It’s late Winter, or perhaps it’s early Spring. An uncertain season here in Orkney, either way. It can mean anything from shirtsleeves and birdsong to blizzarding snow and sometimes both of these in the same day. We’ve had some gentle days recently that saw the hens...
When I gave a presentation to the Open University a few weeks ago, I spoke about my practice of drawing water as one of deliberately slowing down in order to inhabit time with more awareness and presence. One of the questions I was asked in the (unrecorded) Q&A...
Ross Gay’s “Inciting Joy” has been keeping me company these past few days. A poet, Gay’s prose is playful, looping, forking into asides and lengthy footnotes, inviting you to meander alongside. As title the suggests, he explores ‘incitements’ or moments when a kind...
It’s not often that I sit down with a book of poetry and find myself so drawn into its world that I read it in long, deep draughts, like a novel. But this is the effect that my first encounter with the work of Canadian poet Don Domanski had on me. These are poems of...
In the correspondence I have with the wonderful people I work with as coach and mentor I am often struck by how harsh they are with themselves, how much their confidence and wellbeing seems to hinge on achieving this or that creative goal. Indeed, the wider world of...
It’s fair to say that these are trying times. Each news bulletin seems to bring more evidence of the madness, destructiveness, greed and mendacity of those who hold power. My Twitter feed is full of righteous anger, denunciations and calls to action to fight for the...
