Read Online Wreck and Order by Hannah Tennant-Moore - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Hannah Tennant-Moore
Ads: Link
felt just as stupid as the actions that invited an apology. “Can you free the heart from the past?” His voice was slow and oddly unaccented. He repeated the question, speaking to himself. And because there was the same secret weight to his voice day after day, finally, out of solidarity, I repeated the words to my own—whatever it is, not the physical heart but the writhing tangle of remembered words and gestures underneath the wishbone center of my rib cage. After a few more days, it wasn’t that I felt that place as freedom, like the man in white suggested. But at least it was no longer clamoring for my attention.
“Only silence can feel the realeetee,” said the man in white at the front of the Buddha hall.
Realeetee at Shirmani was constant, various birdsong (long beaks tapping a crystal vase, a mechanical kitten crying out for a real live mama cat, the final note of a radio ad for something tasty and fattening and cheap); monkeys sitting on the roof of the kitchen hut, disdainfully gorging on stolen jackfruit; a tornado of cicadas that enveloped us in their throbbing hum each night as the sun descended; stone pathways dappled in sunlight and lizards and, one time, a frog no bigger than my pinkie nail; pastel sheets draped on a sunny laundry line; exquisitely seasoned rice and curry and spicy-sweet tea; stone benches overlooking a valley of every possibility of green rising into a sky of every possibility of white, overlaid with charcoal smudges of mountain ranges whose visibility came and went with the fog, palest blue at the horizon giving way to pure light in a measured spectrum that revealed the dome overhead; “biscuits crunching in the night,” the phrase that tolled in my mind—so easy to amuse oneself when speech is outlawed—during the evening meal of what was presumably once a bread product, before it was sun-dried in a desert and then baked in a kiln, and for which, at the end of the final meditation before bedtime, we were all ravenous and gratefully consumed in the dark, under the stars, surrounded by millions of insects playing their wee violins, no match for the collective crunch our evening snack released into the reigning peace of the nighttime forest; thick, small leaves that fell from the tops of impossibly tall, thin tree trunks, twirling so quickly they seemed frozen midair at each interval of their languid descent; a saggy-breasted, elderly Sri Lankan woman who came to every evening meditation wearing an oversize T-shirt emblazoned with a steaming cup of coffee and the words CAREFUL, LADIES…I MAY BE HOT ; a brightly dressed, exuberantly gestured young white man, either gay or Italian, who attended none of the group activities except for meals, to which he was always first in line, heaping his plate with a mound of food fit for a starving family, consuming this mound with his hands—hunched over, legs crossed, eyes intently downcast—and then refilling his plate with such brazen greed that it seemed he earnestly believed we were at this secluded meditation center on an island in the Indian Ocean to eat as much as possible of the healthy foods harvested and prepared for us for pennies.
Mostly, there was sitting. And when I had sat still long enough that my attention was, at last, consumed by the flicker of my breath—a candle pulsing in a slight, steady breeze—and my body was so light I could only sense it as the line of contact between palm and thigh; when I felt a large insect tickle my neck and still did not move until the tickle became a shooting pain that made me reflexively flick a large caterpillar with poisonous feet off of my Adam’s apple and then resume sitting still, concentrating now on the web of stinging nettles emanating from the center of my neck to the crown of my head; when I opened my eyes slightly and saw a monk’s brown feet moving slowly across the floor and was overcome with a full-body sorrow for all of us meditators doing all of this sitting and slow
“Only silence can feel the realeetee,” said the man in white at the front of the Buddha hall.
Realeetee at Shirmani was constant, various birdsong (long beaks tapping a crystal vase, a mechanical kitten crying out for a real live mama cat, the final note of a radio ad for something tasty and fattening and cheap); monkeys sitting on the roof of the kitchen hut, disdainfully gorging on stolen jackfruit; a tornado of cicadas that enveloped us in their throbbing hum each night as the sun descended; stone pathways dappled in sunlight and lizards and, one time, a frog no bigger than my pinkie nail; pastel sheets draped on a sunny laundry line; exquisitely seasoned rice and curry and spicy-sweet tea; stone benches overlooking a valley of every possibility of green rising into a sky of every possibility of white, overlaid with charcoal smudges of mountain ranges whose visibility came and went with the fog, palest blue at the horizon giving way to pure light in a measured spectrum that revealed the dome overhead; “biscuits crunching in the night,” the phrase that tolled in my mind—so easy to amuse oneself when speech is outlawed—during the evening meal of what was presumably once a bread product, before it was sun-dried in a desert and then baked in a kiln, and for which, at the end of the final meditation before bedtime, we were all ravenous and gratefully consumed in the dark, under the stars, surrounded by millions of insects playing their wee violins, no match for the collective crunch our evening snack released into the reigning peace of the nighttime forest; thick, small leaves that fell from the tops of impossibly tall, thin tree trunks, twirling so quickly they seemed frozen midair at each interval of their languid descent; a saggy-breasted, elderly Sri Lankan woman who came to every evening meditation wearing an oversize T-shirt emblazoned with a steaming cup of coffee and the words CAREFUL, LADIES…I MAY BE HOT ; a brightly dressed, exuberantly gestured young white man, either gay or Italian, who attended none of the group activities except for meals, to which he was always first in line, heaping his plate with a mound of food fit for a starving family, consuming this mound with his hands—hunched over, legs crossed, eyes intently downcast—and then refilling his plate with such brazen greed that it seemed he earnestly believed we were at this secluded meditation center on an island in the Indian Ocean to eat as much as possible of the healthy foods harvested and prepared for us for pennies.
Mostly, there was sitting. And when I had sat still long enough that my attention was, at last, consumed by the flicker of my breath—a candle pulsing in a slight, steady breeze—and my body was so light I could only sense it as the line of contact between palm and thigh; when I felt a large insect tickle my neck and still did not move until the tickle became a shooting pain that made me reflexively flick a large caterpillar with poisonous feet off of my Adam’s apple and then resume sitting still, concentrating now on the web of stinging nettles emanating from the center of my neck to the crown of my head; when I opened my eyes slightly and saw a monk’s brown feet moving slowly across the floor and was overcome with a full-body sorrow for all of us meditators doing all of this sitting and slow
Similar Books
