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              A student asked Jinqing, ‘I am breaking out of my shell. Will you peck?’
             Jingqing asked, ‘But will you survive if I do?’
             ‘If I didn’t survive, people would laugh at me.’
             ‘You really are in the weeds.’
                                                            Blue Cliff Record, Case 16

 

              Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
                            … Hope is pushed down
               but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
                   …
              We know the horses are there in the dark
              meadow because we can smell them,
               can hear them breathing.
                                                             Jack Gilbert

A young echidna wanders through the garden, testing air and soil for the smell and electrical field produced by ants. I sit quietly and it walks right up to me then goes on past, brushing my leg with the spines that emerge from its soft, blond-brown fur. They’re rapier-sharp and can be bristled outwards in seconds to make a spiky mushroom cap over the soft underbelly while the animal uses its powerful legs to dig straight down into the earth. There’s been some rain at last, and in the softened ground of the forest floor, I can see where jack jumper and bull ant nests have been dug over by echidnas seeking eggs and larvae, impervious to the stings of their guardians.

Cold nights begin, near frost when it’s clear. Another fire season over – if that can ever be said now? Quiet, hill fog, low skies. Bird song carries – the soft whip-crack of a whistler, squeaky chitter of fantails in the understorey, peeping conversation of wren families working over a patch of dry grass. At the cattle trough under the hilltop windbreak, black cockatoos gather to drink and bathe; they whicker to one another like horses then launch, wailing, onto the drifts of valley air. Four magpies carol from trees around the garden, and the sweet song of a butcherbird, their relative, belies the sharply hooked beak it uses to dismember its prey – lizards, nestlings, small mammals, insects and their grubs that it hangs in a forked branch for convenience, for later.

From his daily walks with the dog, T brings home pocketfuls of small round stripy apples he finds on a seedling tree beside the road to his brother’s house. They’re sweet-tart delicious, but their flesh remains dense, hard to bite into even when dark brown seeds at the core show that the fruit is fully ripe. It’s a vivid year – in the cold, the leaves of deciduous trees begin to withdraw their green to show the yellows and oranges, reds and magentas underneath. Orchard rows and poplar windbreaks light up like flares before the wind comes to sweep their colours away. A few late roses continue to open and spill their perfume through the room when I bring them inside. Jasmine is in full flower after the rain, its heavy scent strange in the cool air.

Hill mist is followed by days of brilliant sunshine here on the tops, and river fog gathers at night in the valleys so that we wake to a dazzling, roiling sea of grey and white. On such a day, R’s friend asks if he can bring his metal detector to scan old house sites and pathways around the farm. With his long sharp shadow following, he quarters the paddocks for hours and finds buckles from horse tack, British pennies, the bowl of a big serving spoon, part of the workings of a clock, and tokens issued by shops in the mid-19^th century in lieu of currency, which was still scarce here then, early in the encroachment of empire. One of the tokens, issued in 1855 by E.F. Dease, ironist owner of a drapery store called the Golden Fleece, has a quote from Virgil – SIC VOS NON VOBIS VELLERA FERTIS OVES – So you, not for yourselves, grow your fleece, o sheep.

I drive to the next town, spread along a road down on the valley floor where a bridge was built, just above the place where the river widens and becomes tidal. As I descend, greyness gathers and shadows disappear; the day darkens till all the brightness above is a memory, faint then gone. I bring back polyanthus and heartsease seedlings for the garden bed outside my window, to add to self-seeded sweet william and california poppies. Things are dying back and the plants I put in won’t come away for months yet, but I want to settle them in the dampened soil.

The hens, done with moulting, parade in soft bright feathers from scratching-ground to dust bath, magnificent, and as if to celebrate, they’ve started laying again, occasionally in the nest boxes we make for them but usually in places they’ve chosen for themselves around the garden and sheds. J, who looks after them, begins to be anxious that they’ll hide a nest for long enough to bring out chicks.

Whoever wrote the koan I’ve quoted here knew about birds and incubation and hatching. If eggs get too dry, their shells toughen so that the chicks struggle to pierce through when the time comes – but it’s not a simple matter to help them out. If they begin to break the shell but are too exhausted to continue, pulling it open from the outside at the wrong moment can rupture blood vessels that connect to the yolk sac and the chick may bleed to death. Ask me how I know.

Such delicate work to keep hope alive in a time of sardonic laughter and the fleecing of all there is. A life’s work, to soften enough to let the body know what it knows in the dark, to let the fog we’re lost in moisten our toughened shell. To refrain from help that kills. We need each other for that, to be present to another real, and when day and night are swallowed up, we need each other to remember the breath of things, the perfume.

References

Blue Cliff Record. Trans. John Tarrant & Joan Sutherland, pacificzen.org.

Jack Gilbert. ‘Horses at Midnight without a Moon.’ Collected Poems. Knopf, 2012.