‘BODIES ARE FAILING THINGS…ALWAYS OVERCOME BY TIME’ (For Mala Young: a Dharma Sister Dying Of Cancer) Revisiting, at the age of 78, a poem I wrote in 1980 for the fatally ill mother of two young sons

CLICK TO HEAR A POEM written while staying at the private apartment of Chogyal Namkhai Norbu in Formia, Italy, working on his book ‘The Crystal And The Way Of Light, Sutra, Tantra, And Dzogchen‘

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CLICK ON THE PLAY BUTTON above at the right hand side of the page to listen to John Shane reading the poem he wrote for Mala Young in 1980…

And please also scroll down to read the full text of the poem at the end of this post.

When you there, you can listen to Bob Dylan, as an old man, singing a song he wrote as young man - ‘May You Stay Forever Young’, in the version that was featured in his pandemic-era online only TV special ‘Shadow Kingdom’.

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I met Mala Young in the 1970s when I was living in Herefordshire and traveling around the West Midlands playing music, reading poetry, and teaching Creative Writing.

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A young John Shane playing his guitar during a poetry reading at a folk club in a pub in the Welsh border country. I will write more about my travels around the UK performing my poetry and music in future posts, and will include in my posts recordings of some of the songs I wrote at that time.. (Photo: The Hereford Times.)

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Mala lived with her husband Bob and two very young sons, Rishi and Dorje, in the nearby West Midlands town of Worcester, where she had some years earlier formed a diverse Buddhist meditation group that she continued to lead, the members of which were from several different traditions, but who, with Mala’s guidance, all studied and practiced meditation together.

I had already been studying and practicing Buddhist meditation for many years, and, since Worcester was not far from the city of Hereford, the nearest town to my old cottage home in Westhope, I often performed in Worcester, and when I did so, I would visit Mala and her family, often on the days or evenings when her Buddhist group was meeting.

There weren’t many Buddhists in Herefordshire in those days, so I enjoyed meeting up at Mala and Bob’s house with others who shared my interests.

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The ‘Fasting Buddha’ statue that you can see in the photo above on this page is a masterpiece in ancient Gandhara tradition that was excavated in Sikri, Pakistan, in the 19th century. It probably dates to the 2nd century BC.

Since the figure that the statue portrays is the Buddha before his enlightenment, the statue should perhaps really be called the "Fasting Bodhisattva" or even, the "Fasting Siddhartha”, to use the personal name of the young prince who became the Buddha.

Siddhartha Gautama tried many ascetic practices, including starving himself until he resembled a living skeleton, before he came to understand that - rather than mortification of the body through the practice of austerities - it is profound meditation and the resulting insight gained from it that leads to the ending of suffering, or ‘enlightenment’, the quality of being fully awake and at peace, which is what the name ‘Buddha’ means.

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After she developed cancer and grew more and more ill, Mala told me that her cancer made her feel as if her body was beginning to resemble the body of the Buddha in that statue of the Fasting Buddha, and that’s why I’ve included the photo of it here.

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A postcard of Formia….The Namkhai family apartment in Formia, a small town half way between Rome and Naples, was located in a block of flats not far from the sea, with a mountain behind it where Norbu Rinpoche encouraged me, while I was staying with him, to make several retreats living in a tent, with him coming up the mountain in his car to check on my progress and to bring me food and fresh water every few days…I will tell the story of those retreats on the mountain in Formia here on Substack in a future post…

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In 1980, I left my home in rural Herefordshire to travel to Italy to work with my teacher the Dzogchen Master Chogyal Namkhai Norbu on a book of his teachings that, when it was finally published after four years of hard work, had the title ‘The Crystal And The Way Of Light: Sutra, Tantra, and Dzogchen’.

We did the first six months of work on the book together while I was staying at Rinpoche’s private family apartment in Formia, a small seaside town half-way between Rome and Naples, where Rinpoche lived with his wife and two children when he wasn’t teaching at the Oriental Institute of the University of Naples, where he was a Professor, and when he wasn’t away leading a meditation retreat somewhere in the world.

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Chogyal Namkhai Norbu showing a crystal rock to illustrate the Dzogchen teachings while leading a retreat in California. (Photo: John Shane.)

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Chogyal Namkhai Norbu was born, raised, and educated in Tibet, but when wearing a Western hat, he looked so much like a Native American that, when we traveled to meet Native American leaders on their reservations, before he was introduced and it was explained who he was, Native Americans sometimes mistook him for one them.

I will write the wild story of our travel to Native American reservations in a subsequent post.

At the right of the photo above you can see Chogyal Namkhai Norbu wearing a Western hat while we were visiting Carl Gorman, the Medicine Chief of the Navaho Nation. They are standing outside Carl’s trailer home in Window Rock, Arizona.

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While I was away in Italy, Mala and I continued to keep in touch with each other by writing letters back and forth between us.

By this time, Chogyal Namkhai Norbu had already been giving Dzogchen teachings for several years and already had students who lived in many different countries, but he had not yet founded any of the many meditation centres that developed around the world as the number of his students grew over the next decade.

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Back in those days - a long time before people had cell phones or personal computers at home that could be connected to the internet (which hadn’t even been invented yet) - in the living room of Rinpoche’s apartment there was a beige bakelite Telecom Italia landline telephone with a circular dial that was plugged into the wall at the end of a long black curly wire and it was this phone that provided the main way for him and his family to communicate with the world around them.

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During the six months that I stayed at Rinpoche’s apartment sleeping on the sofa in the living room and working with Rinpoche each day, that phone would ring at intervals and at least two or three times a day Norbu Rinpoche would pick up the receiver to find himself speaking to someone who had either themselves just been given a diagnosis of some kind of serious illness, or who had had some accident, or who wanted to talk to him about some other person – perhaps a friend or a loved one – who was caught up in a drama of physical or mental suffering of one kind or another.

Listening to Rinpoche respond to these urgent calls asking for his help and hearing the advice that he gave as he answered those who phoned him, I came to realize for the first time the weight of the responsibility that he carried as a result of his having accepted the role of becoming the spiritual teacher of so many people.

I didn’t, of course, myself have the same kind of responsibilities that Rinpoche had, but while I was staying with him and his family at their home in Formia, I did receive letters from my friends, sometimes asking for advice, and one day I received a letter from Mala back in England in which she told me of her despair at her deteriorating physical condition.

Despite the many painful difficulties her cancer caused her - as well as looking after her two very young boys and her husband - Mala had tried to continue giving weekly teachings to her Dharma group that met in the living room of her family home in Worcester.

But, finally, she found she couldn’t continue teaching, and that’s what she wrote to tell me in the letter I received at Rinpoche’s apartment in Formia.

Inspired by the example of Rinpoche’s compassionate responses to the people who phoned him, I wrote the poem you can read and hear on this page, and I sent it to Mala in a letter that I mailed to her by walking down into town from Rinpoche’s apartment to get to the local post office.

If you are even minimally aware of the Buddha’s teachings, you will notice that in the poem I remind Mala (and myself) of some basic points of the Buddha’s teachings that Mala herself had taught many times, including the truth of impermanence and the fact that our sense of a fixed self separate from a world-out-there defined as ‘other’ is a false construct, attachment to which is a main cause of our suffering.

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Seeking to comfort Mala, whose life, I learned from her letter, was then ebbing away, I wrote in the poem that I sent her the lines ‘..bodies are failing things, always overcome by time..’., to remind her of the Buddha’s teachings on the inevitability of old age illness and death - topics that she was very familiar with because she herself had taught them to others for many years.

The idea behind my writing those lines to her was that it would help her to accept her difficult condition if she remembered the Buddha’s teachings that the condition she herself was then suffering is one that will, sooner or later, be shared by all living beings.

But, back then, of course, the version of myself that wrote the poem was a young man in good health, in what we call ‘the prime of life’, and even my parents were also both still alive and were not yet very old.

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So, even though when I was writing the poem to Mala, I was fully aware of my own mortality, the prospect of my own death nevertheless was something that I could regard as being a long way off, something that was likely to occur sometime in the - perhaps distant - future.

But - now that I’ve reached the age of 78 and several years have passed since my both parents and my teacher Norbu Rinpoche have passed away - how do the words of the poem that I wrote for my dying friend when I was still a young man seem to me..?

Well…I’m now a grandfather six times over, and, as Leonard Cohen sang in one of his later songs - ‘I ache in the places where I used to play…’

My physical condition is not bad for someone well on the way to being 80 years of age, but, at the same time, my experience of my body is completely different from how it was when I was young.

And, at the same time that I’m witnessing my own normal age-related physical decline, I’m also, of course, witnessing, the decline of many of my friends and relatives who are in the same age group as me.

So…no one would question that it’s certainly true that ‘Bodies are failing things, always overcome by time…’, as I wrote in my poem, and it’s also true that my own body is starting to fail in various ways, and will obviously continue to do so as time goes ahead.

But…but….but…on the other hand….growing older has also brought a wider perspective on life that I lacked when I was younger, and it’s from that perspective that - while I’m still physically and mentally able to do so - I decided to begin to publish own my work again after not doing so for the many decades that I preferred instead to dedicate myself to my promoting my teacher Chogyal Namkhai Norbu and his work rather than myself and my own, while at the same time maintaining ‘noble silence’ in public and continuing to do long personal retreats to deepen my understanding of the teachings I had received from Norbu Rinpoche and from many other teachers of different traditions.

Although I did stop publishing my own work (except in the journal of the International Dzogchen Community, ‘The Mirror’, of which I was a Founding Editor), I never stopped writing, and, as a result, I have an archive of poetry, prose, songs and music that I’ve written over the years which I’ve now begun to curate with a view to publishing it here on Substack.

And, since the contents of my archive documents the story of my life principally in the poetry I wrote over the years but didn’t publish, I decided to give my publication here the title ‘The Way Of the Poet - John Shane’.

Along with publishing my own poetry here, I’ll also be continuing to write here not only about the art of Creative Writing, which I used to teach, but also about the mind and meditation, which I hope to do without dogma and beyond limits of tradition, school, or sect.

And I will continue to publish work by other writers that expands on the main themes of my own work and on my other interests.

I’ll also be publishing audio I recorded and video that I shot on my travels round the world over the years, as well as creating a podcast

I’m deeply grateful to those of you who have already joined me on this journey along ‘The Way Of the Poet’ by subscribing to my publication here on Substack.

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Time is very precious, so thank you for sharing your time with me.

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If, on the other hand, you are reading this while just visiting my publication here online, I invite you to please click on the subscribe button so that we can travel ‘The Way Of The Poet’ together.

And, of course, if anyone at all has enjoyed my writing, I invite you to please click the ‘like’ or ‘share’ buttons. We are all subject to The Mighty Al-Go-Rhythm, and clicks on those ‘like’ and ‘share’ buttons, along with clicks on the ‘subscription’ button, make all the difference in determining whether a publication is promoted by the platform to be seen other people or is isolated and ignored.

Please also recommend my Substack publication to your friends and, if you have a Substack publication yourself, to your followers and subscribers.

If you feel moved to do so, also please do leave a comment - or one of your own short poems - in the comments section at the foot my posts.

I look forward to hearing from you.

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Thank you for being here….

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BE WELL AND LIVE LONG….

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J.S

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Below is the full text of John Shane’s poem..and don’t forget that, after the text of the poem, at the foot of the page you can listen to Bob Dylan’s song ‘Forever Young’.

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Bodies Are Failing Things,

Always Overcome By Time

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(For Mala Young: a Dharma Sister Dying Of Cancer)

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John Shane

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15th. May, 1980. Formia, Italy.

(Written at the private apartment

of the Dzogchen Master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu,

whilst staying there as a guest.)

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Bodies are failing things, Mala,

always overcome by time,

and yet body, form and matter

are but grosser forms of mind.

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Freedom is hard fought for

and hard won.

The truth is often bitter,

answers often paradoxes,

questions seldom one.

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Surrendering seems easy

as long as we can

hold a little something back;

the body is a vehicle,

yet when it gets weak,

our fear makes our vision black.

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Death and darkness

are not easy things to face.

Each stands alone,

in this there’s nothing new.

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Yet each, alone, is also

fully part of all around;

Mala, none of this

is news to you.

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Searching for

an independent self,

none can be found;

all is impermanent,

all interpenetrating;

mind is essentially free

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Only our conditioning

ties us down,

preventing us from being

all that we could be.

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But these are only words,

each one of them a liar,

these are only words

and your pain is like a fire.

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Yes, it burns, but its burning

is like a purifying flame.

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There is no need for

any sense of guilt,

there is no blame.

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Your cancer is not

a cause for shame.

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Fire, needing

darkness

to show light,

flows upwards

in the river

of the night.

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Brave sister,

proud lioness,

defender of the dharma,

in the dancing dream of life

your song is singing true

even though, at times,

your sickness

may seem to be undoing you.

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Unfolding itself and

folding itself

at the same time,

in-breath and out-breath,

weaves the way,

between life and death.

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We’re always afraid of

the unknown somehow

but there’s nowhere to go, Mala,

because it’s always

here and now;

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and I wanted to send you my love

and sympathy of angels

and, of course, words won’t do,

but words are all I have to send,

and so I send them to you.

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CLICK ON THE PLAY BUTTON ABOVE at the right hand side of the page to listen to BOB DYLAN sing - as an old man - a song he wrote and first sang as a young man, ‘MAY YOU STAY FOREVER YOUNG’, in the version recorded during his pandemic era online only TV special ‘Shadow Kingdom’…

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The back of the beyond…? JS, currently something of an elder, on retreat, his now completely silver-grey hair plaited by his grown-up daughters….

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BE WELL AND LIVE LONG

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