About this time every year I get to Beckett in the curriculum. And about this time every year, after pulling up all the questions, I trudge home and allow myself to be 19 again. I allow myself to pull back and enter into it all from another perspective, with the same kind of vulnerability I…

They expected the quayside to flood last night, though the wind has been still for a day now. I guess the sea has lifted itself to move out of the way of the weather somewhere else. On yesterday’s run the path was strewn with branches, but the ground was dry. There’s been no snow so…

The days are getting longer. I’m doing all I can to conjure spring – but dreading the fragmented feeling that this time of year can bring. There is a scattering of holidays to abort any sense of flow. After a day of blue skies and quiet, the night blew the lantern off the deck table….

An exit strategy. It’s a lesson learned: finally understanding the need of an exit strategy before entering. And realizing how it can be done without a struggle: it can be as simple as a gentle laying-down of the patterns. A quiet, green walking-away. This week I think someone might have played me for a fool….

Or “Why Ghosts Work so Hard to be Seen” * It is a kind of transgression – moving through the world without definition. Like ghosts. Predictability is absolute control, and we like boundaries, boxes and walls. We draw them on and around one another. Invisible lines – undeniably present. There is an insoluble tension between…

We will all disappear anyway. What’s in a name? A rose… We fragment. As will the life that once caught itself whipping around the sharp corners hanging desperately after a name – or pulling one behind, as heavy as a tire in the sand. I’ve watched them. The runners who train at the beach, pulling…

These flat days of winter are never about a loss of hope. It’s a loss of desire. These days where the edges lose shape, surfaces reflect dull surfaces and the pieces of the world are packed away bit by bit, wrapped in featureless swaddling and stacked in damp cardboard. Don’t get me wrong – there…

The sound that comes: ssshhhh. Maybe instead of a word for the year, I need a sound. Maybe it will be more meaningful for me to swap out “om” with sssshhh in morning meditations. It’s the sound that comes when the tide pulls out. When a person tries to calm a baby.  Or someone else….

My second cup of coffee. The space heater is already turned on, but I don’t remember doing it. And once again those last twenty minutes having slipped by accounted for – not as in black outs, or anything concerning –  just a matter of inattention. Birds sleep half-a-brain at a time. I am awake this…

Still Leonard refuses to go into the yard alone when it is dark – which is pretty much always these days. I think he’s afraid of the hedgehog that lives in the holly hedge. He has to pass that corner before the yard opens up facing the road – and the streetlights. I think I…

And a very domestic start to the year. Last night we spent the evening with good friends. We lit sparkler hearts and toasted with champagne as the calendar flipped. And I was introduced to a New Year’s tradition: 12 grapes. One for each month – 12 wishes for the coming year. After enough food to…

Tomorrow I will run on the beach. The 9th year of a personal tradition for New Year’s Day. Today I will try to tick off some of the things on my to-do list before I head back to work, and into a new year. I write lists. And sometimes I find them lying around the…