Chapter 11, Apple. What to do, when you're filled with shame?
Meditating under an apple - is it like biting the apple of knowledge? Do you get filled with shame and expelled from the Garden of Eden?
But it’s easy to feel bliss and wonder, in the mountains of Colombia; could the feeling be sustained, in a rented room in Crouch End?
‘You’re looking so well,’ everyone said, as I returned to London life, after six months of travel, and it was amazing how much I got given. While taking a break from revision, Iris said, ‘This might seem a strange suggestion, but why don’t you move to Brighton?’ So I went to Brighton, where – in one day - I was offered a room in a flat, a job in a school, a part in a play, and the director said, ‘Ooh, I’ll be going off to France for two months after the play. Would you like to look after my house?’
Staying in the house, which was a bungalow, I realised I loved bungalows – each room is on the ground – but don’t love the suburbs where they are. So, looking on Rightmove, I found a bungalow, right in the middle of Brighton, down its own lane. Though only five minutes from The Brighton Pavillion, the owner would see no pedestrians or cars through the window– just flowers and butterflies.
**
Visiting next day, though, I saw that mushrooms grew in the leaking ceiling. But it cost 250K, making it about the cheapest detached house in England – and before leaving on the trip, I’d sold the flat that I’d bought, years before, on the advice of Sylvia in The Wee Leith Shop. I bought the house.
**
The only shadow over all this was cast by Fenula. ‘Move on!’ she’d said, before walking out of my life. And, back home, I did move on. I didn’t think of her at all.
Apart from when I swam.
And apart from when I listened to the folk singer Sam Lee, who we often listened to on her boat.
And apart from whenever I woke up.
I was now a skilled meditator, with a mind like a well-trained dog. But, first thing in the morning, my mind would run off to her, to her boat on the South Coast, and her bed with the leaf green duvet. And like a dog, my mind would scratch scratch scratch away at the eternal mystery of it. Why would someone, after nine months of a relationship that had felt so loving and trusting, suddenly turn, with such violence? And were they fair – the harsh things she’d said on rejecting me? Just thinking of them still filled me with a sour shame.
**
This was much on my mind, when, out of the blue, I was contacted by Nicki Boyd, who I’d once met at a party. She wondered if I could write a book for her. ‘What’s your story?’ I asked, over a dinner for which she insisted on paying. ‘I am a World Champion at Desert Cycling,’ she said, ‘I played Volleyball for England. I got a BA from Oxford, an MA from Princeton, and I run a Hedge Fund that’s smashing it in the City. But none of it makes me happy… Could there be a book in that?’
‘There definitely could,’ I ventured, ‘if you’ve learned to be happy… Have you?’
An awkward pause then… ‘How do you learn that?’
‘Well, I learn it from trees.’
I explained all.
‘Andrew,’ she said, ‘I work in the City. It’s almost de rigeur to do some astanga yoga before a big meeting. We don’t, generally, go to the park, to hang about, behind a shrub.’
I chuckled, then offered her a free tree meditation. She agreed.
**
I then worried. By now, I was convinced meditating under trees is the best way to find focus and peace, and that meditating anywhere else would seem odd - like taking a bath in your socks. But then I thought of Fenula saying, ‘There’s something wonky about your thinking. You think your thinking affects other people. It’s grandiose. It’s hubristic.’
Well… was it?
**
Just as I was thinking this, my daughter Cassady texted.
‘I have ADHD,’ she said, ‘and I think you do too.’
I felt a moment’s cynicism. Does everyone have a syndrome these days? Do these labels help? Still I investigated the suggestion, and to my surprise, and found a truth that improved happiness as much as an oak. The ADHD clinic sent a questionnaire, which invited you to write down your symptoms – a brilliant exercise, that I’d encourage anyone to do. I quickly listed a few of mine...
-I can’t work, if a fly enters the room. I really can’t plan.
-I think you should get the death penalty, if you make a phone call on a train.
-When I wake up, my head suddenly sees everything that needs doing, and wants to do them all right now, so the thoughts feel like big cows, getting stuck, as they try to squeeze through a fence.
**
A week later, Dr M called me to give the results. It turned out, I had fairly strong ADHD and mild autism. (It wasn’t surprising I’d found it so stressful planning a trip that would involve sailing the Atlantic). It was going to take two months to get ADHD pills, but the diagnosis helped immediately. It’s incredibly helpful knowing your head is wonky, it turned out, like knowing you have a gun, whose sighting is off. Once you know that, you can make allowances…
-Knowing forgetfulness is a problem, I’d speak out loud, when leaving the house. ‘Right, so I’ll need phone charger, dog lead…’ Living with a sheepdog proved a blessing here. He’d head for the front door. He’d nose the dog lead. ‘You’re a good boy, George,’ I told him. He’d look up and smile.
- I’d say it to myself too. ‘And you’re a good boy too, Andrew.’
**
By now, I was benefitting from yet another offer that had come in. I was working at Tolhurst Organic. One hot August day, I was harvesting onions in blazing sunshine, listening to Gabor Mate’s Scattered Minds, which claims ADHD is triggered by ill-attuned parenting. It turns out we all need the perfect Mother, or we go wrong. The sensitive parent, says Mate, responds to their children’s needs, giving quiet comfort when they fall; time out, when they need it. My mother was the exact opposite, I realised. Her tense parenting style was a bombardment of intrusions and disappearances. The child whose parents were too stressed to give attention – explains Gabor Mate - may feel no one can understand their needs. They may reject partners, before they can reject them. I thought instantly of Fenula, whose mother seemed to have had the parenting style of Cruella de Ville. Did this explain Fenula’s sudden, and mysteriously violent rejection?
**
Behind me, an apple plonked to the ground, and bounced over the onions.
Staring, I thought of Newton, who saw an apple fall, and forged his theory of gravity. I thought of Eve, who ate the apple of knowledge, found she was naked, was filled with shame, and was expelled from the Garden of Eden. What would I learn from an apple tree meditation?
Curious, I sat.
Eyes shut, I sensed an apple above my head, and, with the rising breath, consciousness seemed to rise, till I became the apple, experiencing its roundness; its wholeness. I pictured biting its tart green flesh. Nearby, I heard a wood pigeon singing, ‘Hoo-hoo HOO Hoo-hoo’. I could picture it exactly, resting a sleepy beak in grey chest feathers. ‘No one gets pigeons’ – it seemed to be singing.
A quotation from the Bhagavad Gita glided into my head: Krishna, saying, ‘I glide into the plant – root, leaf and bloom – to make the woodlands green with springing sap.’ I’d forgotten I knew any of the Gita – let alone could quote it. I felt as if, by connecting to the apple, I’d connected to spirit, which connects all things, and therefore it was like eating the apple of knowledge, I seemed to know all things – or could.
But what did I want to know?
I wanted to know why Fenula had attacked me, and was it fair?
**
With the next breath hisssssssssssing snakily out – I seemed to go down the apple roots, back and down, and down and back, and came out, into Fenula’s first garden. Three years old, she poked a dimpled finger to a blade of grass, and marvelled as a ladybird now trundled up it.
But then suddenly her mother shouted,
‘Oh, WHAT have you DONE?…You’ve ruined that dress!’
Mum seemed to have loomed from nowhere, biting like a snake. Fenula looked down at her dress, slightly ripped at the bottom. Instantly the warmth of the scene popped – to be replaced by a sad, grey, cold feeling. I was struck by how it felt just like the feeling I’d had all year, since being attacked by Fenula.
The lesson was obvious: we attack others, as we’ve been attacked ourselves.
**
Having learned it, I seemed to float back up the apple tree roots, back up to the apple, which still felt round, and whole, connected to everything, and free of shame. Opening eyes, I saw a butterfly fly to a flushed pink apple.
We’re still in the Garden of Eden, I thought. We never left.
**
A week later, I saw Nicki in Hyde Park, and took her through an oak meditation, inspired by the one I’d done myself, at the start of the journey, when I’d seen a mountain shack, surrounded by young trees. Coming round at the end, blinking contentedly, Nicki revealed she’d seen herself, running a new business, which would be called Sphera, and which would invest exclusively in female sport. ‘I like the name,’ she told me, ‘since Sphera suggests a ball, and a globe.’
**
Emboldened, Nicki decided to take the plunge, to leave her current job, to start Sphera. A week later, she told me she’d been talking to one of her main investors. He said he loved the idea of the new fund. He reckoned he could back it to the tune of fifty million.
‘So the oak meditation was really useful,’ Nicki told me. ‘Do you have any others?’
**
I said I had eight more. Nicki offered to pay me 190 pounds, for each one. So now I had been given an absurdly high wage, and a chance to meet Nicki, once a fortnight, to test these ideas out.
**
I’d also found a friendly builder who’d offered to do up the run down house, for 150 K. I wanted to make it carbon neural (insulation, solar panels…) ‘How much would it be worth, done up?’ I asked the Scottish estate agent who’d sold to me, with whom I’d remained friendly. ‘I wouldn’t sell it for anything less than 575K,’ he said. I was astonished. Just by listening to instinct, and what I’d been told, I seemed to have been given 175 thousand pounds. How could this be?
At this point, I thought of the words of Mamo Gabriel, ‘If you help the Mother, she will help you in return.’
Was that what was happening? Or did I, with my wonky thinking, just think it was? Perhaps it didn’t matter. Since planting all those trees, and, especially since the moment of seeing The Mother in a vision, I felt supported, loved, whole as a fresh green apple.