A perfect Saturday evening of tea, cake, hounds, Eno & ebooks; this tiny space we inhabit fills easily with warmth, contentment, & love. The storms raging outside cause us no stress, instead they’re an excuse to cozy up together. It’s amazing how expansive a place can feel when you have everything you need, but I have found blogging daily more difficult since returning to Cymru so I’m following intuition, not pushing, just letting my heart guide however she will; having…
/ when the earth is heating rapidly / & the air is thick with accusations / when oceans fill with plastic & empty of fish / when people are stacked at borders like refuse / as litter is shipped freely around the world / when the machine has become so huge it extracts joy / from the very marrow of your bones / remember that / this planet survived ice age & fire / that the mountains are gods / that…
Hello friends! I’m so happy to share this image with you today – the front cover of the new poetry pamphlet The Slow-Time Traveller. Andy designs & dreams all the visual art for my work & I love this new piece so much. It speaks of the minimalist, simplicity & beauty of our lives now we’re on the road, as well as of the horizons we keep searching out as we Slow Travel across Europe. The Slow-Time Traveller is created…
Walking the land of north Wales I’m reminded of how normal it feels to be surrounded by castles, when of course this isn’t the case. Many of the castles across this region were built by King Edward I of England in the thirteenth century as a way to subdue the indigenous Welsh peasants, to squash any further uprisings as, led by rebels such as Owain Glyndŵr, the Welsh battled for their freedom from English rule. Still the echoes of Edward’s…
I have so many memories of this place. I used to walk barefoot for miles around here while the mind spilled out across the landscape. This was the first time I became obsessed with collecting litter. I want to tell you that I’d always been litter conscious but that wouldn’t be true. There was a very specific moment that changed me: over those months I’d hiked up & down Dinas Bran, there were so many times I couldn’t see where…
Learning is such a personal thing. the linear way we are taught in schools feels more & more wrong to me as I grow & follow intuition. Real learning often needs to include circular periods of unlearning & relearning, as well as fallow periods when it looks like nothing is happening. Sometimes the learner will make a cognitive leap well past their sphere of understanding and have to spend a good while working backwards from that. There also needs to…
This family member is a total legend. He’s such a sweet, caring hound; super protective of us in the van, always wanting to play. We adopted him when he was five (he’s now nine) after he’d already spent a year in the doggy rescue centre because a previous owner was going to have him put down. I can’t really understand that thinking – if a dog misbehaves then something in their environment isn’t right for them (probably much like a…
You can adore your family & love to travel. You can support others & still go in search of the truth of your heart. There are so many days in a life: allow them to repeat & watch them flood past you like rain, thin & unsatisfying, until a paralysis takes over the soul, until no new dreams can manifest. Learn to step outside of this. Here, I will teach you to fold time: fill your days with meaning; allow…
When I wrote this poem I would tell you that the land spoke to me that night. I would tell you she wrote to tell me to keep the promises I make to myself. To start small. To not give up on myself. My heart wanted to explore Europe, my head said this is not possible. My head said: Know Your Place. But I began to make these small promises to myself: that I would learn to listen to heart…