Author Archives: mattpadwick

I wasn’t worried – I had a micro-flashlight with fresh batteries and a blessed shell-fish  in my back-pack – what could go wrong?

I bump into someone. He’d had a crash. Said his recovery began when he took his hands off the steering wheel. “And your feet off the pedals.” added his wife. Yes, he nodded, that too.

The sun rises slowly to a bird’s call and the goat’s bell and the lap, lap, lap of the tide on the pebble beach. There are no roads here everybody sets there watch by the morning ferry which is late again.

Standing in a vast field row-upon-row of carrots green-tops touching the horizon I pull just one.

When Ed finally arrived at The Himalaya Guesthouse and Café in Darjeeling he was given a key and directions to his room. The door was already unlocked, the television was on, he went in.  “Hello?”

Some people like being in a queue, it’s comforting, somehow proving that they are in the right place at the right time, and engaged in valid activity. For Ed it was almost always the opposite. Like now. It was the middle of the night, the whole world was in bed and asleep, but not him.

The cars were already travelling fast as they passed. It would be difficult for the drivers to pull over here even if they wanted to. He was sure most of them didn’t even see him. The cars were mostly big, usually with just one pale person inside; while accelerating they were steering, changing gear, drinkingContinue reading “edge of unknowing”

He kept coming back to the silence. It was so big. And surprising. Even when a donkey brayed somewhere in the same valley – loud, long and loaded with loneliness – it did not change the silence, it enhanced it. Like jewels around a beautiful neck.

Ed was reading a book in a dentist’s waiting room. “The flower grows without mistakes. A man must grow himself until he understands the intelligence of a flower.  He looked up from the book. There were no flowers, just a tank of goldfish swimming in circles.

Sometimes it was during the breaks that the real meditation happened – moments when it was obvious that wisdom is not something you have, but a wavelength you tune into.