In the morning the sun is barely bright. The trees stand as sentinels as the light splays across their grey trunks. Beyond, the land goes flat and unfeatured towards the converging sky. The grass is wet with dew. A kookaburra laughs, an incredible mimicry, the call crackles terra cotta on the silver pink dawn. There is a smell of damp land and earliness, of earth and dew and morning, and new beginnings. Scrollings of bird song unwind, the notes spiky and across the garden the soft spaced craw of crows as they greet the new dawn. I breathe in deeply until the chill makes me shiver.

As I stand I cradle a mug of hot coffee. Whirls of steam float upwards. The morning sky fades mauve and in it the sun, a pallid yoke, in the gelatine light. The sun’s thin shine evokes shadows nigh blue. Toby, my old cat comes out to join me in my morning musings and I feel his soft brush as he winds himself around my legs. Reaching down I scratch his throat. He stretches and purrs and rolls at my feet, baring his furry stomach for another tickle before silently padding off into the garden to do his morning business..

The tops of the trees ripple and shift in the slight breeze. The sun shines through the spread of branches and makes soft edged shapes of their grand, blurry amoeba movings, constant commingling divisions and reunions, plasmic. The gum leaves tremor and their murmur floats across the garden.. In the grass and in the air innumerable creatures fray the still with their small abrasive lives, a stridulant crust upon the mute earth.

A crow makes its slow, plundering flight over the rustling earth as the early morning lengthens to dry the dew out of the ground. Sounds begin to impeach, the distant roar of traffic and somewhere music, as from a radio, but faint. The music finds itself unerringly and seemingly celebrates itself, celebrates its dexterity and its grace in succeeding measures, music heard at distance, of joyfulness, made abstract, a scherzo of thought. The richness of the waiting world.