Meditation Instructions 11.11.11

Take a comfortable upright posture.

If you are sitting on a chair then make sure you feet are flat on the floor.

If you are sitting on the floor make sure your knees are lower than your hips.

Use as many cushions as you need for this.

Close your eyes and rest your hands palms up in your lap or in chin mudra, with your thumb and forefinger touching.

Now bring your awareness to the sound of the breath

Take notice of the sound the breath makes as it enters the body

And the sound the breath makes as it leaves the body.

Concentrate on the slight whistling sound

Or the rise and fall of the chest

Or the slight tickling of the upper lip as the breath flows in and out of the nose.

Stay with it.

The mind is designed to fly from one place to the next

It is not necessary to clip any wings

Only to watch from a distance

And bring the foreground awareness

Back to the breath and to the strangely soothing

sounds and feelings

of the breath coming in

and the breath going out.

Now bring your awareness to the silent gap at the end of the in breath...

And that same silent gap at the end of the out breath…

Rest your awareness in that silent gap.

The mind may wander here and there

That’s okay

Just don’t follow it…

Keep bringing your awareness back

To the sound of the breath

And the silent gap between the in breath and the out breath.

Rest here.

Keep doing this for twenty minutes.

Now slowly bring your awareness back to your body and to the room.

Wriggle your fingers and your toes.

When you are ready, open your eyes.

Congratulations…

you are now a meditator.

Please keep going…

1. The world needs you to.

2. It’s free.

3. That silent gap between the in breath and the out breath holds the answer to every question you have ever asked.

Moving Towards Acceptance

Water changes the view in eight hourly intervals.

The river, for a while snakes along curvily, lazy

but soon the sea fills her

and she spills over rocks and engulfs the spit,

a landscape alive with lines of waves.

We are a team, you say,

The high and the low tide

each defining the landscape

with an image

that looks permanent

in shapshot -

endless eddies of give and take

beneath.

You have taught me to have faith that even at the lowest tide,

the sea is only waiting for a chance to return.

And you are learning

To welcome the incoming tide

That threatens to wash away all you are.

Sittee Sharifee

1

I’ve gotten used to sitting on this edge, waiting.

Your revelations come erratically and I am sometimes readywith a pen.

But mostly I wait.

I think I am scared of the sadness you felt.

Grateful for the generations between us, as your feelings still live in my bones.

2

When I drove into the mountains to our village in the Cedars, tears flowed from a place back behind everything. There are so many stories there.

3

Rip the veil sittee.

Inject me with the determination that took you from door todoor, day after day, mile after mile.

Fill me with your fearlessness, as you took the hands of strangers and wove for them a future brighter than they believed they deserved.

Lend me your ferociousness too.

A lineage of taking no prisoners. Village women, camped on their land, trees filled with fruit, their guns on their laps, on guard.

Arm me with your gun, Sittee, help me protect my space, so that I can bring your stories to the page.

4

Bless me with time in silence, enough that I can wallow in nothingness until something beautiful emerges.

And if this place cannot be found again because of the beautiful boys who have rearranged me, then give me the grace to be able to find those words in moments snatched, in time between time, in the space either side of the needs of others.

Happy

Today my heart has fully colonised my mind
Relief flows in my blood
And my exhale expands

Freedom

The rebels put up a good fight
Armed with years of judgement, control, self doubt
And age old feelings of unworthiness

But in the end they were no match for the enormous wave
That crashed in my chest today
Expanding the boundaries of what I knew to be myself
Obliterating even my most delicious delusions

I am a happy colonial.

Please can I stay here?

Anniversary

Part 1

Remember I slept in the bath the night before. The road works outside our window were deafening, and after going down to scream at the guys in the hard hats I felt defeated.

I filled the bath with duvets and cuddled up in my nest with a door to muffle the noise.

I knew something was coming, you and I had talked about it.

The calm late summer morning made even the ride on the NBC shuttle bus to New Jersey seem like a holiday. Looking back at the city, a little black cloud was visible over one of the towers.

Two hours later, after all possible film crews had been mobilised, the tall, bespectacled 50-something CFO, (his name gone from my memory) was openly crying at his desk.

Something shifted in me then.

Part 2

But the city shifted too and that broke my heart. Overnight immigrants were displaying the largest stars and stripes flags they could find in their little shop windows to avoid being beaten or killed.

“Are you from the Middle East?” I heard called out behind me as I made my way from the subway to Olivia’s house in Brooklyn. The West Village was still on lock down.

I didn’t answer the man behind me, just put my head down and walked as fast as I could to the corner.

We heard the next day, in the media bunker we set up in the bedroom, that a shop keeper up the road in Carroll Gardens had been killed that night, his shop burned to the ground.

We slept together in that room, marae styles, for three days and when we got back home the white dust had covered everything.

Part 3
As I wiped the window sill she came to me, and I wondered later if it was because some of her DNA was on my cloth.

She had been vaporised, she told me, one minute pouring her coffee in the cafeteria, the next turned into white dust.

“There was no transition,” she said, “no time to make the connection between life and death. That’s why there are so many of us trapped here.”

“Trapped where?” I asked, but I knew what she meant, Manhattan was a ghost town.

“I can’t accept it,” she said, “And I have two little girls.”

The dead had their struggles but so did the living. And I was shocked when your friends had no context in which to put this.

“Why do they hate us so much?” they asked

And as you explained I felt so lucky to be a visitor.

“This is just the start,” you said a week later as we looked at the still smoking hole from the Brooklyn Heights walkway.

“It’s a hard rain,” I said.

“I’ll miss you,” you said.

Paddy

Where did you go my friend?

Where are those eyes?

Tell me what they see

The way you left us was unkind

All alone in a place far from home

Dinner cooking

As you were led

Too swiftly

Out the door

Where did they take you?

And did they answer your questions?

It was a family earthquake

9.2

Seismic shift

No negotiation

No room for other options

Gone

You and all you are

Gone

The past tense will never suit you

You left us

Spilling our grief and shock

Into the finality of unvarnished wood

I held onto your feet

Worshipped there for the last time

Looked at your shoes

Well worn

Humble

Your feet told me your stories

Until I understood

Soon silence and knowing crept in

And sat amongst us

The grieving

Their presence subtle

We felt them at the end of each sigh

Grace was mighty

In the presence of your cold body

And compassion was for once

Centre stage

We stayed for as long as we could

In that enchanted place

Between the worlds

And we communicated in a higher way

From a higher place

Connected to where you had gone

To where you now lived

You promised we would walk that windy beach together

And we do

You promised to share what you have learned

To filter it

To whisper it

To translate it

Transcribe

Share

You answer my questions

Fill my heart

Walk with me

Here and gone.

8 Ways of Looking at a Gum Tree

1

"They call that a tree,"

The lamas say,

Mirth bubbling from their bellies

2

“Time to take it down,” he said

“It’s spoiling the view.

Has done for forty years.”

3

Silver fish dart

In rock pools

Sharp eyes watch from the branch

Joy will eventually deliver lunch

4

The Kermadec tsunami

uprooted the pathway

pipes exposed

Roots tasted salt

For the first time

5

Under silvery strips

We gather in a damp, fragrant world

Working in near darkness

We build and commune

6

“Look mumma,”

A chubby little hand

Holds a crushed silver leaf

To my nose,

“Its smells like a cold,” he says.

7

The old lady with the faded moko and the shorn head

Hands me an ancient photograph

“Can you see how small the tree is here?” she asked

“Before the confiscation.”

8

“Stop moving,” whispers the tree

As my arms circle its big man girth

“Stay in one place.

Rest.”