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Doubts

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                                     The place where we are right                                      is hard and trampled                                      like a yard.                                      But doubts and loves                                      dig up the world                                                                       Yehuda Amichai                                       You find yourself in a stone crypt. There are no windows, and the door is locked from the outside.                                      How will you get out?                                                                      PZI miscellaneous koans, Case 20 Long after the garden daffodils and paper whites have finished, swathes of narcissus bloom on the south-facing and west-facing slopes around where Miss C’s house stood a hundred years ago. They flourish their sweetness on sappy stems from bulbs that withdraw all trace of themselves through summer and autumn and most of winter. Pa
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Regardless

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               The plants that push up through the junk and the plastic, earlier, later, they’re coming,                   regardless... … the light shifts regardless. The truth is a kind of regardless. The winter’s nothing to me. Do you think I don’t know about power? You think I was born green? I was. … I’ll blow down that tree so it cracks your roof open. I’ll carpet your house with the                          river. But I’ll be the reason your own sap’s reviving. I’ll mainline the light to your veins. What’s under your road surface now? What’s under your house’s foundations? What’s warping your doors? What’s giving your world the fresh colours? What’s the key to the song of the bird?                             What’s forming the beak in the egg? What’s sending the thinnest of green shoots through that rock so the rock                starts to split?                                                                                              Ali Smith, Spri
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Every day

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                                                  The moon and sun are eternal travelers.  Even the years wander on.                                        A lifetime adrift in a boat or in old age leading a tired horse into the years,                                        every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.                                                                                                                                    Matsuo Basho Week after week, the aurora comes and goes, sometimes clear along the starry horizon, sometimes a glow behind cloud. Its light gives me a sense of the depth, the dimensionality of space, like looking into the greenish hearts of the marbles that lived in a bag in the hall cupboard when I was a child – they had movement in their depths that took me right inside it if I looked long enough. The aurora, too, lets me into vastness.     A pair of golden whistlers – large-eyed forest birds with the penetrating call that’s
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Conditions

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                                        … in the flattest part of North Dakota                                         on a starless moonless night                                         no breath of wind                                         a man could light a candle                                         then walk away                                         every now and then                                         he could turn and see                                         the candle burning                                          …                                         somewhere between the seventeenth and eighteenth mile                                         he would lose the light                                         if he were walking backwards                                         he would know the exact moment                                         when he lost the flame                                         he could step forward and find it again        
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Brood

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                                                            The commonplace miracle:                                                             that so many common miracles take place.                                                             The usual miracle:                                                             Invisible dogs barking                                                             in the dead of night.                                                             One of many miracles:                                                             a small and airy cloud                                                             is able to upstage the massive moon.                                                             . . .                                                            A miracle, just take a look around:                                                            the inescapable earth.                                                           An extr
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Stranger

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                                           Wherever you are is called Here,                                            And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,                                            Must ask permission to know it and be known.                                                                                                                    David Wagoner                                                                Do you remember?                                                                that time and light are kinds                                                                  of love …                  Tony Hoagland                                                                                                          The valley spirit never dies                                                                                                                         Laozi, Daodejing Chapter 6 A potoroo, a small member of the kangaroo family, long nos
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Solvitur natando

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                              Tomorrow will have an island. Before night                               I always find it. Then on to the next island.                               These places hidden in the day separate                               and come forward if you beckon.                               But you have to know they are there before they exist.                                …                               So to you, Friend, I confide my secret:                               to be a discoverer you hold close whatever                               you find, and after a while you decide                               what it is. Then, secure in where you have been,                               you turn to the open sea and let go.                                                                                                               William Stafford   In a paddock by the road, a brown falcon, shoulders hunched and wings outspread over a pademelon carcass, glares a
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