Flamingos

This evening I had to take a train; a train to the unknown. I am "unemployed," "middle-aged," "woman," and "foreigner" in this country. My numerous epithets could weigh heavily on my mind, but I seem able to observe them as labels on commodities. "No money. No job" is another way I would have described myself at this point in time in the past but not now. These are words to describe someone else it seems. Perhaps someone deceased.

I am enchanted by the countryside as we pass through it in the early evening, although it is not my country; I am not of this hot red earth, or this waveless ocean our rails pass along the edge of. And I am not of these people. I speculate about this word "enchantment" and wonder if it is something we feel when we experience novelty because I cannot imagine myself using it to describe my own land.

Even though I have made this trip many times, tonight it seems as if I have no idea where I am going, and I perceive the countryside and indeed the whole experience as if my memory of it has been erased. I feel like a cat exploring her established territory always as if it is the first time–the first paw gingerly in the water with wide eyes and a sense of being prepared for anything to happen. Even though I have prowled the precincts of employment during the last year, I do not have answers to a lot of questions about how I may find a job here. My eyes are still wide: my senses on full alert.

We pass by lots of vineyards and oyster beds: I know these phenomena only as a tourist and a gastronome. The people on the train with me do not speak my language mostly, though I speak theirs as a foreigner, always a foreigner. And it suddenly occurs to me as we rush through the pink light of the spring evening that I may die on this journey. In fact, in a way, I do.

Tonight, I feel special compassion for myself because I have spent a lot of time looking for something which I do not have the technique to find, or so I think. One goes through many motions of writing endless letters of application, the wording and presentation of which is absolutely crucial. Then following them up with phone calls fielded by ferocious civil servants who detect a slight foreign accent and immediately reject the application.

In the south of France, if you want a job it depends on who you know, not what. Although it is well known as "Le Pays des Papiers"– the country of bureaucracy, par excellence, when it comes to jobs, if you have a brother or a cousin or a concubine in a post, usually ‘he’ is sure to get you a job in his department. If you don’t, well you are trying to squeeze a camel through the eye of a needle.

This could make me feel bad, helpless, impotent, from time to time, and today I admit momentarily resisting getting this train to come to a city I do not know well, in order to find a job I do not know the nature of. I wanted to stay at home, to carry on working in the mountain garden I have tamed, planting out spring flowers and bulbs, in hot sunshine and under a sumptuous blue sky. I wanted to practice kneeling in front of my small altar surrounded by stacks of sutras and discourses, comfortable in my native environment. However, by tearing myself away from where I feel most comfortable, I was able to experience death in quite a dramatic way.

I have spent several years in this state of joblessness and I see clearly how uncomfortable it makes people around me. My mother is anxious, wondering how I can possibly get through a single day without having a job. Others take pity on me, trying to disguise the despair in their eyes. What they do not seem to realize is that I know that I could live in the forest, that nature would nourish me, and that in a way I do live there. I crouch beneath a tree, a large leaf for an umbrella when it rains hard, a small cave for shelter when the wind blows.

In fact, I go through these job-seeking motions solely to make others comfortable and in the hope that I will be led to a situation where I can bring light into the world, can slide below superficial behaviours. I am in no way aware of striving for "status" or "salary" or even "career development." The worry beads, it seems, continue to be passed through the worn fingers of the proletariat.

The train passes large expanses of silver water on a strong land bridge, impenetrable to storms and tempests, curving around this alluring coastline known internationally as the Cote D’Azure. In the middle of these dazzling fabrics laid out across the earth is a tiny island. No roads can reach it although I can see a number of houses there that look inhabited.

I marvel at how the householders come and go, how they find a hospital or a supermarket to meet all their needs. I catch sight of the oyster beds and seafood nets and I work out that they probably sell their oyster and seafood harvests to enable them to live. But then I speculate that maybe before the time of money and markets, they lived entirely from oysters and seafood on their tiny island, rowing ashore in rough boats to bring back barrels of red wine to accompany their island feasts.

This island gem is flat, crowded with buildings butting up to each other—a disc of dry land. It looks as if it could easily get washed away in a storm and yet the inhabitants have probably lived there for many generations and no doubt prospered. Such is the human spirit and the glamorous nutritional properties of oysters!

In the distance, the mountains are still capped with snow like sketches on a blue-grey pad of paper; a rose-pink sun is a saucer balancing on top of the highest peak. This setting sun has the miraculous ability to cast its colour like a dye across the water fabrics and littorals, and even across the train and our faces as we look out. I can feel its radiance and a sense of shimmering beauty as it plays on the hurtling metal tube of the train covered in the graffiti of youthful "Latin" anger. It even changes the nature of that graffiti with its radiance. It is lovely, and I am moved to smile a broad pink smile in solidarity.

Fortunately for us mobile spectators, the inland lakes and the shallows of the ocean itself are dotted with huge flocks of wild birds feeding and breeding, safe from the meddling of humans. One of the species is the flamingo, which spends the mild winters here. These gentle birds are an exotic site with their long legs and pink curved necks, striding in a leisurely way through the shallows, fishing. They are exotic in Europe and therefore bound to attract a certain attention, and yet there is something else innately eye-catching about their pinkness and their grace. Perhaps they are symbolic of our natural pure state. Then, with a shock, I suddenly realise they are no longer pink! They seem to be white or cream coloured! This greatly surprises me! I look more closely. The realisation that they have lost their native colour is the signal of a death, the death of a false view.

You see, the mind gets so easily attached to things it encounters in life. But this attachment is what prevents us from contacting our inner wisdom. These wonderful flames of birds, beautiful as I have always acknowledged that they are, have been keeping my mind alive officiously. Now, as I understand that they are not as I saw them last, I am able to witness a death, the death of the craving of my mind for sameness. These flamingos snap me into the abrupt knowing that I have developed a bad habit of living in a fully human way only occasionally instead of every moment; that I am mostly squandering my precious human existence by sleep-walking.

As it goes down, the sun takes with it the sea pink of these birds and turns us travelers into flamingo pink waders on a littoral train line. And at the same time, my life as a pitiable unemployed woman, my joblessness, makes me see myself in a new way. Maybe the setting sun has also taken away my job-fullness leaving me devoid of its usual colour? And now it is my responsibility to spread my unique human light and to write and to teach people about flamingos.