you in reality
Give up all questions except one: “Who am I?”
After all, the only fact you are sure of is that you are.
The “I am” is certain. The “I am this” is not.
a collection of minutiae
Five Bells
Time that is moved by little fidget wheels
Is not my time, the flood that does not flow.
Between the double and the single bell
Of a ship’s hour, between a round of bells
From the dark warship riding there below,
I have lived many lives, and this one life
Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.
My Country by Dorothea Mackellar
The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running through your veins
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I know, but cannot share it
My love is otherwise
The Ballad of East and West
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!
A Bush Christening – A.B. Paterson
On the outer Barcoo where the churches are few,
And men of religion are scanty,
On a road never cross’d ‘cept by folk that are lost,
One Michael Magee had a shanty.
the great path
Bushwalking in Lamington National Park
The great path is clearly before your eyes,
But the ignorant who are deluded
And confused cannot recognize it.
It is in one thought of the mind.
So why search for it elsewhere?
- Pao-chih
Grant McLennan of the go-betweens dies
cane_fire_gordonvale
Originally uploaded by RaeA.
Grant McLennan was one of the great Aussie songwriters. I went off to university in 1974, a 1600 km train trip down the Queensland coast, and made the same trip up and back each year. As a result his song Cattle and Cane rang particular bells.