John Lukes

LAKE ROTOITI

In January, earlier in the year, I suggested to Jane that we should spend the last night of our three week stay in the South Island by camping at St. Arnaud in the Nelson Lakes District.

Apart from being struck down by a stomach bug in the middle of the night, we had a great time. The area is fabulously beautiful and well-furnished with wildlife like water birds, eels and fish, and hawks.

The stay reminded me of a Buddhist 5-day retreat or ‘sesshin’ that I had attended almost exactly 14 years before in 1996, at the Department of Conservation Convention Centre that is a stone’s throw from the camping site and lakeside.

As the poem below shows, I got pretty ‘high and philosophical’ on the combination of meditation and the thought of returning to a new relationship that appeared to promise much.

BUSH DRAMA - DHARMA

“A little ‘O’ in the Bush,
A roundel of life complete,
The theatre of plant persuasions,
Careers and sad defeat.

Saplings and seedlings
Competing, seeking the light,
Gorging on litter and sunbeams,
Drunk with growing delight.

Upward and wayward waving,
Fleeing the fallers’ waste,
Seeking the budding way”.

However, I also wrote, as a corrective, after a visit to the shower block:

‘Thinking profound thoughts,
I peed on the end of my towel.
‘Mind the flow!”

My interest in Zen Buddhism went back to 1992 when I joined the small group that used to sit under the encouragement of Roz Mackintosh in Wesley Street, Thorndon.

Among the group was another Englishman John Lukes, who like me had suffered the breakdown of his marriage. Both of us had attempted to turn our trials and constrained circumstances to good account by trying to live more simple and spiritual lives.

I have to say immediately that John was much better at this than I was. He had a natural and quiet dignity – and a real sense of commitment to advancing his understanding that was calmly grounded on otherwise frightening health risks stemming from an old head injury.

As for me, my natural tendencies for exuberance and risk-taking (at that time with a periodic undertow of melancholy) led me astray. The relationship on which I had put so much store in 1996 proved to be too fragile to withstand lost hopes, misconceptions and mishaps.

It was a number of months later then (as I had stopped meditating with the sangha) that I found out that John had died quietly in his sleep in mid-1996 – he must have been around 50 years old.

PICKING UP THE PIECES

Recently I have been irregularly attending the weekly meditation sessions of the same small group. I asked about John Lukes, making the point that I would like to pay my respect at his grave. Nobody knew where his ashes had been interred but there had it seems been a Buddhist ceremony in Wellington. It was suggested that I should try to contact his son in Christchurch.

Eventually, I made contact, offering to write and post an obituary.

Wonderfully, it seems that John’s ashes were scattered off the jetty on the shore of Lake Rotoiti among the indigenous long-finned eels that hovered below. These leathery, slightly translucent creatures (or ‘snigs’ as I would have called them as a boy) are very impressive: being sometimes nearly 2 metres long, living up to 100 years, and prone to silently ‘snitheing’ together at dusk (again as we would say in the Cheshire dialect).

I therefore wrote John a haiku in more conventional English:

“Opaque and shoaling
- eels under the jetty.

Now I know it’s you”.