Wiped the rain off the garden chairs. It’s not exactly outdoor weather, but too much interiority becomes claustrophobic. The openness of outside, of nature, is good. Wet September garden: spider’s webs spangled with raindrops, nasturtiums, marrow vines encroaching over the fence, everything late and leggy ... and the damp organic smell of humus: everything ending and beginning at the same time.

Sometimes it’s easier to write when I’m struggling than when the path appears clear and unobstructed. Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I got kind of restrung at Samye Ling ... rewired. My synapses have been reconnected in different ways. I think I said that last year, but this is deeper somehow. I came into a closer relationship with the lineage and the monastery and the teachers and the practices. A lot that had seemed intellectual to me distilled itself into something deep and personal and direct. I suppose this is only what the ngöndro promises, but, still, it comes as a sort of surprise to me to find that it delivers.

I have been focused on finishing the ngöndro so that I can get on with something else; now, though, I’m feeling that this kind of practice is something I want to be engaged with permanently. Perhaps what I have most resisted is the way in which the ngondro permeates my life – because the accumulations are so large that if you’re not in a three-year retreat, you have to be doing them all the time to make any significant pile. But actually this is the way in which, to me anyway, the ngondro turns out to be most profound: because it sacralises everything: it makes the whole of life a sacrament. In words this sounds to me kind of trite, but the depth of experiencing it, moment by moment, absolutely isn’t.

This connects for me with resistance, because when everything is a sacrament, there’s nothing to resist. And when resistance dissolves, what comes in its place is a certain buoyancy, a lightness, a sort of fundamental laughter at the nature of things and the way we keep getting taken in: nothing being taken in by nothing.

As ever when some body of knowledge or practice seeps down, when it is assimilated on a deeper level, many pathways have opened. So many that it’s a bit overwhelming. I see that they connect, because I am holding all the ends, like so many balls of string. They connect because I am the connecting point, and somehow I know they all join up again at the other end. Some of them may turn out to be blind, but most of them need to be walked in order to tie this knot, and that is exciting, challenging and a little bit breathtaking.

Tsultrim Allione has written about how much of spiritual life must remain unspoken. This is not because certain practices, or aspects of practices, are traditionally labelled esoteric (although some of mine are) but because some spiritual processes need silence to mature, as a seed needs the darkness of the earth. I’ve often been frustrated and dismayed at the way the meaning of redolent experiences dissolves when I attempt to put them into words. It seems to me now that this insubmissibility to language is really just the inherent way in which the process protects itself. It is necessary. While this blog might appear to be an exposure, really it tells only a fraction of a part of one story, and it can’t be any other way.