not a paperback kind of girl

I rarely buy hardcovers. I can count on one hand how many I've purchased in my life (I can still feel the weight of Grisham's The Runaway Jury on my belly as I read late into the late 1990s night). Certainly lately, as a Buddhist trying to move away from covetousness and all-out greed, steering clear of paying over £15 for a book suits my attempt at living a simplified life. Borrowing books is good, from friends or the library (although then I can't mark them up or make notes in the margins). Finding a used copy on the internet saves resources (although I get into dodgy ethical territory when I sign onto tax-dodging Amazon.com). Buying a paperback is cheaper, allowing me to (allegedly) direct more of my income towards donations to charities and Big Issue purchases.

But there's another side to this argument, and it has to do with loving reading, and it has to do with the sensuality of books, and it has to do with supporting local bookshops. And a little to do with delighting in Lena Dunham. Dunham is my hero, a woman almost six years my junior whose prose and person delight me and lighten the load of my self-loathing. She's written a book, and it came out in September 2014, and it still hasn't been released in paperback. After being on a two-week retreat during which a slew of suppressed early-adulthood-martini-drenched memories surfaced, I knew I couldn't wait any longer to read it.

When I decide it's time to buy a brand new book, I go to The Book Hive. Norwich's independent bookstore, they have everything you want (including a Wes Anderson photobook I now have my eye on), and if they don't, they'll get it delivered by the next day. They give you a stamp on a loyalty card when you spend over £10. When I buy a book there, I'm doing three things:

1. I'm patronising the place itself, saying yes I want you to exist, I want to be able to walk in here and find piles of books with beautiful covers, climb up a curving staircase, sit down or kneel or squat to reach a shelf and find something to flip through, to remember a bit what it's like to be in Shakespeare and Company or Topping and Company.

2. I'm supporting the staff, saying yes I want you to be paid to be here, to share your knowledge of reading and writing and words, your banter and your slightly-intimidating eyewear.

3. I'm keeping my money in Norwich, not flitting off to an off-shore tax-free account or out of the country.

How much did all this cost me? Well, anywhere from £5.10 to £7.53. Dunham's book cost £11.89 direct from Amazon, or £9.46 if I had it shipped brand new from the US. I could have spent the rest of the afternoon dreaming of the coffee and cake I could have had for £5.10, or thinking about how £7.53 is almost the cost of a movie at Cinema City. But instead I think of it as a separate purchase, a mini-investment on its own, one that I decided to make in conjunction with the book. The Book Hive gets some of it, and also the publishers, editors, office staff, typesetters, and Dunham herself. My partner reminds me, "We tend to make our decisions as consumers, not as workers. We only work in one context, but we consume in all kinds of contexts; we want our work to be valued, but we don't consider the workers who create what we want to consume." I do value the craft required to build a book, to design the cover, to find the words and put them in the right order and choose the paper on which they're printed. I value those who pack the books and bring them to this lovely shop on London Street; I value the space and the solace; and I value the workers who wait there for us to come and patronise.

Which led me to wonder: how much of all of this infrastructure is dependent on hardback revenue? What would have happened if I'd waited for the book to come out in paperback?  Much cheaper for me, of course, but then who takes the hit when the price comes down? I vaguely understood that the mark-up on a hardback was more than a paperback, but percentages and figures alluded me. The chap at The Book Hive explained that further print runs are determined in part by how well the book sells as a hardback. So again, I'm supporting my dear Ms Dunham by purchasing now rather than later. I also found this helpful article from sci-fi author Brandon Sanderson that articulates how royalties to the author are generally higher for hardbacks, both percentage-wise and dollar/pound-wise. So all the above arguments hold, but with double the money for all those involved. Rather than scraping by on paperback royalties, perhaps I can accord the authors the income they're due by choosing to buy more hardcovers.


I've got my eye on Amy Poehler's Yes, Please. Miranda July's The First Bad Man. The Wes Anderson Collection. And perhaps I can read them sooner rather than later, not because it's indulgent, lavish and cowing to craving, but because the money supports the work of people I aspire to emulate, places I want to exist in the world, and provides a tangible and comforting weight on my belly in bed at night.

death necessitates great love

Death is an opportunity. When we witness death, whether face to face or our of the corner of our eye, we can start to let go of the belief that anything is permanent or substantial.

Before we come in contact with the Dharma, we may identify death with the passing away of the body; I certainly did, and to some extent, still do. I find our hamster in his little house, bound up with cotton wool; no longer asleep, but unmoving. Or a grandparent, one day baking us fresh bread, the next in hospital, and then gone. Perhaps we’ve contemplated our own deaths; written wills, talked to loved ones about our wishes. Or perhaps we’ve put all this off because we know it will happen a long, long way in the future.

When my husband Tom’s parents died within three and a half years of each other, death moved to the forefront of my experience. I watched his father shrink and fade over weeks; I saw his mother laid out in the Chapel of Rest without warning. The sadness in the faces of bodies of Tom and his brother sinks deep into my own heart. But amongst this sadness, because of this loss, there is great beauty.

Death is beautiful to the extent that we can turn towards it. And so death is synonymous with honesty. Meditating besides David in his last days, and sitting beside the bed in which Bridget died after she was gone, I leaned towards this opening in reality their death had torn. I mostly practised the Metta Bhavana, as I do in my daily practice, and the layers that I often rely on to divide myself, my body, my emotions, from others, started to fade and slip away. As I recall Bridget, I wonder to ‘what’ I am contacting metta in relation to? Where ‘she’ may be? Her body is gone but I still sense her, in my memories and in those she touched. These questions dissolve as the veils between things become very thin. I’m left with a bare witnessing of a richness and beauty, and a gratitude to them for this glimpse of the experience I will have one day.

 Since coming into contact with the Dharma, I also bring my contemplation of death into my everyday life; it becomes spiritual death. Most strongly I experience this in relation to my ethical practise, which more and more I understand is inextricably linked with my emotions. My emotions, those of my heart or my heart-mind, are what cue me to look at my actions of body, speech, and mind. That slight constriction of the chest; a furrowing of the forehead; an uneasiness in my gut; all these help me navigate through my reflection on my actions and their impact on others. The humiliation, fear, and uncertainty that arise guide me towards the precepts, and allow me to approach others candidly, with a bare heart. When I am met with the same openness, from my Going for Refuge group, my friends in the Order, my fellow wayfarers training for ordination, my husband, and my family, then I can allow my preconceived notion of what I hold onto or what I am drop away. When I start from a place of metta, a longing to be in line with reality, then I can move through these transitions with confidence. I die and what is reborn is different: less tight and fixed. If I continue to open up to life from this place of confidence and love, then I can meet the death of my habits, my notions and my body without fear. For what is necessary for true spiritual death is great love.

embracing uselessness

Teaching meditation to Norwich City College students: validating to see how far I’ve come since school, to see what life experience and the Dharma has given me; humbling to realise how I am still the scared seventeen year old who doesn’t know what to do with her life. And good for my ego that most of them weren't really engaged in what we were saying. My friend said, “Humiliation is good spiritual practice.”

It’s all in a theme for me: dropping my expectations of how I’d like things to be, letting go of the idea that I need to be perfect, seeing that I can’t do everything. I cannot keep this up. Not just the overtime at work, the commitment to Sangha projects, the daily meditation and yoga practices and the practice journal, the meeting up for coffees and teas and the endless emails. I can’t keep up with all that, but furthermore, I cannot keep up this idea that I can control every facet of my life, or even every facet of my job. And I cannot keep up the belief that my self worth is defined by my accomplishments.

But what happens when I let that go? What happens when I stop over-identifying with my job? What happens when I realise I can’t have an eye on everything, that some things will go by without my say, without my input, without my presence?

On one hand there is an immense relief. I can stop. I can not go to that event, I can not offer to cover that class. But behind that is a frightening realisation…that it will all go on without me. That I don’t need to be there. If something needs to be covered, someone else will step up. And if it’s just a case of being present at an event, or showing up at a class, I realise…I’m not that important. My presence does not make or break other peoples’ experiences. What a blow to my sense of self, the importance I’ve pumped into myself.
Fear wells up. If I’m not there, will people forget me? Will someone else take my place? Will I become dispensible?

And if I am not always doing something, leading something, practicing longer or more often, then what good am I? If I can’t show you a list that I’ve checked off, if I can’t prove my worth, if I can’t earn my keep and my space, then what good am I?

I fear I will become lazy, indifferent, uninterested. I will become uninspired, stagnant, boring and unnergised. If I do not move forwards I will slip backwards.

But there is a quiet counter voice. It says my worth is innate, not attached to a spiritual checklist. It says I do not need to do, but to be. It says here I am. It says, lovingly, that I am useless. It says 70% is perfect. It says practice Just Sitting. It says stop, and rest, and trust that what I do is enough.

everybody wants to be ugly

"Every body is beautiful". It's a feminist mantra, it's Dove's advertising campaign, it's the promise made by mothers and cosmetic companies and new age spiritualists. But I don't want to be beautiful anymore. I want to be ugly.

I want to be ugly because I want to be honest. I want the freedom not to be pretty. Not to be cute, or sweet, or interesting. To be tired, or frightening, or plain. To be blatantly, nakedly, ugly ole me. When I talk to people I want to hear their struggles, their challenges, and I want to tell them the truth: that I don't always want to meditate, that traveling alone is often hard and boring and frightening, that I argue with my husband and that I miss smoking cigarettes.

I can't tell everyone I meet everything. And in the online realm, I can't present it all, either. But I aim to maintain digital honesty - the rough unedited rawness without a braying for recognition. When I create blogs or profiles, I open myself up to interpretation. I have a responsibility to decide how much I share and with whom. But I also have a responsibility to be honest.

I allegedly blog, post, Facebook to convey truth, and yet I often strive to share a polished picture of myself. But I also work against this, to make sure my ego's sense of my beautiful self doesn't get out of hand.

Contemplating my relationship to nakedness and beauty led to an exploration of ugliness.

Publicly posted photos have unwritten rules that dictate a sliding scale of acceptablity. Those of pulled faces and intentional blasé are at the top of the pile...


...followed by those we defiantly upload to prove we don't care how we look in fancy dress or ridiculous head garb:
Then there are those posted by friends who we wish had captured us at a better angle. But to ask to remove the photos would be admitting our vanity. (See below for eg1. Smooshed Smile and eg2. Frantic Face). We experience the internal struggle: to Untag or not to Untag.

Next are the unflattering ones where we're caught with a mouth full of food:


And then there are the old selves. Perhaps we've taken them down, telling ourselves they're out of date. But that doesn't explain why our sixth grade photo stays up without an eyelash bat. Perhaps we can see too clearly how we were with ourselves, how we stood and how we looked at the camera.

These are who I was at that time. I remind myself as I write this how I look shouldn't matter.


So what happened when I originally posted all these unflattering photos? Not much. No one cared. There are too many blogs, too many posts, for people to notice a few bad photos. Internally, though, I react to every one. With loathing, with embarrassment, with affected nonchalance, but rarely with an honest equanimity.

They all make me squirm on some level, but they're not exactly ugly. So then I wondered...what if I purposely posted ugly photos?

And there, hiding behind the very thing I thought I was trying to avoid, I found liberation. I found freedom to not just allow my bad angles to be broadcast, but to actively, honestly, try to make myself ugly.

If people see me at my worst, I can stop trying to look my best.


I started looking through my photo archive to find photos of myself looking ugly, seeking to make a horror face horror show. But I couldn't find many.


I'm blindsided so often by billboards and magazines and even friends' cooing encouragements that my standards creep up to photoshopped airbrushed heights. But when I brought myself back down to the realm of normal, I could only classify a few of my past pictures as bordering on bad.

So I tried to take some. Then came the second revelation. I realised: it's actually quite difficult.

I've been so worried about trying to get the right angle when someone takes out a camera that I forgot that it's an effort to be ugly.

As I found more pictures, took more photos, contemplated what I need to do to make myself ugly...
...something unexpected happened.

The next time I looked in the mirror, I didn't see my imperfect skin or my warbling tummy. I saw a reflection of a body, with all these bits that on their own are fascinating. I have two legs, two arms, a waist, a neck. I'm not eating so I don't have to look. I'm not starving or starving myself.

I had to work pretty hard to get ugly.
Most surprisingly, I found it difficult to be ugly naked. I wonder how to digitally bare my base self? Reading a book naked, even with a paper bag over my head, didn't add up to ugliness.


Now when I get out of the shower, or fold over in yoga and see my tummy rolls stack up, or see my skin in a bad light, I don't sigh so loudly. My body is amazing.

Not beautiful, not cute, not pretty, not skinny, not curvy, not special. It might be all of those things. But taking on being ugly means I've taken it apart. And it isn't a sum of thigh measurements or swimsuit sizes or paper bags or Facebook photos. If I can be everything I've been on this page, then I have the freedom to become anything I want.

where I write

I write in the small soft space between bedcovers and eyelashes, in the place you settle into before you drift off. My favourite place to find words is in the sunshine on my duvet, but second place is between the raindrops on the window I see when my head’s down on the pillow.From my bed, I reach my dictionary and diaries off the shelf. I sit cross-legged with notes and rough drafts spread across the comforter. I sprawl on my stomach to tap on my laptop. I sit up against the headboard; the room becomes my head space; I slip into the dream story world. I glance up through the windowpanes when I need freedom from lower case thoughts, but then burrow back into tender down-filled definitions, before finally slipping book covers and laptops shut to go to sleep.

I write in between places, on the subway and sitting down on bridges. I grab words that whizz by like tube stops and slam them down onto the paper before they zoom away again. 

I write up down staircases. I sit on the side and squish against the wall so when ladies walk by with their dogs they become the next character in my stories about shoes.

I write in secret sunshine places, following the light from park benches onto balconies and the roofs of neighbours' houses.

I write in refracted rain, with the silhouettes of the light inside me reflecting on the windowpane and the shiny screen.

I write on cold park benches beside bamboo, where coloured pencils colour my words. All the adjectives a in pink, the nouns bright green. It takes me longer to get it all down, but colour coding helps me remember what I meant.