My kids thought the idea hilarious but I wanted a third career — I came away from it as Cinderella adrift in their green embers a world suddenly grown younger hoisted into oblivion by the tightness of their genius. How quick they were compared to my plodding. Three veterans of the Edinburgh Festival all in their twenties fireflies zipping through stage & auditorium, flashing quickly into the audience. In the green…

Stay attached to the vine & ‘remain in my love’ — A bare brown sculpture of vines gnarled & twisted like a deformed limb stares back at the balcony seat where you might imagine the most patient drinker you’ve ever seen. You’ve been misled — I am no connoisseur just a recovered malcontent observing a less sober world than one I sloshed about in before the damn thing even had…

If you want to envisage better times, read the great poets — A midday sun sets me squinting at your book. It’s a world away from my own life— a history of muscular Americana men working with lathes, enjoying basketball in their spare time. You write the mundane like an angel. I pick up the grain of another culture. The Blue Buick is companion to a balcony siesta &…

After we had passed mid-summer & the sun began to impale itself on the rising dark — she came for the last light to tell us about the end of her marriage trembling with its bloody necessity hard met by clumsy shards of our happiness scorching the table — its comet illumined each…

Freedom surrounds us but first comes the struggle to let go — ‘Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul.’ Herman Hesse People often ask, what is the point of meditation? What’s the point…

WE BELONG TO THE EARTH NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND — ‘When the soul is plunged in the fire of divine love, like iron, it first loses its blackness, and then grows to white heat and becomes like the fire itself, and lastly, it grows liquid. And, losing its nature, is transmuted into an entirely different quality of being. And as…

WHAT TO DO WHEN THE WORLD HAS LOSTS ITS WAY? — ‘When all else is gone and there is nothing left to lose, then what is left and what cannot be completely lost or even thrown away is truly one’s self.’ Michael Meade We are book-ended by images and symbols that provide us with clues and hints to the meaning of…

At the end of an age, it is time to realize one’s true nature — ‘The mystic is one who is not bound by appearances. He has journeyed from the unreality of the outer world to the reality that is found within the heart.’ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee Unless you have been sitting on Mars or one of the other ‘personal’ planets close to the Earth —…

I praise the sun here for a season — The yellow season is here at last. I gladly say farewell to winter blues & browns which came for a time but over stayed like a relative who never goes home — sombre mood making a final attempt to bring me down. That’s the problem with hard weather — it always starts on the inside. I…