Here

Where we discern melody in bird or human song – shifting frequencies between notes – birds likely experience the rich nuances of the inner qualities of each note. David George Haskell Days widen around the solstice. In stands of silver wattle, the sound of bees and other insects is loud as they crowd to feed from nectaries dotted along feathery leaf-fronds. Under the trees, bracken has grown head-high in the wet, and tiny creamy blooms open on spiky heads of Lomandra among sharp-edged leaves clumped near soaks and streambeds. Grasses are flowering.  In honeybee colonies it’s swarming season. Nurse bees bring royal jelly – queen-making superfood – to larvae growing in bean-shaped queen cells attached to the edge of the brood comb. At the same time, workers give less food than usual to the adult, egg-laying queen of the colony. When the time comes, she won’t be too heavy to fly and can lead the swarm out, leaving a newly hatched queen to take over. On the first warm day, four swarms...

                                                Say something in response.                                                               Yun Men, case 14, Blue Cliff Record Three perfect days of sun, not hot, not windy. It draws me out to the edges of myself and then evaporates them; skin alive with its touch, step by step each foot kisses the ground and the ground kisses back. Roses open after being stalled in bud for weeks; as I sit working they send a waft of perfume so strong it’s like a tap on the shoulder.  Then as forecast, from the south, rain mixed with snow falls heavily all night, straight down, chilly twin of the subtropical downpours of my childhood. Later, cold wind blows everything around; it brea...

                                                                          everything echoes                               the dead and those not yet born returning                               speech in fragments like a gust of bells   A northeasterly, strong and strange, full of rain, blows counterclockwise over the island at the beginning of the month. The air is cold, even though it’s from the north, since it’s been drawn up via the Southern Ocean. Things clang around in the wind, and panes rattle in their frames on what is usually the sheltered side of the house. Trees fall, braced as they are against prevailing westerlies but undefended from the e...

                            What sees is seen . Alan Garner A blackbird has laid three eggs and then abandoned them, in a nest she made at eye level in a tangled heap of pink jasmine against the house wall, near where she built before and brought out chicks. Perhaps the nest was a decoy – at any rate, it seems to happen often that birds build nests and lay eggs and leave them, so it’s either worth the effort to pre-emptively divert a predator, or not worth the risk of persisting where danger has actually been sensed – there are rats and quolls on the hunt at night and currawongs in the daytime. Snakes are coming out of hibernation too. Fantailed cuckoos, shining bronze-cuckoos, pallid cuckoos call from before daylight, sometimes in the middle of the night, though they’re not interested in the blackbird – they hunt the garden and forest for nests of smaller birds to lay their eggs in – wrens and thornbills, honeyeaters...

                                      the river washes me through I walk with the road and the hillside it follows. Amazed again by the way the world answers pressure for pressure the roll of each step from heel to ball of foot to toes, answers my palm and fingers touch for touch as they rest on the bar of a gate or the trunk of a tree. Amazed by the way breath comes in from the whole sky. Rain keeps falling and now the soaked ground lets it go. After a night of downpour, for the first time since the big dam was dug more than sixty years ago, water flows over the wall; T hurries to lower the outlet and bring the level down. When the wall becomes saturated it will collapse and wash downhill all the life it holds. Everywhere, the sound of running water. And then two days of sun and just like that, full spring. Hillsides are yellow with wattle flower, flags of pollen fly from the pines, willow ca...

                          Come and come is the seaweed                           Come and come is the red sea-ware                           Come is yellow weed, come is tangle                           Come is food which the wave enwraps.                                                                       Carmina Gadelica Lamps of the wattles slowly brighten, lengthening the days. And a grey robin calls from the hawthorn hedge, quiet, clear, heart-piercing – the sound of the beginning of the end of winter through every year of my life here, early on when I ...

              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.                         ...