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 …
Category Archives: lived experience
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 …
Words, the conduit of life
I was first awakened to language at the end of a game of Scrabble that I had gatecrashed. The actor, whose name now escapes me, but whose beautiful face, rests in partial lines in my memory, quoted a line from Hamlet, “and dawn her russet mantle spread”. I was 19, at drama school doing stage …
Listening to Jackson Brown 2015
The past is alive with music and music is alive with the past. The taste of a whole way of living: the smell, the touch, the greasy feel of the seventies. Sliding through the cloying, rich smell of resin, hanging like incense in a room filled with reclining bodies and pots of tea. Speakers the …
The silence of reality
The core of me is silence. A profound stillness that is thick and filling, which rises up to my mouth and spills out in feelings and words. If I sink into it, I lose the edges of myself and release outwards, gently held in an infinite womb of potential. That silence is reality, it moves …
The shape of life
We are a being seeking shape. The energy of the world – or the shape created by all our interacting energies, can force shape on us by defining the space in which we can exist. If we are passive, we will be conforming in nature, shaped by outside forces. But if the shape allowed, differs …
Salatheel 