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Reference: Post 195. Interrupting the Show, and 163 METRO
It is a sunny day at the Hadron Shopping Center. A huge flat white desert of glistening ice covers the curbs and plantings that divide the parking lot. A yellow plow moves back and forth, having cleared only a fraction of the parking spaces.
Lark Bunlush steps carefully out of the doorway at the Patanjali Yoga Meditation Center with her rolled green yoga mat under her right arm. Followed by Maynard Keyes with his yellow mat under the arm of his massive fur-trimmed orange down jacket, reaching below the knee. Ice chunks are piled up on either side of the narrow path to the parking lot.
I stop by the entrance to Ab and Cheek Fitness Center, next door, to let them by on the narrow lane cleared of ice on the sidewalk.
“Hi, Fred, are you going to work out?”
“Me, Maynard? That will be the day.”
“It will strengthen your ice-breaking muscles!”
“I would settle for my own personal jackhammer.”
“Yeah, I could use one too, Fred. Look at this ice! It’s at least eight inches thick.” Lark points to the digital thermometer outside the bank. “It is only 16 degrees out here.”
She kicks a chunk of ice out of her way and nearly loses her balance. Maynard steps forward and grabs her wrist.
“It was like grains of sugar coming down, Fred.”
“I know, Lark, not a flake to be seen.”
Maynard kicks another chunk of ice.
“It fell like rain last night, not floating quietly in the dark.”
Maynard points toward a nearby ice mountain rising at the end of the plow’s run.
“It’s like sedimentary rock. Look at the stripey sediments over there where the plow cut a lane through.”
A Tesla pickup with blade attached pushes a growing wave of ice and snow past us towards the ice mountain.
“Hey Fred!”
It is Albrecht. He opens the window and raises the blade, reverses the truck, and pulls up by the sidewalk.
“Albrecht, do you know Lark and Maynard?”
“No, sir, how are you doing, there?”
Maynard removes his gold-coated sunglasses.
“Glad to meetcha.”
“Be seeing you.”
Lark waves a mitten at him. Albrecht lowers the blade and plows on.
“Maynard, I don’t see your car anywhere.”
“No, Fred, it is iced in, over in DC. Lark gave me a lift in her Toyota.”
“Yeah, I picked him up at the Metro. Boyd and my neighbor cleared the car and driveway. It took all morning.”
“For which I thank you and Boyd and them, Lark. I needed an ice ax and mountaineering crampons to get to your car, over the Andes the plow put up against the curb.”
“Have you got time for coffee, Fred?”
“Sure, Lark, Chez Roget looks open.”
We walk over. There are plenty of empty tables. Lark and I sit down at a small table by the front window. Maynard buys a round of coffees at the counter.
“So, Lark, I am glad to see you up and about!”
“Yeah, Maynard has been so kind. I call him ‘mother hen’!”
“Yes, he has a mass of feathers on today.”
“Right.”
“How are you doing with your asanas?”
“Oh, okay, I guess. I have started Yoga and meditation again, and joined a Buddhist Zoom group.”
“Are you reading any of the dialogues?”
“We have been into ‘The Milinda Panha’.”
“What is that?”
“The Questions of King Milinda, Fred.”
Maynard puts down three coffees for us and takes off his jacket, which then engulfs his small chair in orange nylon. “That’s it, a Pali text, recounting the questions of the Bactrian Greek King, Milinda or Menander, put to the sage Nagasena.”
“Yes, I think Milinda was a descendant of one of Alexander the Great’s generals.”
“That’s it, Lark.”
“So, you are both in this Zoom group.”
Maynard gathers the nylon around his chair, trying to make way for new customers. “I have been an occasional participant for years. I got back into it when Boyd showed an interest.”
Lark puts her mittens on the table, which barely has room for them. “Fred, the main thing I have learned from Buddhism is to accept whatever comes to mind, know what it is, and let it go.”
“The letting go can be hard, Lark.”
“Yeah, a lot of toxic stuff built up and poisoned my consciousness.”
“Maynard, your jacket is almost the color of a Buddhist Monk’s robes.”
“A little too flashy for a kāṣāya, I think.”
“True, you are not the monkish type.”
“Quite so, Fred, as a matter of fact, I have been attending services at the National Cathedral. It is not far from the Sorrell sister’s haven.”
“You are full of surprises, Maynard.”
“The cathedral itself, its interior light, sounds, and atmosphere, all work on me.”
“You have said that before. What do you mean, ‘working on me’.”
“I mean, Lark, that it takes me out of myself. It’s all rather intuitive and hard to explain when I think about it.”
“Well, that sounds quite mystical to me.”
“So it is, Fred, in fact, it is best not to think about it. By the way, Fred, are you following the eightfold path?”
“Nowhere near, I have a lot of plowing to do, to clear the way!”
“Don’t we all!”
Lark sips her coffee and recites the eightfold path.
“Right View: Notice how all things change.
Right Intention: Choose kindness and compassion.
Right Speech: Speak truthfully.
Right Action: Do what helps, not harms.
Right Livelihood: Earn your living ethically.
Right Effort: Be diligent in your practice.
Right Mindfulness: Pay attention to what’s happening.
Right Concentration: Meditate for clarity and concentration.”
“Well done, Lark!”
“Fred, I can memorize anything; following the path is something else.”
“Yes, we are bombarded with insstent distractions in all the media.”
“I know what you mean, Maynard, You Tube is currently taking up far too much of my time.”
“Oh, I quite understand, Fred. Think of it. The last four generations have been conditioned by commercial TV.”
“Maynard, my attention is absorbed by it.”
“That’s why politicians have to entertain us to succeed.”
“We, who live in a republic based on noble ideas from classical Greece and Rome!”
“That all came through the Enlightenment, Maynard.”
“Fred, the notion of self-mastery and enlightenment has given way to seduction.”
“It’s all PR now.”
“Our Gesellschaft ist aufgelöst!”
“You mean our system is dissolving?”
“Yes, in an acid swamp called social media!”
“Come on, Maynard, it isn’t all acidic.”
“No, but I think its effect is largely sour and poisonous.”
Lark’s two black leather mittens fall off the crowded table when she picks up her rapidly cooling coffee. “It is a wilderness.”
“Labyrinthine!”
“Yeah, Fred, and I got lost in it and was about ready to die when you guys came over with Boyd.”
“You were in a real swivet, my dear.”
“You and your obscure vocab, Maynard!”
“Call it panic, or aggravated nervousness.”
“I would call it hell!”
“You should know, Lark.”
“Fred, I am an activist. Always have been and now I have stalled.”
“Cluck! Cluck! Cluck! Lark, you’re revving up now in a good and steady eightfold way.”
“Hear that, Fred?”
“Oh, Mother Hen, you mean?”
“He has been clucking at me for months.”
“She is part of my brood, Fred!”
“How about that, Maynard! Who else are you raising?”
“Why, the Sorrel girls!
“Seems to me you have a flock of raptors, there.”
“They are lively, all right, and strong. You might say I am fostering their Gemeinschaft.”
“Well, I might if my German were up to it.”
