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Springwinter

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Someone asked Dongshan, ‘How can we avoid cold and heat?’ He replied, ‘Why not go where there’s no cold and heat?’ ‘Where’s that?’ Donshan said, ‘When it’s cold you freeze, when it’s hot you roast.’ The Blue Cliff Record , case 43 Around the solstice, the season seems to shift properly to a winter like those I remember when I first arrived here. Freezing wind draws up from the Southern Ocean, with rain and sleet, and snow on the mountains. We hunch against the cold, add layers of clothing, keep the fire going. Then the latest in a series of blocking highs stations itself over the island, and golden days resume. Dense fog forms in the river valley overnight and boils up over the ridge, sinking the house in pewter-coloured light; it’s hard to remember that the sun is shining from a cloudless sky half a kilometre away. Black cockatoos come wheeling in through skeins of mist and settle in the garden, clacking and wailing, calling out to each other as they tear open banksia pods and p...
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Haunted

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And in the wall The dead increase their invisible honey W.S. Merwin   Since I posted last, an international conflict has begun from a carefully, carelessly dropped match, and spotfires have spread fast. Drone and missile strikes target oil shipping and infrastructure, and as always, there is immediate collateral damage, in addition to long term economic fallout. The strikes are also being used as cover for genocidal actions. Pauses in the fighting are declared and violated, declared and violated, and vast fortunes are made on consequent market volatility. As always, the civilians in whose name this war is fought have no say in its prosecution. Coinciding with the latest ceasefire, a blocking high pressure system has been sitting in the Tasman Sea east of Australia, seeming to correlate with the sense of suspension, of waiting for the next change to come in the wider world. Day after day and night after night the air is still and warm, and full of smoke as autumn fires a...
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Over

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Summer grass all that remains of soldiers’ dreams                                                           Basho   With a calendar month of summer left, the season has already turned. On still days, sound carries in a new way, as if propagated differently within the increasingly oblique angle of light, and the light itself, travelling a greater distance through the atmosphere, catches dust and smoke so that everything swims, resinous, as if in amber. River fog gathers overnight, then lifts cool air over ridge-saddles along the valley each morning. With the swing of the planet away from the sun, we sit now at the slow centre of weather systems as they pass, rather than at their fast-moving edges. For...
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Seamless

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Ye maun make me a fine Holland sark, Without ony stitching or needle wark, And ye maun wash it in yonder well, Where the dew never wat, nor the rain ever fell. ‘The Elfin Knight’   The emperor asked the nation-teacher, ‘What should I do after you die?’ ‘Build a seamless monument for me,’ he replied. Blue Cliff Record , case 18 Hundreds of thousands of hectares of country burn on the mainland, in conditions where, in extremity, flames splash and run and form tornadoes, borrowing the properties of other elements. Crown fires explode, treetop to treetop in the forests. Hay bales burn in farm paddocks – surreal installations. Here on the island, we’re still protected, for now, by the spreading skirts of the slowed polar vortex, with the Southern Ocean as a moderator between us and the Antarctic. In this we’re unlike far northern latitudes, where cold gathers strength as it passes over land, and this month has brought ice storms far south into the interior of the US. In cities there,...
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Spaces

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In 7th century Ireland the monks start writing in the Irish language, and they use what they call a minuscule script – it’s more compressed, it uses less vellum ... and around the same time they start using spaces between words. ... We were inventing the mechanics of modern writing ... you take our indigenous oral mythology and translate that into the written word, and you invent spaces, commas, punctuation – you introduce musicality to writing. There’s beats now, there’s spaces, there’s pauses – you’re making the page sing. The Land of Slaves and Scholars   The day after the operation I had a number of visions. ... I saw a man made of rain. ... He led me to different places (I call them ‘places’) such as my father’s grave, inside my father’s bones, the land of no-language, the place where scars are roads through difficult territories ... Brendan Kennelly First days of summer, hawthorn foams in the hedges, shocks of roses fl...
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Hinge

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The old man said to Baizhang, “A student asked me, ‘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. Please, will you say a turning word for me?”       Baizhang said, “You don’t cut the chains of cause and effect.” Gateless Gate , Case 2 & Book of Serenity , Case 8   On this day C. G. Jung talked about his mother. Since early childhood and again during significant phases of his adulthood he had been aware of two personalities in her. The usually visible one was a warm-hearted, conventional and affable woman but at decisive moments a second voice with powerful, unassailable authority could emerge. Aniela Jaffé, Reflections on the Life and Dreams of C.G. Jung For sixteen of the first twenty days of the month, the island is raked by gales. Each day, and some nights, for ten or twelve hours at a stretc...
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Compassed

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The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depths closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever. Jonah 2: 5–6   Even before the equinox, one after another, fronts bring gale-force winds. It happens in part because, early in the month the atmosphere tens of kilometres above the south pole unexpectedly warms by more than 30 degrees Celsius in less than a week. This Sudden Stratospheric Warming happens every couple of years at the north pole, but almost never over Antarctica (loss of sea ice creating conditions for a blocking high is thought to be a factor in this year’s event). The warming slows the fiercely cold, winter-formed vortex above the pole, so that its winds spread outwards like the skirts of a dancer winding down after a fast spin. They touch us here on the southern coasts of Australia. I hear huge gusts strike the forest canopy then pick up speed on...
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