This is something I wrote for myself some time ago, but I’m offering it up for anyone who is enmeshed in what is currently happening in the Middle East. In order to cope with the discomfort of listening to someone talk about something that creates stress in you, you need three things. Courage to keep …
Category Archives: lived experience
Why music saved my sanity
Words are such untrustworthy things. They cling to the edge of the impulse-to-live as it dies. Scavengers. Every moment of consciousness is a reflection of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. So often the translation is I think, therefore I am. But thinking is so far removed from I, much better to translate it as I am …
Interstices
I find myself in the gaps between words. In the interstices, where awareness flows unfettered by meaning and paints a world that does not fit neatly into the dictionary. I cannot shoehorn all of myself into ways of being that end in a full stop. My sense of self stretches beyond this physical body and …
“I lost a world the other day…”
I remember… I remember… I remember an inn Miranda and a highwayman who came knocking at its door, under a new moon shining wi’ the twinkle, twinkle little stars that looked down on a land where the Jumblies sold sealing wax and cabbages and kings asked queens, who asked the little serving maid, not to …
Memories are made of this
When I look back to my childhood, it is in indistinct shades of grey, punctuated by regular splashes of colour. The colour is foreign in every sense, it bubbles with life and laughter, and its colours are pine green, lapis lazuli and Umbrian red. It rises around me in mountainsides and lakes, gilded churches and …
These are the things …
These are the things that have proved more valuable than my friendship – a washing machine and a television. These are the things that are more important than my wellbeing – what other nameless faces will say These are the things that are more valuable than the lives of countless men, women and children in …
Salatheel 