Liquid electric melting Through the slow burn Honey warm and soft Exploding on the tongue No fear In the seamless division Of body and breath Out and in And out again For the final time Surging through the chest White hot heart melding With the stained earth As the souls seed is sown Into the [...]

Thinking about mysticism and the experience of transformation. Often people strive for the big experience to transform them and by doing so they miss out on the ordinary moments infused with mystery. I have always believed that out-of-the-ordinary experiences come out of the ordinary – the simple mundane things of life looked at from a [...]

Every now and then I have to get my fix of inspirational stuff and one such bit of stuff is this scene from Dead Poets Society when Mr Keating gets Tod to sound his barbaric YAWP! Taken from Walt Whitman’s Song Of Myself the barbaric YAWP is the cry we each carry within us that [...]

I make it a habit of reading poetry everyday – even if only a few lines. Poetry is the distillation of language into a heady liqueur which will intoxicate us with thoughts and feelings previously unknown to us because hidden in the recesses of our inadequate vocabulary. Today, St John of The Cross (continuing yesterdays [...]

From the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh; God cannot catch us Unless we stay in the unconscious room Of our hearts an extract from his poem Having Confessed – it’s a beautiful image of the need for us to remain in the secret place of our heart where God must be allowed to surprise us.

From the poetry of the wonderful Rilke; I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song? Rainer Maria Rilke Whenever I read him I am at a loss for words of my own . [...]

The world is framed In the window of the train I am traveling in Changing constantly A flick book of the landscape I am living in Gently the carriage Rocks me like a baby And very soon I sleep Dreaming of all the places I have been and the place I am returning to Returning [...]

I love the old decaying things The rusted spade where the robin sings The tumbled shed with iron roof The tireless car of someones youth I long for open rolling miles Of rustic earth with hedge and style Beaches blotched with weathered stones And branches strewn like broken bones

Anne Sexton was a painfully honest poet on a trajectory of self destruction. She was one of those creative people who was simply unable to contain her creativity. I first discovered her after hearing a song by Peter Gabriel called Mercy Street on his album So – a haunting track inspired by a haunted woman. [...]

Reading a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye called So Much Happiness from a book by Roger Housden called Ten Poems To Set You Free (highly recommended) it reminds me of a quote by Fyodor Dostoevsky; Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as [...]