sāmaṇera

I love the way ants greet each other.

Each morning, after walking meditation, when the sun is sluicing the treetops, sending shards of soft winnowed light through the forest mist, on the forest floor, I see small highways moving between the blushed, ochre rocks.

Kneeling down, I watch them.

The ants are moving in undulating, serpentine lines, stretching vast distances across the rolling land. Some are leaving the nest, foraging for food, others returning with bounty; gifts for the Queen.

The ants pass by each other on their journey. Every time an ant passes by another, there is a brief pause. They touch faces, before they break and move along, repeating the connection with the next brother or sister they meet. This happens almost every time they encounter one another, the only exception being if an ant carrying a morsel collected from the forest; sometimes the wing of a cicada, sometimes a rolled lump of tree sap, is given a respectful breadth in their struggle to gift that to the nest. Every ant is recognised. Every ant is seen by the other. We have much to learn from the animals.

I leave this absorption, and rise, heading back to my hut. I’ve been walking meditation since the darkened time before dawn, and my eyes glance over the corner of my brick kuti to see where the shadow is cast on my walking path, using the angle of the shadow as a sun-dial, so I may see when it’s time to walk to the sāla for morning duties. Time is light.

It’s not yet light, and so before collecting my bag, work robe, and bowl, I sit meditation, breathing. I can feel the body opened and clear from the walking, my mind centred on the river of sensations flowing through it. I feel awake this morning.

I listen to the waking birds, yawning in the canopy, and then the brawl of red-tailed cockatoos, their drunken ramble like brothers in arms, singing from the return of a night on the town, stumbling home in the small hours, shattering the forest.

Eventually I rise, and walk to the sāla, where the monks gather to eat and plan the morning work to be done. On the way I glimpse monks, brown bundled monks, stumbling or gliding from the forest.

At the sāla the clinking of spoons stirring creamy-white condensed milk into black tea, and a scoop of porridge for each and today there are steamed pears, I can’t remember the last time I ate them, what a treat, and we rise, filing the stairs to the top landing to find out seat, seated in line, and Ajahn at the head of it.

Before eating, I place my bowl and bag to one side of my cushion, and the tea and porridge to the other, next to the garishly coloured spittoons imported from Thailand that are used for waste. I arrange my upper robe, and kneel, hands pressed together in añjali. I focus my mind towards the statue of the Buddha in the corner of the landing, and the relics encased in glass; hair and bones collected from awakened practitioners. The Buddha is framed in flowers, and the flowers catch the morning light, the harsh light of Perth, which burns, and penetrates my mind with radiance and colour.

I kneel, and project my mind out the Buddha to touch it, and with mind touched, I give thanks. I bow three times, one each for the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha - the Awakened Beings, the Teaching, and the Community that practice to embody the teachings, and realise awakening.

Then, I eat.

The mind moves a lot in these moments of eating. I’ve always been slim, and my last meal, my only meal for the day, was at eleven in the morning, yesterday. Winter is receding in Serpentine, yet the mornings are still cold. I can feel my body eating itself and lurching towards my cup of porridge, and the mind falters, wanting. I enjoy the porridge, but I remind myself to stay with the textures in my mouth as I eat, and the sensation of the lumped portion sliding down my throat. Careful not to let the mind wander, as the mind loses interest after the first bite when the flavours dull, I tell myself, in my mind. I watch my hand move towards another scoop before I’ve finished the first, and observe the small lesson in getting ahead of myself. One thing at a time. Everything is teaching me.

The mind wanders, though, like a punk in my former life, hopping trains like a hobo.
I’ve been here two years and I’m constantly humbled by that, its ability to slide away from what I’m doing presently, and into imaginings.

On my way to the sāla, I’d heard the girl.

She was walking the stone steps down towards the sāla as I came from the forest and entered the main area next to the meditation hall, and I heard her small steps on the stone and I knew those steps, the gait of the step, stepping down the stones. I was careful not to look, but my mind traced her anyway in an imagining.

I didn’t come here for this, yet it seemed to be following me, and I felt it was my biggest teacher. I feel my body flush in heat, and the clink of my fellow monk’s spoon in his cup next to me snaps me back. I glance up. Ajahn is smiling at me from across the sāla.

The monks have finished their porridge now, and after wash, we’re on the landing, sitting together. Most monks are silent, eyes closed, being with their body. Moggallāna isn’t though.
His slight, crooked frame is bent over young Khattiya, who is scribbling notes in his notebook, arranging work for the day. He is waving a finger down at the young man, requesting he must sweep the monastery paths this morning, as he does almost every morning. Khattiya is organising duties for thirty other monks, and sweeping the grounds isn’t a high priority, but he smiles, looking up at the old man.
“OK,” he says, “OK,” nodding softly.
Moggallāna seems pleased with this. He shuffles towards his seat, beaming, tripping on his robe.

After Khattiya assigns duties, Anuruddha, Khema, and I, the Australian monks, head towards the southern edge of the forest to collect wood to burn, as we’ve been assigned to do. We file down to the ablution block, Anuruddha a few steps ahead, and he was having a hard time of late, I could tell. His knuckles were bloodied on one hand, and I wondered whether he’d done it himself.

The forest is cool. The morning mist has burnt away, and the air is bright, and clear. Sunlight catches the failing dew and the tips of spinifex bushes shine, their pointed shards shifting in a moving glimmer as we walk, bundling fallen wood.

Khema is slow. Always slow. I’ve never seen a man so slow. He gathers pieces of wood with meticulous scrutiny, every branch his own private act of worship. The things around him seem pulled into his centrifugal motion, as if he could stop time itself, and freeze the world in eternal inertia.

I work hard, but that is my way. I work quickly, darting between trees and into the crooked crevices of ravines, moving, full of purpose. I like lobbing the wood onto the piles, the satisfaction of it, and the way the wood stacks haphazard, yet with structure, on the pile. I often overwork, tiring myself for the more important work of meditation later in the day, and it’s taking me time not to measure my worth in wood.

Anuruddha, brow scrunched, is spitting at the earth.

Nandiya appears now, eyebrows missing like us all, yet with his gone he looks always expectant. His body is swinging sideways like a pendulum moving from the shoulder. He holds a small jerry can, a leaf-blower, and cloth.
“I’ll show you how to-“
“We know how to do it,” Anuruddha says sharply, forgetting himself.
A slight pause, as our collective bodies tense.
“…OK then” says Nandiya in his clipped, lyrical accent, placing the assortment on the ground.
He twirls a thick, white cotton rag around a stick he plucks from the pile. The rag is a t-shirt I’d worn as an anagārika when I first came here, attending to the monks. It had since been worn by others, and was oil streaked, probably from the kitchen work, now reduced to a rag to light fires. He winds it around the stick and I find the revolutions hypnotic, before he breaks my gaze by pushing the end of the stick down in a swift movement, down from the shoulder, and soaks the rag with diesel from the jerry-can.
“Diesel, not petrol,” he says, and I remember the story of a monk who had found that out the hard way, blasting himself into a hospital bed. He sets the rag on fire with a lighter produced from a pocket he’s sewn onto his work robe, and stuffs the stick into the bottom of the pile. He sets the leaf blower on low, and fans the flames by setting it just off centre. It doesn’t take long for the fire to catch full, as the oily eucalypt leaves are potently flammable, and it reminds me of the power of the Australian bush to burn, vast walls of flame like a hellish tidal wave moving towards you. The monastery had seen one such fire in its lifetime. I’d seen another in my former time before coming here, in the Canberra fires, picking smouldering embers off my family home after the deluge.

The fire, a dancing, morphing flame, bringer of light and darkness. I stare into it now.
My mind is entranced by the fire, and wanders…
It was the day Nandiya was ordained.

I’m on retreat. I’ve been alone in the forest, meditating in seclusion, as we were given opportunity to for a few weeks a year. I’ve been gone for nine days, and staying in my hut. I’ve been walking and sitting for long hours every day, starting the retreat with more walking than sitting to ease the nerves and restlessness I feel at the prospect of extended periods of solitude, and now I’m easing into more sitting, the body and mind calming in to the retreat.

My food is being dropped to me once a day by a kindly monk at a location where I’d come and collect it, knowing it had been dropped by the metallic clink of the lid being closed on the tin bin some distance from my hut. Today, when I open the lid and collect my bowl, a little note is attached to the top. On returning to my hut, I open it. It reads –

Dear Bhante,
Hope you’re well. Nandiya’s ordination is tonight.
With mettā.

On reading the note, I smile.

That evening when dusk is descending on the forest, the birds receding into the night canopy, taking roost, I walk with measured steps, to the meditation hall. The hall is a wonderful place, and I’d often sneak into it late at night or before dawn during my retreats, when there was no-one there. I loved the energy of the space. Many powerful meditators had been there over the history of this place, including some very powerful monks from Thailand, and the power of their meditation had soaked into the bricks and mortar. You could feel a powerful electric buzz emanating from the walls, and it would deepen my meditation.

The monks gather, and the nuns had come from Gidgegannup to the north, from our sister monastery. All were assembled, the nuns always more well behaved than the younger monks, who at times seemed like unruly boys, cracking jokes and stifling laughter. The ceremony begins, and Nandiya, framed by two seniors, moves into the ancient ritual to seal the ordination.

As I’m watching him, I feel an overwhelming sense of joy bubbling from within my chest and trickling through the fabric of my body, such joy and bliss at the witness of a young man taking up the Dhamma, the teaching of the Buddha. The Dhamma was growing within me, and I knew it as a growing sense of certainty and strength, an excitement at the possibilities of practice. I wished him such growing faith too, and for him to feel the love I now felt, the gratitude for the blessing to come across it in this lifetime. Such a rare and precious jewel we had stumbled across together!

After the ceremony was over, I almost run back to my hut. I can’t wait to meditate. Careful not to trip in my dim torchlight as I zig-zag the passages between rocks, finding footing on rounded forest pebbles that form the forest tracks back to my hut, I collapse onto my meditation cushion, beaming like a boy. The feelings from the evening are fresh, and buzzing through me, the bliss soaking me, permeating every cell of my body, like bubbling water flowing through soft, porous stone. My heart is glowing, and I bathe in bliss.

The fire now, flickering.

“Kimbila… Kimbila!”
I turn, and see Anuruddha scooping me towards him with a rounded arm.

It’s time to eat, I remember.

I’m walking back to the sāla, and through the forest I can already hear the dim hum of laypeople entering the temple grounds, the cackles of broad Thai women, and the laughing of children, which I love, so free. The low rumble of cars sound in, carrying food and gifts for the Sangha. I detour, heading for the ablution block, passing the activity by. I shower, and dress, cleaning myself from the work, and head to the main area, towards the people.

People teeming, and so many smiling faces. A young Sri Lankan man, on seeing me, with head lowered, approaches. Placing his hands in anjali, he bows, his knees touching the earth, then his hands and head, and I don’t think I’ll ever be used to the praise, I chuckle to myself. He takes that as a sign of approval.

The monks have gathered, and the food is offered, and we portion it into our bowls, before rising to the landing once more, and are now seated in line, with monastery supporters filing in.

Ajahn, our teacher and beacon, is in fine spirits. He’s telling jokes, and the lay people laugh, Thai women covering their mouths, whilst the locals jackal. Gifts are offered, and the anagārikas come to collect them, bodies hunched so as not to tower; tall, thin men, with sharp, searching eyes. After the collection, there’s a talk from the Ajahn, and we sing the anumodāna, calling on the Devas, higher beings, to bid our supporters fair favour for their kindness.

The people mingle out, and the monks eat in silence. Again, the mind moves, and again, I bind it, gently bringing it back.

I collect my bag and bowl, and arrange it to one side, then approach Ajahn to take his bowl for wash, as is the way for the younger monks to give service, and pay respects. I approach Ajahn, body lowered, and gather his bowl, scooping up his cup and bowl cover in a swift, invisible movement, placing them on his bowl lid. In one hand I take the tray, the other, the bowl, indexing it between my thumb and fingers, my eyes cast down.
Just as I’m about to rise, Ajahn breaks off his conversation, and turns to me.
“Oh, Kimbila…” he trails, and in the silence, I listen.
My eyes glance upwards towards his. In his gaze, is a warmth and depth that often startles me. His pupils shine, and within the speckled iris of his eyes, I sense constellations deeper than I’ve ever known. I feel a wash of love flood my body and once again I’m naked, like glass, yet know I am forgiven.
“Yes, Ajahn?”
“How did the burning go today?”
My eyelids flicker.
“We covered the southern side. It’s pretty much done, Ajahn.”
“Very good,” he says, meaning it, and resumes his conversation.
I rise, still feeling the warmth.

On descending the stairs now, I see the laypeople filing into the sunlight. Children dart between the monks making their way down to the bowl washing area, bubbling squeals of laughter. I breathe in the naked air, and feel my feet touch the earth, now arrived.

What is to become of me, in this life?

• Peace.