The hooks

I live on a wide open west coast beach. It is a changeable place; still on some days and wild and challenging on others.  It is in the presence of a large island, Kapiti. The hills rise sharply behind it as if some great hand wanted to demarcate the coast from the land beyond. It is not like the beaches of my childhood, all gorgeous coves and shell packed squeaky silica sand. it is grey sand and often grey sky and sea as well. Less warm welcome and more terse instruction.  This beach is well used; families, dogs,  surfers, surf life savers, the mermaids who swim rain or shine. Always something happening, always changing.

Part of the gift of living here for me is at least once a day, I put on my gumboots and slouch down to the water to wander along the space where the waves are meeting the newly wet sand.  Not a lot to see; the patterns in the sand, sometimes driftwood and the molluscs that couldn’t hold through the latest turbulence.

The other day I was walking in the intertidal zone; the edge of the vastness of the sea, and the vastness of the land, the liquid and the solid, the depth and the rise, when I walked past a couple of lures with large hooks and thick nylon. They beloing to the fishermen who come to the beach to catch the fish; surf casting or long lines it is a way of hunting that has become increasingly specialised. These lures, al shiney lurex and thick nylon, were dangerous to everyone who uses the beach.

I tried to pull them out but they were tethered to something buried. Something buried so deep I couldn’t pull it out, or dig it out. The breaking strain obviously way over my puny pulling power. I didn’t know what to do. I was a bit alarmed but didn’t see what I could do. I even asked a passerby if he had a pocket knife. Understanably alarmed that didn’t work either. So I tried to bury them, fruitless in the rush of tall the water coming and going I’m sure. I marked where it was on the beach – opposite the two storied house and walked home. I met a woman walking a dog and told her to watch out, for which she was grateful but I felt powerless to do much more.

The next day I walked again, same direction but with an awareness that the hooks were possibly still there. And sure enough as I went passed the two storied house I saw them glinting in the light. Still immobile, still dangerous. And I was still unprepared to deal with them.

I hadn’t prepared myself for the reality that they would still be there. I tried to saw with a sharp edged shell but that didn’t even scrape the nylon. So I slouched home, got the paring knife and slouched back again. With one pull of the knife, the lures and hooks came away, the connection to what was buried severed.

It struck me that this is a metaphor for inner work.  The parts of our psyches that are useful to us in some often early circumstances, our adaptations and defences, are not things we notice all the time. Lurking as remnants in the roots of our psyches, they get buried deep, becoming immovable.

If we don’t know they are there, either we, or others, get snagged by them, sometimes with painful and deeply injurious results.

When we do know they are there, our first response is usually to try to get them out or bury them again, both of which are understandable but likely to be futile. The roots of these sharp parts of our psyches are deep and immovable.

We are likely to encounter them a number of times before we gather the understandings necessary to deal with them safely.  We might have to walk a ways and take some unusual action to establish something new, to take away the threat.

We all have psychological contents that cause harm, often we don’t mean to, often we are oblivious, but when we see and we take the action we can to remove the harm. The more we set ourselves and each other free from harm, one hook at a time.