‘…In a car you‘re always in a compartment,
and because you’re use to it you don‘t realize that through that car window
everything you see is just more TV. …On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re
completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just
watching it any more, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.’ From
the opening passage of Robert Pirsig’s, Zen
And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance
Monday
morning and the talk at the Pickwick Café in Teignmouth is about BCW. A friend
of mine is saying how much he enjoyed the visit we made with Martin. It had been
great to be out somewhere so undeveloped, but he warns me that once you set
yourself up to help the ‘disabled’, then the rules and regulations that come
with the money, may mean you end up destroying the very experience you’re
trying to offer! And he should know if anyone does.
Skirting
the edge of Channing’s Wood on the way from Denbury he’d said: ‘That’s one I
was never in!’ He’s in his sixties now, and has spent a total of 25 years of
his life either in prisons or other secure environments. He was put on
psychiatric drugs whilst still a child, and labelled with a severe mental
illness as a young man.
Only
two years ago workers were telling him he would never live independently in the
community. I remember being with him about a year ago, and after ten minutes or
so of intense talk, he apologised and said he’d have to stop. I assumed it was
because of the emotional nature of what we were talking about, but I was quite
wrong, it was because he was not use to talking - full stop. The muscles that
make speech, needed a rest!
But
it wasn’t always that way, for about 12 years he was a casual agricultural
labourer, migrating with the seasons on his bike from Cornwall to Scotland. And
it becomes obvious as we set off to climb Beacon Hill that he knows more about
trees than we do!
His
community now centres around his local church, and his spirituality is
something about letting go of that preoccupation with ‘self’ that comes with
chronic mental distress. Once you’ve got yourself together you can start being
of use to others.
The
writer Karen Armstrong argues that the spiritual is making others, or other
things, the central focus of your life, allowing transcendent experiences -
going beyond our usually limited perception of others - and being guided by
what seems a ‘golden rule’ of all faiths - doing to others, as you would have
them do to you!
Going
up the hill I’m still a little confused by the red and blue trails, but the
other two expect me to lead, and to be carrying in my rucksack anything they
might need! (And Martin’s the worker,
the one being paid to be there). At the summit I find myself giving up water,
sandwiches and chocolate.
My
friend and I are of course as different as chalk and cheese. He’s just
beginning the challenge of learning to read and write. But since we are
everything the other is not, ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’.
My
ambition is that he should get to grips with that great philosophical work Zen And The Art Of
Motorcycle Maintenance. He is steeped in the biker ‘culture’ of the last
forty years, whilst I know about philosophy and meditation. But the real
connection of course is that Pirsig himself spent time in a psychiatric
hospital, and was at one time, like yours truly, diagnosed as a manic
depressive!
(Photos from Flickr: The Broadhempston Community Woodland)
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