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                            Eia, ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte.                            Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us. Just on dusk the three-day moon, a thin orange slice, soft neon, balances on its tip and goes down behind the range to the southwest. Last light passes into the glow of an aurora, pale green at the horizon, dusky red above. Subtle pulses run through it.  Days of heat with streamers of cloud from the northwest that bring no rain; long grasses bleach and turn brittle. Near where I water the little lemon tree, jasmine puts out innumerable small green hands from the places where I pruned it earlier. Sound of bumblebees in the flowering comfrey. White butterflies – preparing to lay their eggs on the winter vegetables! – crowd the purple flowers of horehou...

         I risk to write nonsense these days.          Just write down what you find.          I’ll never know what I’ve found.                                              John Berger, Here Is Where We Meet 237 New moon at the beginning of the month – a sliver of brightness between clouds in the western sky as summer dusk comes in. As part of the rhythm of things I bring water, flowers, candles to acknowledge the ancestors – those as remote as the stars from which we are all descended, and closer in, those of the ground itself and the creatures on whom we depend, and ranged around the walls, those of my human lineage, whose images soften and lean forward in the moving light. An immense curl of cloud, the remains of a cyclone, drifts down across the island from the Coral Sea. Air turns to steam, mis...

                        all through the fabric of this place                         those who have lived and died here                         from the beginning I dream that I dig up two unbroken pieces of glazed pottery that are part of a household altar to the ancestors. They’re separately fired in the same five-sided shape and decorated with slightly fuzzy prints of people and landscapes like the fragments of 19th century crockery – broken dinner plates, teapots, cups – that turn up around the farm in the stump holes and pits dug for long-drop toilets that were used as rubbish dumps at that time. In the dream I keep finding more pieces of the altar and as I do, its overall design becomes apparent – the five-sided pieces are part of the base for a central column with niches for photographs, candles and oth...

                 Each day, each night                  the place sings everything in The swans bring out four young ones. Like many birds, they don’t start incubating until their whole clutch of eggs has been laid, so all the cygnets hatch over the course of a few hours. By next morning, they’re clambering down the sides of the nest into the water and are soon out swimming, with one parent leading and the other bringing up the rear, talking quietly to the chicks and each other in their fluting-honking woodwind voices. The convoy circumnavigates the dam and later the paddock where the adults graze. From time to time as the young ones tire, they climb aboard a parent and disappear under its feathers. The following day the whole family is out again early. J, whose house is by the dam, reports seeing one of the cygnets riding on top of the cob’s back, facing forward between the sweep of his wings like ...

                           this life whole under my hands T found a raven’s nest upended on the track under tall trees – a marvellous springy cradle of interlocking eucalypt and coprosma twigs. Newly or perhaps partly completed and certainly unused, with just a couple of grey underfeathers caught in the clean fine grass of its lining, it must have blown from a fork in the canopy during one of the storms we’ve had. I think of the life that begins in a nest such as this, up in the whipping sway. The ravens are furiously watchful just now, flying sorties high and fast to get above – and so gain tactical advantage over – the eagles whose hunting territory this is, and who pass over the ravens’ nest sites. Drawn-out aoouuourrr aarruuooor  alarm calls sound throughout the days. The eagles respond by beating away out of range with something close to haste, occasionally turning talons-upward to warn off pairs of dive-bom...

I lokid thereupon with eye of my understondyng and thowte, What may this be?                                            Julian of Norwich. The Shewings, 1: 149–50 Promptly, at the start of the month the swallows arrive and begin to fly in and out of the sheds, checking old nest sites and looking for new ones. We have one warm day and I prepare for the turn to fire-vigilance, though I know we still have a time of grace because the ground is so wet. A prickle of green appears on some of the hawthorns. Then for weeks it rains and rains; squalls pass over on the hour and in between the sun shines briefly, hot. The ground is sodden underfoot in a miraculous reversal of recent years when fires were already well under way at this time. They’ll be back, but any reprieve is welcome. The wind blows bitterly cold off heavy snow on the peaks across the river and newborn animals that have be...

          que nadie lo miraba,           Aminadab tampoco parecía,           y el cerco sosegaba,           y la caballería           a vista de las aguas descendía.                                                     and there was no one watching,           neither did Aminadab appear,           the siege was lifting,           and the horsemen,           at the sight of the waters,           came riding down                                           Cántico spiritual, San Juan de la Cruz In 1504, in his early...