Marooned on a far-away planet, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker, Arthur Dent, wakes up and gives ‘his early morning yell of horror’.
A Martin Amis narrator talks of ‘the difference between cosmic reality and how you sometimes feel when you wake up in the morning’. Doctors (and obsessively-Googled medical sites) refer, more blandly, to ‘diurnal mood variation’. But whatever you call it, how you feel in the morning is not always good.
Or at least, how I feel in the morning. I shouldn’t make assumptions, though I suspect I’m not alone in frequently finding myself struggling, on waking. There’s a greyscale (more…)
‘Due to weather conditions, the evening boat is cancelled.’
Under the risen wind, the waves’ alternate push
and tug unfurls, rolls back, returns again,
while underfoot the shingle shifts and seethes,
a living ground which slides away from me
with a rasping rattle, like hard-won breath.
Graceless, I flail towards the frilled edge
where the foamed sea unrolls itself in greeting.
Sand swirls in the shallows, litter bobs,
and lank fingers of torn weed trail and clutch at me.
But beyond, the deeper reaches free me: I fall forward
into heaven-pale blue-green water which holds
and lifts me—where light is delighting in itself,
and the breeze-beaten surface is a shifting infinity
of tiny planes where sun is shattered into stars.
I blink brine-burned eyes and gasp, spitting salt.
A joy rises in me which joins now with far ago,
where a small child is tossed in sure square hands,
and squeals, and is caught again, and danger
is always safe. I laugh, and weep, and play
till I am spent. Leaving the water, I stoop to lift
a piece of sea-glass. Tumbled into opacity, it holds
the light. Carefully I fold my fingers over it,
its warm smoothness sweet against my salt-scoured skin.
First published in The Salopeot, 2017.
The Big Day.
It’s in the post. Should I hire trumpeters, skywriters, a marquee? A cloistered cell in which to grieve? Do I want a Greek chorus to keen over the event, or a Glee chorus to celebrate it? Do I don some kind of ritual clothing, à la Victorian mourning garb, or go out and buy whatever constitutes my personal equivalent of a combover, a sports car or a push-up bra?
You may detect some ambivalence here. Over the last years (more…)
I came across this line by Robert Frost quite recently on the internet (it’s all over the place) and it got me, in the way that poetry often can.
I heard a voice inside my head go Cor, in an almost Phwoar-y kind of a way (swiftly followed by a quiet, greenly-jealous voice saying I wish I’d written that). Though Frost is probably not, in fact, saying something very different from “You can’t put an old head on young shoulders”, there’s something so much more palatable for me in coming across the idea in this form; (more…)
“We read to know that we are not alone…”
I facilitate a range of workshops and ongoing groups which are all designed to give people a shared time and space to think about life-stuff—like love, or loss, or change, or living happily and gently in this wondrous and complicated world. They all work in a person-centred way, which means you are welcome just as you are, and will be met with respect, empathy, interest and genuineness.
The exploration of poems, other texts, and interesting ideas is at the heart of the sessions, together with the time to reflect on your own experience. You don’t need to be an expert on anything. You definitely won’t be grilled or put on the spot, nor required to work with others on developing a means of crossing a ravine using only string, biscuits, and 14 copies of War and Peace. No special knowledge or experience is required: only your desire to take some time for yourself—to explore, ponder, and share as much or as little as you like. And, of course, to spend time with like-minded, curious, kindly people.
Some of these sessions I do on my own, some with other people. About to start—autumn 2018 onwards—is a shared reading and “working through” of Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong. Details of the 42 group and the What Are Words Worth? group can be found on the relevant pages on this site. Please do get in touch if you want to know anything more about any of the sessions.