Held

Trauma alone does not shatter the psyche. The psyche shatters itself through its own self defense system. ... This applies as much to a group’s trauma as it does to the individual’s. ... All of the group’s defenses are mobilized in the name of a self-care system which is designed to protect the injured divine child of the group identity. ... The rest of the world may see ... only the hardened front ... a ‘complex’ ... the psychological equivalent of ... biological systems such as those that carry out digestion or maintain blood pressure ...  structuring and filtering our experience of ourselves and others. Thomas Singer

 

We have to draw to us and drink down to the very dregs what, because of our complexes, we have held at a distance. CG Jung qtd in Singer.

 

Quickly, without thinking good or evil, what is your original face before your parents were born?
Gateless Gate, case 23

The pardalotes are back at the gourd nest for a fourth season. At the end of autumn I looked inside and cleaned it out, so it’s ready for them. How long do they live? Is this the original pair or their descendants? Two, three, four go in and out, calling, pecking the sides of the gourd. Some of them tremble their wings in courtship and some roll around on the ground under the nest, fighting. Is this a territorial dispute or a negotiation? Will raising the young be a group effort?

They begin to bring thin streamers of bark, several times their body length, from the shaggy trunks of stringybark eucalypts in the windbreak, flying canted to accommodate the drag. Then they bring equally long stems of fine grasses, followed by progressively shorter pieces.

Wild sound coming from far off – sixty or seventy black cockatoos flying, calling, heard as a crescendo as they sweep overhead and scatter to land and feed in the banksias around the house, and in the windbreak pines, and to sit like black candles in the dead tree in the paddock. Great creaking as they tear rotten wood, great thudding of half-eaten cones hitting the ground.

The witch hazel is suddenly in flower, and violets, and from the top down, willow catkins have begun to open gold, though at ground level they’re still silvery, pushing out of their varnished sheaths. Gullies are bright with the lemony foam of wattle blossom; bluegum canopies are starred with big creamy flowers and the ground under the trees is littered with bluegreen blossom caps.

My hands are heavy as I write, resisting the page, the practice space, the weight of pain accumulating in the bodyheartmind of the world. Heavy with the sense of all that has happened, is happening, will happen here and elsewhere on usurped land. Theft, murder, ecocide held at a distance and justified by right of power or urgency of our own exile. Everywhere the same story.

For most of the month, clear nights bring white frosts followed by rain fronts from the south, cold, but grass is growing. Then for a while there’s a change of pattern and air starts to stream down from the north and northwest, mild, and it seems that spring is here, weeks early. And again a surge from the antarctic passes over in freezing gales and brings snow to the southern and eastern states.

Everything breathes and stills, breathes and stills, freezes and thaws with the wind – my heartmind too. How to remember that despite the acts of those energised by power over others, most people are creaturely in the intent and scale of their loves and longings and dailyness.

Two thornbills, smaller even than the pardalotes, gather spiderwebs from around the windows to make their spherical nest, dotted with spider egg cases, low down in a clump of grass at the base of a shrub. Their waterdrip song and quick movements, their flecked breasts and needle beaks make me happy. The grey shrike thrush has begun to hunt, and the thornbills tzit tzit anxiously. I haven’t heard a cuckoo yet, but they must surely come soon.

I hear the raven alarm call and think the eagles must be about, but it’s the white goshawk, easily gaining height with fast beats of its big rounded wings, beating and gliding, beating and gliding, outflying the raven pair. The chickens are suddenly quiet, sheltering deep under cover. Other birds don’t seem bothered though – the yellowthroat honeyeaters’ resonant churr pick em up! churr pick em up! echoes through the forest; magpies carol and even the wrens are talking.

A sunny day comes, though with more cold forecast, and suddenly I have the urge to clean windows and tidy my workspace, carrying away stacks of paper already used twice and now going to the bonfire heap or to the garden for mulch. From clouds of blossom on the backyard plum trees in the township, the first petals fall in white eddies even as snow clouds loom over the mountains. Our trees have a few flowers clustered here and there, mostly out at the tips of thin branches where possums and parrots don’t go.

The wind drags over the hillside, cold, and the hillside holds me, the wind carries me despite all the mistakes I make and represent. The world holds me as it holds every presence that emerges and goes back in; it holds my one unfolding moment that is unlike any other. The great earth carries me when I can’t carry myself, my heavy heart and hands, it draws me to it when I no longer know how to hold it off, when at last all I have is my original face, like every other, useless, undefended, irreplaceable.

Reference

Thomas Singer. “The Cultural Complex and Archetypal Defenses of the Group Spirit.” The Cultural Complex. Ed. Thomas Singer and Samuel L. Kimbles. Routledge, 2004, pp. 18–20, 31.