Hanging with the Elephant (10 page)

Irish people don’t spend enough time dozing at the fire, gazing at the flickering flames in the stove or staring out the window at the birds on the peanut feeder. But I find that stillness grows in my body when I do these things and my mind becomes gentle. When nothing happens for the entire afternoon, it’s lovely to just feel you are there. To be aware that you are there. It’s what I used to be accused of doing in school. Back then it was called daydreaming. But today, as I pay attention to the flame in the stove, the flickering shadow, or the movement of a bird on a tree outside or the tiny shifting of the curtains with the wind I am not dreaming. I am awake in my lovely dozing. I feel like a baby in a cot with open eyes. I know I’m there. And I feel like an old man by the fire who knows that he has only a short while to live, and that the clock is ticking and each moment is precious.

‘What are you doing in here?’ the postman asked, one day he was obliged to come around to the studio behind the house with a parcel because he got no answer at the kitchen door.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I was just dozing.’

‘There’s no one in the house,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’

‘Is she away?’

‘She’s in Poland,’ I said.

‘And is she coming back?’ he wondered.

‘Hard to tell,’ I said. ‘The future is a mystery.’

‘That’s true,’ he agreed, as he stared out at the lake. ‘We can never tell what’s out there.’

I
REMEMBER WHEN I lived in west Cavan in the 1970s, I used to finish work as a teacher at about four or sometimes three in the afternoon. I would drive up the hills from Blacklion and turn onto a small laneway that led to a remote farmhouse, where lived three young women in their late teens and their mother and father. I figured out that the best way to find girlfriends in those years was to befriend their mothers. I’d pop in unexpectedly and offer to fetch messages because I had a car, and I’d chat with the mother about anything from the weather to the price of
lambs. When the girls arrived from work in the evening, I was already part of the family. In those days, courtship was a complex ritual in rural Ireland.

I would spend long afternoons sitting on the chair near to the range while the woman of the house mooched about preparing the evening meal. And then sometimes she’d sit down opposite me. We’d both be there on either side of the range, which would wheeze with heat. There was no Joe Duffy or talk shows or political debates on the radio to entertain us. Just the sound of rain. And when we had exhausted the possibilities of whether it might rain imminently or later in the evening or tomorrow morning or if, in fact, it was already raining, there wasn’t much else to say. So the sitting continued. And both of us drifted into a different space, a timeless and beautiful womb of silence and presence. Each of us warmed the other and when I was going later she’d say, ‘Thanks for calling,’ as if I had done her a great service. And I too felt refreshed but at twenty-two years of age, I had no way of expressing how I felt to a middle-aged woman who had reared five children. The only thing we knew about Buddhism or Asian philosophy in those days was that a German woman who lived in a small cottage farther up the hill would pass the door sometimes with a great sack of groceries on her back. She had no car and locals would whisper to each other that she was one of those Hare Krishnas who came from Fermanagh, though nobody quite knew what exactly that meant.

The first time I went to a meditation session in the Buddhist Centre in Cavan, we got instruction on how to practise single-pointed concentration. They said to sit with a straight back, in a lotus or half-lotus or Zen position, and pick a spot at the end of the nose and, rather than close your eyes, focus on this spot and breathe in and out. Let the breath come and go as it pleases. Don’t form it. Don’t control it. Don’t guide it. Allow the breath to come and go. As the thoughts come and go. And watch the breath. Watch the thoughts in the mind, rising and falling. But keep focused on the breath. In and out. With your eyes open and focused on some little spot at the end of your nose.

Of course, they meant a spot on the carpet in line with the end of the nose. I didn’t get that. I thought they meant a spot that was actually on the end of my nose. So I was trying this for weeks, and going cross-eyed until I began to develop headaches every time I tried to do it. I think that’s when I gave up on the formalities of Asian practice. At forty, my body was too unruly to be moulded into anything close to the thin whippet-like bodies of men and women in the group around me; men as supple as young ash plants and women as delicate as dithering ballerinas. I was out of my depth.

But over the years, I have definitely found a lot of spiritual consolation from sitting at the stove and doing nothing and it’s great after all these years to discover that I was actually meditating without realising it.

On this occasion, of course, it was going to be different. I was going to do it right. And so I began. Hoping that the walk had emptied my mind. Hoping to focus on my breath.

I took out a little meditation cushion. I lit a candle at the far end of the room. I found a small Buddha statue in a drawer and set him up on the table. I sat on the cushion and waited. Sadly, no great realisation or sense of enlightenment surfaced. In fact, I couldn’t keep my mind still for two consecutive seconds. The elephant was all over the place. For example, I started looking at the flame, but began thinking of a dinner party. I chastised myself.
I must discipline this elephant
, I told myself. But for some reason, I connected the image of an elephant with a badger. I know they’re not the same size but they do wobble in a similar fashion when they’re trotting.

And that led me to think about the real badger. He’s invisible to me because he only moves around at night. But when we came here twenty years ago, I found his track through the garden, like a human pathway. He came over the ditch and into our sloping field and down at a diagonal towards the road on the southside of the property. Back then, the place was a soft hill, curved and smooth, and beneath the grass there was a million tons of shale.

In time, Sean Quinn arrived, and he walked the land and pointed to where the sandstone ledge ended and where the shale had collected millions of years earlier, creating the
hill that our house now sat on. Sean desperately wanted that shale and before long he had secured a deal with farmers around us to dig out a quarry just on the edge of our property. The diggers came and dug for months, and then years, until the hill vanished, except the ledge our house was on, and, at the end of our garden, a cliff emerged, dropping sixty feet down into a pond below. It was a dramatic change to the landscape. We had bought a house on a hill and it became a house on the edge of a cliff. Instead of having a few ditches as a view, we had the entire length of Leitrim in our windows, and mountains stretching from the top of Lough Allen to the southern point near Drumshanbo.

But the badger wasn’t pleased. The warrens beneath the ground that had probably been there for decades or even centuries must have endured a terrible onslaught from the JCBs over the course of ten years. Then the recession came, and Sean Quinn was destroyed and the quarry closed and the gates rusted and heather grew around the pond below us as we looked down over the cliff.

When I’d come back from the walk, I’d gone down to the end of the garden to examine the ash tree. It used to flower every summer and then produce a glorious flush of red berries. But gradually it had become choked with ivy, and when new fences were being put down by the quarry people, the tree was in the way so they cut it to a stump. However, in the intervening years, the roots had sent out
new shoots and now a new daughter tree stood beautifully bare, beside the old stump and against the backdrop of the lake. I didn’t hug it, but I certainly curled the flat of my two hands around the bark of the young sapling and offered her a few words of encouragement. And that’s when I saw the badger track. The pathway had reappeared, exactly as it had been twenty years ago, a zigzag line through the long grass, the heather, the rushes and even through the fence. Mr Badger or his grandchildren now moved across the earth on the same lines as they had done for generations, long before the upheavals that had befallen them during the time of the boom and the diggers in Mr Quinn’s quarry.

It took a lot of effort to get the badgers out of my mind and to start focusing on my breath again, but the next thing that distracted me was the banjo, because I couldn’t ignore it in the corner of my eye. It had been lying neglected in its case beside the computer desk for months. I don’t play the banjo. But the musician in Mullingar who gave me the walking stick also gave me the banjo for my sixtieth birthday.

Perhaps I ought to have taken it up and played something. I could pluck out ‘Amazing Grace’ and the ‘Leitrim Jig’. I could play three chords – G, D and C – which I’d downloaded onto my iPhone the day after my birthday, so I wanted to quench the candle and pick up the instrument. I guessed that most people would find strumming a musical instrument far more soothing for the
mind than trying to focus on a spot at the end of their nose. My nose as it happened.

But I decided to persevere. I banished the banjo and began to focus once again on my breath. Breathing in and breathing out. I took a quick glance at the little plastic clock on the bookcase. I had begun at 11 a.m. and figured it might now be near midday, and I wanted to get a Scollan’s lunch before 1 p.m. because all the school students come then and create a bottleneck queue for lasagne. But the clock said it was only 11.10.

The reason why my guru once told me that the mind is like an elephant was to explain how very hard it is to discipline the mind. Even with strong ropes, it’s not very easy to keep an elephant still. It will go where it wants unless it is trained. But beginning again to think of the mind as an elephant was making me tense.
I can’t win here
, I told myself. If my mind was a horse, I wouldn’t be able to control it. An elephant is way beyond me. It’s ridiculous. Why bother at all?

I was now fighting myself. It’s a terrible twist that I get into sometimes when I’m trying to meditate. I’m sitting there as still as a statue of the Buddha but inside it’s mad. It’s a war zone of rage. I’m flitting through all the people I loathe. All the reasons I should loathe myself. It’s like a therapy group in my head but everyone has gone berserk and is talking at the same time. I end up more stressed out than when I first began. And though I was still sitting on
the cushion, my hands joined in my lap and my eyes to the ground, I was contorted in fury, and full of frustrated desires to scream or kick the cat or just shoot someone.

And maybe that’s why my mind eventually drifted to Afghanistan again. Or maybe it was because of the documentary that had surfaced in my BBC podcasts the previous day as I was driving home.

A soldier had been talking about his tour of Helmand province.

‘We were driving over a ridge,’ he’d said, ‘and we came under fire. There were Taliban trenches all around us, which the Taliban had left half an hour earlier, and now we were in them and they were firing at us.’

He’d said he liked techno music and that when he was preparing for a tour of duty he made playlists for his iPod. He used dance music for physical exercising and country and western music to put him to sleep at night when he was lying in some half-dug grave under the Afghan sky, but when he was in battle, he found techno music was by far the best soundtrack for killing. And he described what it was like on one occasion to be in battle, shooting away at other people.

‘They started shelling us with rockets,’ he’d said. ‘We were fighting them non-stop for forty-eight hours. And in those situations, if you get something wrong, you’re going to die. And as you’re picking your target, and as you squeeze the trigger and watch the target fall, you must be
focused. And when you see the target fall down, you flick a map to give grid references to the guy on top even though the bullets are still flying over your head. But there is no fear because you are busy and focused. The fear only rises when someone shouts “Stores!” and you know that the aircraft who got your co-ordinates has just dropped its load and it’s on its way down and you feel sickly for a moment because if you got it wrong, it will land on you. And then it detonates. Your heart leaps. And you’re back up firing again. And of course you’re fully focused.’

‘Now that,’ I’d said to myself, ‘is what I call a man.’ And I’d been impressed by how much music meant to him. I could just imagine them all with their iPods and mp3 players banging away intensely and finding more focused concentration in those moments than I would ever find in twenty years of looking at a spot at the end of my nose.

Earphones gave him the illusion of privacy when he needed to relieve himself sexually in the middle of battle, he’d explained – but I didn’t quite understand what he meant.

‘And just as in sex, when the killing stopped, the elation was intense,’ he’d said. ‘A euphoric release. But empty.’

That’s what he’d said. The man was having some kind of mental orgasm as he killed other people. And he was euphoric about it. And then empty. You just can’t beat the BBC.

‘I had a metallic taste in the mouth like after adrenaline,’

he’d said, ‘but empty.’ And he’d grown accustomed to it. And he’d needed more each time. More risk. It’s what turns men into boys. I could just imagine a squad of them with headphones and sexy battle fatigues, like warrior princes going off to slaughter, and them creating playlists for the action on their little iPods.

‘And when you’re fighting,’ he’d said, ‘when you’re scrapping all the time during an engagement, when it has become just an old-fashioned shooting match, it’s just like trying to get through a crowd to get water at the bar during a dance. So there’s a bias towards dance music. I mean it makes sense.’

Right. Of course. Techno music, for the war on terror. You learn something new every day.

‘Bullets flying and the sound of RPGs is music in itself,’ he’d declared. ‘Sometimes I would put on my cans and listen to Josh Wink as all hell was breaking loose. Oh, yes, definitely,’ he’d concluded, ‘it focuses the mind.’