don't confuse the narrator

of mice and birds

It’s been a long time since I posted an update here. In fact the last post was last autumn, and now we’re clearly well beyond the Spring equinox and heading on towards summer, I suppose.

The lack of updates is partly because I simply haven’t had any new ideas and partly because my mind has been in a different space, with work and family issues that really don’t need to be aired in public. After all, that was never my intention when I started this blog: it was intended to be disconnected from my own life and activities, an anonymous space where I could post opinions and poetry and where the “I” of the narrator didn’t automatically get superimposed on the “I” of the writer or vice versa. Continue reading “of mice and birds”

slowly towards winter

Whether you judge by astronomical or meteorological criteria, for a few more days at least, it is still autumn. For me, this autumn seems to have been going on for a long time.

I remember snapping this picture, and thinking how well it summed up the ideas of slowing down and taking things gently that are associated with the season.
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wool gathering

When I lived in Madrid, I had a friend who collected building façades.

These weren’t just the well known landmarks like the bright red bricks and decorative paintings of the Plaza Mayor, the imposing white, wedding-cake like tiers of the Palacio de Comunicaciones or the complex scrollwork of the Palacio Longoria (which was ruined, anyway, in those days, by ugly air-conditioning units.) No. These were the kind of façade you can find on any street – if you’re paying attention.
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across the world

As anyone who sees this on a desk top and looks beyond the posts to the surrounding information will have realised, I do a lot of writerly things other than this blog. There’s the Modern Pagan Prayers project, other books and author mentoring, as well as online courses and occasional workshops.

Apart from the workshops and book mentoring, which actually need me to show up in person, most of the activities can just tick over without any input, so it’s all fairly relaxed: I don’t go out of my way to market the books and courses – they just sit somewhere online and get found (or not). So, occasionally, I receive a small quantity of “passive income”.
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bars, boards & blocks

It sees to be a long time since I wrote something new. In early 2020, when the pandemic first started, I wrote a number of new poems, inspired by new lockdown habits and experiences. Then my friend Lucía asked for my assistance with prayer writing and the Modern Pagan Prayers project was started.

There are three books in the series, now – a total of nearly 100 prayers, most of them completely new, with just a handful repurposed from poems I had written previously. There were also a handful of pieces that were rejected as they were too much like poetry and too little like prayer. An average of around two new pieces a week is definitely not something to be ashamed of.
Continue reading “bars, boards & blocks”