portmadoc and the Caernarvon hills, and north up the valley of the Glasslyn to Snowdon. I was captivated by it, and particularly pleased that across the valley could be seen the house where Shelley lived.”

I am also both pleased and captivated. The house, owned now by my friend’s landlord who doesn’t live there, has been uninhabited for a number of years and is in a state of disrepair.

The room she put me in was in the upper northeast corner. The carpets had been pulled out and there was a strange smell in the air, which she tried to get rid of with incense.

She’d also put a little portable heater in the room for me. I remember being all alone in that house and having a terrible time trying to sleep. There were definitely spirits about.

In fact, on my second night someone came to the doorway of the room and stood looking at me for a while before trying to get into bed with me. Of course, it could have been just a dream. But I remember the feeling of the mattress sinking under the weight of something and being so scared I became paralyzed.

That wasn’t the first time something like that has happened to me. It’s a “nightmare” I’ve had for as long as I can remember. It’s happened to me a few times in the house in Maine and often happens to me on retreat, especially if it is the first time I’ve been to that particular retreat centre.

It never happens when I’m camping or at home.

The other thing I remember about that trip is that I was highly anxious. I had been to get my breast checked but hadn’t yet had the results back. That Friday the nurse had called and left a rather cryptic message saying that I should call her back but not to worry.

It was the early May bank holiday so I had to wait all weekend until Tuesday to call her back. When I finally did get her on the phone she said she couldn’t tell me what was going on over the phone but wanted to schedule a time for me to come in as soon as possible.

Perhaps the dead are always hanging around trying to get through to us somehow. Trying to warn us or help us or comfort us or simply witness us. Although part of me is terrified by that thought another part feels strangely comforted by it.

I feel less lonely imagining Bertrand Russell trying to climb into bed with me. We wouldn’t have had sex, we’d just have talked philosophy and human nature and what life lessons might be gleaned from my various brushes with death.

I look back through my photos of that trip, disappointed I never took one of the house or the room I stayed in. There is one photo of the view from that room, which is stunning and the exact view Russell wrote about. You can also see the roof of the greenhouse off the ground floor, and the garden below, with yellow flowering trees.

I get on FaceTime with my friend and she weeds her garden while we talk about racial justice. We’ve both done a lot of work on it over the years, although I’ve been out of the game for a while since changing careers from educational organisational consultant to dharma teacher.

I’m hoping to find ways to bring social justice and dharma together more in my personal practice and teaching. She’s encouraging me to keep going more deeply into my own experience of living in a racialized society. Particularly the subtle ways in which the habits of white dominance continue to manifest in my thoughts, words and actions.

She’s challenging me to sit with my own discomfort, need to know and understand, need to fix things, make them better, push towards resolution.

 It’s tricky ground for me, as I don’t identify as white, having come from South American roots and grown up a second-generation American immigrant. But I am light-skinned and incredibly privileged and I’ve definitely benefited from that.

I also come from a history of dominance, my ancestors having kept others in servitude, even if it was part of the culture they inherited, not perpetrated “on purpose,” a mutually beneficial relationship, etc. They participated in a highly stratified social hierarchy and benefited from being at the top of the pecking order.

And I’ve also benefited. I’ve benefited from the oppression and subjugation of others. Even though I’ve tried all my life not to capitalize off those benefits, it’s still true that I have and continue to reap the fruits of those benefits.

From a Buddhist point of view, the work is to use our privilege to support skillful action on our part and the part of others. But it’s not enough to simply try and do better. I know there is deeper work to do to undo the ways in which I’ve been racialized. These habits that bind.

This is the work I am both interested in and terrified by. It’s my edge and I’m traversing it as best I can. And mostly these days I’m interested in how coronavirus may be a gateway to going deeper with this very material, both individually and collectively.

Towards the end of the call we identify that it might be good for me to find other like-minded folks to keep exploring the terrain together. Luckily that won’t be too hard to do, we already have a Zoom call scheduled with a couple of other dharma teachers in our tradition interested in building an international People of Colour sangha.

I make roasted Spanish veg for dinner and eat it with my leftover pizza. Then we watch an episode of Killing Eve.

Villanelle is struggling in her work. Since she murdered her mother she hasn’t been able to successfully complete a job. Meanwhile, Eve has almost tracked her down, missing her by mere minutes at a train station in Scotland.

Will Villanelle be waiting for her on the other end of the line? And when they finally meet will they try to kill each other or ride off into the sunset to live happily ever after?

 Perhaps they’ll start their own assassination business, going after assassins and taking them out before they can “take care” of others. Somehow I think that would be cathartic for Villanelle but I’m not sure Eve would be able to hack it.

Or maybe they’ll launch a wellness business for recovering assassins, helping them heal from the long-term emotional and psychological toll of their actions.

They could run it out of Cuba, far from the watchful eye of MI5 and the 12.