REGISTER

The stone woman gives birth in the middle of the night.

—PZI Miscellaneous Koans Case 33

Here is a koan for transitions. In the darkest hour of night, in the depths of your not knowing, there is a quickening, a stirring. The womb, or should we say the womb-of-origins, churning as it awakens to bring forth the new.

It could be said that the stone woman in the middle of the night is a koan for winter—the bare trees, the cold ground, the seamless cover of snow. In life we have those barren times, like a woman unable to bear a child, to bring forth. Here is a koan for the dark of night, without sight or knowing. And yet, against all expectation that which is bare is full of life. There is a stone woman giving birth, a quickening, the aliveness made manifest. As there is a light inside the dark, there is a spring in every winter.

Also, I found this in Wendell Berry’s essay, “A Native Hill.” It could easily serve as a reflection on the stone woman. Employing all the senses Berry finds his place in the pattern of things.

“Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in—to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them—neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them—and so at last he will grow to be native–born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.”

—David Parks