Squeezing in a few minutes of scratching an itch (writing) before going for a walk.  The weather has been hot and intolerably humid - until today when it's just tolerably humid and not too hot.  When it is as hot as it's been my brain melts.  Even reading is too much of an effort.  End up watching, mindlessly, television, with the fan  on full blowing right in my face.

Not that I should complain.  I walk around my new life here in the Tweed breathing gratitude. Right now, as I write, it is overcast.  Windless.  I look out a large window over the bitumen turn circle which is edged with the two large aviaries (covered in reflective paper and draped inside with sheets to deflect the heat).  Beyond them is a wall of green bisected by a white trunked tree.  The green wall is a mosaic of greens; pale new growth green, green tinged with yellow, vivid kelly green, deep forest green, soft greens, hard greens, greens webbed with vines and filigreed with pale fingers of dead twigs.  Flashes of pale blue mark the trajectory of the fastest butterflies I have ever seen.  They have pointed, almost triangular wings and describing their colour as pale blue isn't accurate.  The blue almost glows.  But they move so fast and with so many jerks and feints they are  impossible to describe.

When we walk, Richard comes part of the way and then turns for home.  For awhile I am alone.  On the way up the hill I don't think about much except getting to the top.  On the way home I realize, every day as if it's the first day, how quiet it is.  I live in a rainforest suburb and cars drive past, lawnmowers growl, jets pass overhead, but there are long moments, even minutes when I hear nothing but the insects and the birds.  Does the thickness of the bush absorb sound?  My footsteps sound loud on the bitumen.  My breath echoes off the underside of my hat.  The silence serves to bring all extraneous thought to an end.  It presses in until I am finally in the moment; in the green, under the blue.  It is then I take a deeper breath, an appreciative breath. 

And now it's time to walk!  

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