nicholas in vietnam

This morning I felt much happier; I’ve been feeling down for weeks. We’ve been talking with friends about children and we’ve found that we’re not the only ones who feel like, with the world going the way it is, having children might be wrong. Lots of people think the same – westerners I mean; Vietnamese certainly don’t think that way and that is the most depressing thing of all.

Last night I played a lot with a little girl at Trish’s house, a Vietnamese girl adopted by an American mother. She pretended to be a cat and then a dog.

Francis said that the family is the basis of society, that if we give up on the family we might as well give up completely. That was an opinion we could have argued with but, when we pushed him further, Francis said he prayed he would always fear God more than he feared environmental catastrophe. That made me feel uneasy: was I returning to a simplistic idea of doing good in the world in order to escape spirituality? Was the violence of my fear and anger just a front against something even worse or even closer to home? Was I even forgetting what was really important – does the Saola really matter?
It reminded me of something a monk at Plum Village once said: “You want to save the rainforest? See if you can look after a pot plant first, then see about the rainforest.”
‘Very spiritually correct,’ I thought from a darker place, ‘but do we really have time for that?’

This morning I wanted to write and I did, before sitting or anything else, while Hannah lay in bed reading her book. I wrote about the wind-up radio on my desk and about its personality. Suddenly I decided that, in order to develop my writing, I ought to try and describe it properly, including all the electric innards I could see because it was transparent. Suddenly I felt there was an emotional gulf between me and the radio. A minute ago we had been conspiring together in writing; now I was writing about it. It seemed to me that maybe the idea of developing my writing wasn’t really the point, that maybe my voice wasn’t just my own. And when I started writing about Hannah, still in bed reading, I felt from the little objects something that was almost jealousy. I remembered how my friends, who want to ordain as monk and nun, said they felt their love should be free of all attachment. Suddenly the idea didn’t scare me any more.
I began to feel hungry for breakfast, and to think about breakfast with my family in Ellerton Rd. I suddenly realised how wonderful it was that we always had a proper breakfast together – not a pull things from the fridge breakfast. Cappucino and croissants and the table laid. It was a wonderful achievement, and the most wonderful thing about it was that it was never a battleground, we never questioned it.
Yesterday I said I was alone in the house with the computer, a book of short stories, some dried ginger and my work ethic. I was quite wrong, our children are also in the house and they are really with us, no matter what we’re doing and no matter what we decide. Francis said that having children was not a choice like having a car and I think he’s right. The question is no longer whether to have children, but how to look after them.

we must get a new calendar before it gets round to May.

I’m alone in the house, it’s just me, the computer,  a big book of short stories I bought Hannah for her birthday, some candied ginger, and the Protestant work ethic. I try to avoid being in the same room as the work ethic.

This morning I went birdwatching with John. It was heavy drizzle but we saw what might have been a Pechora pipit. After that I went and had a hot chocolate and a carrot cake in a cafe called Puku. I thought about cycling over to the pagoda to find out some stuff for the Hanoi sangha but I remembered what a very long way it was and was worried I might catch cold. I went home instead and went back to bed. I had been looking forward to sending some emails and to planning my parents trip. I didn’t do either and I didn’t manage to call home because I haven’t got any Skype credit yet. I did mean to buy some honey but I couldn’t find the shop.  I feel like the lamest creature on God’s earth.

I’ve been having a lot of weird dreams lately and would probably enjoy it if I start writing. I had a sort of insight into a dream I had about a year ago which scared the living daylights out of me at the time. I was thinking about a time on my last survey when me & Đức went swimming in the Hữu Trạch river, in a wide pool above some rapids. He said ‘can you swim to the other side?’ I was a little downstream of him. I should have tried to swim diagonally upstream but I aimed for straight across and so went diagonally down instead. I can remember thinking – in just the same way I think about approaching deadlines – OK I can’t make it to the rocks, but there’s a thick stem of a water bush just there, I can just grab on to that – Oh no I can’t. I remember somebody from BirdLife telling me a story of how he crawled out of the jungle with a broken leg fuelled only by the great desire to live which Jack London talks about. I remembered afterwards how I didn’t feel any of that, just the faint surprise that my swimming strength, in which I’d trusted like a tourist, wasn’t going to be enough to keep me out of the rapids.

I was reading a book recently by a Burmese freedom fighter who described being pleased to be swept away by rapids because they were carrying him out of enemy fire. He probably remembered not to exhaust himself trying to swim and instead to put his hands behind my head, protecting it with his elbows, and wait till he was through. Perhaps if I’d done that it wouldn’t have seemed like very long and all I’d have had to deal with would have been the inescapable reality of being in the hands of the river.

But things like that, which you read in books, don’t necessarily come to you at the time. In fact I have read that same sentiment in books as well and I tend to dismiss it. I was thinking of other examples and I remembered a time when I was with my parents on a wildlife holiday in Botswana. Normally we were in a truck but one day we did a walking safari somewhere in the Okavango. Our guide was a very good guide, totally cool in the bush and he told us that, no matter what we ran into, we weren’t to run because running attracts attention and makes you look like prey. As our party rounded into a scrubby clearing he announced calmly ‘OK the lion cubs, let’s get out of here.’ Afterwards he chided gently ‘You ran, I told you not to run.’

Nothing about it is burned in my memory except his words. The way the emphasis in the first sentence was on ‘cubs’, not ‘lion’ and how after the second I felt a bit ashamed and shown up. But how can that possibly matter in such a situation? Perhaps that dream five years later of being alone in a room with an invisible big cat was my acceptance of the fear from that moment which I never truly felt at the time. No chance in that moment to think what to do, to see your fear in anything other than its full splendour, no pontificating about immortal hands or eyes. Not stressful, not disturbing just plain old-fashioned terrifying. But that was in the dream. In real life the thoughts didn’t stop and the world went by as blurred as always.