Discovering Beautiful - longer ending

Chapter Nine

And so down the mountain we go, Shawn and I, and back on that dark green strip of California highway silently cruising into the night, glowing in our stillness, the motor purring, the headlights steadily revealing the ever onwards black ribbon of tarmac – and then, there in those headlights, there is an owl, and time comes almost to a stop as the owl slowly turns its big white head to meet us, and nods an acknowledgement, and shining pure and white and huge then spreads its wings and flies purposefully and head-on straight into the front of our car. Normally it’s a tragedy to hit such a beautiful creature – but this owl is different. And as its body smashes into the front grill and enters the car two streams of energy shoot up into the soles of our feet and race through our bodies, and settle there in the centres of our being. And Shawn and I, in our by-now telepathic ways, both smile and nod and accept with quiet gratitude this gift, for owl, we know, signifies liberation and owl signifies death, and this owl is there for a reason.

I left Shawn a few days later and went to see Amma in San Francisco, and over the course of ten days and ten hugs I was rocketed deeper still into a dazed divine bliss. Amma was mindblowing to be around – to just hug and receive and hug and love so many thousands of people, endlessly streaming in a line, right on through the night without taking food or water or rest. I would fall asleep at four a.m. some eight hours in, exhausted, and then I’d wake up and go and see her thinking, surely she must be tired by now – but, no, she was just as bright-faced and smiley and alive as she’d ever been, and when the hugging stopped at seven or nine or eleven in the morning she’d rise from her chair like she’d only been sitting in it for fifteen seconds, nevermind fifteen hours – not a hint of the aches and pains and stiffnesses we mere mortals would suffer – and even then she wouldn’t sleep, she’d go administering to her various charities and disciples and take phone calls and a few hours later be back with a smile and a hug for the next deluge of seekers. She was unreal, this woman – no one has ever been this happy, this enlightened, this giving. Apparently no one’s ever seen her yawn. Apparently in Indiashe once hugged a stadium full of people for twenty-seven hours straight, present and blissful and ever-loving for each and every one of them. Oh, but to know how she does it! And, oh, but to have even a fraction of her spirit! I wanted it bad. I prayed for her to lead me to that place.

Amma left San Fran to go hug some other soul-starved nation and I hitched on up to the Vipassana meditation centre in northern California. En route I did a healing for the lady driver while she drove – she’d been suffering from migraines and got instant benefit – and then, as we’d been bathing in the afterglow of that – you can see where this is going – a big truck had slowly drifted by with the word, “ENGLAND” massively decaled on the back and the lady had said, “oh, maybe it’s a sign that it’s time for you to go home.” She said it and I felt it too – felt it after all the times I’d longed for England and then been denied; felt it now that England, like almost everything else, was absent from my thinking; felt it now that I was perfectly happy exactly where I was, doing exactly what I was doing – but felt it all the same.

“Maybe,” I said, “but I don’t know how that’s going to happen: I honestly haven’t a dime to my name; no plane ticket; no nothing.”

And now you really can see where this is going.

I do Vipassana; do ten days of sitting on a cushion in a room full of meditating men and women watching my breath come slowly in and out, eyes closed, awareness focused entirely on my respiration, on the physical sensations as they arise within my body. I bring my attention to my nostrils, to the muscles of my face; right shoulder, left shoulder; back and chest and stomach and legs and feet. A thought arises and then I notice it, accept it, and return to my breathing, to my body. Up and down I go and slowly, thoughts subside, that mad monkey chatter of the mind becoming quiet and still, and peace grows within. Peace and joy. Peace and love and joy. There’s a whole universe within this body of mine: a universe full of subtle vibrations and sensations and light. And the deeper and deeper I go into this universe the greater and greater my happiness becomes.

Ten days we have sat on our various cushions, wrapped in our various blankets from dawn till bedtime – and for ten days we have maintained total silence and avoided interaction of any kind. No eye contact, no gestures, no smiles or acknowledgements: totally within. For ten days I have slept in a room full of men and heard nothing from them but the occasional fart and snore – and when the ten days are over, and the silence is lifted, the roar of their conversation is deafening.

I slide off into the corner and sit quiet. I don’t want to come back into this world; I don’t want to talk about all I’ve just been through. I hear them – their accents grating after all that time in a place without words – and I can’t help but listen as they talk about their trials, their pains, their sexual fantasies; the time when, on day seven, someone let rip and the whole place slowly got the giggles and the teachers told us off and how wonderfully funny it was. About how good the food has been. About hating it at first but already wanting to come back. About, even, peace and love and joy. I don’t want to hear any of it – and I certainly don’t want to talk to anyone – but, it seems, the return is inevitable.

A man in glasses comes over and introduces himself as Brad.

“Pretty intense, huh?” he says, smiling and glowing and pleased. “Had some real rough days in there myself – but, you know what, I just gotta tell you that whenever I saw you, and whenever I saw that t-shirt that you’re wearing – what’s it say? ‘Property of the Nut Factory’? – it just made me smile, sort of gave me the strength to go on. You seem like a real peaceful kind of guy. Like, you got the light.”

“Thanks Brad,” I say, my voice quiet and smoother than I remembered it, a tentative reacquaintance with myself. “Looks like you got the light too.”

“Listen,” he says, “I can see that you want to be alone right now but – I was just thinking, if you ever need a plane ticket to anywhere you just let me know. I got all these frequent flyer miles and I’m sure I could sort you something out. You got a pen?”

And that’s how I got back to England.

And – oh, England! My England! How I’d fretted over Thee and Thy dense and materialistic ways; where the religion of the day is shopping and booze; where all we do is watch TV and moan about the price of things; where none of my friends will have a clue what I’m talking about; where I know nobody who’s into the things I now am. How I’ve worried – and all to no avail – for almost immediately I’m back in the bosom of Vipassana, becushioned and happy, meditating deeper ever deeper, and surrounded by beautiful young English things all doing the same. And in Yorkshire, where Reiki is blooming like a flower, and groups are meeting and getting into it, and even my grandma’s wobbly old knees want a piece of the action and are receptive and fixed. My mum smiles and looks adoringly and says, “you look happy, really happy; I don’t know what you’ve found but I know you’ve found something,” and tells her own tales of once disappearing down a tunnel of light and also of having many premonitions that came true but at the same time not liking them, wishing they’d go away. She tells me about my conception in the doorway of a St John’s Ambulance building and how, even in the moment, she knew there was a reason for it, that the reason was me – and how looking at me now she feels some justification for that feeling. My dad, on the other hand, looks at me askance and cracks jokes about my vegetarianism, says he thinks I’ve been body-snatched, that it’s just not me, this ever-smiling, always happy, clean-living thing that stands in front of him; what he remembers is me drunk and committing crimes, throwing paint over some guy’s Mercedes, robbing his own till and leaving the shop door open all night, not this…this…alien.

“You’re no son of mine,” he keeps on saying, joking, of course – but there’s a lot of truth in jokes.

My dad is not my dad – well, he is my dad but he’s not my father: not the guy who put his sperm inside my teenage mother that St John’s Ambulance doorway night; that’s some other guy, some guy that I’ve never met, never wanted to. My mum had told me about it when I was eleven, offered me the chance to see him then, but in my expressionless and confused adolescence – are there four things more guaranteed to ensure the repression of emotion than Englishness, masculinity, youth, and an unsupportive upbringing? – I had refused to talk about it and done all I could to block it out and pretend that it didn’t exist. And that’s how it had gone on for more than twelve years, never telling a soul and never even thinking or writing about it myself – until now.

We met in a pub, my mum dropping me off and saying hello to him for the first time in nearly twenty-five years. She was smiling and I was smiling and he, poor fellow, was the only one that looked nervous. She left us alone and for two hours we talked, and all the time I’m thinking, how weird, this guy looks just like me. Not only that but he says, “yeah,” like me, and is pretty chill and relaxed like me, and likes to travel and to travel in less orthodox ways than most, and isn’t too bothered about conformity and possessions and being clean and tidy and even lived in a caravan for a while, which is sort of a dream of mine. In a nutshell, despite the never having met, we’ve got a hell of a lot in common. When we say goodbye he asks me for a hug and there are tears in his eyes. He says we should have done this a long time ago.