Exile on High Street

After Laura went I did precisely nothing for a few hours...it was wonderful! I had the windows wide open for the paint to dry without being smelly and it was quite cosy with a hoodie on and quilted throw over my legs listening to the squishy sounds of heavy rain falling on gardens. I bet the slugs were having a party!

I watched a programme about a Tibetan lama who lived in a glorified garden shed in Ruislip but who was on a mission to find some world scattered instructional texts on the practice of compassion. He was an enchanting character and the people who he lived with noted how the family pets adored him, whilst the commentator commentated on how despite the fact he was a revered figure in his own culture he was happy to be involved with the physical work of creating a Buddhist centre in a converted shop on the High Street. There were shots of him tiling in the kitchen. I felt a great affinity with the man, ha ha! I loved seeing people meditating...what ever I see on TV I seem to mimic in spirit so it's best if it's nice things!

I don't actually have a sofa in my living room but a high wooden single bed piled with cushions and backed with hangings that I most often sit on cross legged. This seems perfectly normal and comfortable to me but it gave me a jolt to see all the venerable personages he visited doing the same thing...it dawned on me properly for the first time that most people over here don't! The picture would have been almost complete when I had alopecia for a year...

I thought about Timmy. Timmy was a little boy who was best friends with a cousin of mine, Adam who was a few years younger than me. He was a perfectly normal little boy from Birmingham in all respects except that he meditated for twenty minutes morning and evening before he was even in double figures! And all he wanted to be when he grew up was a Buddhist monk...no kidding! And when he left school he went to a monastery and asked to join and they sent him away to get an education first (partly I think as a test) so he went away and got a degree and went back to the monastery and said can I join now please? And they said OK and he did and, as far as I know stayed there til this day. He stayed in occasional contact with Adam's mum Marie for a while and I did too and she showed me a letter from him explaining how he was going into retreat and wouldn't be able to write again. It had his monk name on it but I can't remember it now and I don't have any contact with any of my family now so there's no one to ask and I don't have enough information to find out anything via the internet (I tried). I'd love to see a picture of him in his robes.

After I wrote the first part of this I decided to look for Adam and I found a bit about him and loads of old family photos too on Flickr. Made me cry...but in a nice way. You know about me and crying in a nice way by now. I last saw Adam in an instant photo shop on the high street in Aberystwyth...but it seems he's gone up in the photography world. That's nice. There's a site with an email address on it and I wondered whether to send him a message. I know there's no point in asking anyone because everyone else comes from normal families and have no idea what it's like to be a black sheep outcast in mine. Hmmm...