Operation Epic Love: notes from London

Lately I’ve had no time to develop a full blown article from up my sleeve, so I thought I’d share some gentle musings instead.

Gratitude

Simon from Eritrea told me he is in a good mood because he has three things:

1. Health
2. An unstressful job, by his reckoning, as he quite likes driving
3. A shift that is almost over, lol

He, like a lot of cabbies I’ve spoken to, loves London. He has a good attitude and enjoys his life. He feels grateful for the government safety net, though he wishes that doctors and nurses were paid more.

I do, too, for I am a fan of the NHS and would like it to be fully supported. A few days after I arrived in London I had a strange squeaking in my ear – a couple of High Street pharmacists were kind enough to peer into my ear with their bare eyes and said I was fine, but I still thought I’d use this as an opportunity to sign up for an NHS doctor. So I walked less than two minutes to the nearest clinic, gave them my national insurance number, and in approximately 12 hours, no questions asked, was booked in for a complete wellness exam. For all its difficulties, the NHS has been good to my parents and so far it’s being good to me. I even stuck my head around the door of a random dentist last week, and there and then they took me on for free.

I am feeling the support of others around every corner. This gratitude is making me happy as it also makes Simon happy.

London convert

I have become one of those converts who has fallen for something they knew little about – or even didn’t think they had much time for – who now feels they’ve discovered it.

Take my good friends M and J, for example, who shall remain nameless (if not initial-less). For years as I enjoyed coffees in atmospheric cafés around the world, they spurned it, “It is horrible. Pointless. Tea is better.” Something changed a few years ago, not sure what, whereupon they suddenly fell in love with coffee and café culture. Now they think they know a great deal about it, including exactly what makes a good coffee and what doesn’t, and indeed have been acting a bit like they invented it. It’s as if the rest of us who have been drinking it for decades have just been pretending to enjoy it.

I’m like that with London, only worse, because at least they do make better coffee than I do. “London is so beautiful, you’ll never guess what I saw the other day?!” says I. “I know”, says a long-suffering friend who was born and bred here. I’m aware that I’m displaying a mildly unbearable enthusiasm – London has existed perfectly well without me for years, indeed millennia, yet now I’m going around saying, “But have you ever noticed this?!” to people who have been quietly noticing it, and much more, for their entire lives.

Not sure of the Dharma moral to all this. Perhaps something about my need to exchange myself with others. Or perhaps it’s just an apology to my patient London friends.

Operation Epic Love

I just wandered into a high end Persian café – the sign pointing to it, very close to the London Kadampa Meditation Centre, luring me in with: “Nice coffee this way!” And indeed I am drinking a very nice expresso as we speak. I also felt a trifle obliged to buy a fig and pistachio cake that could actually feed four people because I am feeling a little embarrassed that my (other) country has just invaded Iran. (I will offer the cake at this afternoon’s puja). I said to these smiling servers, truthfully, that I will bring some friends back here for a proper yummy meal one of these days.

The music is Persian, not everyone’s cup of tea, but reminding me of my years in Turkey. Most people in here seem to be speaking in Farsi or a mixture of English and Farsi. Hospitable people, friendship, aromatic food, opulent décor – a tiny taste of that ancient and profound culture of Persia, all just around the corner behind this inadvertent door. Did I tell you that I love London?!

In here is a million miles away from Operation Epic Hatred, I mean Fury, same difference. But in here the war cannot be far from anyone’s mind. How can politicians be so stupid and cruel, is what I am thinking, to want to destroy such beauty and civilization, to want to destroy each other. When, all along, to quote Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s words:

Love is the real nuclear bomb that destroys enemies.

Tormas

Talking of cakes and love, I came here after observing people at the Centre making traditional cakes known in Tibetan as tormas for our two shrines; and I read this out to them from the book Essence of Vajrayana:

“Tor” indicates that we should spend everything we own on these offerings, and “ma”, which literally means “mother”, indicates that we should love all living beings as a mother loves her children. Nowadays it is impossible to find a practitioner who will spend everything they own on a torma offering, but from the word “tor” we should understand that the torma offering is very important and that it would be worthwhile to spend everything on it.

Even if we don’t spend quite everything we own on our next torma offering, I sometimes imagine I am doing that, offering the world’s biggest torma out of love for all mother beings, nowadays with a prayer for world peace before we slide into World War III. (According to an old friend I saw the other day, Geshe-la did once suggest that the third world war might start in the Middle East, so there is that.)

Longer term, because wars and suffering are endemic to samsara, I make this offering with the wish for everyone everywhere to gain the true happiness and permanent freedom that come from getting all their inner winds into the central channel and realizing the union of bliss and emptiness.

What I’m noticing now is that there’s a queue forming to get into this excellent Persian café. So I’d better leave you, dear reader, to make room for them. Fare thee well.

Comments warmly welcomed.