Thought Vacations

Sorry I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation about about sub-Saharan African aquatic mammals. Did you know hippopotamuses communicate through snorts and grunts? It’s true! These snorts and grunts cause subtle vibrations in the water. Other hippos can tell who’s snorting this and who’s grunting that by inhaling the bubbles that are in the minute water vibrations. The gas reaches their tongue and the taste determines the sender. Hippos can taste another hippopotamus from a mile off! This wine tastes great, doesn’t it? In fact, their sophisticated taste makes hippos perfect sommeliers. Who said they can’t tell a merlot from a pinot noir?

I knew a hippo sommelier, they were a terrible drunk and they would only spit out the wine at people’s faces. But a hippo sommelier was such a curiosity that they got away with such awful manners. I think they chose this evenings wine selection…

Oh you have to make a call? Take care, and if you see that hippo tell them the wine tastes rather dry with this fish. If there’s wine on their chin, be on guard for a spit!

My husband abandoned me and became a monk.

These monks didn’t believe in the idea of an inherent self, a witness behind the thoughts. This belief led them to drop their names, labels and all identities they once assumed. They had trouble organising themselves and soon couldn’t tell each other apart. When I called even the monastery didn’t know if he was still there or not because he had no name and no traits.

After a while, I became lonely and joined the nameless order as a nun to find my husband. I never found him. I abandoned everything searching; my name, my gender, my nationality, my beliefs, my hair, my possessions. I became no one in search of another no one. I thought even though all the monastics had adopted the same appearance, the same mannerisms, the same plastered expression of peace that I would still be able to recognise my husband.

I realised that I could pick any one of the nameless and make them my husband for they had dropped their memories just like everything else. If there was no self, who did the memories held belong to? No one. So they let them go as, eventually, did I in an act of voluntary dementia. I saw that these memories I had were not my own. I never had a husband, he never had a wife, I never had myself and he never had himself. The body and mind that was once “mine” drifted in the ocean of nameless monastics. Just an experience of awareness that had shed everything.