Hanging with the Elephant: A Story of Love, Loss and Meditation by Harding Michael

Author:Harding, Michael [Harding, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: BIO026000, FAM014000
ISBN: 9781444783124
Publisher: Hachette Ireland
Published: 2014-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

THE MORNING AFTER I shared my curry with the cat, the wind was gusting and the ground was dry. I stood at the gable of my studio listening to my five stones; they were smooth and round and as big as ostrich eggs and sat one on top of the other on the step of the studio. I believe that if I make offerings to my own demons regularly, I can keep them under control. Anger, rage, jealousy and all the other disturbing emotions a human being experiences between one sup of tea and the next can be personified, and assigned a particular corner of the garden, and kept at bay with generous offerings of breadcrumbs, bowls of water, jelly beans or wild flowers. My therapist thought I was nuts, but what can you say to the unbelieving? When you respect your darkest energy, like anger, and when you are mindful of it, and when you hold and embrace it, then you’re less likely to be possessed by it unconsciously. That’s what I believe. So the stones became a kind of shrine to my demons. I would leave peanuts beside them, which the birds enjoyed through the winter, and sometimes I even imagined that the wind faintly whistling through the stones was the sound of those demons in pain and I felt pity for them.

A few days after I threw the stone at the magpie and hit the postman, he came again, this time to the studio, and caught me reverently placing a jelly baby sweet on top of the stones.

‘What’s all this about?’ the postman wondered.

‘I like to feed the birds,’ I said, not wanting to share with him the real intent of my ritual in case he’d be frightened away and I’d never get any more letters.

‘Didn’t know they liked sweets,’ he said suspiciously.

‘Oh, yes,’ I assured him, ‘some of them are mad for the jelly babies.’

But these rituals, like everything else in the ornate world of Buddhist practice, were, as far as I was concerned, merely a method of becoming more conscious of the disturbing emotions that drew me into depression. By doing this yoga of conscious activity, I tried to protect myself from ever becoming completely possessed by them.

Not that the person who gave me the stones shared any of these fanciful notions. She just presented them for my birthday a month after my mother died because she found them on the beach and thought them to be pretty and eloquent and I was delighted with her generous gift. That was back in August 2012. They were oval and they held fossils on their surface, and they could be arranged in stacks. The smaller stones sat on top of the larger ones and they made two small monuments. But to assemble them outside the door of my new studio like a shrine was my own idea.

I used to sit by the fire and stare at them through the window, and I remember one day in September falling asleep so that when my beloved arrived, she laughed.

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