— “Look around you,” I demand, sweeping my arm in front of me. The sound resonates, the first echo returning before the word has completely left my mouth. “What does this place remind you of?”
We’re on the blarney rock, the monolith that juts into the farm reservoir as a natural peninsula. If you were to join up a dozen Stonehenge slabs and topple the result to lie half in and half out of the water, you would have the blarney rock. Siobhan and I have picnicked here, painted watercolors, solved the world’s problems, and made unrestrained love here, much to the astonishment of the alpacas. One time, at the critical moment, an avalanche started over on Ringa Mountain and we laughed so hard we nearly fell into the reservoir.
When I leave my body here on the rock, it will merge with the elements and eventually disappear, leaving just the bullet. I like that.
The reservoir is a very deep, natural tarn, formed by a geological fault running across the middle of the valley. Siobhan and I once dropped a rock off the blarney stone and watched it shimmy away into the depths, growing smaller until it vanished. So we tied another rock to the end of a full reel of builder’s twine, and dropped that too. It didn’t touch bottom, so all we discovered is that the farm would never be short of water.
Matthew inspects the way the valley has formed around rock and reservoir, a sweeping, rising curve.
“It’s a natural amphitheater,” he muses. “We’re on stage. We should turn on a Greek tragedy.” For now, he has suspended hostilities, his tone almost friendly, as if he has allowed the sun’s warmth to reach inside him.
Where an audience might sit, alpacas are either studying us, or grazing, and more are arriving, drawn by the human activity. They spend most of their time grazing the grass, supplementing with alpine daisies and buttercups that emboss the pasture with white and gold. When summer settles in, the display will be even more extravagant, because Siobhan spent a small fortune improving on nature.
Following my lead, Matthew strips off his shirt and lies back on the warm rock, using the shirt as a pillow. In times past, a hiker has scratched Kilroy was here into the surface near his head. There’s an upward tilt at that end of the slab, inviting humans to lie back and contemplate the abandon of the Southern Alps. In recent geological history, some exuberant giant flung peaks, bush and lakes into the air to fall where they would. In Maori legend, the Earth mother is reaching up, yearning for her lover, the Sky Father.
In the distance, the sun shines down on Ringa Mountain. Ringa means arm. With three gullies reaching for the peak, it takes little imagination to see fingers pointing high. This side of the hand is in shadow, but the gullies are snow-filled, sharply defining the gaps between the fingers. The thumb is a stumpy misshapen outcrop; the palm a rain-hollowed slope. The arm is greywacke scree running down to the beige and green garments of tussock and beech. Arm, hand and fingers beseech the sky, asking why.
When he first clambered up, Matthew stayed crouched until he found a safe spot away from the water. He explained that if he looks down into the deep water, he’ll turn dizzy and breathless and his hands will shake. At five years old, he was playing on the beach by an ill-tempered Tasman Sea when a freak wave reared up, fell on him, and pulled him back in the undertow.
“You got yourself out, or were you rescued?”
“Rescued. Howled my head off. I never could go near deep water after that.”
We bask in the warmth, but after a while a thought occurs to me and I speak lazily to the sky. “So you’ll know how to really appreciate a lungful of air.”
Just as lazily, he rolls over and looks at me. “If you mean do without it for a while, then yes. Is there a point?”
“There is. Want the best experience of eating and drinking? Do without for a day or two. Want the best shower you’ve ever had? Do without. Likewise, the full experience of hot must include cold. Up has no meaning without down. You appreciate light when it has been dark, and starlight as the mist melts away, and happiness when sadness has carved a cavern within you. On this earthly plane, nothing can be fully experienced, appreciated or understood or have any meaning without its opposite or lack. Your mind performs on a stage built of opposites and contrast. Listen…”
In the beginning, there were no stars or planets, there was no space and no time, no opposites, nor any contrast. There was only the stillness of a deep longing, and the deep longing was the Great Spirit.
The Great Spirit longed to know itself, because there was nothing else to know. So it asked the question, What Am I? It wanted to experience the answer in many ways, so within its stillness, it created many smaller spirits called souls, each asking the question, What Am I? So the one became the many and yet they were still one.
And each soul created within its own stillness a separate region called mind, and each mind asked the question, What Am I?
And each mind was given the gift of space and time and contrast. Each was given light and dark, here and there, past and future, big and small, up and down, hot and cold, right and wrong, male and female. And each contrast brought desire, and each desire was the asking and the answering of the eternal question, What Am I?
And each mind was given the gift of forgetting. So that its experience could be real, each would forget that it is a creator surrounded by its creations. Each would experience itself as separate, and restricted to a vibration called physical, and each would believe itself contained by a shape with head, arms, and legs.
A bush robin, tououwai, flits past, so low over the outlet stream that the pale underbelly is barely visible. It lands on the stream bank, an ebony pebble against grey stones.
“Forgetting,” Matthew says. “Why does that make it real?”
“Imagine that you’re playing chess with yourself. You make a move on one side of the board, then go around to the other side. What has to happen before you can truly-”
He interrupts. “Okay. I have to forget the other guy is me.”
The robin’s mate arrives, and the pair pursue insects under twigs and small stones, the female so enthusiastic that her discards bounce off nearby rocks.
Matthew says, “I feel about as important as a sparrow.”
“You’re about as important as a being which casts itself out as a sparrow and returns as a bird of paradise. You have only to remember what you forgot.”
“Hah! This from someone missing the first half of his life.”
“That from someone missing the second half.”
“I could go crazy listening to you.”
“Crazier than your visions made you, or not that crazy?”
He glares, but says nothing.
“How long before they let you out of the psychiatric hospital?”
“The bin? A month.”
“A month? One month?” My disbelief must be written all over my face. “After you wrecked a police car and ran other-”
“Well, after three days, I stopped fighting them. Instead, I became a model patient and got to know what the shrinks wanted. You know, talking openly and calmly about my own feelings, a little regret for how I had scared people, a bit of humility, a touch of wry humour about my situation, eagerness to make a new start. Not difficult.”
“But how could you think so clearly? Didn’t you say you were on the maximum-”
“I reduced my dose.”
“You reduced it?”
“Broke the pill in two on the way to my mouth—between the thumbnail and forefinger—chewed and swallowed one bit in front of them, with the other bit tucked in the side at the back of my tongue. Bitter as the devil, but worth it.”
“And you got away with it?”
“I was so well behaved, they stopped watching me so carefully at drug call. Then I had to get a balance between acting zombied and looking like I was improving. They bought it. After a while, they reduced the dose themselves. Then I reduced that. Which freed me up to work my way out.”
“Even so, they can’t have released you in a month. You escaped?”
“No. They showed me the door. Actually my psychiatrist came to the door with me and opened it. I think he wanted to make sure I went through it. He looked a bit disturbed.” There’s a hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth.
“Wait a minute. It doesn’t add up. There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Nothing important.” He shrugs dismissively.
So I let it go and change direction.
“Brain chemistry is an effect, not a cause. The root cause of insanity is the belief that you are alone. But when you understand my kind of craziness, you’ll know you’re far from alone.”
He’s amused. “It’s all psychology, isn’t it? No hard facts. You can’t substantiate a single thing you’re saying.”
“Of course not, and be glad of it. Empirical evidence, logic, and deductive reasoning don’t even begin to help you remember the being waiting inside you. The human mind does not become wise through reason. History is littered with those who used reason to corner the Truth, but who would come to blows if they met.”
“And you,” he says, “have transcended such limitations.”
“Yes. I have.”
He rolls on his side to look at me. “Do you know how arrogant you are?”
“It’s the opposite of arrogance. Once you master your life, you won’t see your self as superior or inferior to anyone or anything.”
“So you would not be superior to a dung beetle.”
“Superior at hammering nails, inferior at rolling dung balls to impress my mate, but inherently superior? No.”
He presses the point. “And you wouldn’t see yourself as inferior to, say, the Buddha.”
“Inherently? No. Of all people, the Buddha would say that if I think I am inferior, I will become so and then mistake it for reality. No. There is no higher or lower.”
He sighs, closing his eyes against the sun, which must turn his blue sky to salmon pink. “Can your expanded self talk to you directly? Like with a voice?”
“Yes, it can. But… ” My tone is rueful. “… it’s very choosy about when.”
“Then what about people who hear voices telling them to do really crazy shit. You know, kill someone.”
“You associate the expanded self with only pleasant, non-painful things?”
“Of course.”
“No. Your expanded self—your soul if you like—often brings you painful events deliberately, most of them at your direction. As you’ll see.”
He mutters. “Who the hell’s the crazy one here?”
“Obviously you. You’re the one mumbling to yourself.”
Abruptly, for the first time, he laughs out loud. That makes him cough, so he clambers down the land end of the rock, well away from deep water, and goes to the outlet stream. Still coughing, he kneels in the stones and scoops cold, crystal water into his mouth, cooling his throat. Both tououwai flit to the top of the opposite stream bank, then loop away into the bush in different directions. Their wings make no sound at all because melt water is on the move everywhere, bustling down the stream, bubbling through and under the soggy pasture.
