My love of books drew me to the practice of writing; and poetry was and still is my primary craft. My first book of poetry was published by Hard Echo Press when I was 17. It was called A Ceiling for a Sky and on the cover were the doodles that I had scribbled in my notebook at the time. It is only now when I reflect back that those doodles and drawings have been part of my expression from the beginning.
My prose is poetic, I prefer that form of writing. I am influenced by Virginia Woolf with her sense of rhythm as the essential structure of her form. My interest in the esoteric arose through the way I experience the world, which led me to healing and teaching. From this rose the desire to articulate a language of understanding the world through the eyes of a mystic. That is the foundation of the book Into the World.
In the culture of my family we began piano lessons and received our first watch on our 9th birthdays. It was so new and adult to translate time into words. Time, of course, had no meaning as one day flowed into another, and was measured by the sun and what we were allowed to eat.
Read MoreIn the dream I am standing in front of the kiosk trying to buy my train ticket. The machine is becoming uncooperative.
Read MoreI am lying in the tent – hiding from the midges that are hanging in dark clouds – on the Isle of Arran. I am listening to the water and a bird giving a soft whistle call as if it's having a conversation about the ordinary events of the day. I am alone.
Read MoreWhen I am hiking in the European wild areas and I am lying there in my sleeping bag, this time in a small tent, I start thinking about all the wild animals out there roaming around. It’s not a comforting thought.
Read MoreThe journey started at the Berlin Train station. I was travelling with my family; my son, daughter-in-law and grandchild. Rowan was looking for The Guardian to read; as it wasn’t there, he bought a copy of the New York Times. On the front cover was an article on the separation of children from families on the US-Mexican border.
Read More"You can’t garden with such will," I said as I entered the surround of the dream.
In the dream, the helpful people had bulldozed a pathway down to the garden. They stood there dumbfounded, as if to express, How could you not like our help? The path did not even follow the contours of the hill, it just went straight down. And still, they seemed shocked at my distress. How could I not appreciate their straight, steep, bulldozed path?
I once owned Brian Eno's record Ambient 1: Music For Airports. I lived in a 28ft tipi with Mike in the early 80s and that particular album was perfect to play whilst redoing the tipi lining - one of those slow meditative processes. Poetry and music were the most important things in our life, so we managed to stretch an electrical cord into the tipi just to play the record player.
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BUY: Into the World by Leila Lees
Into the World arose from teaching a series of workshops that are working with the Lasavia Healing Essences as a foundation of learning. As insights and understandings came through I would write and receive and sometimes record myself working around subjects like power, belief patterns, the mind and how we learn.
Piripai is natural history as prose poetry. It is a story of place, time and a subtle coming of age on the sand dunes between the river and the sea. The book is structured around twenty-six birds that inhabited Piripai, and ordered according to the time of year, beginning in spring and ending in winter. It is suffused with observation and memory, conveyed in a stripped back style that both evokes and abstracts.
