Together

             … the river still glinting-up into its handfuls, heapings.

                                                                                    glassy

            forgettings under the river of

            my attention –

            and the river of my attention laying itself down –

                                                                                    bending,

            reassembling – over the quick leaving-offs and windy

                                                                        obstacles –

            and the surface rippling under the wind's attention –

            rippling over the accumulations, the slowed-down drifting

            permanences …

                                                                                                Jorie Graham

 

            In the old days there were sixteen bodhisattvas. When it was time to bathe they got into the bath together.
            Suddenly they realized the cause of water and said, ‘This subtle touch releases the brightness ...’ 
            Blue Cliff Record Case 78

I pull out armfuls of onion grass, cocksfoot, Yorkshire fog, fireweed from among the close-growing aloes and ground-cover succulents planted close to the house as ember traps. The long-term forecast is for a rainy summer but still we prepare for the turn that can come with a few days of dry heat and wind. One of the fire pumps has seized beyond T’s capacity to cajole it, and he takes it to W, genius self-taught mechanic, who in his eighties loves to solve a problem as much as he always did, and has ever more experience to call on.

Six pardalotes come and go outside my window – two from the gourd nest and maybe two paired-up young ones from last year – there’s no fighting that I can see. They display for each other with spread wings, perched on tall dried stalks of the fennel-like ammi that’s self-seeded all round where we planted it to bring in pollinating insects. Nestlings buzz their hunger cries from the gourd while the parents come and go, quietly now, between nest and forest eucalypts all through the long days, collecting sugary lerps like tiny cups of cotton candy from the leaves. 

Insects of all kinds are out now – flies, mosquitoes, hoverflies, moths. Bumblebees and honeybees and tiny native bees work the flowering plants, and the leaf-axil nectaries of both local and introduced trees. Cabbage white butterflies chase off interlopers from territories that take in the last of the cauliflowers and broccoli, while Australian admirals zigzag over nettle patches under the windbreaks. Partnerships of insects and plants go back very far.

 

Cuckoos are calling everywhere still – the pardalotes are safe in their tunnels but other small birds are not. Snakes are out hunting too, and currawongs, ever-present, stalk the thickets with extra urgency, now that they have their own young to feed. Alarm calls of nesting birds signal danger-near-the-ground as most imminent, rather than danger-overhead, though falcons and goshawks and eagles continue to trace the sky.

The kowhai has almost finished flowering, so the yellow wattlebirds that came to feed there and to chase and be chased by smaller honeyeaters aren’t around so much now. Roses are still in full extraordinary bloom. All the deciduous trees, even the late ones like linden and English oak, have leafed out luminous green. Days have been humid as air flows down out of heatwaves and thunderstorms on the mainland and the garden is heavy with scent of roses and jasmine, and mock orange that’s suddenly opened its creamy cups.

In places around the valley, the first lush growth of grass is cut and heaped and wrapped for silage. On the drier banks, mower tracks bleach yellow but in other places new green appears. A soft fog of rain drifts in from the north; it collapses standing grass into stooks and tufts like gelled hair. Blackbirds sing through the damp, and wattlebirds carry on their coughed exchanges. 

Each night a brushtail possum finds its way into the netted orchard and eats fresh leaves from the fruit trees. Plums are its favourite just now, but earlier it mowed new growth from the cherries and if last year is anything to go by, it will find its way to the little apple tree in the corner. When we block one hole in the netting, the possum finds or makes another. Under the trees, rows of broad beans – favas – stand and fall under the weight of growing pods, then stagger partly upright again – ancient standby crops of the middle east and Europe and now here, half a world and 10,000 years on.

 

Out in the world, the latest megalomaniacs flex for one another, flattening cities. My attention shifts back and forth as if near and distant, chronos and kairos, texture and abstraction were dualities, as language sets them up to be. But underneath and through all of it, something encompassing carries everything along. And through the trees, down in the valley I can see as stretch of the actual river, so often called on to stand in for this flow, as it goes its way, clear or tannin-stained or muddy, swelling with the tide and with rainfall and snowfall and water released from the hydroelectric catchment far upstream. The river’s surface is ruffled or still or streaked white and black by wind. All of this to say it’s all both/and, always – detail and vastness, the idea and its materialisation.

But I have such resistance, trying to bring this experience into words – mostly from fear that I’ll only give voice to my same-old opinions that follow the same old round. And yet something still rises toward speech. Making a start is not a matter of will – although will is involved in sitting to face the page (or any practice space) – it’s more a matter of letting unwillingness drop away so that I fall into not-knowing’s depths and buoyancy. And right there is the reason for making it a conversation – so much easier to fall together into the stream that’s a shared creation, with its subtle touch that brings us awake. 

References

Jorie Graham. ‘The Surface.’ Materialism. Ecco, 1996.

‘Sixteen Bodhisattvas take a bath,’ trans. John Tarrant & Joan Sutherland
             www.pacificzen.org.