2015/11/18

A TRANS SIBERIAN MEDITATION

It’s dark on the Trans Siberian Express in winter. The monochrome of an endless blank white landscape is replaced by the early departure of the sun. Then the windows are consumed by blackness, and all you can see is the occasional streetlight, passing like a shooting star.

After adjusting to it, the drone of steel on steel below becomes as a friend, and something familiar amongst the occasional rumbling of Russian, and the fact that the train is near empty, as even most Russians don’t travel by it at this time of year.

It is a particular form of solitude, and from time to time I go to the restaurant car where Irina, with her black teeth and iron authority, pours me tea. Having initially seemed irritated by my presence, she has somehow thawed in her aspect, maybe in reconsidering after so few passengers entered, that we may as well be friendly, or at least put up with one another. She is now pushing Martini on me but Dmitry has already seen me off in Moscow with 96% shots, & I struggle to put forward that my refusal is not an act of rudeness, but an act of survival.

I have many forms of solitude, and in it I seemingly find an infinite variety of versions of myself. There is the child which feels fear. Not of the surroundings or of the people (not ever) but with the simple confrontation of myself without attachments. I am traveling further from home than I’ve ever been.

The only way back is by rail, and the trains arrive at best twice a week. Since Russia has 9 different time zones, one has the sense not that you are being abandoned, but rather that you are abandoning yourself.

Yet these times of anxiety at the last pass, and usually when a reconnection is made to the heart. It’s corridors are long, and its rooms are filled with the people I love.

And in loving them I miss them, and in missing them I am returned to my bones, my being. At one time I moved far from people, into the deepest of disconnects. And in that place I found the realisation that I was in danger of becoming trapped in the one place on earth I didn’t wish to be – cut off from the capacity to give and receive love. The way back was fraught, but I felt that I had discovered some type of truth in the wilderness, and its sanctity and the responsibility to harbour it gave me strength for my life and for my return. And it was then that my journey truly began. Because all it is is to carry the simplest of messages, which is the hardest to find, if not to live.

When my emotional self is sated, i find at last the deepest peace. It is Buddha like, because I have been through both the edge of anxiety and the passion on an emotional reconnect. It is then that finally I can allow myself to notice myself. The parts of my body that ache from travel and carrying gear, the part of my heart that is currently digesting loss and going through the process of grieving.

And it unfolds like a flower, unfurls as if from a released fist, and I find myself in a contented weariness. Could it be that I am exactly where I am meant to be? Is it not always so in our lives? Even our dead ends are revelations. And at the moment there are no dead ends, just a steel line moving forward into the vanishing point where future lives converge – the tracks, my life, what we create, the great moving on inherent in nature, and eventually to somewhere.