Heavy

The old man said, “It’s true, I’m not a human being. In a previous universe … I was the abbot on this mountain. A student asked, ‘Does an enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘someone like that doesn’t fall under the law of cause and effect.’ Because of this, I’ve been reborn 500 times as a fox. ‘Baizhang’s fox’

 

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Milan Kundera

Each day this year’s falcon chick chitters a one-note wheedling cry from high in the dead eucalypt out in the paddock, or from the tip of one of the windbreak pines; the sound increases and decreases in volume as its parents come and go. At first the other birds ignore it. Then one day it flies down onto a low branch in the garden. Perhaps it’s trying to hunt. If so, no luck this time – it sits looking furious, hunched, surrounded by a buzz and clatter of honeyeaters, thornbills, wattlebirds, wrens, blackbirds. 

In the first days of the new year the aurora flickers, and thunderstorms pass, and low close humid skies come rivering down out of the tropics as cyclones intensify in seas east and west of the mainland. This pattern alternates with another that draws strong winds up out of the southern ocean, driving the heat away. In the cool, snakes come out to sun in sheltered corners, flattening themselves so that they become little glossy sinuous solar panels.

But even though the burning weather is held off for the time being and there’s still green at the roots of the pasture grasses, it's dry – I have to remind myself to water the garden. I mulched the beds thickly with hay at the end of winter and it protected everything for quite a while but now that straw is brittle and spent. Birds, pademelons, bandicoots come to bathe and drink from water pots around the house, and skinks, and a snake lifts its head over the lip of the pond to dip its tongue.

Grey robins bring out nestlings and the young ones whistle plaintively – nearly a song, unlike their almost silent parents. Banksias are flowering and cockatoos and possums come to feast on the honey-scented flowers. There’s a great sweetness of blackbird song, and the reed warbler we heard for the first time last year is back. The pardalotes are silent but the autumn sound of parrots talking back and forth as they crack hawthorn seeds in the hedgerow has begun.

Walking at dusk, I see that the gravel at my feet is strewn with chewed tips of young eucalypt leaves, scattered by Christmas beetles browsing roadside treetops. Bats hunt up and down along the dusty road, scooping up insects hatched from the pasture on one side and the windbreak on the other, planted by T from seedlings that came up after the 1967 bushfires.

We’re swapping cucumbers for bread, and now that the house cows are retired, tomatoes and other vegetables for milk. Eating green beans fresh off the vine, stopped in my tracks by their raspy leaves and tendrils, the creamy perfume of their flowers twines me round. Summer raspberries are still in fruit as the autumn canes flower and begin to set their crimson thimbles of juice. Boysenberries are black-ripe, half as long as my thumb. The possum moves its attention away from roses and towards the ripening grapes. Corn puts out tassels as pollen falls from the male flowers above.

Then the first days of dangerous weather begin. On a hot, dry, windy morning, with a file of thunderheads stalking the horizon, I take the car down into the town, hurrying, noticing a road-killed pademelon just outside the gate and thinking, I’ll move that when I get back, or quolls and devils that smell the body and look for it in the night will be caught in the terror of headlights. But when I come home it’s already too late – in a ruffle of feathers on the roadway lies the smashed body of a little hawk that’s been struck, flying down to eat. Is it a parent of the young one I hear calling? If I’d stopped on the way out, those vivid wings would still be quick over the valley.

And in the afternoon, a fire does start, just one ridge to the northeast, in steep, forested country – a strong plume of smoke goes up as winds reach their peak. All day gusts carry the thud of chopper blades and the clank of heavy machinery as crews drop water and push firebreaks around the edges of the blaze. After dark, clouds reflect the glow. People from towns in the fire’s path get ready to evacuate, ahead of more hot weather forecast in this, the most dangerous part of the season.

I’m remembering how, in my twenties, our house burned down and how that night, as the shock began to pass, I walked in my mind through its vanished rooms and felt the weight of connection to all they had held lift away. At the time this detachment, my all-too-bearable lightness of being, seemed a virtue, a freedom. Now I remember with sadness that young woman’s fear of truly being present, her fear of loving because that means having to bear letting go of everything that’s loved. I split off from feeling loss and so split off from entering into joy, as I sought to cut off death by cutting off from life.

Old now, I’m learning to be human by living as my animal self, in all its intensities of response to the tastes and sounds and smells of living, its loves and griefs, learning not to use my mind’s tricksterish skills to evade connection with the world of plant and stone and creaturely kin, all its peoples our true family, all the objects we make and hold and give and are given, true members of our household. Learning to sink into the happiness of being human – even as an interloper, feral, on land that never was and never can be mine. Now the bad thing happens and I feel it, and know life carries it all, and continues.

 

References

‘Baizhang’s fox.’ Gateless Gate, Case 2; Book of Serenity, Case 8. pacificzen.org

Milan Kundera. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans Michael Henry Heim.
           Harper Perennial, 1999.