📿 Pointing at Sheep from a Scottish Train

Ringu Tulku Rinpoche on Impermanence

Hello you — Adreanna here for this week’s dispatch of The Laundry,

After two weeks in Edinburgh, Scotland, we’ve taken the train to Inverness. We’re headed up to the Scottish highlands, and I’m pointing out the fields of sheep that arise and dissolve in our window panel like extended flashes across a screen. Ruby is squirming on my lap, neither charmed by the bucolic views or our dense seating arrangement. Sheep, though, are holding her attention. For now. It’s a working vacation, both in the sense that we’re still hosting meditation programming and meeting with 1:1 students during the stretch of day that’s New York morning / Scottish afternoon. It’s also a “working” vacation in that it’s a month without childcare beyond just the two of us.

The woman with the ruddy cheeks in the Tesco checkout line reminds me that “she won’t be young like this for long.” She waves and smiles at Ruby with an adoration that extends behind her eyes. It’s the smile of someone who’s known and loved someone who didn’t stay young like this for long. Ruby often gets this smile from women (mostly) a bit older than me (mostly) who wistfully offer how quickly this toddler stage goes.

This toddler stage is proving both darling and chaotic, as all the other cliches about raising kiddos have proved. At our first AirBnB I dared to go to the bathroom alone and returned to the kitchen, 30 seconds later, to find her covered in a pound of polenta crumbs she found while ransacking the lower cabinets. Everything is fodder for learning and forming new connections, which has made her such (chaotic) fun to travel with. She’s spongeing up, joining the dots, wanting to know, pulling, testing, understanding. We see the quick changes in real time.

Our first afternoon in Inverness we follow the river walk up to Leakey’s, a historic used book store with Harry Potter vibes. Lodro and I trade off between chasing Ruby through the musty stacks, and browsing the musty stacks for some unique written treasures that we don’t have space to pack. I find the Buddhist books in a section entitled “Mysticism, Occult, Supernatural” which makes me smile and wonder if this perception of Buddhism is contained to the bookstore, or if it extends out to the general Scottish population. I make a mental note to read the face of the older gent behind the desk when I bring my books up to pay.

I pull a book of transcribed talks by Ringu Tulku Rinpoche and thumb through it, landing on this passage: