Becalmed.  Deeply uncomfortable, since I expected forward movement.   There’s nowhere to go but down, into the fathoms of unexplored shadowlands beneath my hull.  Heat stroke like a sluggishness drug, an IV drip drip to erode the well-focused plan until I only vaguely remember what, why, how… Like road pizza I’m pissed off by this. I […]

Sideways works best. I’ve been away from this studio for a month – longest time in three years – to work at sorting out old family issues that had reached a boiling point, then (surprise) to feed and look after a teenage cat mama and her three kittens who appeared in my house half-way through June.  Quite a […]

Veritas. It’s dark down there – difficult to see, to dig and keep digging.  At the bottom of it, when you get there, you find an understanding that changes the shape of your world.     I’ve just watched a film about a young prosecutor with great natural integrity who is working in Frankfurt just […]

…day three relentless and me shrinking under the onslaught, smaller smaller until I smell like nothing at all not even fear you could walk through me and not even know it now, though I would feel it.  Years ago I had a voice, strong in the chorus of strong but someone I trusted browbeat the spectrum out […]

bound·a·ry Origin early 17th century: variant of dialect bounder, from bound2 + -er1, perhaps on the pattern of limitary. Interesting word. from “bound” 1. a territorial limit; a boundary. “the ancient bounds of the forest” a limitation or restriction on feeling or action. “it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the issue could […]

I can smell the gardenia from here.  The late evening breeze that carries its fragrance brings Joni Mitchell and Billie Holiday too and we sit together on my back deck around a candle, watching the air move.  They’re both smoking and for the first time since I quit seven years ago I’m tempted to light […]

I’m in my socks on a quiet street in the old section of town, pulling goutweed out of the garden.  It’s early on an idyllic spring morning, full of bees and growth, flowers and a gentle cool breeze.  A starling, harsh and insistent, comments on my weeding.  I explain that in the ecosystem of my tiny […]

A colour that invites full, willing surrender. Inside indigo, an old old resonance, subtle and rare.  I imagine a pool in the middle of a forest, the hum of a deep bell-tone, the sense of things expanding even as you go inward.  It feels transcendent, mystical. Compelling – a deep way through the inside of me.  A passageway colour. I can immerse […]

I hold Red in my mind and thoughts rise like bubbles. They’re not what I expect. This decision is rooted in fear. I’m stuck in Repeat. I’m bored. Confined.  categorized, manipulated, abused, constricted, driven, exhausted, worried, overstressed, coping. Aren’t we all to some extent.  And isn’t this an essential part of the story. Then another thought rises (after […]

Blue is internal. It’s the other side of sunlight, where solitude lives. Demons also live there.  If you don’t make friends with the demons and fully acknowledge their right to live in the shadows, they grow malevolent.  Eventually, inevitably the malevolence comes to find you in the dark, biting. This is an excellent method for self-administered shock therapy, […]

Aggression is the other side of green. As a 14-year-old downhill racer I was trained to attack the hill, to ski not just on top of it, but in it. At the same age I was also developing my approach to cello. My first teacher – a passionate violinist who adored Kreisler, who played always from inside the music […]

1200 kilometres and one bottle of all-night-long scotch later, a 10-man reggae band called The Human Rights comes to my house and after partying euphoric until almost daylight, drapes its multi-limbs over every available surface and falls asleep, still humming. Sometimes you just need a good shock to the system.  This makes it possible to change, […]