Net
Cold, like the winters when I first arrived in the valley nearly half a century ago, but so far, no snow settles here on the ridge, though the mountains come and go as a jagged white line to the west. Small birds start to return from their wintering far north on the mainland – I hear the first pardalote, and the first fantail. No cuckoos yet. A blackbird sings from the hawthorns to the west of the house, and after months of silence, a grey robin calls from the windbreak – Here! C’m’ere!
Rising later and later after its full, the moon pares down to a silver curl that floats above the sunrise with Venus and Jupiter and disappears. Sun and moon, planets and stars, these movers and companions along the spiral. I’m thinking about the entanglement of time with the wide world. Culture, ancestry, collective memory, collective amnesia, epigenetics of trauma and privilege – crossing across personal circumstance, connections in place and its peoples, cultures, ancestry, memory, forgetting. Each self a changing centre of all those meetings.
Days are getting longer, though the light is still low, slanting; it picks out every detail of texture. Daffodil leaves power up through the mulch; winter wallflowers are suddenly vivid in their purple and russet. Alternating with the cold, drifts of warm air bring a smell of vegetation, then the chill returns as continent-sized weather-spirals draw in air from the south, the west, the north, the east, then south again, freezing. Despite this, the dog starts to shed clumps of her winter coat. Hold onto that floof a bit longer, I tell her.
Soft rain comes with the easterly flow – a cloudy touch that soothes over the house, tenting, enclosing. From mounds of dirt where the potoroo has dug up grubs among the roots of grasses, a fresh earth smell on the rainy wind. And the smell of jasmine, lemon, daphne, wintersweet. Wattlebirds feed in theri namesake trees, and, near the house, among bright flowers of shrubby blue sage; their weight pulls the branches down. Bluegums begin to blossom, pushing the silvergreen caps off bunched stamens. Everything does its best to flourish.
It rains a night and a day and another night, then stops some time before dawn. When light comes, everything is so still that long into the afternoon, droplets hang undisturbed from every leaf and twig, refracting sunlight. Each drop holds a whole upside-down world, until a bird lands in a scatter of brilliance or the air breathes it in again. Bees are out working, and their sound is loud in the quiet.
In
China from the sixth century CE, during the entanglement of Taoism and Buddhism
that became known as Chan, there began an attempt to articulate the experience
of non-duality. As a metaphor for a non-dual universe, teachers in the Hua-Yen
school took up the image of the net of Indra from the Arthava Veda – a compendium
of spells and hymns some scholars believe to have originated in shamanic
traditions of the paleolithic era. In the Arthava Veda, Indra’s net is a
weapon:
Bound in a
mighty net let them break quickly like an arrow's shaft.
Air was the net; the poles thereof were the great quarters of the sky:
Sakra therewith enveloped and cast on the ground the host of Dasyus...
Therewith pressed all the foemen down so that not one of them escaped...
This world
so mighty was ... the net of Indra.
(Book 8, Hymn 8)
Chan buddhism turned this image around to make Indra’s hunting-net a matrix of interconnections extending infinitely in all directions, with a jewel threaded at each node, where every jewel reflects and is reflected by all the others, fractal, holographic. All beings, human and wider-than-human, interrelated, interdependent.
We live the tension between these possibilities of ensnarement and connection. More and more clearly, I feel the web as an entanglement of deep time in the world: borne from war and famine into places that have been taken violently, my ancestors and I eat the food and drink the water of our own dispossession and take into our bones with that nourishment the angers and sorrows of those we have dispossessed.
As
I am moved through my days and nights by this awareness, in a resonance of
inner and outer worlds, a major earthquake in the Kamchatka peninsular in
Russia’s far east strikes the globe like a gong. Shocks go out; waves of
turbulence spread and wash back from the coastlines of the Americas, Japan,
Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Aotearoa, snagging islands, surging
around until the edge of the wave reaches the Antarctic.
At least as far back as the brilliant, thawing, dripping world at the end of the last ice age, the image of the net has been with us. The jewelled net may be our deep reality, but we proceed step by step in the dark, sparkle-free for the most part. We are entangled – do we fight the web (and thereby strengthen and weaponise it), or do we acknowledge our capacity, in a flash that changes everything, to respond otherwise in the matrix?
Earth and river breathe out fog each night after the rain, and each day the sun breathes it up again to reveal a world of gold and blue. We go out into it drunk with light like the slow bees. We eat what the ground speaks for us in the cold – broccoli, little sweet turnips – and also the food stored from summer.
We
make our world in the way we use language, image, rhythms of breath and song
and cries of grief. The starvation, the shootings and bombings in Gaza are
brought home, interconnected and present here in the quiet of an island on the
other side of the world. But so are all the attempts, everywhere, at
relationality, that other truth of the net we’re in.
References
Elizabeth Fisher. Women’s Creation: Sexual
Evolution and the Shaping of Society. [1979] Anchor, 2008.
Book 8, Hymn 8. Hymns of the Atharva Veda, trans.
Ralph T.H. Griffith, [1895], at sacred-texts.com.
Ursula Le Guin. ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.’
Ignota, 2019, pp.29–30.
Comments
Post a Comment