Every day

                

                                 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 needed to make themselves heard among the trees – come to the windows and fight their reflections there. This happens each year when the light grows and nesting begins – whistlers and shrike thrushes, wrens and robins try to see off the competition. I’m sorry to see them use so much energy that way but they seem to have enough left to raise chicks successfully each year.

While our friends E and H go away for a few days, I milk the goats in their little herd. At first they watch me closely, ears up, but soon settle and come peaceably into the miking stalls to eat alfalfa and crushed barley. The clonk of their bells, each a different tone, sounds out through the forest and pasture.

The days are rainy and cold. Hunkered down in the warmth near the fire, I’ve been making herbal ointments using infused oils of comfrey root, chamomile, hypericum, yarrow and tinctures of bellis perennis and calendula, with beeswax melted in to stabilise and set the mixture. Two different batches – one with arnica, to be used for sprains and strains and bruises, and the other without arnica, which can irritate broken skin, to be used for grazes, burns and open wounds.

Despite the cold, the pardalotes – so tiny, so loud! – are back from their winter feeding grounds a couple of thousand kilometres away up the east coast of the mainland. When I hear them I rush to clean out their gourd nest so that they can start afresh, without parasites that might be hanging around from last season. The space is a packed ball of thin fibrous strips of eucalypt bark with last year’s feather cup at its heart, and in it the mummified body of a near-fledged chick that didn’t make it.

 

Once I’ve cleaned the nest they come immediately to look at it, calling excitedly. Then they disappear – they make their long flight and come straight to the nesting place to see how things are, then go away to rest and feed. Swallows do the same thing – maybe most migrant species do it. They’ll be back when they’re ready to begin the great work of bringing out another generation. Many species have already begun – ravens are patrolling the skies of their territories; grebes call from the dam and chase each other, whirring across the water; new holland honeyeaters are feeding hatchlings.

And I travel north to where the pardalotes have been, to see A in her valley where the rainforest canopy piles on itself, green cumulus, and the sky heaps white and purple and blue. I wake to birds, birds, birds here too, some if them returning from elsewhere to nest. Swallows investigate the eaves with exactly the same excited conversation they’ll be having further south a couple of weeks from now. Fantails call and shining bronze cuckoos are waiting for them, here here here here now now now.

There are familiar calls – whistlers live in the understorey around the house; there are honeyeaters that sound the same as ours; there are kookaburras, ravens, black cockatoos, white cockatoos, magpies, shrike thrushes, scrubwrens, and at night, boobooks and the grating hiss of a masked owl. There are birds whose calls I’ve learned during visits here – koels, cat birds, forest pigeons, brush turkeys; a yellow robin fights its reflection in the window – and others I can’t yet name. Pademelons graze the lawn but they’re lighter, faster, more streamlined than their chunky, heavily furred cousins at home.

Living in and around the garden and forest are creatures that give incentive for the pademelons’ extra speed. On the grass beside the path, a python suns itself and watches us go by, then slips back into the cool space where the roots of a red cedar have heaved the paving aside. At night in the roof cavity above my bed I hear a lace monitor making itself comfortable, sliding its bulk through the narrow space, long claws clicking. In the morning it emerges to warm itself on the sunny roof then goes to hunt – small animals, eggs, insects, carrion – on the forest floor and up in the canopy and among the epiphytic ferns that attach themselves to trunks and branches.

This is Bundjalung country, a place where life flourishes – people, plants, animals co-evolving for tens of millennia and now responding to damage and loss brought by colonisation and the practices and creatures that accompany it – species not yet brought into balance and running wild here – beachside apartments and cane toads and lantana and camphor trees and all the others.

Along the coast, pods of whales feed and play and rest before the long migration south to their summer feeding grounds in the antarctic. We see them in groups of four and five and six, just offshore. Shoals of fish shiver the surface while terns and gulls and gannets hunt from above. More fish hang in the currents above the sandy beds of clear green rivers that flow through mangroves into the surf.

I swim there, aware of all the life the ocean holds, and feel myself washed free of winter, even as storms continue to bring snow and lashing winds to the south. I sink into deep rest and recovery in warmth and light that reminds me of my homeplace in Aotearoa New Zealand, journeying, journeying as we all do through each day, travelling far, whether we leave home or not.