breath like

I have been making work in the botanical gardens
sitting under a palm tree that a sulphur crested cockatoo lives in.
Each day he sheds a feather
I watch it fall to the ground and pick it up.

One day a large feather was shed
but a small butcher bird got to it first
we almost had a fight for it
but I let the bird pick it up in it's beak and add it too it's nest
in the palm tree opposite the one that provides me shade.

Actually there are 6 cockies that I watch
2 live in the palm tree I sit under,
2 live across the way in a pine tree
and another two live in a tree I don't know the name of.
At around 6 pm they all call out to each other
and chat across the sky.
The down that I collect
is like breath
and it is how I my heart feels at times,
gentle and soft
yet capable of a loud and high pitched squawk for life.

more here

Parts of the wings

The day looked like this today in the late afternoon

I walked home via here

detouring to lay down on the grass

under here.
I watched two parachutists glide through the sky
and wondered where on earth they would land.
I listened to the ducks
and the
rainbow lorikeet
and cockatoo in the trees above me
and soon I began to drift off into a dream.
When I woke up
I had a heightened sense of the present
and all around me
I found these :

I might as well have won the lottery
for that is what I imagine it would feel like!

WONDERFUL.

Willy Wagtail

Willy Wagail and I
hanging out
in the autumn sun.
Bliss.

Kennebec Soup

On Saturday nights Tone, the general of the general store,
cooks dinner for anyone who is about.
Tonight Kerry, who has recently moved to Woodend
arrived with a bag of organic Kennebac potatoes,
she made soup while Tony cooked up a storm with produce from the shop.

Kerry's bag of potatoes are from Tom.
Tom grows organic potatoes just outside of Trentham.
"He also has eggs..." she says
"On the way to Tom's this morning
I saw a bird..
and on the way back I stopped.
It was a baby Kookaburra
and it was dead
and I picked it up
and I held it."

She went on to tell about once learning from an
ornithologist friend, that if you see a bird that has been hit
you should stop and check it as I may be stunned.
If you Keep it warm it will come too again.

"I thought it might be stunned," Kerry explained softly
"It had no blood on it, but then I noticed
it had lost a whole wing. It was dead
and I took it home and I just couldn't bury it
so I put it in my freezer."

When I read this post out to her
we all laughed a sad but happy laugh,
like kookaburras..