The Assistens cemetery in Copenhagen is home to the graves of Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard. The only work of the Kierkegaard’s I’ve read is Fear and Trembling, his writing on Abraham’s journey to surrender his son to God in. For a couple of hours early one morning this summer, I wandered about the cemetery…

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Time – the sense of not having enough of it – has played a defining role in my life. I’ve written of this previously : its origins and my attempts to counter the discomfort. On the latter, I’ve developed a new practice for myself. I’m walking in circles, every morning, after my stretching and sitting practice, I go outside and set my timer for longer than feels comfortable and walk a small circle of about 15 paces in circumference.

I’m lucky to live alongside a limestone escarpment and have begun an almost daily practice of walking on top of this ancient rock of dead sea creatures, a virile fig tree and various brief bloomings of (currently) herb Robert, nipplewort and slender St John’s wort. I walk in small circles, in the same place same direction and for between 30-90 mins. This circle walking is an opening of time. The small circles, round and round and round, a reminder of how much of [my] human life is a walking in circles. I watch the fleeting flight of birds, scuttle of insects, my walking in in the presence of the rock which was once sea bed, once equatorial and now rising, incrementally, here on the edge of Morecambe Bay.

This practice touches on one of the Buddhist doors of liberation: Aimlessness, which is intended to remind us that what we want we already have: the future is a seed in the present of my body. Aimlessness tests me. I’m inviting myself to resist jumping into the doing that is my default mode. I am deferring to the time of the rock – as much as I can – to that of blackbird or herb Robert. I am trying to remind myself that time is flexible and not the rigid master I have grown up being anxious of.

When we lived right by the sea we would fetch washed up tree trunks, carry them home to chain saw up, chop into burnable sizes then stack them in a shed. Sometimes we could spend a morning collecting and storing enough wood to last us several months through the winter. I never timed the work in the way I might time work that was going to earn my money. I never equated how many hours of money work I had saved by collecting the wood. It was simply a task we set ourselves, a gathering of the gifts of the sea and land, that had the reward of warming us four times over: the collecting, the sawing, the chopping then the burning of wood.

Not being classically educated, I was only recently introduced to ‘Kairos’, the more sociable, tender cousin to the Greek concept of ‘Chronos’. I knew Chronos from being blown away by Guillermo del Toro’s film of the same name : the clock-ticking time of our society where ‘time is money’ and ‘killing time’ or ‘hurry up please, it’s time’ etc etc.

As Rebecca Tamás says in her recent Caught by the River interview about her new book, (and I’m paraphrasing): when you start off thinking you’re being cutting edge, it becomes sadly inevitable that by the time you’ve articulated your thinking, it’s mainstream (perhaps a social form of kairos). So I shouldn’t be surprised that when I went to double check my understanding of kairos, I discovered this Guardian article on it from just four days ago.

For me, kairos reinforces a way of living that trusts my opportunistic decision making, that is to live with the phrase given to me by artist Caroline Pick, which ought to be a Zen Crone but for reasons beyond my comprehension isn’t : Your Timing is Always Perfect.

Because, of course, ‘perfect’ might not be what we want, but how the great collective moment assembles itself. Kairos, for me, is understanding how I might settle into / live with this greater collaboration that is any given moment: how I am walking in circles on the millennia old planktonic limestone with the herb Robert and Nipplewort today and the ripe figs next week.

In the Guardian article Kelley Swain refers to blooming and ripening, which are words also used by Zen master Thich Naht Hanh. In his translations of The Buddha’s teachings he uses the phrase ‘ripening in every moment’ for one of the Plum Village’s Dharma seals. There is a talk on that here. In short, this ripening is to encourage us to no expect / demand / live to seeing instant results, rather to recognise that things come to fruition at different times, with different conditions, in different forms and different places.

This remembering of ripening feels particuarly pertinent for me as I return to my ancestral memoir manuscript - begun in 2022 - to try and understand what it is, and so how it find a home in the world. Part of me (ego, hello) feels terribly frustrated and wearied at the process. Why can’t someone just see what it is for me? This is countered by the quieter, somehow more insistant voice that understands the work that needs to be done, that patiently returns to the work and sits with it, diligently, and considers it.

It is a lesson in the immeasurable nature of time when with someone or thing you love.

And perhaps timely enough I’ve just finished Helm - the first Sarah Hall book I’ve enjoyed enough to finish. In the acknowledgements she writes tat this book took her about twenty years to write.

The book I’ve just begun is Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life . In this she writes, ‘It takes years to write a book—between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant. One American writer has written a dozen major books over six decades. He wrote one of those books, a perfect novel, in three months. He speaks of it, still, with awe, almost whispering. Who wants to offend the spirit that hands out such books? Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people, and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.’

This makes me smile. Reminds me of my friends who came to Giggleswick last year and spoke of how they were returning with the same manuscript as the previous year to spend the week with.

My adoption of retiming will be, for someone as impatient as myself, a lifelong practice – which maybe continue to include walking in circles, literally and figuratively. And to help me work through this in terms of my writing, and how it might feed my work, and the ideas within it, I think the next Imaginarium will be Imaginarium Time, there’s plenty to explore, from our own sense of time as a writer to how time features in what we write. This will be a January start, so keep your eyes out for news of that in the autumn.

Books I’ve not yet read on time are

Todd Wassle’s Walking in Circles: Finding Happiness in Lost Japan

Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock

Rebecca Tamás’s The Book of Mysteries: Wild Time and the Ritual Year

I’d be interested to add to this list, if you have any to recommend

One story of creativity is the process of making sense of how we see the world. I was five and a half before I discovered what I saw wasn’t what everyone else saw. Up until that point the stories and poems I knew reinforced the view of the world as being a fairyland of pixelated balls of light and soft shapes. Pixies and elves lived in the shimmer of da…

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Sustainbility: that last word stops the flow of the subheading. Hearing it so often muddies its meaning. Paul Kingsolver wrote it meant allowing the middle classes to continue to do what they wanted to do (or something similar). The meaning I take from it is maintaining a healthy (to all) life.

The list compiles some of the qualities I’ve been actively working towards these past six months within my creative practice (as mentioned here). The culmination of this programme was to spend at least eight hours in the woods near me to invite encounters with myself and others to see what guidance or insight I might uncover.

I decided on twelve hours, and went out at 0530, in the rain. I wasn’t feeling particularly open to the experience. I don’t like getting wet (another cat-attribute I have as well as not enjoying descents). I sat under a large umbrella drinking tea for a few hours before it cleared up into a glorious day. I walked in small circles. I talked to the trees. Listened to cuckoos, deer, ravens and blackbirds. I asked questions of leaves, lichen and moss. I barely heard any humans (except for the recycling truck, a short burst of hammering, the primary school playtimes, some occasional distant road traffic, and two fighter jets).

Perhaps it was this lack of human intervention that allowed time to open in a totally unexpected way. The wind up watch I’d brought with me stopped after three hours. When I checked my phone I was astounded that six hours had passed. I couldn’t have said how long I’d thought I’d been sitting. The alternative duration was perhaps understandable, being surrounded by the limestone of ancient seabed.

As the sun moved over the canopy and warmed the ground, having told the everyone there what had brought me to spend this day with them, I announced to the small circle of birch and hazel, the moss and twigs, the blackbirds and mosquitoes and whoever else was listening, that I was a Cottage Artist.

Speaking these words out felt like slipping on a knee-length blue-green moss-sea velvet coat.

In that instant I understood a Cottage Artist worked at a cottage industry scale, intimate and rooted in place. That she was a forager, drawing upon all she found to make new worlds that unfolded for others. She was unlimited by her materials. She was of many communities, living at the rich ecotone of edgelands. Responsive and adaptable. She had served her apprenticeship in cottages, even if she didn’t live in one now : she was not fixed nor attached to a particular place. The fairies, witches, sprites, trolls and elves she’d known, dreamt, imagined and written of were beloved companions to this point, and, with continued luck and love, would stay alongside. They had been joined (also throughout life) by dogs, bats, beavers, oaks, wood anemones and many (less complicated) others offering joy and encouragement in those times of open-hearted relaxation. It was clear I was one.

Perhaps this all sounds rather hippy, a bit too new age, too la la, woo woo and other nonsensical sounds that imply derogatory feelings. And certainly as a young adult when I first began to see the power and pleasure of how I interacted with the world in this way I was also embarrassed by this perspective, dismissive of it. I aspired to the rational, knowingly articulate way of life. That was the way to success. The way to get grants, be published, booked for readings. And in some way it was. But not a way that sustained how I lived in the world, and how it lived through me.

During my PhD research I found more and more academics holding up indigenous knowledge systems (as they were often categorised, as if separate from those of us who didn’t necessarily see ourselves as ‘indigenous’) as ways to aspire to be in the world. Instead of talking about animism these researchers used the word ‘agency’. It made it sound (to my ears at least) less spiritual and more post-modern, explanatory, material in our relationships. And this discovery enabled a turning back to those earlier loves. It made me realise all I needed was a frame through which to see things (or how I could be seen) and I could understand where my perception could sit in the world. I could place myself. (There is a whole other story about the novel Cluny Brown I won’t go into here)

Stumbling upon the term Cottage Artist has allowed me to understand why I could be so confident in my making and writing – continuing it – while also feeling so disparaged / ravaged by its un/reception, so wracked by doubt for what I was offering a world that seemed so often indifferent (a side note: which is why you readers and subscribers here are so very enjoyed and important to me, thank you).

Prior to the ‘label’ I didn’t have the right frame through which to see me in relation to the rest of the world. Perhaps it’s a little like having an assessment for being on a spectrum. And more personalised than simply being on the Artistic Spectrum (as a dear friend of mine calls it). As long as I didn’t consider the rest of the world – when immersed in writing / making – I didn’t worry about how to present the work / me to others. As soon as I finished something and wanted to share it, I would find (over and over) that I didn’t quite know how to explain it, or where it fitted. And while perhaps I still don’t quite know that in a way I can articulate, I know it on a feeling level how it fits with what I offer, with who I am, and what makes me continue. And that is what was missing. That certainty of my value. My ecological niche.

This niche-value is all encompassing. And therefore a slow, wide movement in my living it makes perfect sense, and is not something to be frustrated by. The open duré I experienced that day in the woods reminded me of how to live to my own time and to trust how that fits with the wider, ecological time. Being a Cottage Artist is perhaps, as the term suggests, not a commercial endeavour. A while back another friend was telling me about Gabriella Marcella of Risotto Studio. And we were laughing at how we couldn’t imagine ourselves living out our work to the extent she does. How that would be exhausting and too time-consuming. And yet, that is exactly how I live (without the colour coordination): applying my creative energies to most of what I do.

An aside: In Buddhist philosophy, the three vital life energies can be categorised as sexual, breath and spirit. These apply to both lay and monastic practitioners. My way of understanding the three is to see sexual energy as also being interpreted as creative.

The Cottage Artist reminds me of how Grayson Perry might describe Claire – not simply his alter-ego, more an extension or an extending self. The Cottage Artist attends to a multitude of creative works: from her writing and artistbooks, to her facilitating and listening, to her meal-making, her garden-growing, her dreaming, her befriending, space-making, time-opening, homing and discovering ...

Discovering the world and her place in it. This is how I might live at the edge of a constant becoming, an ever renewing sense of self. The coat will grow with me. Unlike the terms Writer or Poet or Artist – as much as I loved them when I first turned towards them and tried them on for size. The tricky thing was that I knew what they meant – or thought I knew. And I know I don’t really know entirely what a Cottage Artist does, who she is. I’ve made some attempt to define her here, but at her heart is magic and that means anything might happen.

As a kid - maybe early teens - I used to think the adverts were the best part of tv. Not sure what it was: the quick fire images; the ‘science’; the potential of a chatty family tea; slogans that lodged poem-like in my brain (top breeders reccommend it / a finger of fudge is just enough; too good to hurry mints; for mash get smash); how I felt spoken t…

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This year I’ve been spending some time – with a mentor and online programme – digging into what it is that supports me to continue my creative practice, where I can settle into confidence in doing what I do and let go of the doubt. I’m thinking that with luck I’ll have maybe 20 more years (at least) of outward-facing energy and I’m really very tired of how crippling the doubt can be. I see its usefulness in the larger inquiry. I also feel its debilitation in the immediate joy of life.

This impetus, or consolidation, is part of a larger transition that may have started after finishing my PhD and dispelling all the nonsense my secondary school education instilled in me. It may have begun with the Covid lockdowns, living through troubling, unequal consequences of our societal set up, and wondering how I can align my skills and delights with what the world needs. Another starting point could be my mother’s death and that whole upturning of my constellation. These all happened within two years of each other, so it could be an amalgamation of all three. I also know that part of this transition has been the move from my old cottage right on the edge of Morecambe Bay to a limestone wooded spot up river.

One idea I’ve been introduced to during this programme is from theologian and author Frederick Buechner, who wrote that ‘the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet’.

I’ve written elsewhere (maybe here, definitely in the ms I’m working on at the moment) how my notion of god is the creativity which resides within us all: human, croc, tree, grass, cloud … The creator that was taken by the Bible to be external, is internal. I understand why: I certainly find it easier to praise the other over myself. Or maybe that’s why I find it so

Anyway, I’ve looking at my deep gladness: making, writing, wooding, walking, growing, listening, sharing, learning, concentrating, playing and see how they are all elements of communing (which had such negative connotations when I was a young adult). And from communing rises community (another potentially over-used word).

I have, since I can remember, enjoyed playing and being with sympathetic others. And one of the key, joyous parts of my working life is the opportunity to make temporary community, whether it is over an afternoon, a week or six months, or longer, over learning, making zines, creating. To be one of a group of people with shared concerns and aspirations and different perspectives is a joyous place for me. Community building forms not just part of my working life. A couple of weeks ago I was on a five day silent retreat and saw again how community doesn’t need words to be what Martin Luther King called the beloved community. In fact without words, there is a dropping of masks (as one of the Zen Crones attests to) and an opportunity to listen more deeply to that which can be drowned out by spoken words: the trees, grasses, clouds, human etc.

Community is what will protect us in times ahead: the various communities we belong to, and learning how to be within them – how to touch our deep gladness and the community’s deep hunger. And to listen attentively because these things are not static.

Part of this process has been to ask friends what they think are my gifts to the world. And I’ve been surprised that one of my gifts present back to me has been my authenticity, my ability to be honest and direct. I think, like much of what I consider to be no big deal, this quality is in short supply, especially when it comes to those supposedly leading us. I appreciate it isn’t always easy or welcome, and I don’t have to persuade hundreds or thousands of people, and I’m fortunate enough not to be in that position. In fact, I’m working diligently to be in the business of not having to persuade anyone of anything, while also feeling and expressing what’s going on for me. And, as a writer/artist, what gladness it gives me when I do manage either in written, spoken or otherwise to convey myself with clarity.

Maybe that’s why I’m so interested in form, and its possibility. How many different ways can I say essentially the same thing? And that form extends beyond what I write – poems, stories, artistbooks – to what I make – workshops, retreats, events.

What is this ‘same thing’ I’m saying over and over? I think basically it boils down to: Look. Closely. Listen. Feel. And…?

My mentor called me a Spacemaker.

Yes, I make small worlds, to which you’re all invited. I consider these substack posts to be such a world. Thank you for coming. Would you like a hot drink?

However small, these worlds are labyrinthian. At least that’s my hope. Which is why it takes as long as it can for me to create these things. With an obvious entry point, a circuitous or meandery experience, that often involves repetition, different perspectives on the same view, gentle play, not-knowing, drawing on ancient wisdom and probably much more I’m not consciously aware of before exiting.

I hadn’t thought all this clearly before beginning a conversation with one of my more recently beloved collaborators, Katherine Zeserson, about how we might create a space for us and others to dig into a confidence for our purpose in these times that quake so much around us and within. How we might take time for us to come back to ourselves and reconsolidate what makes us glad. And having a tender hold on my gladness means it can grow slowly, and surely.

This particular space has come to fruition as the next Imaginarium: Imaginarium Homing, which is both in person and online. Because as much as I love the spread the digital world offers me, nothing beats being in the same space with a bunch of curious and caring people.

We’re building on what we know works and are proposing we stay at a lovely place in Yorkshire that offers a generous time-buffer for us to gather together interested people. This makes the whole offer feasible. It does mean we have to decide by the middle of May if it’s running. So have asked for people to let us know of their interest by 11^th May if you’d like to be part of a small community that wants to explore how we can stay rooted in times of speed and despair. how we can continue to make art that feeds us as much as anyone else.

If you’re curious about this Imaginarium, you can read more about it here.

If you’re curious about ecological niches, you can read more about them here.

I’ve been reading One Straw Revolution (1975) by Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese farmer philosopher. He promotes what he calls Natural Farming, a way of not-farming, which feels like a distant relative to not-writing. They could be cousins perhaps, connected by the Buddhist practice of Right Effort*. Right Effort is, as I understand it, no-effort. Another translation of the word effort is ‘diligence’, which used to have rather negative connotations for me – bringing with it a sense of duty, or morality which instantly made me feel guilty. I like the word ‘diligence’ more and more these days. Now I hear it as ‘showing up’ or ‘commitment to a task’, and Right Diligence would be showing up without effort, or, in my case, guilt.

As I mentioned in my piece about Not-Writing, I’m aiming for a more easeful practice these days. So Right Effort is much on my mind. And I had the good fortune to witness it recently in action. I’m taking a breather from editing the (for me) big manuscript I’ve been working on for the past few years. Maybe because I might have finished editing, and I need to read it back to see if this is true and to have some objectivity on this I need time out before I send it to my Kindle (I know, I know, I hate Amazon too but it’s super useful for pdfs and word docs) to read. An aside: reading any draft on the Kindle enables me to read it as I would read anyone else’s finished publication and prevents me from stepping out of reader mode into editor mode.

To help me not tinker (maybe there should be another post on that practice) I decided to have a read of all the poems I’ve written since I’d stopped writing poems in 2020, after the hispering popped out. At thirty, there were more than I realised. I printed them out and, barely remembering what they were, read them. And rather enjoyed them. They were an odd bunch, absolutely speaking to rather discombobulated pandemic, post-lockdown, habitat- and maternally-bereaved, ocean-concerned, doula training experiences I’d been through in those six years.

They needed editing, of course. Mainly cutting into slightly more coherent order. Not too coherent. What I liked about them was how they came at emotions and experiences in an askance way. Slant-wise, as Emily Dickinson would say. Of course they speak to bog and sea and limestone and trees as much as they do me. They also listen, and perhaps that’s what makes them sound a little odd at times. They’re speaking from a different perspective to the one I usually inhabit. Or the one I’m inhabiting now. I remember writing some of them, not all. And what I remember of those writings is generally they just fell out of my fingers onto the screen or from pen to page.

I shuffled them into an order, dropped some that didn’t fit and took a containing title from a line I’d cut from one of the more squirming poems: Praying to the Goddess of Buoyancy. And there, within a morning, I had a pamphlet. Except it was just a sheaf of A4 pages. So I decided the next time I had time to fold them into a proper-looking pamphlet. That required another shuffle of the order before mocking up the pages and printing them out, stitching them together and done.

When I was in town earlier this week for a meeting and sitting in the wrong cafe waiting for my project collaborators to turn up, I read this pamphlet and decided it held together. The poems were open and swinging enough to hold their own while sing across the pages to each other. They sang a song of doubt, love, worry, tiredness, anger, awe, wonder and magic. And I liked it. I liked the sense of how I’d been praying to this Goddess of Buoyancy for the past few years without consciously realising it.

Which is good, because if I’m asked to pray I get uncomfortable, nervous and unsure as to whether I can do it without kneeling on a tapestry bolster in a pew in a church. In fact I’m not sure I know how to do it without the bolster or pew or if I’m not kneeling next to my bed with my hands pressed together in front of my face. Which is how I wanted to end my days / begin my sleep as a child but never got into the habit, was never accompanied by my parents to do so. It was something the children in books seemed to enjoy doing.

Anyway, seems like I had been praying all along. And to a Goddess I’d never heard of, but of course must exist in these times of increasing water.

So now I have this pamphlet, I’m thinking what next. And then, in the way of Flow, the next day the Friday Poem sent out their Friday email with a list of places one might send a pamphlet to if one had such a thing ready to send. Was that the Goddess speaking through Hilary Menos? Why not? I’m sure she has experience of such channelling.

Of course the tricky stage now is to maintain this Right Effort in sending out the Praying pamphlet. I’ve written elsewhere about how the writing of things is (relatively speaking) the easy bit for me, and once the writing is contained in a form that feels like a separate body from mine I doubt its veracity or worth, or worse the opposite and am convinced it should all the prizes - superiority and inferiority complexes entwined in action. Then the whole process of sharing it becomes riddled with yes but no buts. So to send it our with the same curiosity I brought to the writing and then reading of the poems in the first place is the completion of this particular piece of Right Effort. Letting go would be another way of approaching the nontask.

I’ve won two giveaway book competitions, an Arvon six word story competition which led to my studying the PhD, and the Black Sunflowers inaugural competition which published the hispering, using this spell. Perhaps it’s time to make it a practice.

A Spell for Winning**
Do something with a wholehearted, care-full intention.
Then forget about it.

Like so much wisdom I admire in our world, the power lies in applying its simplicity.

*Right Effort is one practice on the Eightfold Noble Path, which are eight practices to help you / us live a more conscious and rewarding life.

**The yellow image is an asemic version of the same spell

The first thing I did when I bought my house in Lancaster was to demolish the perfectly adequate garden path that ran straight from my back door to the garden gate. I replaced it with a brick-laid one that curved its way between one wall and another, that was never quite wide enough, never completely level, but I loved the longer route, the way it asked me to take in the raspberries, the plum tree, rhubarb or foxgloves as I made my way to the bins or the back lane.

This innate draw to a meandering is utterly unlike how I live much of my life. I have long lived with a drive for efficiency. The straight drop of lists have been a feature I have not pulverised. I love that list of what needs to be done in the day ahead. The worse manifestation of this is my shopping list, written in the order in which I will walk through town to maximise productivity and streamline unnecessary delay. Other lists: creative aspirations for the year; gardening jobs; notes towards editing: are more rambling and scribbled, and are unhelpfully perhaps rarely spent in the delight of crossing off.

This drive for efficacy on the one hand means I often struggle with my style of zigzag gathering for creative research, my visceral processing that circles round and round the thoughts formed into words on a page, the constant slipping of form before the slow upwelling of meaning. I can still see the look of horrified bemusement on a friend’s face when I asked her how she, with so many books under her belt, managed to write so efficiently.

It was when I was lucky enough to spend three weeks in the Arctic some years ago as part of my PhD, where it was always daylight, my phone had no signal, and the guides told me what to do when, that my sense of not-enough time disappeared. For those three weeks I indulged in the antithesis of efficiency: wide-eyed observing, loose scrawling in my journal, and relishing in the inability to understand how where I was could be rendered satisfactorily in words.

The timing of this suspension of decision making and any obvious activity allowed me to see my time anxiety and how it manifested as an incessant need for productivity a little more clearly. I realised how this intermediate level of my life activities counterbalanced my meta plans for living – such as over five or ten years – and the micro level of making an artistbook or writing a poem. In these realms I happily faff and blunder and do what feels right, yes, with half an eye on a blurry sense of something I’m working towards, but no defining action plan. No list.

That Arctic trip instilled in me the almost-enjoyment of the time it took to do any thing, because there I lost the bounded sense of time. And I’ve been trying (perhaps too hard) to hold on to that way of being ever since.

Nature does not rush because it is already completed

I heard this line from Lao Tsu the other day. And perhaps it was with this in mind I whittled the wand that is in the photo at the top of this post. The stick had been left here by a friend who visited a few weeks back. We spent the afternoon together walking through the woods, me showing her my playground of sculptures and troll rocks and secret paths where I go whenever I have the time. It is a weandering path that avoids most of the recent felling areas of the woods, and touches on all my favourite rocks and steps and trees and hidey places. These are the woods of my latest artistbook, where I can wander and feel and remember and see and hear and expand into what is there and what is not there and what I and it might imagine together.

My friend had picked up this old honeysuckle vinep somewhere along that path, and once we were home had begun to peel back the bark, before leaving it on my kitchen table when she headed to her home. Yesterday afternoon, in what felt like the second day of spring, in the late afternoon sunshine, I took the remaining bark off, smoothed out the nobbled remains of smaller branches and whipped it with some paper twine I had.

It is my wand of meandering, reminding me that the indirect route still takes me there, that the winding way brings more sights and sensations en route, that it may take longer but I love it, as I love walking and cycling and sailing over driving and flying. It reminds me that this love is perhaps the alignment of my self with my way in the world. And as such should be listened to.

Maybe it’s because it is a physical act. I use my hands to bring the writing together. It’s spatial work and three dimensional placement as much as it is about the words and their meaning. There is a slow movement in the alignment of meaning and space, folds and the unspoken references. It brings to mind the Buddhist story about using the finger to point at the moon and the danger of focusing on the finger rather than the moon. The words are the finger. The folds help me to remember the moon. I have to play with blank sheets of paper to be sure the folds capture the sensation the words allude to, pattern in ways that hold some inherent, illusive, sensibility.

This one includes illustrations. They’ve been made from painting and printing, which is not my natural, or learnt, way of expression. So there’s plenty of trial and error in that process. Leaves guided the printing, so there was the collecting: the going out into the woods and selecting and cleaning and inking and pressing and printing.

And again.

There’s something glorious and intense about the movement of the paintbrush, about not fussing what will come, about repetition and discovering. I am reminded of the Zen Crone: Do. Undo. Redo.

I do this work at a different table to the one that has the pc on it. This one is the rather crabby old pine table my parents bought for me when I was studying for my O levels – over forty years ago. It’s big enough to just hold my A1 cutting mat. To make the artistbook, I come here, spend time on the same small details. The folds. The images. The writing. Concentrating. Turning up to ensure the book comes together in a way that holds it together. It is not a prayer. It the manifestation of prayer. It might be closer to meditation. Or perhaps it is an act of mindfulness. My mind is full of the world I am creating. This particular world of love and loss, of trees and breath, of things hidden and things coming into sight.

I think this devotion must be the same as that which I show to the screen writing. It just has a different action. Like the difference between sitting meditation and walking meditation. The piece of writing I’m working onscreen with has asked a far longer sustained dedication. I’m on my x edit, which feels like it could be the last (ha). Certainly I am loving the thickening of the flesh of this world. The worlds I create through the screen are definitely not as obvious to me as the worlds I make in folded paper. Alongside the devotion I hold those worlds in, there is a trust that I can feel my way through something so big I can’t entirely see it – let alone hold it as I can the artistbooks.

Faith is as much as part of the devotion as anything. Faith not in an external dogma or ideology. Faith as in confidence in my relationship with those in my current environment – the words, the ideas, the characters, the place I write, the emotions I’m conveying, and of course all those who informed the feelings and thoughts and memories.

And where there is Devotion and Faith, so too is Consolation. That came at the Worlds in Progress retreat in January when others there were also working on pieces of work begun in 2020 or 2021. Sharing our commitment as it is, voicing it and framing it as it is without judgement was a delight. I hold in my another writer friend who recently finished a novella that took ten years for them to write. Finished, published and enjoyed by others. And of course there is Elizabeth Bishop taking ten years to write a poem – as in to complete a poem.

For an act of devotion, no time is too long. Why would I want to hurry my devotion? The act radiates from me, back to me, out to the world. Of course it takes time.

We (my ancestors at least) once assigned such creative devotion solely to an external entity, who, it was said, created the world in seven days, when actually this creative energy is within us all – from sunflower seed to limestone escarpment to human expression to cloud. We are all creating ourselves anew, constantly. How apparent that is depends on the timeframe in which we operate. Sitting with the limestone near my home, I decided it would helpful for me to realise that it takes me about five to seven years to write a [flat page] book. Which does feel a fairly good approximation of my writing history.

Giving myself that space to ease into the [flat page] book’s world allows me to settle into a new, more patient way of being with it, one that is slowly beginning to feel as devotional as the artistbooks. It allows a tenderness, a care for the flesh of the world, its inhabitants and how they are slowly creating themselves within it. It recognises that this is it, this, the act of tending to the ideas, emotions and people within, is an act of care and respect and sacred acknowledgement of my place in the ecology of its world. It also allows me to stop fretting about what others are doing. My devotion is what sustains me. There is no measurement or comparison for it.

If you’d like to explore this Bower Book a little more, head over to this page of my website, where you can read a more pithy explanation of the book’s origins.

I began this year by being ill. A go-slow start. I could accept that but was frustrated that I was still rather inert for the week of the (now annual) Imaginarium Retreat. Luckily it isn’t a taught retreat, and I didn’t have to talk too much. The main symptom of the virus was a very very sore throat lined with razor blades. And I was co-facilitating, so my wonderful compardre, Katherine Zeserson, totally stepped up where needed.

On the first evening of the retreat we ask everyone to set an aspiration for their week. Mine was to work on my project with easefulness. As last year we facilitators managed to find a few hours every day to focus on our own projects alongside everyone else, I was hoping that would be possible again this. Easefulness: what is described in Buddhist philosophy as Right Effort: which is effectively no effort. I attempted to sit at the desk for a few hours on the first afternoon, and wrote on the issues I needed to consider in this rather wayward memoir I’m trying to edit: perspective, plotting rationale, character development… And managed some notes on some of the women who feature in the story. But it was too much like pushing a boulder up hill. Absolutely not easeful.

So I took to the sofa and let my thought meander, with the prompts of Why … ? and What … ? about this one character whose first scene wasn’t doing anything useful to the narrator’s development (this was the realisation I’d brought with me to the retreat. A not so helpful insight that had become a rather high hurdle to any onwward thinking). I swapped the pc screen for notebook, then zine (in the final participant-led workshop). And noodled and doodled through my thinking, when I wasn’t lighting fires and making soup and other chores that kept the retreat running.

Since being home I’ve taken up the habit of adding to my morning sit three requests. One of which is a request, to all the elements that make me and the world I know, to help ensure this edit is an easeful process. I sit with this request loosely hanging in my consciousness for a few minutes every morning and let it be so.

And things are coming. I go to sleep with an idea. Wake up with a sentence or phrase that sounds as if they could come from her. Slowly I’m bulding an understanding of the character’s possible early 20th century Christian faith, what she might be thinking about as she goes about her evening in this very small and important scene.

We talked a lot about not-writing during the retreat - about how it isn’t just watching telly or eating crisps. It is creating an intentional space of not writing, in which the writing process takes another form. It could be as easily swimming or walking or sitting as lying on a sofa.

And it reminded me of the time I ran an Imaginairum on the Art of Not Writing and found over twenty people who wanted to join me in the process. Inspired by Bruce Lee’s art of fighting by not fighting in Enter the Dragon I went on to turn the course into a pdf, which if you’re interested in you can download here.

Imaginarium By Not Writing

729KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

It obviously isn’t a fast track writing process. But neither is mine. As the razor throat virus was slowly nesting within me just after Christmas I was sitting, blissfully unaware of what lay ahead, under the limestone escarpment I live next to. And while admiring its age and general slow evolution, the thought occurred to me that if I admitted to myself that writing a book seems to take me between five to seven years, from starting it to having it accepted by someone to publish, then all stress of ‘getting it done’ evaporates.

No one is pestering me for this book. No contract relies upon it. I’m supposedly writing it for the pleasure of working things out. And if some of that writing takes the form of not-writing then all the more pleasure. And probably all the more expansiveness and depth in the writing that will eventually be written. Or thoughts that are thought. Or insights that appear. It’s all part of the letting go of stuff that I find myself clinging onto without having good reasons for the clenched fist. Which seems to be a recurrent theme for these posts. Perhaps each post helps me remember it a little more deeply. I wish myself good luck on that path!

Thank you for reading.

Because this year was such a good one for mushrooms, like so many other fruits, and perhaps because it has also been so full of deaths of people close to me, I had a thought, while walking in the woods earlier this month. They were still reeling – or was it me doing the reeling? – from the mass felling of pines and leylandii and larch that the Forestry Commission had overseen. The footpaths were not as well trod as usual, and one entrance had thrown up some mushrooms that usually would have been decapitated by the movement of us overgrounders. They looked fresh, that morning’s produce. And the thought occurred to me that our human lives are another scale of such fruiting bodies. How we rise from the invisible networks of chemistry, physics and society (amongst others) for a period before sinking back into it when our individual lives are over.

This thought pleased me, it contextualised much of what I’ve been thinking and feeling for the past while. I chewed it over, considered it whenever I saw more mushrooms, and finally articulated it to a friend. He ran with it, suggesting that some of us were more toxic than others, some benign, some larger, more evident, some solo some clustering with many others. Feeling spurred on by his enthusiasm for the thought, I revealed the associative thought that I might write on it. I was thinking a poem. I’ve been thinking in poems a bit more recently. And left it there, waiting for the moment or the thought that would be the impetus of the action.

It was at the funeral of a friend last week that a monastic, who was leading the internment, spoke of seeing mushrooms in this way, as being on the scale of fruiting bodies as we humans are, albeit far smaller, how we fall back into the mycelium network of our common consciousness. I guess the thinking in one way is not new – Jung’s notion of the collective consciousness has supported many people’s ways of seeing themselves and the world for many years. It was, however, the synchronicity of him speaking out a thought I had only recently had myself that brought it into relief.

My first response was oh no! I can’t write about that now, since someone else has had the thought, and spoken it to a large group of people. Firstly because I might be seen as copying (or stealing) their thought, and secondly because it realising it was not an original thought made me hold it in a lower regard.

And then I saw how his speaking it was a perfect illumination of the mycelium network the thought was articulating. This made me wonder how important is the originality of any thought? Since there are many artists who claim there is no original thought. Or is it the impetus the artist (or whoever) has for spreading the thought, and how they contextualise it, how they shape it and deliver it to more people to digest, that gives the thought enough value to be disseminated in whatever form?

A poet (maybe Philip Larkin, maybe Vicki Feaver, maybe Jenny Diski or maybe another writer) once said that as writers (and probably all artists) we just repeat our preoccupations again and again. Another writer (maybe Italo Calvino or José Saramago or or) said since no one is listening we are forced to repeat ourselves over and over, until maybe one day someone does pay attention.

Surely then if we are just different fruiting bodies of the same networks of consciousness it is inevitable we simply spread the same ideas, honing them for the age we live in, shaping them in ways that are familiar or natural to how we express things. Originality, perhaps, is just a fallible indicator of the egotistical desire to be noticed. And such ambition is another arm in the body of competition, which must dismiss cooperation as a hindrance or at best a drag in the flow of greatness. When did originality become so revered? Is it integral to competition?

The woods would say that its greatness is dependent on many bodies, fruiting at different times to keep the nourishment available to all those who are involved in being a part of the woods. And that those bodies are willing to fall back into the humus of the woods for the benefit of its ongoingness to rise up as another body on another day or month or year, through the intermediary of the soil from which everything grows.

Today, then, in the gleeful forsaking of my originality, I shall be a scarlet elf cap.

While clearing some bramble the other day, I was snagged briefly before snipping and continuing. I thought nothing more beyond the a mild irritation of the time. After an hour or so, over a cup of tea, my finger began throbbing, persistent, as if burnt or cut. I could see nothing. Again thought nothing more. But whenever I used the finger, the pain was there. It must be a splinter, I thought, and after squeezing and prodding my fingertip a small brown dot of something becomes apparent under the surface of my skin. The skin around it was red and tender. I sucked the finger to heat it up, soften the skin and the miniscule body of plant remains rose slowly to the point of my being able to lever it out with a needle. It was smaller than a pinhead, a grain sand whose power to impact me far outweighs its appearance.

I’ve long been fascinated by the small in our life. Some years ago I was told that there are more plankton – those marine micro plants and animals – in a bucketful of sea water than stars in the milky way. Plankton provides more oxygen than terrestrial plants. It is part of the great oceanic carbon sequestration, and yet scoop up a handful of seawater and I can barely see anything.

I suspect my interest in the small has to do with my extreme short-sightedness. My natural focus point is a few centimetres from my eye, and when I hold things that close without my glasses on their glorious detail is astonishingly evident. I do not need a magnifying glass to see the composition of a damselfly’s wing, for example. Close up, I can see how like stained glass it is, held with the finest of leading.

Reminders of the power of small are everywhere, once you tune in. Leprose lichen, that appears like orange or chalky green spray paint on trees and rocks in woodland, has given me great delight when walking through the recently felled woodland near where I live. It was a plantation and so apparently ‘matured’ and ready to harvest, after a hundred years of assimilation into the woodland. The rationale also includes ‘conservation’ and ‘rewilding’ and ‘restoring native trees’. All the same, the sight (to me) and the immediate impact (on the remaining woody organism) is shocking. So taking any small consolation, in the form of lichen or earthtongue fungi or a scuttling harvestman, or the flash of a wren, is invaluable in the restoration – of my spirit and the regeneration of the wood.

This all helps me to take comfort in my own smallness, particularly in the smallness of my actions. Increasingly my desire for a big, bold presence is diminishing. Perhaps it is autumn, perhaps it is the autumn of my life, perhaps it is just after this particularly testing year.

I restarted the weekly Imaginarium practice of Writing Alongside in September and have found that single hour of writing, with one or five others online, has sustained the embers of that creative fire in me. It’s a small habit that offers little pressure and huge comfort of writing whatever I can conjure in that weekly hour.

It reminds me of the practice I took up during the first Covid lockdown of going to the shore and finding a stone and a word. One word a day. It was on the scale of taking a breath. One small breath and within it is the life force that sustains me, connecting me to the ocean and the trees.

In these times of overwhelm, where so much can choke me, the comfort of any small act feels as disproportionate as the release of a splinter. A smile. A stroke on the back of my neck. A sitting in silence doing nothing for a few minutes. Almost so insignificant I might forget to allow myself such rich pleasures. And yet when I do remember, like when I sit down for that hour a week, which has recently increased to [half] an hour every few days, the reward of such connection is immense.

Is that all I need? Connection? To myself, to another? To realise the ongoing connection that sustains life on this planet? Is it the living out of this realisation that gives me enough meaning, or nourishment, or activation, to feel healthy, to feel part of a healthy system, even when so much of it doesn’t feel so healthy?

This is later than I had hoped it’d be. I’ve been trying to find time to write about writing, in particular to write about the power I draw from small things - plankton, lichen, breathing. But it’s been an unsettled month slash couple of years, and last night I lay awake finding myself beginning to compose this - which is both about the smallness of a middle class life in England and an overwhelm that crystalised when I decided to not run a new Imagarinarium - Imaginarium Homing, with Katherine Zeserson, this autumn. This thinking and feeling about home / being unhomed. of course I wasn’t up for facilitating a six month course about connecting to our home within when I was feeling so unhomed myself.

It took telling Katherine I needed to postpone our call out to realise that this unhomedness had been two years in the making. Moving house was, unsurprisingly, a central element to this state. It took a year from having our offer accepted to getting the keys to mine and my partner’s first co-bought home. We moved in and six months later moved out again for builders to add a loft conversion. This weekend we moved back in to face dust, filth and a beautitful new space upstairs. My ultimately good house fortune running alongside the rolling destruction of thousands of Palestinian’s homes has made for a dissonance I’ve struggled to find peace with.

Alongside that conflicting parallel was this summer’s display of St George’s Crosses which seemed in part to be a demand for the return of ‘English Culture’. The culture I experience in the England I inhabit is rich and embedded, historical, mythic, communal and playful. I don’t know what culture these flagbearers’ want back, but I fear it’s one I’m happy to have left behind, or never really knew.

Then the day we moved back in, I was outside when there was a splintering crack of a tree trunk toppling in the woods next door. I knew the woods were being cleaered of non-native species. The notices have bene up for months. It’s predominantly yew and birch and beech in the woods, some fir and spruce, but not as many, I thought, as the number of denuded trunks stacked in a clearing round the corner, that are being transported out of the area. It was the visceral sound of the splitting of heartwood, pith and tightly packed growth rings, that brought home to me how another home, many homes, was being destroyed.

I’m surprised at how vulnerable I’ve felt by all these disruptions of my personal, social, political and environmental homes. I thought I had a solid core that meant I was my home, that I could create myself a home through my imagination, I could write a place for myself to inhabit. I thought that by writing, or paper folding, I creared a spaxe of safety for myself, whatever the outcome. And to come extent I can, and have been doing so for most of my life. I’ve long appreciated how the security of my childhood home meant I could play and imagine and create without fear or wariness or a need to be on alert. The routines of my parents, their home-making, protected me from recognising how essential it is for me to feel safe to be able to tap into the creative force that is at the heart of all life on this planet. As you’ll know if you’ve been reading this for the past while, I’ve had no impetus to write or make anything very much over a couple of years. It has taken most of these two years for me to accept this is so, and that it might change when I’m settled again.

Yesterday, in part to honour this ongoing disparity of my life with those in Gaza, to face it in the quiet dark of a cinema, I went to see Put Your Sould On Your Hand and Walk. It wasn’t an easy watch, for many obvious reasons, and yet it was compelling in its honesty about the seeming gulf between the lives of the two women who connect in the film. What I’m ultimately left with is the impact of living in a place where the overriding force is destruction. The slow ‘dispression’ of Fatma Hassona’s experience was captured not just in her words and photos, but in the relentless disconnections of her communications with the film’s director Sepideh Farsi.

To live amongst annihilation is the greatest unhoming, dissonance and disconnection. How can any brain - or body - truly relate to it? It goes against the life force that has brought any one of us into being.

I’ve suffered a relatively short period of controlled and self-inflicted destruction that had a clear prize a consequence. Still, I wonder at this culture I’m upholding that encourages such a practice of home improvement, refurb and renovation. More ways to spend our money, to encourage us to earn more. To spend on our own small lives, to reinforce our sense of territory, our sense of individualised self.

Imagine what the world might be like if we all felt a belonging in ourselves, a sensation of home in our being, like say the oak tree that spreads out and down, that produces acorns, houses epiphytes, shelters squirrels, expressing itself in a continual creative flourishing of life across decades.

My mother’s mother, Florence, died when she was 51 and Mum was 17, thirteen years before I was born. Yet I have never not known her. Ever since I can remember I heard stories of her, there were photos of her in the house, always elegant, whether it was a studio portrait or a snap of her picnicking on a indeterminate fellside. She had been a loving mother, to all four of her children, made them feel as safe during the tempestuous family life with her husband as she did after their divorce. She had a beautiful voice, as well as being a dedicated piano player. What she lacked in cooking skills, she made up for in sharing her love for reciting poetry and stories of her favourite flowers and trees. Her physical absence was filled by her spiritual and emotional presence.

She was more vivid and real to me, through my imagination, than the grandmother who lived in the same time as us, who we saw several times a month. Perhaps it was because she was made flesh by the combination of Mum’s memory and my imagination that her existence was so tangible to me. Her curtailed life, Mum’s desire for her to have lived longer and my fevered animation of how she might attend to my needs, created a life force that exceeded any singular body.

I carried this energy, alongside her various, always fun, creative and loving, interventions in my daydreams. She shaped herself into some intangible part of my body as an imperative to live life to the full, and to have no regrets if I was suddenly struck down or told I was going die tomorrow. When I was thirteen or fourteen I eschewed my bed, to sleep only on a mattress on the floor in preparation for having to sleep anywhere on my extensive travels that I planned to take as soon as I was old enough. Until then, I’d read books as rapidly as I could turn their pages, to be sure to inhabit all those that populated the shelves of our house. This meant an eclectic consumption of my brother’s science fiction, Florence’s own volumes of Conrad and Somerset Maugham that Mum had kept, and my Dad’s copies of James Thurber and the anthologies of the cartoons of Giles and Andy Capp. On our weekly trips to the library I would borrow all six books I was allowed on my ticket, regardless of whether I read them or not. When not reading I’d make elaborate things from shells, cardboard boxes or scraps of material or occupy grubbier worlds at the foot of trees or in puddles in the building site next door. Life existed everywhere and I was going to experience it.

The downside to this drive was a frenetic need for efficiency, to be able to fit everything in. I would write out my shopping lists into the order in which I would walk through town. I had other lists of things I wanted to achieve, of maybe ten of fifteen things that I’d expect to finish within a day rather than the week that a more tempered approach would take. To sleep on an unfinished jobs list was a fundamental discomfort to me, that often would lead to my waking in the early hours ordering the activities to complete the following day.

The complication of this efficiency drive comes in relation to creative endeavours. I remember asking a friend how she managed an efficient writing practice. I can still see the look of horrified bemusement on her face in the place of a vocalised answer. Creative work is perhaps the antithesis of efficiency, or at least the creative work I most enjoy, the meandering, the slow observing and processing, the almost aimless gathering of that which intrigues, the slow rising of form and meaning.

This urge for productivity, thankfully and possibly inevitably, loosened when I was 51. It’d been that year when I first connected my unspoken time deficit to Florence’s premature death. I forgive myself for not realising how these two things mapped onto each other. I’d heard of this anticipatory momentum from friends who’d experienced the early death of parents, but hadn’t considered it in my non-lived experience of Florence’s death. It had not been my grief, but only ever a story to me. I hadn’t even known her. This had meant I could dismiss the weight of its impact, not realising that in the realm of emotional nourishment, the umbilical cord is never cut. I’d been absorbing its truth with every cell of my body, hence living it. And ironically probably too busy to allow myself to connect the dots. The work continues to shake myself free of it. Another story to tell is that life, any speed of life, post Florence’s death, is a bonus, and can be lived as such in honour of her.

Lifers is a new experiment from Hymas&Lewis : short conversations around who or what have influenced creative lives.

The method we follow is to consider all who influenced our creative life. Then whittle them down to down ten names / things which we wrote on slips of paper that were put in a hat. We then picked out only one to speak on.

This episode is me speaking on the sailor, Bernard Espinet, who I met in the early 90s.

You might recognise it as a riffing of This Cultural Life. Steve Lewis talks more about the origins of the idea on his Substack, We Are Lichen. In short, it is a celebration of the small ponds of creative life and how they are nourished and in turn nourish others.

We have an idea to continue this series, with short conversations with others on eternal creative quests. We’re interested in talking with people who aren’t celebrated on a national or international scale, but who are energetic creative forces in their communities, whatever shape that takes.

We are currently compiling a list of names. Who would you suggest?

The current Imaginarium is on the theme of Power, and began with an observation from one of Starhawk’s substack posts: ‘The word ‘power’ comes from the Latin potere, related to potency and potential, to our ability to do, to think, to envision and imagine, to speak our truth. That kind of power is unlimited.’ Which is phrase enough to set my internal power radar tingling.

It seems to me that our experience of potency and potential changes over time. Take limestone, for example. How to see the potential of one urchin becoming instrumental in a vast limestone pavement?

To see anything clearly, by which I mean seeing the wider congtext of a thing, we need to slow down, observe possibilities, pasts, and the tendrils of connection that have brought this thing into being at the same moment we’re there to observe it.

Slowing down is difficult for me. It goes against everything I’ve been taught about self-worth, societal value and efficiency. I know also that it’s increasingly important.

At the start of every calendar year I ask a question, which I write in the front of my paper diary to keep it live through the twelve months ahead. Or at least in a place I can go back and remind myself of it.

This practice, I think, rose from Rilke’s prompt: Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

My question for 2025 is ‘What does space give?’

At the eighth month of the year I feel answers might be forming.

One answer is: space gives the chance to mourn. I touched on some of this mourning in Echo Soundings posts written during, what I now call, the Winter of Grief. I mourned personal past failures and my fragile sense of self worth. I mourned (still mourn) the ongoing destruction of habitat, the resulting loss of birds and insects, my own dead beloved, the dead I don’t know, the insatiable human appetite for more, the causal consumerism of my culture, the numbness that comes with wealth and power over others. I mourned in a way that stopped me doing anything else very much when I had space to choose what I might do. My mourning forced me to occupy the space in a way that meant the space occupied me. It helped to know the practice of Non Violent Communication asks us to observe and honour our mourning, to give it time, to give ourselves time within it. All the same, I felt hollow, slow, heavy. It was an unpleasant space, and it seemed I had little choice but to be in it, until, perhaps inevitably, I changed, it changed.

That space lasted two or three months, maybe more. Like much these days, it didn’t map neatly onto recognisable timeframes. And of course that’s what makes such space so horrible to be in. So horrible I usually find ways to distract myself out of asap.

The next time I found myself in unexpected space was when I went to Sligo for two weeks in June. It was an unexpected offer of a holiday. We went with no expectations. No plans. And that meant we didn’t do very much. And in that space I met three new poems and the manifestation of an idea I’d been mulling over for a ‘long time’. I was fizzing with words and visuals of words. It was all very sweet and gentle, and I didn’t complain (as I have in the past) that these words weren’t edgy or textured enough. I just said hello, welcome, to them. Nice to see you here. And it was.

These letters are the prototypes for the next phase that needs yet more space to be formed, made ready for the Riso printer. I’m hoping that’ll happen before the end of the year…

Anyway, not to run ahead of myself. Back to grief. I think I needed to acknowledge the grief, live the mourning (that so much of our world doesn’t want me to feel) to know what is important to me, what is living within me.

Someone* wrote (and I probably misquote) humans are the universe coming to know itself. I can’t know the universe objectively. I can only know anything through the lens that is my body (and all its cultural weight), my society and my environment. And space is an opportunity for knowing how the internal and external universes are distinct and interconnected.

How can we see potential of ourselves within the spinning, sparking universe, unless we are resting, a momentary point of stillness in the chaotic motions? If this is even possible, and not only a metpahorical rest, it isn’t intended to suggest rest as a tool for growth. Rest is a place of potential in itself. The idea being as valuable as the action.**

There’s no knowing what will rise in any given space. Its amorphousness is what makes it a space and not a place. Ultimately I believe it’s simplest to say Hello, welcome, rather than No, thank you, which never seems to prevent the stuff that wants to wriggle through come what may. Grief is many things. Many people have written most beautifully about our experiences of it. It is as inevitable as pain and death. Perhaps, like anything, it holds the seed of life itself.

* If this sound familiar and you know wrote this, or what they wrote exactly, please let me know!

** I do struggle with this. Want to believe it. Want to live it, happily. Want to trust the immeasurable collective spirit that lies within this idea.

*** A heartwarming podcast with Joanna Macy on despair

Moira and I became friends over the years, and I’m sure that fed into the welcome we offered those who came. We had such fun, creating the environment for stimulation and relaxation. The food was delicious. The people (mostly) appreciative. My partner came latterly and offered walking meditation sessions for those who wanted to begin their days with such attention and stillness. Deepening my connection with that small region of France became a delight over those years. I’d stay longer. Drink in the mountains, the coasts, the lakes, the book towns, the castles, the wine, and cheese. Moira and I would take a day out between the two courses to visit a village or the coast. Moira was generous enough to cover the cost of my train travel, there and back, when the thought of flying became harder for me to stomach. I would take another day or two after the course to see something more of somewhere en route.

When we came back together after the pandemic, I had changed. I found the travel and the heat more troublesome - to go all that way to work with people writing on things that had nothing to do with the place we were in, for it to be too hot for people to want to leave the grounds. I found the socialising harder - every meal was taken together. I found my mojo for the facilitation was waning. I needed more and more time to retreat from the retreat everyone else was taking. So I found someone else to run the week and stepped back. My time was over. A new season needed to start.

And for me too. When I realised I didn’t want to continue running these weeks I knew I didn’t want to stop facilitating that space for people (and often myself) to write and dream. I loved the process of building of that spacetime. I just wanted to do it closer to home, more accessible, less expensive. I wanted the place we were in to have more of an impact on those of us visiting it. I wanted more community, less alcohol (yes, my 40 year old self, I’m looking at you), more stillness. So when I was on a residency with Settle Stories in January 2024 in this old mansion in Giggleswick, working, as one of twelve artists, on their Storyful Way, I knew I had found the place I wanted to trial a new Imaginarium retreat.

I also knew I didn’t want to run it solo. Moira had been a key part of making the Write Like Nobody’s Watching work (or play) so well. Someone to share the stresses and joys with. Someone to plan with. Someone to talk candidly to. I had already run an Ancestral Imaginarium with Katherine Zeserson and knew she had experience of running residential retreats so she was the obvious choice. As well as experienced, Katherine is joyful, intuitive, creatively curious and energetic.

Our first Worlds in Progress Retreat ran in January 2025 with ten other people who work, create and play with text somehow. We offered sitting, singing and flexing every morning, for those who wanted. We suggested loose mealtimes to suit however everyone liked to eat - sorting ourselves out for breakfast and lunch - and to fit around whatever was the occupation for people’s days. We invited people to share their creative practice during playshops later in some of the afternoons. These were attended by maybe two thirds of the group, those who wanted a break from their own head, or wanted to explore what they were writing in a different way, or who fancied some playtime. We offered one to ones to anyone who wanted to chat about anything they wanted. We had cooking teams for the evening veggie meal and lingered long over them with chat and laughter that often took someone (or two or three) out into the January nights for further exploration of our wider world in progess. We were blessed with an astonishing week of snow and ice (far far from the temperatures of the last year I was in St Raymond when it reached 55° in the sun).

We wrote and researched. Even I wrote for a couple of hours every afternoons, beginning a new long form iece that had been cooking in the recesses of my imagination for a while. We made new friends. We found commonalities. We were given space. We learnt new words, new ideas, and felt safe enough to share ignorances, unknowns, uncertainities and silly things. In short, we constructed a world we wanted to inhabit and nourish and sustain.

Some who came, came with a sense of fraudulance - the original call out was for ‘text-based artists’ - for anyone whose creative practice worked with text in any form - and this word triggered people’s doubt they were an artist. But the artistry that was seeded and flowered and continues to be shared from that week is clear to me. The careful crafting of love and generosity, the sharing, the giving and receiving of intention, and the relishing of beauty and preciousness in life. That confidence was felt across the board it seemed. It was such a delight that everything came together to make this new form Imaginarium such a blissful retreat experience.

It takes time for seeds to germinate. The seeds of our imagination don’t come in packets that explain when or where to sow and how long they’ll take to flower. The seeds of our imagination need various, soils and weather conditions to nourish them. Our intuition knows these conditions. And perhaps these seeds aren’t too particular or tender. Perhaps they are. Nothing can tell us how long until harvest. We need to water these seeds with faith (by which I mean the fertile mix of trust and confidence), and a selective choice of positive actions (with a sprinkle of learnings). And perhaps most importantly we need not to over-tend, not insist on a timeframe. Nor over focus, but to encourage with a light touch, accepting other shoots may grow in the soil we’re feeding, that rogue seeds are already in there. All life begins in the dark. The unexpected is inevitable. As a creative spirit it’s easiest to welcome whatever appears and ask: Who are you? How can I help you grow? How can you help my growth? In what world can we thrive?

If you’d like to know about the next Worlds In Progress Retreat that’s happening in January 2026, then head over to this page. We ask for ‘Expressions of Interest’ (by the end of July) to be sure that what you’re wanting is what we’re offering.

Not only did Mum plant the seed of the prophecy from any early age, she also encouraged me express myself. She always listened to my chatter on the walk home from primary school, asked questions, laughed and nodded at whatever I had to tell her. Her attention fuelled confidence in what I had to say. Home was safe enough for me to explore my imagination. Once I could write words, I found myself utterly entranced with stringing them together. My favourite word was ‘and’. Words sprawled across pages, unfettered by spelling or straight lines. I added words in sentences that built a path for my own psychic explorer. Notebooks could be closed and tucked away, and their events still exist. These private worlds mashed in unwieldy constructions that didn’t require gravity, a teacher, or anyone else to realise. Conditions for landing were always favourable.

I wrote to express, to expunge, to process. For these words to hold sense, they needed shaping, clarifying. It’s taken years to accept how slow I am at it.

Through writing, the me who’s first compelled to capture an experience, real or imaginary, becomes overlaid with another me who reads it and expands on it, then a later me who cuts and rewrites. Reading other people adds more ways of seeing, feeling and thinking, more approaches to express. More rewrites and crossings out, and writing becomes a teacher of patience in understanding. When, in my young adulthood, I admitted to people I wanted to be a writer, they laughed like the skipper did, on hearing I was a vegetarian. Later, I met people who were curious, who introduced me to the me who wanted others to enter these realms, the me who believes in sharing refuge.

These versions of myself span years in the making and remaking of stories, growing with impressions, sensations and ripplings with each layer. Realising this assuaged my frustrations at being inefficient. There’s no linear through-line in creating anything. It’s an unfolding mash up of multiple pasts with anticipatory futures. My mother’s value of efficiency equated it with productivity, getting things done. Writing’s efficiency is the smooth running of all its parts, all my parts, historic and dreaming. Slowing down allows me to encompass them all, if not equally. This isn’t the same efficiency Mum required to get us kids ready for school. And I struggle with accepting how long it takes me to write something I’m pleased with, especially since the initial act of writing is a fast flow of words.

Writing became an easier, safer way than speaking, to articulate the grace I experienced in reading first of elves and fairies then of people as unfamiliar. In the world of words I had the quiet space to develop my reasoning, my thoughts, experiences, emotions, perceptions. Maybe that’s why my sense of refuge remains in the act of writing rather than in having written. The balancing of these selves is a precious, precarious act.

All of them are as embedded in me as the forehead and thighs of my grandmother and great grandmother, or the lips and noses of their grandmothers and great grandmothers, only discernible in certain lights, if at all. Their actions settle alongside the efforts of the other mothers I don’t resemble so closely. I become buoyed and enabled by all of them. I am, like the creations that absorb me, a momentary coalescence of elements that have long been in circulation. The writing that upwells from me, and all the streams of me, forms a body that appears to be one, but is as numerous and lively as the molecules that form the water that make the tide.

I first stumbled upon the philosophical concept of the Fold (capital F) from the French Filosopher Gilles Deleuze - who also gave me the word / experience ‘chaosmos’ (which is the point before any creative coalescence). I came across his thinking around the Fold during my early days of making Artistbooks, which I loved to make because of the various ways I might fold paper to disrupt the intellectual and embed the physical reading experience. One way Deleuze describes the Fold as working is as ‘flowing sand might dissolve into grains, but resembles a sheet of paper divided into infinite folds or separated into bending movements, each one determined by the consistent or conspiring surroundings.’ // ‘… divided to infinity in smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion.’

Everything is connected. Everything is in a state of becoming.

It was my immersion into Deleuze’s thinking that became a gateway in a Buddhist practice, which helps me apply his complex concepts on a more lived level.

Steve Lewis’s comment on my last post about confusing my being a writer with being a successful writer reminded me of the helpfulness of nondiscriminative thinking. Nondiscimination is about acceptance, is about noticing the emotional response to anything and attempting to uncouple that from the experience, is trying not to judge or compare. ‘May I be free from attachment and aversion, but not be indifferent’. This last line of a Mette meditation has kept me on my toes for a fair old while. How is this possible?

You may have your own ideas (if you’re even interested). My best answer is (currently) : curiosity. Curiosity offers a state of mind that is open, my best bet at not ascribing ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ to an event. Rather it encourages me to wonder, How is this? How am I in relation to this? And to best be able to ask these questions is to unhook myself from the desired outcome. Yes, I have a trajectory within which I operate - I want to ‘be a writer’ - it just isn’t necesarily how I originally envisioned it. The world is so much bigger than my imagination. Especially my 16 year old imagination.

Remembering all this, I tracked back my various ‘failures’ - those events that didn’t align themselves to my desire - and considered how they altered the course I thought I was travelling. For example: When my A levels didn’t match expectations - of teachers and my university applications - I went to study English Literature rather than Psychology (now, I canot believe I even was thinking to study a science). Not getting a ‘proper’ job after my degree meant I worked at casual placements, met a New Zealander went travelling, learnt to sail. An early conversation with an editor at Faber not developing into a contract left me free to write for a performance trio, collaborating and being funded to workshop and tour together. Penned in the Margins not taking a manuscript of new work led me to making an artistbook to get some of these new poems into the world and discovering the wonder of this form. And on.

So, if I am to think in terms of failure, I might add She who fails also succeeds.

Samuel Beckett’s maxim Fail. Fail again. Fail Better. haunted me for years. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. While I still wouldn’t like to have to explain it to anyone in words I have more of a sense of its meaning. Possibly.

When I wrote those last couple of substack posts I was on an End of Life Doula Foundation course. We were encouraged to consider ourselves as our ‘first client’, and this led me to open myself to the various losses I’d experienced - starting with my mother and then unravelling through other various anchor points I’d be holding on to. Anchor points that are helpful until they’re not. Maybe instead of ‘anchor points’ I might see these points of aspiration [‘goals’ in coaching language] as ‘waymarkers’. I might stop at them for a while, weigh anchor for a night, week or month, or might simply be using them a directional guidance in a larger voyage.

And the longer I am on this voyage, the more clearly I can see the route I’m taking / have taken. I can feel myself embracing fully the sailing metaphor - the tacking (zig-zagging) into a headwind - the tides and currents. And of course I cannot proceed without incorporating the variables of the world I’m in - the ‘consistant or conspiring environment’. And not knowing those variables ahead of time, or the lay of the land you’re heading towards, is challenging, at times disorientating, scary and exhausting. My mantra on the boat was never to sail without someone stronger than me on board. Physical strength is the key for the creative voyage, but certainly I value the presence of others alongside.

So it was interesting to stumble upon this old JD Hoo cartoon from The Vegan. I can’t quite remember how long she appeared there - quarterly for perhaps five or so years. What I do remember is a new editor (replacing Richard Farhall who had originally commissioned them) writing to me (sometime in the late 90s) saying ‘I think these are meant to be funny, but I don’t find them so’. And that was the end of JDHoo’s relationship with The Vegan magazine. And JDHoo in the public realm.

Until I work with Closing Loops on Mapping Our Place, a community participatory project I’ve been trying to get off the ground (seeded in the Walk with Us, NOC collaboration with Maya Chowdhry) for some years, and am now in the final stages of. And see how her spirit is still very much alive in my interpretations of people’s stories on the maps.

I challenge you to spot which of these images is mine / hers :)

And so back to Deleuze’s ‘certain cohesion’ that rises from the small folds of any one body - whoever’s body we might be considering - human, city, river, planetary. There she is, a crease in my creative yield, who I’d dismissed as being scrappy and ultimately unfunny - no wonder nobody wanted her - until she finds her place in the zine world of community mapping.

Her story here, if you’re curious, is: ‘I can go from a built up housing estate to the middle of nowhere, a sanctuary. It’s an escape.’

Talking with a wise friend some weeks ago, when I was struggling with an overwhelming sense of despair and doubt, she suggested that perhaps I needed to align what I need with what the world needs.

To begin with, as I have done for most of my life, with what I need - which is to make, capture, configure, push and play with my way of seeing the world, primarily through words. It seems my way of seeing is out of kilter with the mainstream. I am myopic. Naturally I see close up, look for patterns, am drawn to texture and sensation rather than an overall meaning. No wonder poetry felt like home. At least for a while.

I have been writing and making for most of my life. Sometimes these things - poems, stories, artist books, performances - are received with interest and joy. The longer narratives are more convoluted. They expose a fragmented, molecular way of seeing that can feel oblique or too difficult to piece together for the outsider. These that take so long to draw together are where my heart beats and sings its own particular tune. It has to, to sustain my being there and the interest and desire required to create the whole.

And therein lies some pain, especially more recently. That which I spend so long inside is not so well received by others. I am a collaborator at heart. I want to share. To show and draw others with me, and to be opened to how they experience things. It has felt increasingly hard (perhaps especially coupled in these challenging times of oppression and separation and hurt) to sustain a creative energy when things aren’t quickly or simply welcomed.

When what I need doesn’t appear to be what the world needs, or at least my needs don’t find their place in the world of needs.

How do I know what the world needs? I am an artist not a businesswoman. I explore and imagine and guess and express. I am not looking for the niche to be filled - except in myself. There are many worlds within any one world.

Not to be dramatic or comparative, I think of Vincent VG ending his life. All that energy and expression and engagement to be met with silence. And he sustained so much, creating all he did.

Another wise friend is lucky enough not to experience doubt. She has a belief in herself that ensures if she can imagine something she knows she can undertake it. She is not so caught up with the external eye upon her. She will find a way to execute her needs.

Execute?

Let them loose from her inner world into the world of others.

Perhaps.

Once Vincent’s work was considered radical and impossible. Now he is so reproduced - postcards, teatowels, puzzles, immersive experiences - he is almost a cliche, certainly totally accepted by our mainstream consumerist culture as a creative visionary.

Blake, too. And Emily Dickinson. Kafka. Plenty more.

That folding in of the edge to the middle takes its own time. It’s a process with an unpredictable timescale that moves to the various rhythms of the place, atmosphere and other conditions. I think of the ecotones I love, the shore, say, or the wild edge of a building site. Those fertile places of interaction and hybridisation. Where the resilience of difference and sometimes extremes (of tide height and strength) brings about smart strategies for survival and growth. And these strategies don’t come quickly either.

Creating stuff doesn’t necessarily fit into clearly defined timetables, or align to notions of efficiency. There is no manager or precident telling me this can be sorted within the week or month. Alignment is tricky when everything is being made up, when edges are blurred, when things aren’t yet known. It becomes a sense thing, intuition, trust and a continued fumbling.


(Image: Repudiation by Maria Gonçlaves Barreira, 1957)