Conditions

                                … in the flattest part of North Dakota
                                on a starless moonless night
                                no breath of wind

                                a man could light a candle
                                then walk away
                                every now and then
                                he could turn and see
                                the candle burning 
                                …

                                somewhere between the seventeenth and eighteenth mile
                                he would lose the light

                                if he were walking backwards
                                he would know the exact moment
                                when he lost the flame

                                he could step forward and find it again
                                back and forth
                                dark to light light to dark
                                …

                                                        … that place
                                where the light appears and disappears
                                that’s the place where we live
                                                                                    Al Zolynas

                                                                                                            Stop the war.
                                                                                                            Pacific Zen Institute
                                                                                                            Miscellaneous Koans, Case 25

T finds a patch of saffron milk cap mushrooms on the sheltered, easterly side of the pine windbreak, down among stems of damp grass just outside the dripline. In the wet, they’re slimy on top like the slippery jack boletes that appear to the west of the trees where it’s drier and more exposed, but unlike the round-topped boletes (‘penny buns’), the milk caps are concave and instead of pores they have gills that glow soft apricot in the low light. When I slice them the cut edges gleam orange with the milky sap they’re named for. I cook them with garlic and olive oil and a bit of salt. They’re slightly chewy-crunchy like seaweed, and full of flavour.

Enormous blocking highs continue to stall over the island, extending halfway to Antarctica and north over the whole of the mainland, out into the Indian Ocean to the west and beyond Aotearoa New Zealand to the east. They bring clear nights of record-breaking cold in the central highlands; the temperature drops below minus 130 Celsius and the shallow lakes there crust over with ice. One very cold night, hunger emboldens a quoll to take one of the old hens from her perch. J finds her body in the morning, head and breast eaten, but we don’t notice till late afternoon that the quoll is still in the hen house, hiding quietly behind a nest box. We chase it out and it rushes off – but comes back later to check the now-closed door.

I’m grateful for the freezing weather, like an icepack ahead of the fever to come, as northern hemisphere temperatures continue to break summer records and fires burn out of control. Despite the cold, a honeyeater gathers nesting material, tugging fibres from the sisal twine I’ve used to tie up a climbing rose. The grevilleas are coming into full flower around the house so there’s food to raise chicks. The hens continue to lay and begin to go broody one after another. Many creatures give birth in winter and suckle or forage for their young in the first weeks so that when the young are ready to find food for themselves, it’s there, flourishing as the weather warms – grasses, flowers, insects, and the young of other animals and birds. 

When the latest high finally moves east it drags cold air far northwards into the Tasman and brings the first days of proper winter rain, easterly, soaking. Though it’s not as cold as it was, the cattle stand around with their tails to the wind, looking annoyed and dispirited – they’d always rather be cold than wet. Water starts to run into the dam. In the rain, scarlet robins in nesting plumage search the wet grass and weeds around the garden for insects. Covid and various other viruses circulate; I get a head cold and spend a few days shut away, trying to keep it to myself.

First silver on the buds of the willows; tiny flower heads among emerging leaves on the elders. In the pine windbreak on top of the hill where male cones’ tiny candelabra are fattening yellow, six or seven clinking currawongs, more streamlined than the ravens with whom they sometimes forage, hurl themselves like animated spears in and out among the branches, yelling and chasing, their metallic cries ear-splitting at close range.

Weeks of no sun, of humid cold, like the winters when I first arrived here in the ‘80s – a pattern that’s become unusual in the last twenty years or so. Then sun, sun, dazzling. As the moon waxes to full, it adds its light at dusk and then, waning, at dawn, and suddenly the days are longer. Mild air comes streaming down from the northwest, and frogs begin their all-day, all-night concerts in farm dam amphitheatres. In the forest, jack jumper ants and bull ants are beginning to appear above ground, and with them the echidnas that feed on them. First wattles start to brighten in the gullies. Each night a bandicoot ploughs soft ground around the house in search of grass grubs and worms.

Whistlers and scarlet robins and grey robins, yellow throated honeyeaters and shrike thrushes are calling; blackbirds pursue each other through the garden, and I hear their first nesting song; early one morning, a brown quail asks and asks its question from the frosty grasses. From high up, the soft mewing of a family of eagles filters down – a pair of adults and this year’s chick call to one another, gyring. 

And nearby and far off, under skies of all a piece with this one, we tear one another to pieces in a spiral of violence suffered and inflicted and denied – not out of creaturely need and hunger but manipulated by fear and desire for power. How to do what is ours to do, to stop our own wars, to honour and keep alive in the imagination of our hearts the flicker of companionship? 

I dream that I inherit, or someone gives into my care, a beautiful, jet-black female mastiff – like an Italian cane corso, bred to hunt, and to guard and shepherd, and also like the guardian lion statues placed outside buddhist temples. Her coat is short, lustrous, wonderful to touch. I drive with a friend to a nearby town to do some errands and the dog sits in the back seat. She rests her head on my left shoulder so that I feel the silken softness of the folds of her face against my cheek and in the angle of my neck, intimate, tender. When I get out of the car, she cleverly manoeuvres herself onto my back in such a way that I can’t feel her weight. I go to visit friends, healers, and the dog jumps down to greet them and sniff the ground. We talk about salve for burns and burnout. 

As a young woman I was horrified and disgusted by the legacy that came to me of rage and its muzzled kennel-mate, depression – a doom-curse burden I dragged and was dragged by. But it seems to me now that some part of the curse can transform. Aggression can become courage and an ability to respond, to live precisely at the place where the light seems to come and go; movement downwards and inwards can be to a place of intimacy and enlivenment rather than into numbness. Though conditions are never ideal, the rage-cycle can be interrupted; another reality winks in and out, out and in, over the curve of the world.

Reference

Al Zolynas. ‘Under Ideal Conditions.’ Under Ideal Conditions. Laterthanever Press, 1994.