Sara's # 4 Note on Australia

words from Sara . Posted for those of you not on facebook:
If you are the types of readers who like to have a placement for your author, then picture me here: I have currently secured a seat for myself in the direct middle of a free Wollongong city bus. I am sitting in the section with the slightly shaded windows – still bright enough to let me watch the man in the suit coat rushing to meet us at the next stop, or the bicyclist in spandex uniform bike by with his jaw set tight beneath a mask of determination, or the pink-clad Asian girl with her face turned up to the sun hopping up and down at her patient mothers side – but still dim enough so that I can see my laptop screen below the glare. I have come from a cool morning walk, lungs scrubbed enliveningly raw by the salty air, through the mall, where my bones imperceptibly danced beneath my skin to the collective strums of all the young street musicians’ guitars. There is a man there who seems to have befriended all of them. I see him every time I go to the mall. He wears the same clothes and rough leather jacket every day, but they are always clean and he is always clean-shaven. He pollinates the musicians, traveling from one to the next requesting the same songs over and over again in exchange for coins that he may or may not have in his jacket pocket. They amuse him, and amuse themselves, trying to pick out tunes and remember words that they never bothered to memorize.

I look back on the past week and I’m not sure what I want to write about. There’s always an overwhelming expanse of words between me and yesterday, much less last Saturday, but I will do my best to harvest only the quality among them, and leave the rest for fictional gleaning. I should start with last Saturday and work my way up to this one, but there are parts of last Saturday that I would rather not record. I should not say “would rather not record,” but should say, “would rather not attempt to record,” as there is a great difference between the two phrases. We spent last Saturday at the Nan Tien Humanistic Buddhist temple just North of Wollongong. My family and I were there for a day retreat, which my father organized for us, and which we were fortunate to get into, as the retreat had initially been booked full. If you have been keeping up with my previous notes, then you already have the setting in your mind: crimson temple halls with golden, honeycombed walls full of small golden Buddhas, each lit by its own light, and shimmering with candles. The heavy smoke of incense circling the immense iron doors. Shoes neatly set or eagerly tossed into heaps by the door. The devout and the curious alike on bended knees, with flower, light, or fruit offerings laid before the five enormous Buddhas on the temple platform. Most of me would just like to leave you with the descriptions, themselves, and keep the day to myself. There are some memories that are too perfect to be remembered. I worry now, on the breach of description, that my very attempts at journaling through our retreat will somehow obliterate the completeness of it. Still, words are the best ways of remembering, and if I don’t at least try, then the whole day will be lost as I have allowed it to be: completely. Time burns through our memories like fire through a house, and this is my attempt to rush against the flames to grab what few things are precious and near to me. If I do not capture at least this much – then all of my thoughts and things should be lost together.

We woke up with the sunrise to catch an early bus to the temple. We arrived half an hour before the gates were scheduled to be open, at 8:30 a.m., but we were not alone. With us was a wiry middle-aged woman with purple-brown hair, a fur-lined winter jacket, and sweatpants. She had already called the office before our arrival, and after a few minutes standing below the towering iron grating, the gates yawned open and we found ourselves wandering through the meditation paths toward the reception area. The reception attendant served us tea and we all waited in quietude for the rest of our retreat members to gather. There was something about the reception room itself that commanded silence. Not commanded, so much, as invited. No words were spoken as person after person drifted in , collecting nametags and accepting glasses of tea. We were an unusual group, from all corners of Australia and beyond. There were three beautiful Indian women in brown wraps of a material light and delicate as paper, and several wide American women in two-piece matching purple track suits making sarcastic faces at one another over teacups that were too small for their hands. The rest of us were mixed in all shapes and sizes, mostly Australian, and hung with mismatched but comfortable clothing. When our leader, the Venerable Mai, entered, we collectively leaning out of our chairs with an eager anticipation. A compact, Chinese woman with a shaved head and layers of Autumnal nun’s robes, she greeted us with a sagacious smile that she would wear for the rest of the day. With a brief welcome and an outline of our day, she encouraged us to maintain what we had already instinctually begun: a noble silence. Throughout the rest of the retreat and the day, we were encouraged not to speak. This silence, she explained, would help us to face ourselves and find the centering that we had come to seek.

(To interrupt my narrative and share a slight delight from my bus route, which is on its second loop around Wollongong: we are over the ocean now and the sea is speckled with determined surfers paddling against waves that are six times larger than themselves. A man at the street corner has lifted his toddler by the underarms and they are spinning together. The child’s smile outshines the sun, and is matched in joy only by the same smile on the face of his father.)

From the reception area, the Venerable Mai led us to a meditation center, where we were led in several basic meditation exercises, and encouraged to consider our own mortality as a necessary part of the greater cosmic workings. She explained an idea that I had heard previously from my father, that the wave can only be at peace with its swells and falls, when it realizes that it is part of the ocean.

After meditation, we were released for another morning tea, and after the morning tea, we gathered in the central courtyard at the base of the temple for a lesson in Tai Chi. Each of us stood at the seam s of two tile squares and flowed or stumbled through the movements demonstrated for us by a Tai Chi master who stood on the first landing of the temple steps.

From Tai Chi, we gathered again for more instruction and explanations about Humanistic Buddhism. The Venerable Mai’s words are strangely the hardest for me to remember, not because I have forgotten them, but because I have remembered, more, the feeling of them. I know the lessons I have learned, because they are part of me now. Her instructions on mindfulness, generosity, and living in the present moment have impacted me deeply in a way that I daresay I cannot begin to replicate through two-dimensional memories on paper. All I can encourage you to do is to do some of your own research and learning around Humanistic Buddhism, and hope that you, too, are impacted as deeply as I have been. I liked especially what she said about Buddhism as a mindset and matter of principle. Because it is so centered around action and living, it is a lifestyle and not a religion. It is just as easy for one to be a Christian Buddhist, or Jewish Buddhist, etc. as long as one is willing to live by the very practices that many of the mystic versions of Western religion already advocate: selflessness, awareness, compassion (SUPREMELY MOST COMPASSION), generosity, patience, and loving kindness. I suppose I can give the same example that she did of loving kindness, as opposed to kindness. Say you have two dogs – one is soft and fluffy and cuddly, and one is mangy and bad-mannered and has fleas. Kindness is picking up the soft, cute dog and petting it and giving it treats and being nice to it, but giving the ugly dog to the pound. Loving kindness is picking both dogs up and petting them and giving them both treats and loving them equally. Not because of any personal gain that could be accomplished, but simply because both of them exist. Loving indiscriminately, and being kind without consideration of the self. She said to give – give wholeheartedly and fearlessly, even if you were being taken advantage of , because what do we have to lose? Things are only things, and people are what matter. By being an example of love and wisdom, you are doing more good than by denying a request out of self-concern or fear. Ultimately, the other person is only hurting him or herself by clinging to the material needs and wants of a world that is fundamentally impermanent. We can’t take it with us. She said that death is just the exchange of old, used bodies for new bodies, for our bodies to continue our spiritual journeys along until we enter the path toward enlightenment. She said that sometimes when we keep encountering certain personality types that we can’t get along with, it is our soul’s way of encouraging us to make things right with these types of people. Our enemies, she said, are our greatest gifts, because they allow us to see the weaknesses of ourselves. “What is the sound of one hand clapping? There is no sound. We all know there is no sound. In the same way, we cannot have a clash or an argument without some wrongness on both sides. Our enemies can teach us what we are doing wrong.” The quote I liked the most was this: “There are two things that you must not worry about. First, do not worry about the things you cannot change, because if you cannot change them, then you are wasting energy thinking about them. Second, do not worry about the things you can change, because if you can change them, then all you need to do is take action!”

The rest of the day was spent upon a beautiful lunch, temple tour, and second session of meditation. We focused on mindful walking and mindful eating. To walk mindfully, we had to walk very, very slowly, being aware of every muscle as it moved, and every toe as it pressed full pressure against the cool wood floor. The same principles of attention and slowness applied to our eating, when we were encouraged to chew each bite of food twenty times. Such mindfulness helps us to take deeper joy out of life, and not to be so caught up in distant thoughts and worries. To reconnect with our bodies. I thought this idea of reconnecting with the body through awareness of walking and eating was especially applicable to our American mindsets, where food is often eaten on the go and walking is disregarded as a basic and slow function of motion. That is a quote that my dad often uses, too, about the distinction of monks in their awareness. “When a journalist asked a monk what the monks did at the monastery, the monk smiled and responded ‘we walk, we eat, and we sleep.’ ‘What is so different about that?’ asked the journalist. ‘Ah,’ the monk responded, ‘but when we walk, we know that we are walking; when we eat, we know that we are eating; and when we sleep, we know that we are sleeping.’”

Our day ended at 4:30 p.m., when two nuns struck the closing drum and bell, each 108 times, as the sun set slow behind the mountains. We waited for half an hour at the bus stop back, where I met a small, match-stick-thin woman with one front tooth and a thick tuft of black hair that disguised her age. She had also spent the day at the temple. She had taken the bus all the way from her hometown, all by herself, for the first time, to visit the pagodas and talk with the nuns. When we weren’t talking about her own adventures in New Zealand (getting traveling advice for the second half of our trip), she was reading information on taking Buddhist vows, and reverently smoothing the petals of a flower offering she had purchased earlier that afternoon.

(For those of you, again, who love author placement, I am off the bus now and attempting to access the internet from a busy McDonalds at the mall. There is a man sharing the table with me who will not make eye contact, and flocks of long-haired girls dressed in the latest fashions float by on clouds of perfumes. Malls, unfortunately, tend to remind me of all I like least about our species. Loud men my age race by, cussing and shoving one another in the wide hallways. Twenty different songs play from each of the surrounding stores. Wrappers and dirt clutter the wildly tiled floor. I will not stay here for long.)

The next morning we woke up early, again. This time, before the sunrise. It was Nick’s birthday, so Mom and Dad surprised him with breakfast in bed. We didn’t have long to lounge, though, because we had to catch a taxi at six in order to make our bus at six thirty. Nick and Mom slept through a good portion of the bus ride, but Dad and I couldn’t help but stay awake. We moved through each level of the mountains like we were moving through the evolution of centuries. First, the rugged seaside coasts, then shrinking local villages surrounded by fields full of fluffy white sheep, standing in groups with their back legs crossed like proper English ladies. Then the lurking forests with ageless, stooping trees – the thick peat of the Earth packed deep with stones. The grave-markers where the ferns come to bury their dead. The mountains climbed and the temperature dropped, until at last we were in the Australian highlands. We caught our train at a small town called Moss Vale, where all of the centuries we had passed were laid out before us, and we were welcome at every angle to take deep gulps of each, the fields, the forest, and sea.

The train ride was full of the previous – rocky, rolling fields with trees that had died with their roots in the ground and rotted where they stood. Sheep and cattle covered what the grass didn’t, and not a human soul was seen for four hours of our trip, before we started making stops at all of the small towns with stone churches and crumbling tin-roofed houses. There was a lively little boy in the seat ahead of me, who couldn’t speak much, but certainly had a lot of faces that he could make. When his mother wasn’t looking, we made faces at one another over the seat, and he laughed a lot. As mothers often do – I knew she had a sense of what we were up to, and soon we were having a friendly chat over the antics of her sweet little Alfred.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon by the time we finally arrived in the small city of Albury. Albury has a population of about 100,000 people, and, like Wollongong, is primarily constructed of local restaurants and small specialty shops. I’ll lump most of our week there into a single paragraph, as much of our time was spent in leisurely strolls, long lunches, and trivial shopping. We ended our day of travel with dinner at an Italian restaurant, giving Nick his gifts and topping the evening off with ice cream bars. Mom enjoyed her conference during the week, and Nick and I bought hats from a local surplus store. Nick also found a jacket at the Vinnies used clothing store, and Dad and Nick bought book satchels. We visited the Botanical gardens in that area, enjoyed the local library museum, and had a very… interesting tour of the local art gallery by a elderly gentleman who had an overwhelming affinity for trick rhetorical questions. “All right now. How is the color match on this? Does anyone think this is a bad color match? Who thinks it is a good color match? Well, right, it is an almost perfect color match…” and “All right now. Where does this line lead your eye? And where is the brightest color part of the painting? Now: is this a dress? Take your time. Get the angle. Hint. Look at the top. Is it a dress? Right. It IS a dress.” He didn’t seem to know much about the exact details of the art pieces, but as a volunteer tour guide, he had a lot of opinions to share, and invited us, often, to agree with him. It rained most of the time we were there, which was apparently a miracle to the people of Albury, who haven’t seen rain in years. The area has been plagued by such a terrible drought, that there are children in that town who have lived their whole lives without ever seeing rain.

The three most interesting characters we met from Albury were the two breakfast hosts and a lively, bearded man from Mom’s conference. The breakfast hosts were interesting because of their opposite natures. Both were slightly over middle-aged, but that was their only similarity. The woman was a petite, wiry creature with bright red hair and a constant, ecstatic grin. She moved like a bird, constantly cleaning dishes, refilling trays, and chatting energetically with anyone who would talk to her. She referred to us all as, “Love, Dove, Darling, or Pet” and made the morning an event to look forward to. Her coworker, however, was a large, swarthy fellow with deep bags sculpted into his face under his eyes. He moved slowly, seldom spoke, and carried with him an ominous heir of doom.

The other character was a quirky old professor named John, who was from Redford, England. Mom had apparently met him earlier at her conference, but the rest of us met him while on a tour of the Charles Sturt eco College. The college in of itself merits some words: it is entirely self-sustained, recycling all of its own water to sustain local wetlands. They plant over 3,000 new trees every year and are reintroducing animal species that have been lost to the area. All of the toilets are composting, and all of the building materials are environment friendly. The heating and cooling systems are tempered by insulation, wax, and water pumped by energy gained through windmills or solar panels. The walls are made of a local red clay, and the buildings all looked strangely like the old adobe constructs of the American South West.

I met John on the bus. He latched onto me as a good target for his light bulb jokes. My favorite was, “How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Fish.” He was a curious little man, with a very well kept triangular white beard that he occasionally tugged on. He told me of his adventures traveling to Poland, Iceland, Turkey, China, Japan, and living in Africa. He described himself as a “Philosopher of Geology,” and proudly went on to share all the details of his line of work, and how his son had taken after him. I am a fan of a good character, and that he was. It seems that John uses his light bulb jokes as a sort of introduction, as, after having a bottle of wine at my mother’s dinner table that evening at a conference event, he went through the entire sequence all over again.

After enjoying our vacation from our vacation (I finished editing my novel and read two books, Dad read several books, and Mom read… basically, we all read). We caught a midnight express train back to Wollongong yesterday. Needless to say, we all slept through the trip, after a slight altercation over who was to sit where (it seems a woman from Sydney had fallen asleep spread out over our row of seats. But the seat manager rearranged things so that she could continue to rest peacefully, and so could the rest of us). We had to wait for our rooms to open back up at the YHA, so we had breakfast at a fantastic little restaurant called “The Green Frog Café.” They thought we were an odd crew, coming in with full suitcases for breakfast, but after a few jokes and some get-to-know-you conversation, we each ended up with a plate of delicious toast, smoothies, and coffee. I had something called Scottish Barley Toast with butter, for which I will have to track down a recipe. Nick, Dad, and I went back there for lunch yesterday. They remembered us, and we had a good time telling them about our adventures and assure them that we had found a place to stay, after all.

We didn’t do much with our day back. Or yesterday. Nor have we done much today. We poked around at a few used clothing stores, and I discovered a new walking track that trailed around my favorite place in Wollongong: the shore. Last night we ate dinner at Wollongong’s only Mexican restaurant, It’s been very quiet, slow, and relaxing. I’ve caught up on my journaling, and Mom and Dad are rested again from all of our traveling. Nick has struck up a few sewing projects. Having explored most of Wollongong, I think we’re going to start doing more day trips up to Sydney. Dad, Nick, and I are considering going skydiving on the beach. They’ve got a popular operation here, and the cost is reasonable, so I’ll have to keep you updated on that.

Now, I think I’ve written enough. Whether you have read my entire update or not, I thank you for your attentions and wish you the best. I apologize for any typos, but I only have a little bit of internet access here at the mall, and I am rather eager to leave this place. Love to all, hope summer is treating you well! More later…

---- Sara Ann