This title may be taken as sounding rather weary, dreary and depressed, or as a statement of positive basic Buddhist training. Both are true for me, and I will continue this training forever. It may not match up with my ideal of being wholehearted, but it will continue. I’m never impressed by articles written as if saying, “There we are, that’s sorted”, because I find everything so very not sorted and there’s no point in pretending that it is. But I can let go of bitterness and anger – that I can do. The tightness of those things is my pain and vice versa.

Six months ago I moved house. Six hard and frightened months when I have taken refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha with all my heart. I managed to up my half-hour sittings from one to two a day, and attended our meditation group which was a big support. I went to the Abbey less than usual, and missed being on retreat there, but always felt the monks’ kindness and sympathy behind me.

When people have asked if I am settling in, I have said “No”. But maybe now I am starting to settle in; I had a house blessing ceremony and now have a Buddhist name for my flat. I loved my old house, the garden and the housemates. When I realised it had to end, I was clinging to them fiercely. I think I am still clinging to them. This grief comes and goes, making some days long.

Sometime during one of the covid lockdowns one of my housemates wrote us a letter saying that she did not want to live with us forever. My other housemate and I had assumed we would live there forever, and unfortunately we did not have the money to buy out the other housemate. Then it became both of my housemates who were moving, and both of them fell ill and the house had to be sold. I realised that the house had to go on the market as quickly as possible – winter was coming and houses do not sell in winter. I think my years of meditation allowed me to make this total change from, “No, I refuse to move”, to “Okay I will move now”. I knew it had to be done, it could not wait.

The housemates brought in furniture removals and moved out, and we found agents for selling the house. I had to clean and paint the house which was horribly hard work. This badly hurt my back and my resentment boiled up of course. The house was on the market at the beginning of September 2022; our agent was kind and helpful and I kept up the house-tidying and the meditation during the period when people were coming for a viewing. At times I stopped showing people around the house, because they obviously didn’t love the house as much as I did and that upset me. The agent kindly did these viewings for free.

This went on and on, I slept less and less, and my anxiety grew more and more. In January 2023 we had an offer while I was at the Abbey helping in the kitchen for the Winter Sangha Retreat, and we housemates ran around frantically, but then the offer was withdrawn. Then there was more tidying for people coming to view and more days of just getting up in the morning and keeping up my meditation. I was also working out if I would have enough money to buy somewhere which would enable me to stay living in lovely Castle Douglas. Incredibly our house had doubled in value and the way we housemates were sharing meant that with my savings and two small loans I would have just enough. I put in an offer for a flat with an attic and garden just over the road but sadly lost it because our house did not sell quickly enough.

Within my panic and distress I think I managed to stay calm and sensible enough – thanks to my practice – to look at what would happen if the house was sold and I had nowhere to live.  I asked a friend if I could stay in his house if I had nowhere else, and he very kindly said yes. I thought of paying to put my goods into storage, and I started putting gardening equipment into my neighbour’s shed which they kindly agreed to. People were very generous with me in my troubles and I stayed aware enough to take them up on their offers. Without meditation and the Precepts to guide me I would have been overwhelmed by anxiety.

Although the removal van had been in, there was a vast amount of wood and other things to move out of the garden shed. A couple of friends appreciated receiving the wood for their stove. My poor housemate was a big collector, and he died before he could move all his stuff. He became very ill at the end of 2022, with two blood diseases, and died in March 2023. I did a great deal of crying and gnashing of teeth at his funeral. His partner is still crying.

A few years ago I was given a beautiful mala of amethyst and crystal beads with a little double vajra joining the string. I have quite a few malas but have not worn them much until now. I vaguely thought that the vajra is a thunderbolt symbol and I looked it up in The Shambala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen. What a wonderful surprise to read the description:

In Buddhism it is not a weapon but a symbol of the indestructible, for this reason it is translated as ‘diamond’ or ‘adamantine’…. Here it stands for true reality, emptiness (shūnyatā), the being or essence of everything existing. This emptiness is indestructible like diamond, i.e. imperishable and unborn or uncreated. The spotless purity and translucency of the diamond symbolises the perfect spotlessness of emptiness, untainted by all the appearances that arise out of it…. This emptiness, however, is not different from things, from all phenomena. it is one and identical with them.¹

Isn’t that joyous! The vajra hangs round my neck to remind me. This ‘little me’ shudders and fears – so what! My meditation teaches me to keep going.

During the year of moving I stopped growing vegetables and instead sowed wild flowers, and the strawberries and raspberries in the garden were prolific and delicious. We had two offers for the house so we got the price we wanted after the agent had been advising us to lower it because it was taking so long to sell. It took a year. We were very lucky, although there were complications and more stops and starts. We kept wondering, “Will the buyer change his mind…?”

And at the same time I was viewing a flat and two houses. The houses were ugly and in less-than-ideal locations. This flat has plenty of light and tall ceilings. My eldest son said I should not have a first floor flat with stairs in which to grow old and infirm. “He has a point”, I thought, when I had my seventy-seventh birthday at the end of September. But the stairs are shallow and wide, with a strong bannister to hang on to. My other sons, my daughter-in-law and a friend liked it, and I liked it even more on the second visit. And somehow I was going to move out of our house and into the flat on the same day, 30th August, with the help of my sons. It worked, although one son had to go back home to the Czech Republic and come back in a month. It happened with the help of expensive and efficient removals, my sons and good friends. All my boxes, bookshelves and tables and chairs were all over the place in the new flat, which was in a big red sandstone house built in 1860.

I was feeling really feeble after the move, which was probably not helped by becoming an insulin-using diabetic a couple of years ago. It seemed there was such a lot to manage for my body – no let up. And there was nowhere to keep my electric bike – the shed was too small – so I would have to pay for a new shed to be built. Six months later and the bike is in its fine new home of green metal sheeting, with a golden finial over the door and a handmade hook to hold the door open, all costing £1,400. Yes, my meditation is still saying, “Just keep going.”

My two sons came to stay a month after the move and set about some D.I.Y., and making garden beds out of planks I had bought from my previous neighbours’ old fences, and bags of compost which were all carried by the removals people. My cheerful sons put up the little greenhouse, and dug and paved round the old garden shed to stop water pooling.

A dreadful thing happened, however: My son living in the Czech Republic badly injured his eye while he was here. He might have lost his eye, but it is healing well now after six months and soon he will get a new lens. It has been very difficult for him being unable to work or drive. His father, sister, brother and nephew have just been over there to cheer him on, with success, I think.

Will I make a garden here? Will I have the equanimity and strength to stay the course? The beds are covered in compost, seaweed and cardboard hopefully rotting down the turf to make soil for vegetables, raspberries, shrubs and flowers. There are pots with plants in them from the old house. When the sun is out, I feel a twinkle of the old gardening urge and I am stronger now. Blackbirds have been digging up a bit of the mulch on the beds as they always do. Two trees have been cut down, with the cost of the work being shared by my very kind neighbour who had to have the holly tree cut down because it was too near her house, so now the sunlight shining from the west in the afternoon is unhindered.

Will I make a life alone? I sent cards to my neighbours at Christmas time and joined a choir. Sparrows enjoy the bird food in the tray stuck to my bedroom window, and I enjoy watching them. The other Buddhist in town invites me out to coffee nearly every week, and I think he has stopped trying to convert me to his type of Buddhism(!) I’m cycling over to visit a friend in a village where I once lived. It is actually nice living in the middle of town over a charity shop with a view of the hills Screel and Ben Gairn. “Just keep going.” And will I find ever find out what ‘settling in’ means…?

I am so grateful for my fifty years of training with the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives and so grateful for my twenty years with my housemates. My meditation and training are allowing my heart to soften from the rigid resentment I felt when I thought I was losing so much. And my practice continues to teach me to keep going on and on.

Note

1. Fischer-Schreiber, Ingrid; Ehrhard, Franz-Karl & Diener, Michael S.: The Shambala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen, (Michael H. Kohn, trans.) Shambala, Boston, 1991. P. 241.