existing's tricky:but to live's a gift
Note: this post was first published on the Portfolio page of my website on July 25th. And now, stop. I have been working on this piece for months now, trying and failing to find a way in. I have a lot of thoughts, but I don’t know how to order them, I don’t know where…
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I associate the smell of woodfire with autumn giving way to winter, dark wet cobbled streets, treacherously slippy fallen leaves, damp socks, dim bike lights, painful chapped hands. This is the season of course that heralds Christmas, the turn of the year, and thus it felt so natural to me that it took a few seconds before it jarred against the reality of warm summer air and blue skies. I could smell wood-smoke on Christmas day
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The first time I remember being introduced to meditation was by a friend of mine during a summer working in Germany. I was struggling with a number of things, I asked her to show me how it worked. And so we sat crosslegged on the floor in our shared bedroom as she attempted to guide…
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On the eve of my three year anniversary in New Zealand, I wanted to pause for a moment to try write the words that I would have found comforting back in 2017, before I left.
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For the last week at work I have been providing cover for a service that operates largely outside the realm of my knowledge and experience. I don’t say that with any false modesty.
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Sometimes I think my whole adult life has been a struggle to subdue the aftershock of my own first love, to subjugate the feelings it engendered, to identify and begin to heal the all-encompassing damage it wrought.
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April 29th would have been my Grandfather’s 92nd birthday. He died in October, but it is only now, slowly, that my mind is beginning to accept that he is gone. I thought about him last night when I admitted a desperately unwell 92 year-old gentleman with pneumonia. I thought about him last week when I…
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I remember the first time I went to Berlin. It was in the age of £0.01 Ryanair Flights. You had to be opportunistic to catch them, skipping classes mid-term, just before my first dissertation deadline. I can’t remember where we stayed, too many trips back to that city have layered it with a million overlapping…
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Mad to Live 