Life is hard...and amazingly wonderful, so keep an open mind

Walking a Spiral is a form of walking meditation. As such it is not a meditation I am physically capable of doing, nevertheless, it was required of me this week as part of the art as meditation course I've been taking for the past eight weeks. So what to do? Well, I used a little trick I learned from Carl Jung. It is called active imagination and I've been using it since I was a child. Of course, back then I had no idea what I was doing or where it comes from. I was simply doing what seemed to come naturally to me. And so this week I went into a moonlit forest and laid out a spiral path with smooth white pebbles that glistened in the moonlight and I walked that path, but I did so with a heavy heart and a dark question lurking around the edges. The poem below came from that 'walk' in the spiral. WALKING THE SPIRAL A spiral laid out in my mind smooth pebbles white in the new moon's light. the spiral clockwise turning  Love holds you fast Smooth pebb...

I'm an avid reader, I love books and I read every chance I get. There have been several books over the years that shaped me and changed my life, literally.  Back in 2007 one such a book was published. It was a little book called THE SHACK by William P. Young. This year as part of our practice during Lent my mom and I decided to revisit The Shack. I've seen the movie of course, but it has been 13 years since I last read the book. I wondered whether it would pack the same punch the second time around as it did the first. In 2007 I was spiritually in a very different place. I had always seen things differently, even as a child. I can't recall exactly how The Shack first came to me but looking back now it came along in a nick of time. Now, this book has been very polarizing in the Christian community. Some loved it, some hated it. I loved it! This book blew my mind in the very best way. I found that I could relate to the lead character Mack's deep distrust of God. I...

 I've learned a lot about myself in these past months and in the process I also learned a lot about my writing process. I had somewhat of an existential crisis at the end of last year when after a two-year struggle I finally produced a rough draft for my novel Selkie's Magick, the draft sucked, no false humility, no fishing for compliments, just plain unvarnished truth. Seriously it was hideous.  It was lazy and rushed (after two full years of struggling, really what have I been doing?) The next two drafts were not much better, it pains me to say it but it is true. Like Amy March in Little Women, I was forced to face the cold, hard reality that, while I may have some talent I'm unlikely to ever be great. So now what? As I saw it I had two choices. I could quit and oh that was tempting, so very, very tempting or, and this was the much less appealing option, I could go back to the manuscript and see if anything could be salvaged at all.  But first I had to have a fran...

Last night I had a nightmare. I dreamt I had cancer. It was so vivid, so real that I woke with a rapidly beating heart and a huge sense of relief when I realized it was, in fact, just a dream. The big C has been a huge fear of mine ever since I was a very young child. In my late teens, I watched my dad succumb to the dreaded disease and later still it claimed my aunt as well as the youngest of my half-sisters. Once I was ready to tackle the day I googled what dreaming of cancer might mean, I read the first explanation: A part of you is dying... Oookay then. The next explanation popped up and seemed to leap off the screen at me: Dreaming of cancer often denotes the end of one life-cycle and the beginning of another... An unwilling smile tugged at my lips as I looked at the computer screen. Of course, I thought wryly, of course... Have I mentioned that it is less than a fortnight until my 45th Birthday? That puts me firmly in the middle-age bracket. How strange when in my...

I've been building worlds in my head for as long as I can remember. As a child, it was a way to cope with life in a wheelchair. As an adult, it made sense to try and put these worlds to paper. When I began writing seriously I did it simply because I enjoyed it. I had no real expectation at the time, except maybe to share this inner-world with others who might enjoy it. Then came the expectations, my own to be sure, and little by little the joy seeped out of the craft. I looked at my stories and they seemed too simple somehow. My stories, the ones I love to write, those stories which seem to flow most naturally from me, are simple stories. Stories about a tiny hamlet and it's everyday people with everyday lives. The 'magic' in this story is natural, simple magic. The love story at the heart of this series is equally simple. I looked at it and thought of the 'market', feeling my little, simple story quite inadequate. So I tried to make it more complic...