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There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
These last weeks the possible re-election of Donald Trump has been one of the dark birds that visit many of us in the night. As with other such epochal events, of course, how we might react internally to it is of vastly less weight than its effect on the world. Neither early morning wandering nor anything else we can do will change that. But it might shape our response.
Funny, thongs, how they make that thwack thwack noise: Your ten little pistons push off the ground and the earth calls back a little salute, just a nudge, really: I’m here. So…
We are at the end of the beginning. ‘If you feel you have coronavirus…’ I tune out emotionally and daydream as the public service announcement plays over and over in empty trams and trains, and in deserted shopping centres.
Reports of the rain are weak front, then strong. Sunshine headline news, or so it appears. I whisper the tune from a scratchy disc. Maybe Tuesday will be my good news day.
It was summer in the midst of drought. The earth was parched, impenetrably hard, and all about leaves fell like rain, clogging gutters and the drains. Leaves fell in clouds, curled and dry, and formed a carpet across the street that crunched beneath pedestrians’ feet.
While I stay by my mother, I glean only the edges of the news; already the horror of the fires has been at full stretch. In the quiet room where my mother lies, I think of people trying to sleep in unfamiliar environments, refugees from the fires.
Illness, so apparently explicit and ever more obvious as it progresses, in fact defies definition: submitting apparently to scientific and medical description, it escapes into a quality of pain, exquisite loss or appalled helplessness that is often most clearly captured at the heart of great works of art.
After the fire/they found a nail preserved in glass/and piles of dust and ash. After the fire/this place lost its memory/of trees cleared, a slab hut/of fences, a verandahed timber house/and a circle of orange trees.
Turning off the main road, we burrowed now into a verdant tunnel; at the end of it stood one of Australia's flagship properties, Southern Ocean Lodge. Entering its vaulted, glass encased great room, I turned my head from the rolling waves on one side to the rolling bush on the other. Each was an ocean unto itself.
As the sea withdrew, the waves left curling black lines that crossed one another. The beach became a map in which territories were separated from one another. That image reflected the fires and the ways in which they were perceived. They were more than localised events. They affected relationships that spread far beyond the fire.
I dreamed Thoreau told me that whenever I was lost, if only I'd remember that it was not I but simply those familiar places of the world that were lost then I would realise at last the trick of standing upright here ... Everywhere, departure opens wide its gates into the nothing that awaits us in the dusk
Johnson describes this encounter as one of grandeur, the same feeling some adherents of religion experience when they visit a sacred site or enter a holy place of worship. In this way, nature is a mystical experience. It's the closest feeling I get to an overwhelming presence that is all encompassing and all forgiving at the same time.
25-36 out of 200 results.