Doubts

                                     The place where we are right
                                     is hard and trampled
                                     like a yard.

                                     But doubts and loves
                                     dig up the world 
                                                                     Yehuda Amichai

                                      You find yourself in a stone crypt. There are no windows, and the door is locked from the outside.
                                     How will you get out?
                                                                     PZI miscellaneous koans, Case 20

Long after the garden daffodils and paper whites have finished, swathes of narcissus bloom on the south-facing and west-facing slopes around where Miss C’s house stood a hundred years ago. They flourish their sweetness on sappy stems from bulbs that withdraw all trace of themselves through summer and autumn and most of winter. Patches ten or more metres across have been spread by the plough, and here and there an outlying single clump where some fragment of bulb has been displaced downslope. Their perfume drifts across the hillside.

Cuckoo shrikes are here, shuffling their wings as they land to eat insects in the trees around the house; their purring calls sound through the garden. Bluebells, solomon’s seal, lily of the valley come fountaining out of the ground and each jet breaks in blossom, blue and green and white. The bluebells match the flowers of love vine curling through the forest understorey. Roses, so far mysteriously uneaten by possums and pademelons, open their hearts to bees.

A skink has moved inside. Each day it comes out from under the furniture to bask in spring sunlight that reaches into the room. I fill a saucer of water for it and the lizard turns its head to look at me as I loom overhead. I like to be in the sun too, and one day as I lie with my eyes closed, from the other side of the room I hear the scritching of the little animal’s feet as it comes towards me across the tiles. It touches its tongue to my hand, and then I feel its body settle in under the warm escarpment of my forearm where it rests on the floor.

Thinking about my writing practice and this journal – how it somehow perfectly encapsulates both my life-longing to engage with the world, and an acute need to remain out of sight. It’s a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found, as child psychologist Donald Winnicott said. For a long time, I fought with myself (and others) to resolve the tension in favour of either a gregariousness I couldn’t sustain, or an increasingly dissociated withdrawal from contact. 

Sometime in my 30s I realised that both impulses – to connect and to withdraw – were mine forever. I would never be right, clear, free of contradictions. Frantic with the thought that I was doomed to inner warfare, for months I used to get up before dawn and light the fire then settle down beside it, trying to calm myself. I had some potter’s clay, and each day I shaped a little creature, human or animal, or something from a dream. As these wildly various inhabitants of my inner and outer worlds formed themselves in my hands, questions and doubts arose. What if there was nothing wrong with the tensions and differences of an internal ecosystem? What if I could learn to be within it – and even love it, as I loved the forest and garden lives that leaned and hopped and flew around me. And so my prison door opened of itself. 

It’s been rainy cold for weeks, though the days are long now, and the grass is growing wildly. Everything rushes to nest and bring out young. When the sun finally appears, the light is intoxicating. I settle on a log in the paddock to watch a swamp hen pair, supremely elegant in the shadings of their grey-green-silver-blue plumage, as they talk from deep in their chests, donk duddonk, with their half dozen black, down-puff chicks. Then as I sit, there’s sudden movement at the edge of my vision. I turn my head to look and come face to face with fantailed cuckoo swooping to perch on my head. We see each other, and though I’m not the fence post it thought I was, it lands anyway.

We sit like that for maybe five minutes; I feel it move its feet and flip its tail and hear it swallow; it feels me breathe and move my weight around a little. The swamp hens continue what they’re doing, leading the chicks along, feeding them morsels of greenery. Then the cuckoo takes off and regards me from the next post in the fence. A thornbill flies out of a blackberry thicket and tries to chase it off. Like most host species, it’s much smaller than the cuckoo and looks like an agitated bumble bee beside the larger bird.

Once again the blackbird crouches over her eggs, hoping the black snake in its glossy new skin is staying by the dam to eat frogs. Once again the falcon goes crying overhead to its nest at dawn and dusk. The bandicoot continues to dig the damp ground for grass grubs till the lawn around the house looks like ploughed ground. The pardalotes make foray after foray into the eucalypt windbreak and bring back tiny curled mustachios of bark for their gourd nest in the shelter of the walkway outside the back door.

The aurora glows along the horizon. Cherries, apples, quinces flower and begin to form their fruit. Softened now, broken up, sweet clumps flower from the spot where I went down, under, in.

References
Yehuda Amichai. ‘The Place Where We Are Right.’ Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai,
           ed. and trans. Chana Bloch, Stephen Mitchell. U of California P, 1996.

Miscellaneous koans. Pacific Zen Institute: pacificzen.org