Jimmy and Zen Buddhism

When I was 6 my mother invited a spiritual guru to come over to our flat in Tunbridge Wells. There was a lot of excitement about it among the grownups and my younger sister Esther and I got quite interested, even though we had no idea what it was about. At some point during the day we were told the guru was going to give us a mantra each, which he did. We weren’t supposed to reveal this to anyone else but immediately told each other. It was the same word: Om. This didn’t feel special at all and the whole notion lost any allure or sense of meaning. My childhood was quite unpredictable, without much routine. When I became a mother to my son Jimmy I tried to have a mixture of reliability, and awareness to facilitate his curiosity about life. One day when he was about 9 he told me he wanted to learn how to practice Zen Buddhism. I was quite surprised, meditation was not the buzzword that it is now. Nevertheless I was happy to explore - maybe there would be something in it for me too. I asked him to look up and find a centre we could go to, and on a Sunday morning at 9am we found ourselves in a flat on the 9 th floor of a tower block on a North London housing estate. I kept asking Jimmy if he wanted to bail, but he didn’t. A matter of fact young woman placed some round cushions on the floor and explained the principles of Zen Buddhism. Then the three of us sat there for an hour and a half. It seemed a bit of a non event but Jimmy said he had enjoyed it. It felt like an adventure, like pointing to somewhere on a globe and going there.

Pictured: Portrait of Jimmy Fox by Earl Cave