Ground

on body, belonging, and the idea of home

I didn’t pay attention to the taxi driver at first. I was coming away from a week-long Buddhist retreat. I was shaken. I was on a high. I was looking forward to going home and seeing my family. Without realising it, I was counting on a bit of peace.

I got into the back seat and closed the door. I told him my friends would be out in a moment.

‘Where are you from?’ he said.

This is my least favourite question. ‘Edinburgh,’ I said.

‘You don’t sound Scottish.’

He didn’t turn around. I could see his profile, the way his forehead receded from a prominent nose. There was something thin and rat-like about his face. Already, I disliked him.

‘I’m not,’ I said.

‘Right, so you’re living in Edinburgh. I asked where you were from.’

At this point, my friends came out of the cloister door and I got out of the taxi to help with their bags. I might, possibly, have grunted.

The truth is, I don’t know where I’m from. It’s not that I’ve had a particularly adventurous life. I was born in Buckinghamshire but we moved when I was two and I don’t remember it. We lived in the Forest of Dean until I was seven, then in Suffolk for a few years, then Norfolk. When I left home, I continued to move: Birmingham for a year, then Norwich for a lost-footed gap year that became two. Then university in the Midlands followed by Winchester, Southampton, and London. In London I moved from Shepherd’s Bush to Islington, then on to Homerton within two years. And then Scotland. I’ve lived here now for twenty years, much longer than I ever lived anywhere else. But it’s perfectly clear – to me and to everyone else – that it isn’t where I’m from. In fact, I’m not from anywhere. Not in the way the taxi driver meant. However much I love Scotland, as soon as I open my mouth it’s clear I don’t belong. But I have to live somewhere.

Sometimes I decide this fundamental homelessness suits me. Other times, not so much. There’s a concept in Buddhism I love called anatta. Often translated as ‘no soul’ it is perhaps better understood as no separate or permanently existing self. There is a sense in which we are constantly co-arising in the moment along with everything else. If this is true, if everything is in constant flux, each shifting entity dependent on an infinite array of other shifting entities, it makes little sense to talk about a person as a product of a particular nation or place. That’s what I would have liked to tell that taxi driver, but there was no way to say it.

I glanced at his profile. I was already kicking myself for letting him rile me. Right after a week’s retreat too. It was a long way to the train station. As he drove (too fast, in my opinion) I had time to decide the problem was the way he was determined to define me. Surely it was for me to decide where I was, or wasn’t, from.

Sitting in the front, one of my friends asked if he could drop us at a particular car park, near the platform, because she had a heavy suitcase.

‘I don’t want to finish myself off,’ she said.

‘What do you mean, finish yourself off?’ he said. ‘You’ve just had a week relaxing. You’ve only just started.’

As far as I was concerned a Buddhist retreat is not relaxing; it’s about doing the challenging work of facing yourself as you really are, so you can go back out and be kinder in the world. As far as I was concerned, that taxi driver could have done with a few Buddhist retreats himself.

Looking back from a safe distance, I can acknowledge there was a script running that day, that was not of my choosing, nor of his. He was the hard-working man, no nonsense, salt of earth. I was – what? Female? Self-indulgent? Liberal? There were politics at play, regional and national pride, old-fashioned misogyny.

And we were paying him. So there was that.

I saw my friend laugh it off and it was clear to me I should have done the same. We buzzed across a cattle grid and shot up the hill between fields of sheep. As we rounded a corner, he began to tell the others the story of our conversation.

‘And then she got out of the taxi,’ he said at last. ‘Without answering my question.’

Trying to keep the defensive pitch from my voice I started to explain myself.

‘I never know what to say,’ I said. ‘I don’t know where I’m from.’

But it was clear we had taken against each other: that he didn’t like the cut of my jib and I didn’t like the cut of his. When we got to the station he went round the back of the car and took my friends’ cases from the boot. Then he nodded to mine.

‘And that’s yours,’ he said.

I took my bag and swung it onto my back. I looked him in the eye. I thanked him. From the look on his face, I could see I was not forgiven. From the way I’m still thinking about this several days later I can see that, despite my best intentions, neither was he.

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My partner and I have lived together in the same Edinburgh flat for nearly a decade. We’ve had a child. We’ve been through family illness and a death. There has been, believe it or not, a pandemic. We’ve been through the usual storms of joy and distress. Now we’re on the move again. Our plan is to relocate to a village in the Cairngorms. The area we have our eyes on is surrounded by ancient pine forest and flanked by mountains. It is very beautiful but, on the face of it, such a move makes little sense. We will be leaving behind friends and work, things we enjoy, the city and all its diversions: cinemas and yoga studios, coding clubs and choirs. If we get our wish, our nearest city would be over thirty miles away, too far for a casual visit. There will be inconvenience. There will be freezing temperatures and snow days. Even writing that down I’m impatient; I can hardly wait.

Recently we booked a cottage for the week and drove up the A9 to check the place out, arriving in the dark. The next morning I walked out alone into the forest: its great silence. The silken rustle of pine needles was the only sound for miles, whispering above my head. As I looked up through unfathomable branches to the sky something said yes and I knew that I could trust it.

It’s change I want. Maybe it’s my age. There comes a point when life no longer seems endless or even very long. As my body starts to creak and ache I crave something that’s just beginning, something fresh. Presenting myself with two paths as I have, of course I want to choose the one less travelled. I’m not sure how much of this is fantasy, but I wonder how it might change a person to live mostly among trees and mountains: to see, each day, the vaulted air unencumbered by human form and ambition. I wonder how I might change in such a place.

During our week at the monastery, a monk encouraged us to sit in the meditation hall not so much as individual ant-like beings, each wrapped up in our own desires and aversions, but as the hall itself. Trying to see what she meant I felt that space pulsating at my back, its energy not mine, yet not not-mine. There were moments I became so tall and wide that my body, sitting there, seemed small. I could almost hold myself in the palm of my own hand. Such a practice is not to deny the overwhelm and confusion of life but to connect it into something bigger, something kinder.

We know our nervous systems continue to be rewired by thought, action and experience throughout the lifespan. In light of this, it’s clear that such a hall-like posture, repeated over time, could recreate us. Sitting there on the third day, the room buzzing around me, remembering our small, cramped flat in Edinburgh, I imagined how it would be to meditate within an ancient forest, one that stretched for miles in all directions. I might become more root and branch than bone and flesh. Hoping for such a turn of events seemed too much to ask of life. It seemed unfair that such forest dwelling should be offered to me but not to all. And it is unfair. Especially because, as the taxi driver reminded me, I’m not from that place. I’m not even Scottish.

Furthermore, I knew I couldn’t make my life conditional on any such lucky turn of events. If you want true peace you have to be able to find it anywhere, to ground yourself in any place (and any irritating conversation). And yet the humming, almost human silence of an ancient swath of pines. You couldn’t say no to that.

Life multiplies in all directions, faster than thought, too complex for our bean-counting brains. Considering what is best, not only for myself but also for my partner and child, and not only now but in the future, is too much to compute. Perhaps it’s always like that. Yet, somehow, decisions get made. We choose. We act.       

Sitting in the hall towards the end of the retreat, shoulders tight no matter what I did, a twinge in my right knee, torso in a twist, it became clear to me I was pulling up, away from my own experience. I didn’t want to see or feel my life as it really was. As so often I felt as if I was outside, looking at myself through a window. That even there I didn’t belong.

It scares me how easy it would be to live my entire life this way, always turning from actual experience into some story or other, exiled from myself. Yet recognising this opens another set of possibilities. What if body was our landscape, the only home we have? Or, not the body but through it: down and out and through. The more I sit there, the less solid I am. I see then how I habitually make myself up, a buzz of energy here, a glimpse of knee there and from these scant facts I create an entire body and a life. I’ve never even seen my face.

Here in this quiet evening kitchen, I ground myself again. The body isn’t mine. I can’t fix or name it. I don’t tell my heart to beat; I don’t know when it will stop. Weather passes through: pressure builds; rain pours in torrents. It reminds me of the vagus nerve, the so-called ‘wandering’ nerve that links to almost every organ in the body, affecting our digestion, the secretion of hormones, and the beating of our hearts. I can’t help picturing it as a tiny robed figure traversing the body’s mountains and forests, never resting, making rounds and offerings, ringing a bell at every shrine. It isn’t really this way; a nerve is more path than pilgrim. But I like the image. It is as if there’s something watchful there, independent of ‘me’, keeping me safe while the brain is still upstairs in its office, writing its policies, making its plans. Before the printer has finished spewing it all out onto the floor, each one is obsolete.

I live a life distracted. Yet I’ve been here, in this body, all the time. I’m here now, if only I could feel it. And even if I can’t. The concept of anatta says there’s nowhere to go back to. I agree with that. I’m not from anywhere. That doesn’t mean I don’t belong.

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