Five years ago this was what Australia looked like from above. In the grip of catastrophic firestorms that had been raging for months and cost us all dearly. We could not see the sky. It was hard to breathe everywhere. Our PM took off anyway for his Summer holidays in Hawaii and famously told the journos who tracked him to a luxury hotel, mate I don't hold a hose. Or give a shit, as it turned out. A new norm was revealed, as dangerous as any inferno.

If your senses grow soft and stay sharp enough, you can feel yourself slipping between worlds and into wonder. The noise of our built environs, its grinding cogs of industry and inhumanity give way. The soft animal of your body, finely tuned and well eqipped to perceive magic, can intuit its rippling margins. Without warning or care you can find yourself delightfully beholden to its everyday miracles.

dryad dancing today in an old friend forest, found again.

I spent a decade living in a flood zone. It is terrifying at first, often unheralded and arriving out of the blue with a disconcerting inevitability. But over the years as I would sit and watch storms dump rain in my tank and crossings go under, I began to see how unwilling we are to accept nature in whatever form she arrives.

Years ago it was, I had this dream. I was on a yacht travelling backwards at speed and I couldn't see land anywhere. I didn't know how to get off it and no one could hear me shouting into the wind.

Monday meditation brought to you by the starlings that live in UK nature sanctuary Minsmere. This is hands down my favourite natural phenomenon, one I have been lucky enough to witness with my own eyes many moons ago, way out west as the sun was setting over open plains.

Dark mooning, the way nature does it.