Fourth Form of Madness

When I was about 12, our family  got chooks.  They were beautiful black hens with scarlet speckles around their necks.  I used to love to watch them pecking around their pen, stirring up the dirty with their forever scratching feet.  My brother and I would sometimes play a game of releasing all the girls (as they were affectionately known) out into their larger pen and then see who could round the most up into their smaller sleeping quarters.  Sometimes they would burst loose from their confines altogether and roam our larger mid-surban backyard eating all the parsley and assorted vegetable garden goodies they could find before being returned to their chookie prison behind mesh wire.

They were all magnificent creatures, but by far the chook that stole all our hearts the most, and was also the consistently best egg layer, was Moses.  Named by father for reasons only known to him, I’m guessing biblical flashback, Moses was by far the most splendid girl amongst them.  With graces that can only  be bestowed by the gods, Moses ruled that chook pen with the cold, steel, beady eye of a most convincing and appropriate Matriarch.   Nothing went on under her watch without her say so.  And that was why I was so surprised when a certain turn of events happened one hot mid summer days in the mist of school holidays.

It was like any other day, as I meandered my way down the back yard, being careful to stick to the shade, the shadow, out of the blazing mid day sun.  I was going to check on the girl’s water levels and collect any eggs that may have been laid already for the day.  There had been a lot of noise from the pen earlier and I felt confident that there would be a bounty of eggs to collect. Instead a rather gruesome discovery lay ahead of me.

There amongst the dust of the scratching feet of the girls, lay a fallen hen who was missing many feathers and was looking feeble and unwell.  Instead of the other girls showing any signs of concern or offering any form of assistance, they instead were taking turns at pecking maliciously at the fallen hen with aims so true and strong that it make me flinch each time a beak struck her.  And there was Moses, off happily pecking up random grain that had been flung the furtherest from the early morning feed.  Off taking care of her business the best she could whilst the others settled a civil unrest in true might is right style.

I was childishly and idealistically appalled.  How could this happen on her watch, how could she let the whole group peck to death a stricken hen,whilst merrily feeding in the corner, her refusal to engage or even acknowledge  the vile scene condoning her support of what was happening.  And it was then that I saw it, her powerlessness in the face of group action.  Moses only had status, power, dependent on the approval of the group of girls she led, without that she was just any other speckled neck hen with a slightly better than average egg laying ability trying to get by along with the rest of the brood.  In the mist of that blistering summer’sday, a chill overtook my being.

Recovering from my initial shock, I quickly rushed the group of blood hungry pecking machines and did my best to shelter the fallen hen from them.  The mauled and mutilated hen survived the ordeal but my trust in groups did not.  Group dynamics, to this day remains one of my biggest fears and I give it all the respect it deserves.  This is an ill defined,  often poorly understood leviathan that does not care for the rules of rhyme nor reason but seemingly has rote learnt all the words in the songbook of dogma. This makes it a most menacing foe indeed.   A foe that you can never entirely be certain that you are not, in some way, forming a silent alliance with, somewhere in some far off corner of your own life.

This week a new rule became installed at our house.  No-one, under no circumstances is allowed to let the cat our after 4pm.  Yes puss now has a curfew.  I’m not one for imposing rules on free spirits but this one definitely needs to be chained a little.  Over the years puss has developed some bad and one could say slightly annoying habits.  The first is she forgets she has been fed.  A little forgetful is fine but not when it is coupled with a demanding on the second meow at your feet. This loop continues from the time she gets up till the time she is locked in the laundry at night with a nano-second of relief provided when she is actually eating. It is like living groundhog day over and over again.  But I got to say she sure has helped me practice shutting out distracting noises.

This second bad habit came on in the last year or so.  Bedtime would come for the household and I would go open the front door to allow her to come in as she is always usually malingering on the front path or hiding in the hedge.  It used to work like clockwork, I open the door, puss runs in, gets a pat and then gets installed in the laundry (aka her bedroom that she shares with the dog).  Now it has turned into an odd ritual of me begging for her to come in and bribing her with whatever goodies are on hand.

The other night it reached it’s crescendo.  It started as usual, me hovering at the door in my shortie pjs trying to entice  the cat inside whilst still retaining some of my dignity with the neighbours.  Each time I edged closer to her she retreated away a few steps.  I got down to her level and tried the old, “here puss, puss, puss, puss” Nope not giving up any ground.  Next I tried the old “I’m just going to the letterbox, and I am so not interesting in you puss”. No joy, the minute I set one foot in her direction she was off to the edge of the road, which she knows sets my heart in my mouth.  After 15 minutes or so this was wearing thin, it was time for the big guns – food, puss is not one to deny her desires.  So there I am, under the moonlight shaking her bag of biscuits whilst by this time hissing between clenched teeth “Here kitty kitty kitty”.  Nope, puss has chosen this moment to exercise some self control over her usually out of control eating habits.

And then my solution appears.  For some time now I have been feeding a stray cat that I think was left behind when some people around the block from me moved out.  Despite my hubby’s disapproval, I have snuck biscuits out to the friendly and full of personality little fellow when he has come looking for food.  The shaking of the cat biscuits was like music to his ears and like the piped piper I led him to my front yard in a kitty trance.  Well the minute puss clapped eyes on her nemesis, she turned tail and trotted off inside quick smart.  Nothing like a lesson in gratefulness to motivate right action.  I left a healthy handful of biscuits for my partner in crime and gave him an affectionate pat on the head that he loves and then legged it inside before the approaching headlights caught me in their view.

Earlier this week I had a blogging crisis.  Some lovely person from the Ukraine had decided to embellish all my blogs with hidden embedded code – in the techy geeky world of my hubby this is known as malware – malicious code.  And I never even noticed a thing 🙂 The first I knew of it was when hubby dropped me an email at work to say that he been working for the last 6 hours on my blog page to clean it up and gave it the all clear.

It did get me thinking though, that sometimes it is easy to resemble the malware blog page model in real life.  How much malicious coding have we taken on board, either voluntary or involuntary, that we then operate from, most times from a totally subconscious level.  What constructs are lurking within us that pull our strings like we were puppets?  It’s hard to say as we are all rather like icebergs when it comes to these issues.  There is the insy winsy part of us existing in the conscious world existing as the tip of the iceberg, and then there is the large hunky chunky murky subconscious floating along in the darkness of the water, the massive majority of the iceberg.

I have often heard life described as an adventure, I believe that adventure is to delve into the subconscious part of your being with the courageous heart of an explorer, open to all experiences, come what may.  There are many ways to start having a conversation with this part of yourself, but none of them use words, this is not the language of the subconscious.  The subconscious loves to speaks in many other ways, and invites you often to listen.  It speaks though mythologies (the central themes), symbols, synchronicity, dreams and feelings (yes those old things), intuition and many more ways.

It’s popular to think that perhaps you shouldn’t get stuck in exploring this part of yourself, that you should transcend it.  But it is impossible to transcend this part of yourself.  Bear with me a bit and I will try to explain.  All of us have pretty much done the “ultimate” transcending to be able to say “this is me” in the conscious realm.  To transcend something means to go beyond the meaning of something in the conscious realm and find a higher knowledge, deeper knowledge.  To know things in the conscious realm, they must exist in time and space.  The body exists in time and space, and therefore  you can know it, in a segment of time you can know that form as you.  But the mind does not exist in time and space (I don’t believe the brain to be the same as mind).  The mind is a formless, bodiless structure.  It can not exist in time and space.  In any one segment of time you would not be able to say , this is my mind, here and forever, this is me.  Therefore to have any concept of who you are (in terms of your mind) in the conscious realm, you must transcend yourself, to arrive at a concept of you.  Concepts are great but they are just concepts, abstract.

The subconscious is an invitation to return to a “truer”, more “unfettered” version of you.  It’s an invitation to sink deep into the murky, dark water and surrender to what you find there.  This descension is a necessary journey which allows you to deconstruct the “ultimate” yet rather false transcending you have already done.  It is here where you will start to learn all those things that you have squirrelled away, sometimes on purpose, sometimes unconsciously, that now pull your strings in the conscious world.  However, unlike the malicious code embedded in my blog page, these things do not need to be removed, it is enough to have awareness of them.  To see them in all their raw beauty (yes beauty).  Awareness gives you choice.  If you know these things have the power to pull your strings, you can then decide if you want them to.  To me, this is true freedom, a kind of freedom that is open and accessible all.  Happy journeys 🙂