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Net

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... the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. ... Before – once you think about it, surely long before – the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and axe; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder and digger ... with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. (Ursula Le Guin) Cold, like the winters when I first arrived in the valley nearly half a century ago, but so far, no snow settles here on the ridge, though the mountains come and go as a jagged white line to the west. Small birds start to return from their wintering far north on the mainland – I hear the first pardalote, and the first fantail. No cuckoos yet. A blackbird sings from the hawthorns to the west of the house, and after months of silence, a grey robin calls from the windbreak – Here! C’m’ere! Rising later and later after its full, the moon...
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Where do we go when we die?

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                                                      Gate gate paragate                                                        parasamgate bodhi svaha!                                                                              Heart Sutra                                                                The world of dew               ...
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Fend, defend

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                                Mountains, rivers, the great earth, the sun, the moon and the stars                                 are none other than your own heart and mind.         Mazu Daoyi First snow on the ranges; I know it’s there because of the feel of the air in the afternoon and the high feathered edges of nimbostratus rearing up in the west, but the mountains themselves are invisible in the storm. Next morning as I drive along the ridge road to E and H’s house, for a moment looking south there’s a gap in the cloud and in it, a huge white shoulder turning away. The four magpies tune up from the tips of macrocarpas in the windbreak, then all glide down to the pasture below to stand carolling, facing inwards like any quartet making sure they can hear each other. It’s now several years that t...
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Help

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              A student asked Jinqing, ‘I am breaking out of my shell. Will you peck?’              Jingqing asked, ‘But will you survive if I do?’              ‘If I didn’t survive, people would laugh at me.’              ‘You really are in the weeds.’                                                             Blue Cliff Record , Case 16                 Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.                             … Hope is pushed down                but the angel flies up again taking us with her.             ...
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Mend

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         Shenshan was mending clothes when Dongshan asked, “What are you doing?”         “Mending,” said Shenshan.         “How is it going?” asked Dongshan.         “One stitch follows another,” said Shenshan.         “We’ve been traveling together for twenty years and you’re still talking like that!” said Dongshan.         “How can you be so clueless?”         “How do you mend, then?”         “With each stitch the whole earth is spewing flames,” said Dongshan.                                                                                                         ...
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Heavy

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The old man said, “It’s true, I’m not a human being. In a previous universe … I was the abbot on this mountain. A student asked, ‘Does an enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘someone like that doesn’t fall under the law of cause and effect.’ Because of this, I’ve been reborn 500 times as a fox. ‘Baizhang’s fox’   The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Milan Kundera Each day this year’s falcon chick chitters a one-note wheedling cry from high in the dead eucalypt out in the paddock, or from the tip of one of the windbreak pines; the sound increases and decreases in volume as its parents come and go. At first the other birds ignore it. Then one day it flies down onto a low branch in the garden. Perhaps it’s trying to hunt. If so, no luck this time – it sits looking furious, hunched, surrounded by a buzz and clatter of honeyeaters, thornbills, wattlebirds, wrens, blackbirds. ...
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Evidence

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I told her how after finding out our mother had been up in court when we were small I’d … looked up stuff about courtrooms online, and … read there that judges’ and lawyers’ wigs had traditionally been made and still more often than not were made of horsehair. … It means horses have been a little bit present at every important thing, just or unjust, carried out in a courtroom in this country since the seventeenth century. Wow, she said. So many bits of dead gone horse on so many powerful people’s heads, yeah? Imagine real horses in there. Imagine them there at the trial … We should all be being judged and decided about by horses ...    Ali Smith, Gliff A bronzewing pigeon makes its see-through raft of twigs less than a metre off the ground in a little juniper tree in the garden and lays two eggs there. The bird sits for a few days, but then I find the nest skewed and abandoned, one egg gone. Probably a currawong or...
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