Here

              Daowu and Jianyuan went to a house to offer condolences. Jianyuan struck the coffin with his hand                and asked, “Alive or dead?”               Daowu said, “I’m not saying alive, I’m not saying dead.”               Jianyuan asked, “Why won’t you say?”               Daowu said, “I’m not saying! I’m not saying!”               On the way home, Jianyuan stopped in the middle of the road and demanded, “Tell me right now, Teacher.                If you don’t say, I’m going to hit you and leave.”               Daowu said, “You can hit me, but even if you do, I still won’t say.” Jianyuan hit him.                         ...

            the victory of a revolution is immanent and consists in             the new bonds it installs between people. What Is Philosophy?   Early in the month, a great serpent-dragon of cloud with a feathered crest coils around the island, noses in across the coastal peninsulas from the southeast and up along the river valley from the sea. It rains for days, heavy sheets of water that twist in the wind and slap against the east facing doors; towards the end, lightning circles northeast, north, northwest, west, southwest, so close that we hear the crackle as bolts cleave the air before the shockwave goes out. Each bolt is followed by a deluge as the cloud that carried the charge collapses, released from the static tension that holds each raindrop or snowflake apart from all the others. Snow falls on the peaks; tanks and dams fill. Water birds feed, delighted, but other birds and all the furred creatures hunch and wait i...

                    you will greet yourself arriving                     at your own door …                                                        Derek Walcott Blackbirds chase on the roof above my head (I know the sound of their feet). Three males, beautiful in their glossy black, their daffodil-yellow beaks, are fighting for territory already. They face off, but don’t yet sing. One picks something up and drops it, picks it up and drops it – a snail? A stick? A small stone? Birds are everywhere, their calls clear in the cool air that pools overnight now above the river, topped by a warm layer that bounces back all the sounds generated beneath it – vehicles on the road across the valley, conversations, dogs barking, geese sounding an alarm somew...

What do oceans talk about, or trees? What do predators and prey shout to each other in the night? What name does the doe give the fawn as it lies in the grass catching its breath?                                                                       Rachel Boughton, ‘The Stone Woman Gives Birth’ Picking apples – they’re small and hard this year after a dry summer, the unthinned fruit bunched together, tart-sweet, but the seeds of the mid-season varieties are dark now and the birds and animals have begun to eat. Parrots and silvereyes and yellow wattlebirds and possums in the branches, pademelons and swans on the ground. We leave some for all of them. There are still blackberries on the bushes but not for much longer. I cook both sweet and savoury dishes with the apple-blackberry combination. High clear cool da...

                            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...