Springwinter

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 pinecones to get at the seeds.

Down in the town, other cockatoos – pink-and-grey galahs, a small species not local to the island, play through streets and backyards; escaped birds paired, and now there’s a flock of twenty or thirty. Beside the local sports ground, they chase through narrow margins between limbs of tall trees that surround the oval, and in the rain, hang upside down by their feet from powerlines and open their wings like inside-out umbrellas, calling their delight. How do birds, with their small mass and speedy metabolisms, survive the cold? Scarlet robins flirt across the road in front of the car, their volume a scant palmful, their weight miniscule. Wrens and thornbills, even smaller, feed between showers in the wet vegetation.

In the evening sky, night by night from the western horizon Venus climbs toward Jupiter as Jupiter sinks until they hang together, softly bright, then go their separate ways. Later, Venus joins Regulus, brightest star in the constellation of Leo, and one of the solstice markers of ancient astronomy. In Aotearoa New Zealand, it’s the festival of Matariki, the Maori new year that begins when Rigel and the Pleiades appear above the eastern horizon.

The moon rises late, later, until it’s early, until it’s just appearing at sunrise, a yellow sliver, until it’s gone and we hold our breath in the dark. After that, a cloudband flows down from the tropics across the mainland, bringing three days and nights of soft, steady, easterly rain, indistinguishable at times from mist. I listen to it trickling in the gutters. The air feels warm, though the arc of the sun is very low as the daylength shortens to its limit for the year; saffron milk cap mushrooms are still appearing under the pines of the windbreak, and from its capsule a basket fungus performs its magical self-expansion under the trees near the house.

Each night, in the light of the returning moon, more mist rises. I read recently that ground mist like this is alive with organisms that metabolise toxins such as formaldehyde – these bacteria live on the surface of leaves during the day and rise into the air at night. T spends long minutes shining a torch beam upwards into the shifting web of droplets as they drift down to glitter on the fur of animals – pademelons, bandicoots, quolls – who come out to feed in the safety of its cloaking quiet. There’s a cat, too, that appeared a few weeks ago; I hope it’s hunting rats and mice. In the morning before the fog lifts, wattlebirds, ravens, magpies cry out through the dimness.

Once more, squalls bring snow clouds that rise slate-purple above the mountains and sweep eastwards over us from peaks that are at first just patched white in glimpsed intervals between standing waves of sleet. Soon the whole range is white, white against purple, and the foothills are dusted too. The eagle pair from across the river hang in the wind with this year’s young, still in its shawl of pale feathers. Despite the cold, there’s no shortage of food for them, or for the other raptors, or for the ravens in their glossy black – roadkill abounds. Now, in addition to pademelons, we see more and more of the larger Bennett’s wallabies alive in the paddocks and dead on the road, and the even bigger Forester’s kangaroos, with their smoke-grey fur and deerlike heads.

Then there’s another pause in the cold as tropical air pours south-eastwards from the Timor Sea and for a few days its balmy, springlike. And again, because our seasons often mirror what’s happening in the northern hemisphere, the warmth fills me with sorrow and apprehension, as I watch catastrophe unfold in Spain and France, where wildfires have burned through hundreds of thousands of hectares. And remediation is not straightforward – these fires have been stoked in part by the success of environmental regulations that have cleaned the atmosphere; there’s less haze to reflect heat back into space.

It’s not just meteorological seasons that are out of whack – conflict is spreading in the countries around the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. The US has resumed bombing Iran and Iran retaliates by hitting infrastructure in US-allied states; now some of those states are firing back at Iran. And all of them are doing back-channel deals, stalling, rearming under the guise of peace negotiations.

The wintersweet is in full flower, and I see a bumblebee working the blossom. There must be other insects active too, because the grey robins have brought out young who beg around the garden after their parents. Plovers start to pair up in the sodden paddocks. Silver wattles come into flower in the gullies where fire went through most recently and in other places where the ground has been disturbed. They spring up quickly, flourish and die, having made way for forest species that germinate in their shelter. In this winter-not-winter, this spring-not-spring, I light candles and ask for guidance from the benevolent ancestors – those who found a way to give and receive love as they held the tension of living-dying; I ask their help to find a path between quietism and reactivity, help to do what’s mine to do in the world.