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 .

Saturday 21 February 2015

The Art of Wabi-sabi

 
'The question is not what you look at, but what you see.'  Henry David Thoreau

So, what is wabi-sabi?

'Broadly, wabi-sabi is everything that today’s sleek, mass-produced, technology-saturated culture isn’t. It’s flea markets, not shopping malls; aged wood, not swank floor coverings; one single morning glory, not a dozen red roses. Wabi-sabi understands the tender, raw beauty of a gray December landscape and the aching elegance of an abandoned building or shed. It celebrates cracks and crevices and rot and all the other marks that time and weather and use leave behind. To discover wabi-sabi is to see the singular beauty in something that may first look decrepit and ugly.

Saturday 14 February 2015

Seeing Eye to Eye

    
When I was in my late teens, my mother informed me that she had gone to see a fortune teller, a man who lay on a bed amidst plumes of cigarette smoke and didn't look at her once.  He told her that she had two children; that her son would have two boys and that her daughter would travel. 
     Now, I have never held much store by foretellers of the future, but I have thought of this a few times over the years, especially given that I constantly dreamed of travelling as a child, and yearned to know what was beyond the furthest hills I could see from the valley where I lived.  And then my brother had two boys.....
 
'To travel is to dispel the mists of fable and clear the mind of prejudice, and facilitate perfectness of seeing eye to eye.'   Thomas Cook, from the 19th century.

Sunday 8 February 2015

On the Beauty of Brokenness

 



"In Japan there is a kind of reverence for the art of mending. In the context of the tea ceremony there is no such thing as failure or success in the way we are accustomed to using those words. A broken bowl would be valued precisely because of the exquisite nature of how it was repaired, a distinctly Japanese tradition of kintsugi, meaning to "to patch with gold". Often, we try to repair broken things in such a way as to conceal the repair and make it "good as new."