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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.                                                                                                         ...

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. ...

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...

                 … the river still glinting-up into its handfuls, heapings.                                                                                        glassy                forgettings under the river of                my attention –                and the river of my attention laying itself down –                 ...

                                     The place where we are right                                      is hard and trampled                                      like a yard.                                      But doubts and loves                                      dig up the world                                                                    ...

               The plants that push up through the junk and the plastic, earlier, later, they’re coming,                   regardless... … the light shifts regardless. The truth is a kind of regardless. The winter’s nothing to me. Do you think I don’t know about power? You think I was born green? I was. … I’ll blow down that tree so it cracks your roof open. I’ll carpet your house with the                          river. But I’ll be the reason your own sap’s reviving. I’ll mainline the light to your veins. What’s under your road surface now? What’s under your house’s foundations? What’s warping your doors? What’s giving your world the fresh colours? What’s the key to the song of the bird?                           ...