Almost Composed

Meditation and curiosity

The importance of imagination

September 8, 2015

The world seems apt to give rise to stories and images. Such imaginings may be the product of our minds, but our minds are nonetheless part of the world and shaped by it. Imagination is a dialogue with the world, and a feature of it. To conceive of reality only in terms of the barest […]

categories: essays, reflections

Takagi Masakatsu, Akira Kosemura and the beauty

April 28, 2015

I love Takagi Masakatsu’s music. I don’t know much about him but, as far as I can tell, he travelled the world asking people to sing or play one melody, ‘The Light Song’. Hopeful piano riffs mix with childrens’ choirs, found sounds and scratchy processes. If I could sum up what I know of his […]

categories: essays, music, reflections

Moving house, the not-so-minimalist way

April 23, 2015

Moving house is a time for deciding what to keep and what to throw away. A chance to be minimalist, if only I had the cojones. We’ve decamped from Cornwall and marched on Devon. Now we are faced with many Things To Do, not least of which is deciding which of my faded treasures and […]

categories: essays, music, reflections

Sea music: foreword to a poetry pamphlet

April 2, 2015

I’m hoping to send our new poetry pamphlet to the printers this weekend. It’s the second collaboration between myself and poets Joe Franklin and Hugh Greasley. To whet your appetite, here’s a draft of the foreword: Sea music Ted Hughes once said that if the reason we travelled to the coast during our holidays was to relax, […]

categories: essays, poems, reflections

Of the combustible and useless varieties of trees

March 3, 2015

Reading Fire Season, Philip Connors’ account of his experiences watching for forest fires in the Gila mountain range, I was struck by the following passage: “My own insights are fragmentary, fleeting. I write something in my notebook and forget it an hour later. I do not so much seek anything as allow the world to come to […]

categories: essays, philosophy, reflections