Retreat Diary Tues 29/8

Come this morning, I really don't want to drive up the M1 to a remote village, Unstone, just short of Sheffield, for a Zen Buddhist retreat. How much nicer it would be to stay in Kew and wander around the Gardens each day, having a cup of tea here, a lounge about under a rhododendron bush there, and watch while Arthur chases butterflies, pigeons and Canada geese. But it's a work job so I have to go. 'Bring ancestor photos for the ancestor shrine,' says the list. 'Bring a poem for the tree-planting ceremony.' I retrieve a photo my father has just given me of his late father, Prof Alan Gledhill. He is bewigged and lined up with two dozen other judges from the Burmese judiciary, shortly before independence. I still have a solid brass Buddha that he brought back from Burma when he returned, via the Indian judiciary, to become a professor of Indian law at Soas. (Picture of lotus flower from public domain site.)

  My grandfather would have been amused at the thought of me on a Buddhist retreat. I dig out another that I think is of my great-great-aunt Eleanor Rathbone as a child. My mother has just given me an old box of Eleanor's and it was tucked away in the bottom of that.  The poem I take is one written by my husband Alan. His daughter Amy read it at our recent wedding.

A blissfully uneventful drive when Arthur is kept occupied by Shark Tales on the in-car DVD brings us to the warmth and faded gentility of Unstone Grange where dinner is about to be served. There are appear to be about two dozen of us, 12 children and 12 adults, including an exotic teenager, Tara. The retreat is being organised by the UK arm of the Community of Interbeing set up by Nobel peace prize nominee and Vietnamese Buddhist Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, known as Thay. Our retreat leader is Murray Corke, veterinary surgeon who lectures at Cambridge University and a UK dharma teacher who received the 14 mindfulness trainings in 1994.

We sit down to the first of the week's vegan meals, baked potato and apple crumble. Or most of us do.

A bell sounds, and everyone is silent. Except Arthur. And another child. They are outside the dining room, throwing themselves up and down the stairs and emitting fearful shrieks and shouts of delight. Is the whole retreat intended to be silent, I wonder? The beginnings of panic set in. This is not going to work. Arthur reappears, with tiny drops of blood around a nasty new graze on his back and livid bruises on his shins. He is grinning madly, delighted with his war wounds. I establish where the naughty step is, put him firmly on it and spend dinner running in and out, feeding him spoonfuls of baked potato. Luckily he is hungry so most of it goes in his mouth.

Another bell sounds and, thank heavens, people start talking. I pluck Arthur from the naughty step, run to our bedroom and telephone Alan on my mobile. 'I've lost control of Arthur,' I say. 'I want to come home.' He tells me I cannot write an honest article for Body and Soul if I leave after one hour, and must try and stick it out for a bit longer. I long for normal work, for the meditative peace of The Times office in Wapping, for the school term to start. One aim of the retreat was to calm Arthur down and help him prepare for school. If the first hour is any guide, it looks as though it is going to have the opposite effect.

The adults head off for meditation but I accept I will be doing the children's programme with Arthur, at least for the time being. Single mum Hannah, with Theo, also aged 4 and also wide-eyed with glee at the prospect of this huge house and garden to run around in, is in the same situation. She tells me of the last family retreat two years ago, when there was a whole bunch of two-year-olds. Whenever the bell for silence went, the toddlers chorused: 'Boing! Boing! Boing!' I laugh for the first time. Not surprisingly, there is no wireless network in the Grange and in any case I do not feel like using my laptop. I decide to keep a written diary in my writer's notebook, acquired for my OU creative writing course, and to transcribe it all onto Typepad when I get back into the office.

An enigmatic woman, Teri West, has come up from the West Country Sangha in Devon to lead the childen's session, assisted by Colin from the London sangha. She is a professional story teller and lives with Brian Davison, former drummer with The Nice, the band that preceded Emerson Lake & Palmer. Having actually got us sitting quietly cross-legged in a circle, her first lesson is on how to 'invite' the bell. A bell is not boinged, or sounded, or struck, it is invited. First, says Teri, you place the bell on the flat palm of your hand, then 'wake it up' with a touch with the 'inviter'. Then you invite it by a gentle strike on the side, and listen in silence to the sound to the end. The children, including Arthur, are entranced. (Soon, he is being asked to invite the bell himself. I am never asked.) Two wonderfully funny games follow, to help us all learn each other's names. One involves asking the group to say your own name in the form of particular animal or character. I say 'dog' for mine, and everyone sits there going 'woof, woof'. Arthur asks everyone to say his name in the style of the green Power Ranger.

After that we meet Dale and Ben, the resident Buddhists in Unstone Grange, who talk to us about the dangers as well as the beauty and purity of fire. Unstone is full of creaky, lovely old wood, full of children and full of matches for the oven and hearths.

At last it is bed. The last thing Arthur says before falling asleep is, 'What is that on the window Mummy?' It is a feathered dream catcher. It takes me a few minutes to drop off. I miss the hum of the planes over Kew.

A meditation by Murray Corke on the First Mindfulness Training

'Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I am committed to cultivating compassion and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to condone any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, and in my way of life.'

'For me, this training is part of my every day working life. I am a veterinary surgeon. One of my roles is to deal with sick and injured animals and sometimes distressed or distraught owners. Learning to manage that situation in a mindful way is very much part of my practice. I also have to accept that part of my job at times is to put animals to sleep, to kill them.

'My partner Jane is also a veterinary surgeon. She asked Thay about this. She did not think she could receive the five mindfulness trainings because she could not keep this one. Thay said he felt it was very good for the veterinary profession to have people in it practising mindfulness and bringing mindfulness to this practice of helping animals and also at times allowing them to die or even helping to kill them. When the training says 'do not kill', it is alerting us to the fact that this is dangerous territory. It is not an absolute prohibition. It is saying, we must be careful.

'You have to be aware of the effect it has on you. It does have an effect. I have put a lot of animals to sleep. It really does have a profound effect on your state of mind. Anyone who has worked in a slaughter house will have seen the effect on those who do the slaughtering. It is a dehumanising efffect. With animals, you have to try and be as mindful about the situation as you can. I have to consider the needs of the owner, the animal and of myself. Sometimes, the animal is really ill and if you cannot relieve the suffering, helping the animal to die is the kindest thing you can do. Or it may be that the owner is not able to cope with the fact that the animal has a disease. The disease may not bother the animal but it is the owner that cannot cope and asks me to put the animal to sleep. In that situation, you have either to help the owner or find another home for the animal. [RCVS guidance is that no owner can be turned away, even if they want a totally health animal put down. The rational is that a desperate owner might take matters into their own hands, resulting in an even worse death for their pet. But the result can be distressing for vets, who are vocationally animal lovers. The profession has the highest suicide rate of any, even higher than that of farmers. Having crossed the line with being forced to kill so many animals, it becomes all too easy for these highly intelligent men and women, drawn from the cream of each year's A level students, to turn the gun on themselves.]

'Most vets have at least one sick dog in their household. That is one way of dealing with it. Currently I do not have one, but it has happened. As a vet I have to consider the owner as well as the animal. I am not allowed to turn the owner away. I also have to consider my needs. After abdominal surgery on a horse with colic, many hours of nursing can be needed. It can be easy, after nights without sleep, to lose sight of what is important. When you do have to put an animal down, you have to do it in as kind and loving a way as you can. It means working slowly and quietly and in a way that reassures both the animal and the owner. It is a really strong practice of mindfulness. And if it stops being a painful situation, you should not be doing it. The most helpful thing I have found is what a friend said to me: to consider, in any situation, what is the most loving thing to do. It includes not just this mindfulness training, but all the others as well.

'I also want to say something about vegetarianism. I have been vegetarian for 24 years now. But I used to do a lot of farm work. If a vet comes out at lunch or dinner time, it is a tradition to invite them to eat with the family. These meals always contain a lot of meat. Most farmers find vegetarians very threatening. Buddha taught his monks that if anything was put in your bowl as an act of generosity, you must accept it. He did say you should not allow an animal to be killed for you to eat. Taking that as my precedent, if someone presented me with a meal I would eat it without question. I found I still liked the taste of meat but I had no desire to repeat the experience.'

Comments

[John Nash]

Not so much a response as a genuine question. How does one reconcile Buddhist belief with, for example, understanding many indigenous people who kill animals in truly horrible ways in order to survive, yet who have the highest regard possible for the creatures they kill?
I am neither veggie nor pacifist and am not intimidated by either (it would be illogical to feel threatened by a pacifist), but I do wonder how such difficult matters are handled by those that are.

[Murray Corke]

Dear Ruth,
I much appreciated your openess and willingness to engage with new ideas and ways of practising on the retreat. It was great to see Arthur relax and enjoy himself too. The weblog reads well, 2 minor points:
1.The Times donation was 'dana' not 'dan'.
2.Dale and Ben may or may not be Buddhists, I dont know, Unstone is eclectic in outlook.
A lotus for you, Murray

[Teri West]

Dear Ruth,

I am glad that you enjoyed our first children's circle, and regret my lack of mindfulness - if parents are in the children's first circle on our retreats, they too, should be invited to invite the bell!