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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 i...

... the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. ... Before – once you think about it, surely long before – the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and axe; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder and digger ... with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. (Ursula Le Guin) 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...

                                                      Gate gate paragate                                                        parasamgate bodhi svaha!                                                                              Heart Sutra                                                                The world of dew               ...

                                Mountains, rivers, the great earth, the sun, the moon and the stars                                 are none other than your own heart and mind.         Mazu Daoyi First snow on the ranges; I know it’s there because of the feel of the air in the afternoon and the high feathered edges of nimbostratus rearing up in the west, but the mountains themselves are invisible in the storm. Next morning as I drive along the ridge road to E and H’s house, for a moment looking south there’s a gap in the cloud and in it, a huge white shoulder turning away. The four magpies tune up from the tips of macrocarpas in the windbreak, then all glide down to the pasture below to stand carolling, facing inwards like any quartet making sure they can hear each other. It’s now several years that t...

              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.             ...

         Shenshan was mending clothes when Dongshan asked, “What are you doing?”         “Mending,” said Shenshan.         “How is it going?” asked Dongshan.         “One stitch follows another,” said Shenshan.         “We’ve been traveling together for twenty years and you’re still talking like that!” said Dongshan.         “How can you be so clueless?”         “How do you mend, then?”         “With each stitch the whole earth is spewing flames,” said Dongshan.                                                                                                         ...

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...