The Toadstool Darshana
I noticed that the gnome was gone quite by accident one midsummer morning. He had sat beneath his ceramic mushroom, slumbering or meditating I was never quite sure, ever since he had come to live with us in our first apartment, and pride of place had been given him in the house upon my grandmother’s record box near the fireplace. His presence was so atmospheric that I may well not have noticed it at all, had Daisy not made it a point to sniff out his empty seat and stare at it with some confusion a few minutes before pacing nervously about the room to find him.
You must understand that it had been my belief that he could not be separated from the fungus, insofar as the two seemed to be of a piece with one another. So my first thought was not so much to go searching for him as to puzzle over how it could be possible that his stalk and shade should be without him. Finally, as Daisy returned from a course around the kitchen and came to look up at me, I looked down at her and asked her where she thought he’d gone. She seemed to look out the front window a minute, and then to turn around and walk towards the back door; thinking she needed to go out, I followed her, when I recalled that the plants needed water.
A very general rule of gardening is that anything that a plant has to produce will require it to be resourced so to do, and amply resourced to do so well; this is particularly true of flowers, fruit, and vegetable bearing plants, all of which are constantly engaged in the one work of bringing forth those visual or gustatory beauties for which they have been bred and kept. Another such rule is that the sun is as much foe as friend for a great deal of the plant kingdom, and so the key resource, water, needs to be regularly and freshly supplied for those botanical patients most subject to his visage. And so by this time it was common for me to trot out twice, perhaps thrice a day to water the flowers and herbs that adorned the deck and then to drag out the house to water the vegetable beds, during which time I would also make routine inspections of petals and leaves, ensuring that the dead were pruned to be reborn once more and that there were not too many pests to be found anywhere. I would also generally pick what was ripe at this time: tomatoes, strawberries, green and jalapeno and banana peppers, and so forth.
On this particular day, thrown off by the gnome, I was not thinking very much about a third general rule of gardening, which is that one should time all such activities with the indigenous inhabitants of the garden in mind. Worms and frogs, yes, and hummingbirds too, and butterflies and bees, surely, all of whom can be quite put off a daily routine by an inconsistent and inconsiderate gardener; but also the fay, who do not always enjoy suddenly unexpected baths from on high nor human fingers poking and prodding about through their homes and hideaways. I was made suddenly aware that I was breaking this rule while plucking the husk of a dead Marigold from its stem and envisioning how long it might take its successor to unfold.
“Well, excuse me!” remarked the clearly put off longaevus, who had been reclining in its shade. He now was clinging to the nearest flower, seeking to avoid the direct sunlight in its full force. No matter how long I have lived in the House at Jove’s Oak, I have never quite accustomed myself to the sight of the fay, whether appearing as little people, fair folk, or other numina, and as was my custom, stared for a moment longer than I meant to, trying to contain my surprise but unable to react smoothly.
“I—I’m sorry, sir,” I said honestly. “I didn’t realize that this bed was in use.”
The fairy was dressed, it seemed clear to me, in the fallen Marigold and Hollyhock petals that had come to rest in the bottom of the bed. I had no idea how long he had been there; perhaps he did not realize that it was I who had left the petals from which he had constructed his clothing. I privately wondered whether they were for my benefit or his.
“Well, of course not. You didn’t ask.”
“Again, my mistake,” I replied, a little put off now myself. “Might I ask how you came to use this hanging bed? You know, the two vegetable beds down below are certainly more spacious.”
“And currently a bit crowded,” the fay retorted, seemingly hacked. “There’s a gnome down there making a great deal of fuss, and it’s too loud to take a proper midday nap, with all this sun.”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly much more interested. “Did he have a hat? A pipe?”
“Friend of yours?” the fay asked contemptuously.
“I would say so. I have no idea what he would say, not least since this is the first I’m hearing of his speaking.”
“Believe me,” the Marigold fairy replied, “you’ll have had quite enough of it before long.”
I did not bother to end the conversation formally, but strode off down the stairs to the left. I had not realized that while the floral fay and I had conversed, Daisy was watching intently, tail wagging, the shaded vacant space beneath the zucchini leaves in one of the vegetable beds. As I rounded the bed, I saw what she saw. Beneath the fronded canopy, right where the sunlight now pierced the lattice up which crept the cucumber vines, there had grown in the weeks of rain a great mushroom, solemn of shape, and there sat my gnome, in his usual lotus position, a small crowd of the fay folk gathered round him in rapt attention as he propounded his doctrine. The frog, whom I had some weeks before named Betty Croaker, was also there, perched upon the stalk of the nearby squash, seemingly listening as he also eyeballed a descending beetle; I noticed, for the first time, a small garden snake coiling in the crevice of the cornerstone, his eyes trained on the assembly.
“Beneath the shade of this mushroom,” his gruff voice croaked, “I sit with you, my children, in the bliss of the true Self, which is not this body, nor this mind.”
“What is the Self?” yelled one of the fay children, to be hushed by his mother.
The gnome leaned down, as though he was looking deeply into the eyes of the fay child, though his eyes were of course covered by the bushel of hair that emerged from his cap (now wrapped, I thought curiously, like a turban) around his eyes. “The Self,” he said slowly, “is that which is left when there is no body, nor any mind. And yet,” he continued, looking across the crowd, “it is not ‘I,’ if by ‘I’ I mean me, and not you; and it is not you, if by you I mean you, and not I.”
He leaned back and began to breathe deeply, as silence filled the air. Daisy was now sitting patiently, waiting to see what would happen, as was I, crouched next to her. Another breath, through the nostrils, and first very quietly, then very loudly: “Aum!” droned the gnome. A breath; “Aum!” droned gnome and audience; “Aum!” they droned again, this time seemingly joined by the frog and the hummingbird who now hovered just out of the immediate vicinity. I did not join in the Aumkar, nor did Daisy, who suddenly became quite interested in a squirrel perched some yards away upon the rusted fence, and ran off after him. The satsang began to dissipate after a few minutes, the fay mothers and children wandering off back to their homes in the soil, many of the young fay men paired off each with the fay young women, and the frog hopped off to find his next meal. A snail ceased to be rapt in attention and began to nuzzle the ground. This seemed a good time to approach the gnome.
“It was a nice sermon,” I said after a moment.
“The truth of the Toadstool darshana,” said the gnome, “must reach the edge of the field.”
I looked behind me to the common area, then back to the gnome and pointed over my shoulder. “More of your kind out that way?”
“There is one kind,” said the gnome, after which he sat silently again.
“So I have to confess,” I interjected, after around forty seconds, “that I did not think you could move.”
He breathed deeply again. “Long did I sit this meditation.”
“Oh?” I asked. A pause again; then:
“For seven years I sat beneath my toadstool,” said the gnome, “contemplating the suffering of existence. So completely did I become the act of meditation that my own body solidified. This often happens to the fay folk, you know,” he said, taking a long drag upon his pipe: “we will get lost in thought, or merry, or good dreams, perhaps so long that for the whole of a human life we may appear as a tree, or a stone, or even,” he said, taking in another draught of smoke, “a figurine.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding, wishing to be diplomatic. Some obvious questions arose for me concerning the character of fay corporeality, and of whether it might differ between fay and fay; I could not be certain that the body of the gnome before me was quite the body of the Marigold fairy, nor that either was the same sort of flesh that I or Daisy or Betty Croaker or the bird picking at the coconut grass in the hanging bed had. But now did not seem the time, for the gnome seemed—I cannot quite describe how—once more lost in thought. Finally, I said:
“Well, so I really just wanted to ask if you intend to stay here, or if you intend to return to your usual perch.”
At this, the gnome seemed to return, and to be more serious than before. “I know what I must do,” he said, “to bring liberation to the fay of the field.”
“I see,” I said. “And I won’t be stopping you. Bee, of course, will surely miss you. But I do have two questions.”
“Ask, my son,” said the gnome, with his newfound gravity.
“First,” I asked, “it does rather seem that your kind does not like the daylight. The crowd you gathered here was hidden in the shade and all of them have gone back to their burrows, I presume until twilight. Is that not the time your kinds—or I guess, your kind—prefer to congregate?”
“It is so,” he said.
“So this leads to my second question: if your goal is to gospel the field—wait, actually, I have three questions. My second is whether you mean field literally or metaphorically.”
The gnome seemed to start to get nervous. “Come again?” he asked.
“I mean to say,” I continued, “do you intend to evangelize ‘the field,’ as in, the ‘world,’ with this—what did you call it?”
“The toadstool darshana,” he said confidently, though quickly.
“Yes, right, that,” I said. “The toadstool darshana. Do you intend to bring it to the world, or merely to the common ground?” At these words, I gestured beyond the fence to the trees and houses there.
The gnome looked off into the distance. He was quiet a long time, and drew his pipe from his mouth, turning it back and forth in his hands. And then, very solemnly, very sadly, in almost the pouting voice of a child, asked with a hush: “Is not the field the world?”
Pity—a pity of love, not of exasperation—filled my heart at this question. I smiled at him, and turned around to sit on the cornerstone of the vegetable bed. I looked out with him at a world wider than either of us could ever know. I had come to suspect through my interactions with the fay so far that they in fact knew very little of the world beyond their haunts; in this they were indeed no different than most humans I have known, or dogs, or Marigolds. The smallness of the world, its darkness and cavernous recess of mystery, can make those beams of genuine illumination which happen to fall through the thickly strewn vines latticing our perception seem like an ocean of light; and at least half of spiritual maturity, it seemed to me then, and has seemed to me since, comes down to not mistaking the prodigal rays for the Sun himself, nor the endless words of God for the whole of his speech. There may well be prophets among ants as among fay and men, as among angels and great gods; each speaks from a well of divine experience in so many ways incommensurate with the other, bridged only in God himself. I felt suddenly quite bad for my little friend; perhaps I had denied him moksa. But then, his courage seemed to return.
“Well, even so,” he piped: “the true Self is not this body, nor this mind.”
I had seldom till then, and have seldom since, encountered so much humility grown up together with wisdom. “So my third question,” I said, “was whether the house might not still serve you well, as a kind of matha or Capernaum—at least, until your mission takes you further on.”
The gnome thought on this a moment. “The lady would miss me,” he said.
“Yes,” I replied, “the lady would miss you.”
Time passed, and the two of us began to talk. He asked when I thought the shelves sitting ever unfinished in the garage might be hung, and when the stone I had brought for a fire pit might be laid; I, in turn, asked him to tell me what he could of his people, and their history, and whether they had any songs worth singing in the vesperal antechamber. He offered me once or twice what pinch of tobacco he had on him, seemingly bottomless, and each time I reminded him, gently and unoffended, that I did not smoke. And on we went like that, talking until the evening star arose, lingering for liberation from the littleness of the world, but also glorying in it; and he, in a most gentlemanly manner, kindly accepted when I offered him safe passage back inside, just as the fay folk began to awake, some of them seeking their teacher again; and I thought I distinctly heard the annoyed grunt of the Marigold fairy as we passed. And as I returned him to his fungal bodhi tree, I remarked, once more, “You know, it really was a nice sermon.” And so I wandered off to sleep.