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Complex

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       A fierce wind blew the ship off course and set it drifting toward the land of the flesh-eating demons.          Entangling Vines , Case 39        Cultural complexes structure emotional experience and operate in the personal and collective psyche        in much the same way as individual complexes … [they] tend to be repetitive, autonomous,        resist consciousness and collect experience that confirms their historical point of view.         Thomas Singer        I have this nagging idea that at each major site something aberrant … happened and        a cultural liberation converted to a cultural complex.         Craig San Roque        [The etak navigational system is not a birds-eye view, but] occupies a “real point of view        on the real local space” and envisions everything else – stars, islands, reference objects –        only as it exists in relation to the viewer. Thus, “the star bearings of the etak island radiate out        from the navigator himself” and cannot be t
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Days of the dead

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                                   After every war                                    someone has to clean up.                                    Things won’t                                    straighten themselves up, after all.                                    Someone has to push the rubble                                    to the side of the road,                                    so the corpse-filled wagons                                    can pass.                                    Someone has to get mired                                    in scum and ashes,                                    sofa springs,                                    splintered glass,                                    and bloody rags.                                    Someone has to drag in a girder                                    to prop up a wall.                                    Someone has to glaze a window,                                    rehang a door.                       
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Where have you been?

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                                 The darkling way, the bird path, the open hand.                                                                            The Record of Dongshan In the first few days of the month, pallid cuckoos arrive, and fantailed cuckoos, and shining-bronze cuckoos, calling, calling all day, and at night after moonrise – See?See?See?See?See?See? See. Here. Their host birds rush to bring out a first brood from eggs laid before the cuckoos arrived, or to complete their nests if they themselves have only just returned from migration – satin flycatchers! Swallows make reconnaissance flights over dams, checking for insect life, and skirl in and out of the sheds and under eaves where they build their mud cups. The equinox is here and wild weather passes over the island as storms emerge from the Southern Ocean and track eastwards, to collide with tropical air that streams down off the Coral Sea; atmospheric rivers pour themselves out over the islands of Aotearoa New Zeal
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Dry

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                         Sickness and medicine heal each other. The whole world is medicine. What am I?                           Blue Cliff Record , Case 87 I come from a place of creeks and rivers, and subtropical downpours that feed them. Here, even though rivers run out of the wet forest across the valley, this side is already in the rainshadow of ranges to the west and there’s not much running water – farms rely on dams, and pump through the summer to fill troughs and keep crops growing. When I first arrived I was always listening for water, always looking for its signs. The first few years I was here seemed parched to me. I remember lying awake, sick with longing for the smell of rain, for the sound of it on the roof. Feeling that if it came, softening the air and the ground, it would answer me as well, like a promise that my life too could mollify and flourish. With all my fingers and toes I prayed down the days of drought, counting; I prayed in the way I knew, for what I knew. 
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Cold and heat

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                        A monk asked Dongshan, “When cold and heat come, how can we avoid them?”                         Dongshan said, “Why not go where there is no cold or heat?”                         The monk asked, “Where is the place without cold or heat?”                         Dongshan said, “When it is cold, the cold kills you. When it is hot, the heat kills you.”                                                                                                                         Blue Cliff Record , Case 43 Strange windy days and nights, like the equinox, out of time. Spattering of driven rain and the mountains shrouded in snowclouds again. Before daylight, in the lulls, currawongs call like a rattling of silver ingots; wattlebirds clear their throats and the falcon goes cackling away to hunt. Walking with the dog down by the river I hear the first pardalote – some of the migratory birds are back already. Patches of wattle come into bloom in the gullies. Again and again th
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Down

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                                  How many times have I gone down into the blue dragon’s cave ...                                                                                           Xuedou, Blue Cliff Record , Case 3 Southwest over the ranges, at dawn the full moon answers the rising sun that sidles to its midwinter notch in hills to the northeast. Even before the shortest day there’s a feeling that the season has turned. Birdcalls change as territorial manoeuvres begin again; brown thornbills check the eaves for cobwebs to carry away for nestbuilding; blackbirds chase and scold but don’t yet stake out a nest-range with their songs; fantails that didn’t migrate haunt the ways. When I go walking with F and Z we need only light clothing – they’re visiting from maritime eastern Canada, where this year, unlike other parts of the north, just now summer temperatures are the same as ours. Black cockatoos gather in the big pines on top of the hill to shred cones for the seeds inside and
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Reluctant

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                 Reluctance n. ‘act of struggling against;’ ‘unwillingness, aversion;’ …                 from re- ‘back, against, in opposition’ + luctari ‘to struggle, wrestle,’ …                 from PIE * lug-to - ‘bent’ (also Old Irish foloing ‘supports,’ inloing ‘connects;’                 Middle Welsh ellwng - ‘to set free;’ Greek lygos ‘withy, pliant twig,’                 lygizein ‘to bend, twist;’ Gothic galukan ‘to shut,’ uslukan ‘to open;’                  Old English locc ‘twist of hair.’)                 Step by step in the dark, if my foot’s not wet, I’ve found the stone. Soyen Shaku The year winds down towards winter; each day is a small circle, shadowless under cloud or with shadows that lean away from the low sun. Sleet showers alternate with golden light, and after clear nights, frost and fog transform the morning landscape. My resistance to writing grows as the days shorten; heavy, slow, I’m reluctant to enter what feels like my own cold-dark until I remember that
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