…
Sophie McKeand Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.Walt Whitman I am in love with swallows. They have become the mascot of our travels as we follow their migratory paths: north for summer, south for winter. Standing at the borderlands of Y Mers (The Welsh Marches in south Wales) with fellow collaborator Mark Daman-Thomas, we watch summer swallows swing determined arcs from farmhouse roofs out across ankle-high grasses to take flying insects on the wing then sling-shot…
Sophie McKeand Often I can only get at the truth of a thing by writing it down as poetry. It’s how I understand my heart, how I translate the world so that things makes sense. Sometimes all that happens is that certain contradictions become more pronounced. What can I say about it except that the truth of a thing contains its opposite? How else could anything exist?…
Dark Mountain 10th anniversary
July 17, 2019Sophie McKeand The world is a beautiful, unfathomable being; an eternally shapeshifting spirit; a guide everybody can connect with on their life journey. We do not need wise men, religions or spiritual guides, we just need to be prepared to put the work in to understand our Selves on a deep & meaningful level. This means complete honesty about our situation. This means facing our shadows. This means manifesting joy even in our darkest hours. Our creativity is a gift…
Words & image: Sophie McKeand We greeted the children of gods with operatic indifference.Having already slaved to make the world right for some time we promised the earth (as if she were ours to gift) & set them to work in call centres & factories & department stores & endless cafe chains & when they finally began to show promise we stacked debt onto shoulders already bowed with overwrought expectation shackled their imagination to the sum total of our experience then…
We are travelling more quickly than usual at the moment. As I do this final edit, a heatwave has pushed temperatures to well over 35ºC in central France, which in turn has hurried us north. We have learned to position the van so that the sun shines on the driver’s side where there are no windows and the walls are super-insulated, which also means I can sit on my trusty step in the shade. Today we’re parked under a giant…
Travelling across Europe I am coming to realise how many more cultures exist in the liminal spaces between living people & history books; how many more words & stories grow like weeds in the manicured lawn of western cultural hegemony. I need to learn languages again. I don’t have any except English and Cymraeg (and my Welsh unravels a little more every day I don’t use it); although I can get by in French. I woke thinking of this older…
by Sophie McKeand control: when I see you in dreams / your grief is a moon harrying oceans / on black nights I am weather patterns stuttering across the sky / it is exhausting to be shifting in this way // I can no longer be the rivers of your tears / can no longer be the dam or funnel you towards beauty // I have built endless canopies as shelter from this lunar gaze / still, interference weeps like…
Only a dream can kill a dream. How do we wake from the American Dream, the capitalist dream? It’s the dreamers who are prepared to step away from the system, who are not dazzled by it all, who know that we create the world each day anew along with the rising sun & we do it with poetry & song & art all woven into nature; we do it by planting seeds & mending ourselves & sharing & repurposing; we…