The Point of Vanishing & Other Dreams

Blog


In my blog, I explore the themes that weave through my stories and dreams:

the need to belong, and the fear of loss; the longing for family and home and love; loneliness and the extraordinary power of the human spirit; depression - and hope; the clarifying presence of the natural world, and ways of being awake and alive in the only moment we really have: this one.

I hope you'll follow me beyond the storytelling, and join me on this very human journey....




MoonsilverTales

"Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." ~Oscar Wilde

‘I dream my paintings and then I paint my dreams’. ~Vincent Van Gogh

The following little creations are taken from recent dreams, rough hewn and unpolished, mined directly from the unconscious. They are the raw material for future Wishing Tree tales, and they are very, very short .

Sunday 30 November 2014

The Vulture's Wings: Poem


So often I feel just on the edge of understanding something, something important, something true, something just beyond thought and mind.  Mary Oliver puts it well:


The vulture's
wings are
black death
color but
the underwings
as sunlight
flushes into
the feathers
are bright
are swamped
with light.

Tuesday 25 November 2014

On Meditating, Sort Of: Poem

Meditation, so I've heard, is best accomplished
if you entertain a certain strict posture.
Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.
So why should I think I could ever be successful?

Thursday 20 November 2014

The Canary Sings: a Moonsilver Tale


Inside a vast warehouse, where dusty shafts of sunlight filter down through grubby windows high, high up, there is a railway track.
     I'm standing on the platform. You are there, too. You are holding a canary in a gilded cage. The canary whistles, and its song bounces and multiplies off the struts across the high ceiling, and disturbs a flock of roosting doves.  The doves whirl in circles above my head, a blur of white wings and black shadows.
     'Why are we here?' I ask.

    You don't answer. You swing the cage a little, and - but no, I'm mistaken, it isn't you swinging the cage. It is a breeze, looping and charging down the tunnel towards us: a train is approaching.

Sunday 16 November 2014

On How Not to Steer


So easy to want to steer every moment, every direction in our life, to feel safe and secure in where we are headed.  Or even, for the more relaxed among us, who steer our life more generally, allowing for a few false starts and leeward winds - to fix our eyes unwaveringly on the distant goal, the aim, the moving target. 

Sunday 9 November 2014

Such Silence: Poem




As deep as I ever went into the forest
I came upon an old stone bench, very, very old,
and around it a clearing, and beyond that
trees taller and older than I had ever seen.

Saturday 1 November 2014

Forgetting the Sun

 


 
I can just about withstand the UK winter, particularly with my trusty old SAD lamp, and have done so for 19 years. But I can't withstand many bad summers, of which there have been far more than our fair share. The problem with a bad summer is that you know you still have to get through winter, untopped up with Vitamin D, pale as the moon, with lower than normal serotonin levels. And then there is no guarantee that the summer following the winter will be any better, either. And then there's another winter after that.