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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...

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...

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...

Trauma alone does not shatter the psyche. The psyche shatters itself through its own self defense system. ... This applies as much to a group’s trauma as it does to the individual’s. ... All of the group’s defenses are mobilized in the name of a self-care system which is designed to protect the injured divine child of the group identity. ... The rest of the world may see ... only the hardened front ... a ‘complex’ ... the psychological equivalent of ... biological systems such as those that carry out digestion or maintain blood pressure ...  structuring and filtering our experience of ourselves and others. Thomas Singer   We have to draw to us and drink down to the very dregs what, because of our complexes, we have held at a distance. CG Jung qtd in Singer.   Quickly, without thinking good or evil, what is your original face before your parents were born? Gateless Gate , case 23 The pardalotes are back at the gourd nest for a fourth season. At the end of autumn I looked i...

... 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...

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