Maps to Arrive With

 Posted by at 8:17 am  Anti-Gravity Surgery, Exodus, ON the STREET  Comments Off
Feb 202013
 
tripe stew131

What do we mean, spiritual?  Our attention is constantly caught by the flow of the yellow brown waters rushing past our tiny WordStall encampment, and we are strangely mesmerised as we watch the surface patterns of swirling froth and bubbles. With the same apparently effortless ease I find my mind able, while morning shopping for an hour today on my local High Street, to move between a consideration of the efficiencies  of capitalist political economy as I draw some notes from the cash machine, the practical concerns of my body as a pull a scrumpled piece of paper from out of my pocket and try to read the shopping list I came into town with, and simultaneously consumed  with feelings and thoughts and the presence of others as I roam the streets.

As I walk the pedestrianised street I recognise am old man I used to sing in a local community choir with for a couple of years. We used to sit together and he would sometimes tell me of his cancer and how he is managing since the death of his wife. He is standing in conversations some other town’s people who I don’t know, and I move along. The Pope resigns.  Infirmity. He begins to fail. Soon, like all living persons, he will be consumed by death.  The end of life.

And what do we mean, spiritual? Do we still mean, we come in with nothing and we go out with nothing – as the Bible wisdom saying of Jesus has it – Terra Nulla, unmapped? Or do we come in and go out encrusted with physical, moral and inicipient environmental formations in our bones and sinews; mapped out in a strange kind of way for life at its beginning, middle and end – as in the Kamma teaching of the Buddha? The prescripted map I have a sense of is neither nothing nor everything. It is more a kind of meshwork reminiscent of the maps of pre-modernity, lands surrounded by oceans in which whales and magical sea monsters swim, and filled with places of habitation and wilderness, locations known and unknown (Terra Incognita – one of whose components also being these turbid waters rushing by Wordstall here).

I wish the old Pope many happy moments and hours of anonymity as he is out and about on the streets of his home town when he returns there, and that even if I were to be there myself too walking one day and recognise him I would not feel obliged to go up and talk with him and interrupt his composure.