Give me filthy-faced grandchildren slurping fat cherries with thick dirt slicked beneath fingernails. Give me time spooling generously out across a long summer evening of push-bike races & hen chases & lazy hounds’s sleepy faces. Give me bowls of fragrant lemon & fresh coriander rice, earth-dark kidney beans spiced with the stomach-deep-warmth of cumin & paprika; lip-smacking bursts of tiny-fresh tomatoes with diced, sharp-tongued red onion & a bright cider vinegar tumbled into bowls along with juicy-sweet pan-charred peppers demanding…
It’s the strangest thing, finding your way in the world, and I’ve written before about the many circular or dead-end paths encountered on this journey of self-discovery. During early sessions of studying Kung Fu (in my late 20s), I couldn’t get my head around the feeling I was a blackboard being wiped clean in order for a new text to be written across me. I didn’t then have the self-knowing to understand this was not the kind of teaching I…
An interesting conversation growing from my recently published novel, The Madness of Sara Mansfield (link in bio), is people wanting to discuss why I’ve put it out as Copyleft.I love this. I love that people are thinking about the implications, and want to talk to me about it. The main response I get is people worrying that I’ve spent six years writing a book only to leave it wide open to interpretation, that someone else could take the book and…
Figuring out the language of my body is a lifetime’s work. Does anybody else feel they’re balancing so many elements – like keeping a very long line of plates spinning? And I drop them, sometimes a lot of them, even if less often these days. I write often about self-directed learning because this is the pathway into understanding that resonates most strongly, especially so with my body.Maybe this is a ridiculous approach because there’s so much to learn from others.…
Why I don’t love a pruned hedge
June 16, 2021Hello friends,I’m aware that some people get a bit upset about my original use of grammar and punctuation. This is absolutely okay. I’m not the writer for everybody and I fully embrace that. However, instead of presuming that my writing is inferior because I don’t follow the rules, I wonder if they might consider the fact that writing this way is an act of rebellion – a way for me to fully embody this wild and natural world that inspires…
Woken early by dreams, I watched the sun rise, wrote these words: Sunrise at Stonehenge I sit on this van-home stepas the sun rises overthe prehistoric Stonehenge monument last night I dreamedI became the stones(I walked right into them / my heart was called) I search for words(in the voice of three crows)and they are prophetic: How well do I know my heart?How can this knowing serve the whole? The polarisationof light & shadow is a rough knotof wood I…
Up against the guardians of land & water
June 10, 2021A bit of a mission to find a swim spot today. Usually we hunt on the map for bodies of water & can navigate our way into the deliciousness of a wild swim BUT Bristol Water PLC had other ideas. First-off we headed over to Chew Valley Lake, which on a map looks as perfect a swim spot as you would ever wish to encounter. A large part of the lake is a nature reserve & (rightly so) fenced off…
In The Madness of Sara Mansfield, these words are attributed to Medha, a character who is activist, mother and grandmother. Medha is a fierce, determined woman living in defiance of the expected order of things. This has been an overarching theme of her life, and that of her ancestors, and yet she struggles to pass this onto her daughter, Saraswati, without squashing her at times. All of the characters in this novel speak from the first person perspective so that…
My father passed away earlier this week.He was a truly wonderful man – taught me to ride a bike, swim, and always do my best for others. He was a brilliant gymnast and high-board diver. By the age of ten I could dive off the 10meter board in the local pool (couldn’t do it now tho). He once dived into a river and saved a woman from drowning whose car veered in and landed upside down.As a teacher, he worked…
Thank you so much again to everyone who continues to support the book! I’m so delighted. I had also set myself the challenge of reading the book in its entirety throughout May on my InstaTV, but realised quite quickly this isn’t something I have the creative capacity for at this time. A close family member’s health declined rapidly yesterday and I don’t feel I have the focus for so many things just now.I want to concentrate on spreading the word…