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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....

                 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, ...

        I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen . . .                                                                               Walt Whitman We drink the beginnings of cider and perry – H has pressed fruit from trees all around the valley, including pears from the old orchard in the paddock here, and he gives us juice – complex earthy sour-sweet, with the zingy edge of new fermentation. I’ve also juiced a few kilos of nashi pears before the currawongs clean them all up – it tastes good, though the fruit is insipid.  Even as autumn deepens here, a tropical cyclone forms in the Timor Sea and travels south off the western coast of the mainland. It gathers strength till sensors on offshore islands record gusts of 290 kilometres per hour before the equipment ...

You come and go by daylight. You make people out by daylight. But suddenly it’s midnight. There’s no sun, no moon, no lamp. If it’s a place where you’ve been, then of course it’s possible – but if it’s a place you’ve never been, how will you get hold of something?      Yunmen  O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall …      GM Hopkins Equinoctial gales have begun. At the start of the month, a wild westerly stream encompasses the whole island, bringing massive swells to exposed beaches, touching up the wind-shorn manicure of coastal and alpine vegetation, combing twigs and leaves and dead wood from the forests to litter the ground. Despite this, the pigeon is raising another brood on the meagre twig platform in the birches where she brought out young in January. The autumn world goes about its business. Wattlebirds and families of currawongs feast on ripe pears. Flocks of thornbills gather, stopping at the water pots, checking the wintersweet out...

                                The space we stood around had been emptied                                 Into us to keep …                                                           Seamus Heaney, ‘Clearances: 7’ Overnight, it’s autumn in the angle of the light, in the smell of morning, in the beginnings of night fog on the river. The black cockatoo flock starts to gather ahead of winter, young ones chattering and wailing as they fly, excited and chasing each other like children at a festival. They come down into the garden as they have done since the trees we planted began to grow up, to eat banksia seeds and check the blackwoods for goat moth grubs, on their way to the pine windbreak,...

                                                  The moon knocks on my breastbone,                                                                                                 asks to come in. Such quiet – I fall into it, sounds fall into it like homecoming – raven calls; the pardalote chicks’ chorus of cries at each visit from their parents and the thready monotone of four or five repeated notes in the interim; the approaching and retreating digdigdigdig of a helicopter fanning the night’s rain off fruit in the cherry orchard along the road; wattlebirds feeding in the flowering pōhutukawa, their voices guttural above the d...

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...