Absence

The bird is not in the tree yet

But will be

So that is not absence

When the tree is waiting

The silence is here

But that is not absolute either

When the birds are here

The songs come with them

The songs are in the birds

But the insects are gone

That the birds eat

That is absence

And the stump of a tree

And who knows

If there will come some sad day

When the rain looks down

And says I must pass on

……………………

On March 30 I posted a poem, “The teaching of the rainmaker” where I wrote:

One tree

One dirty sock

One small garden

One well

One view

One life

One dream

One house of salt.

The story of the rainmaker is that there is a devestating draught, and, as a last resort, the rainmaker is summoned. The rainmaker is centered — he lives in Tao. He agrees to help. All that he requires is a little hut, a garden and to be left alone. After he has been living there, in a very short time, the weather returns to its natural cycles. This was a favorite teaching story of Jung’s to help people understand what it means to be centered. It means to be in Tao. What I am describing above with this list of one tree, one life, one dream, one house of salt, is the simple Taoistic life-style of the rainmaker. This list comes from a poem I posted March 30, “the teaching of the rainmaker”. The rainmaker only needs the basics. In the poem “Absence”, Tao is missing: the birds do not return because there are no insects, so there is no song, and the tree (the one tree, which we might interpret as the archetypal or world-tree) has been cut down. In other words, the world, as depicted in “Absence” is off-balance. It is not centered. The rainmaker is not there, so the rain, instead of falling, moves on. The assumption here is, the human world, by itself, is not enough to initiate the harmony of existence that is Tao.