
It is a warm enough morning for him to practice outside today.
Taking his gaze upwards, he is reminded of a beautiful Van Gogh painting he saw once in Paris, or was it Spain? Maybe it was in London. He can’t recall exactly where, and anyway, that part of the memory is not so important after all.
The terrace has a dark chestnut stained pergola that in the summer months he used to cover with sailcloth to provide respite from the summer sun, but now the grapevine has claimed it for its own, weaving in and out of the timbers. He put the sailcloth away somewhere or other, now it sits in the back of his mind, along with other memories.
The grapevine is a maze of gnarly grey scrawny fingers at the moment, without bud as far as he can see, (well, it is only March after all), and he’s not certain it will flourish again after the two metres of snow that fell suddenly from nowhere, last month.
His wife has a postcard of the Van Gogh somewhere. He thinks it was a cherry, or perhaps an apple tree, with pink blossom set against the bluest of sky, quite Japanese in a way, and quite beautiful. It may not even been a Van Gogh, he muses.
Sometimes one in-breath can seem to last for ever.
He folds forward, inwards. The muscles of the back of his legs grumble their objection. He is used to their whining, tends to ignore them, and simply wait. They usually surrender before his will does.
Taking his gaze inwards he hears the name Hokusai. He is counting his breath for his mantra, and Hokusai departs.
He is taking his thoughts inwards, where he is nothing but everything. In this moment he can be neither the past nor the future.
His Guru was a man of few words, not in English anyway. He would say: ‘practice is all,’ and so, all has become ‘practice.’