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Intimations of Samatha

A spring day in north London. A portacabin for a classroom. A bearded Canadian art teacher who began and ended each lesson with us sitting still at our desks. “Listen to the silence,” he would say. There were giggles for the first few weeks before it became part of the routine.

One spring day, during the period of silence, the sun was streaming through the dusty windows and the classroom slipped away in a stream of yellow brightness and I was somewhere else, very far away. The call to finish - “Come back to the sense of sitting on your chair,” seemed to echo from a vast distance. How strangely fresh to land back on earth and emerge from the classroom into the mid-morning break.