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

Perseus’ Flight

August 22, 2015

Gustave Moreau – Perseus and Andromeda. 1870. Perseus’ Flight Medusa’s murdered head drips blood into the sea. Curls twitch. Her filthy mane, dead but possessed by hate, disgorges poison through my grip. Even the white waves thundering below, Neptune’s loose cavalry, no longer gallop beneath winged shoes. They’re petrified by curdled Gorgon’s blood, gold calderas where […]

categories: poems

The Tide Clock proof has arrived

May 19, 2015

The new poetry pamphlet I’ve been working on with Hugh Greasley and Joe Franklin has arrived in proof form. There are a couple of minor errors to be fixed: I didn’t leave enough room between the bleed and the page margin on the cover, for one thing. These should now be resolved and I’ve put […]

categories: poems

Restoration work

May 4, 2015

A paragraph from David Brazier in Tricycle caught my eye: “And what does that honest looking come up with? What trophies does it glean from the seabed and haul to the surface? Ancient amphoras. The broken pots of our earlier strivings. Shards of self-seeking in myriad forms, now strewn across the bottom of our ocean. Fragments […]

categories: music

Really looking

December 14, 2014

I attended a mindfulness meditation retreat a couple of weeks ago. As I lay on my back forming an intention not to prod the meditator below me with my foot again, some writing on the rafters caught my eye: A work of art can only be comprehended by looking at it and no description is a substitute for this. […]

categories: aphorisms, reflections