"And when he fell asleep, it was like the moss had him in its embrace. And the sense he got from his dreams was that the ultra-fine rhyzoids of the moss had spread throughout his brain, that he was being held in place by it, and that he too had squeezed into a mysterious shadowy realm where anything could happen."

I have been looking closely at mosses around the train carriage. Who knew that something so small could prompt so many stories?

"'All my life, my way of loving was to say goodbye.' That’s what the poet Marina Tsvetaeva once wrote. Perhaps it’s also true of the world: its way of loving is to present us with phenomena that are always poised to leave us."

I have been watching things come and go in the world around me, and trying to pin down those phenomena in words. Join me as I ponder that which is fleeting in the bush, and in the universe.

"No, there’s no end to the tales that might be told, the tentacles spreading and sprawling across the seas, deep into them, and onto land as well."

This is the second part of a 'cephalopodcast', made in collaboration with the Spring Bay Squid Festival in Tasmania. It's great if you're listening to it on your way home from the festival. Whatever the case, dive deep into this collection of tales -- history, folklore and fable about cephalopods.

squidfest.com.au/

"Sometimes when I see a veil of surf lift and then collapse on itself, I imagine it as a shining curl of life, schools of fish, plankton, crustaceans; a symbol of the whole fleeting, flashing vision of existence."

I have made this 'cephalopodcast' in collaboration with the Spring Bay Squid Festival in Tasmania. It's best listened to on your drive to the festival, Friday, November 25. But even if you're not attending, you're allowed to listen to the podcast. You'll learn a lot. Or at least you'll learn that I've been learning a lot.

https://squidfest.com.au/

"I’ve long known you can be in two places at once. Or, in three, or four, or five – more to the point it actually takes practise to stay where you are, to be fully present and focused and in the moment, not unmoored on seas of fantasy, imagination, memory."

Near the train carriage in which I live is a river that started to rise. I got to imagining it being turned into an ark in which I might make voyages to distant places, or different times.

"Words generally don’t spring up from nowhere. By and large they each have some lengthy backstory behind them, an origin back that goes thousands of years, often into a different part of the world."

Surrounded by books, and listening to the chatter of birds, I have a lot of opportunity to reflect on the nature of language. Join me in my train carriage for a long journey to nowhere, where the local lingo changes every few minutes.

"And, said another of us, we must remember that not all seasons are for growing or producing fruit. Some are for building strength, for staying dormant, for simply enduring. Some hard seasons you simply must survive."

Here are five stories from winter. They're about wine, birds, frogs, football, bushwalking and solitude. And there's a train that travels through the bush into the future.

"It turns out that the word ‘tree’ is part of a cohort of the oldest words we’ve got in the English language...If we meander into this linguistic past, we find a word something like ‘doru’, the ancestor of today’s ‘tree’ words in not just the English language but also in Persian and Albanian and Sanskrit, among others. There’s more to it than that though: the same word seems to have been the origin to the word for our word ‘true’."

I live in a train carriage, surrounded by trees. So it's no surprise that often my thoughts and ideas grow into a forest, intricate, interconnected, and verging on wild.

"After all this rainfall, the soil is black.

From this dark source, what will soon come forth

is a suite of the brightest colours."

I have been enjoying the change of season, as the southern hemisphere turns towards long nights. Join me as I lie under the stars contemplating darkness.

"But this all begs the question: must we just get used to catastrophe? Is it now time to accept the fact that all our landmarks are out of whack, that our life with the world is turning out all wrong? Must we get used to uncertainty, chaos, a future defined by fires and floods? What do we do when the river raves, sky is screaming, and country has curled its lip at us?"

Sometimes the river murmurs, sometimes it raves. I have spent much of the past summer alongside waterways, thinking of their secrets and mysteries, and the shelter they give various animals and swimmers. But I have also had to reflect that rivers give us a sense of the uncertainty of the future.