The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey

Author:Samantha Harvey [Harvey, Samantha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473572713
Publisher: Random House

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Tennessee, standing in the shade in a steep, bouldered park, a clump of orange lilies on an outcropping, insects fizzing in the June heat.

My friend tells me about a man in her neighbourhood who gave up his lifelong Buddhism when a skiing accident left him with an anger he didn’t think he should feel. All his life he’d practised the craft of Zen, of responding with equanimity and compassion. Yet the moment somebody skied into him, his response was rage and blame. So he gave up being a Buddhist and turned instead to God.

I picture a little handbook called ‘Why Buddhists Shouldn’t Ski’. In general it is better for Buddhists to limit themselves to warm-weather sports and pastimes, the more sedentary the better. There is a reason why the Buddha is most often seen sitting. He was never found in the Rockies trying to outwit gravity.

‘Why, though?’ I ask. ‘Why would he give up a lifelong belief for one bit of bad luck?’

‘Because of his anger,’ my friend said. ‘Because all he felt was anger.’

‘But no Buddhist I ever met said you’re not allowed to feel anger.’

‘Imagine you spend your whole life honing your mind so that when trouble comes you can respond without conditioning, respond without a kneejerk reaction. You know? Unthinking reaction. That’s what he did, he spent his whole life trying to respond from a truer place in himself. Then, when trouble came, what did he do? He went straight to his conditioning. Anger, blame. Not truth.’

‘What if the truest place in him at that moment was angry?’

‘He wanted more for himself than that.’

‘Why? He wanted more for himself than to be a human feeling human things?’

‘Yes – yes. He wanted more than to always be trapped by the smallness of human things.’

‘So he turned to God.’

‘So he turned to God.’

My friend and I can’t talk for more than six minutes before we get into the deep-and-meaningfuls. Small talk isn’t in our chemistry. For a while we wonder at the beauty of this little place, our grassy plateau, then the drop into the woody glade. It’s so hot. My friend lives on a mountain up above a city, a mountain partitioned and landscaped into dignified homes with preened lawns, pillared porches, verandas, coloured stucco. Cardinals flash red between maples. At dusk fireflies are floating embers in the darkness that collects between trees. Xibipiio-ing across the threshold of experience, here, gone. My friend has God. Whatever vanishes for her is held in the permanence that is Him. All of her steep, giddy drops have a landing place: Him. All of her belly-turning leaps are met with His open arms. All of her ecstatic soaring enjoys the safety of His tether. All the stale and eventless stretches of her life open into the wild drama of His love. My friend, standing here next to me, has all this, crowding her blood and bones in this moment, inflating her heart.

‘There’s a Buddhist image,’ I say, ‘it’s a mural of a snake, huge, lunging out of flames, and on the end of its forked tongue, a monk meditating.

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