We are entering the season of Advent, a time of longing and anticipation; a time of looking back to what haunts us; a time to redefine and face the present moment. Advent, then, is a season for writers prepared to witness to what has gone before, mark out the territory…

Part 2: Enough To live from a sense of abundance rather than lack, is to be rich. The discernment to know what is unnecessary in life, what is merely superfluous, what is more than enough, is crucial to claiming the time and space to create. As Wendell Berry puts it: Wisdom, it seems…

Part 1: between the superfluous and the indispensable You can be anyone, but you can’t be everything. You can make choices, but you can’t do it all. ‘Everything’ is one of the most insidious myths of our time. Doing it all and having it all dangled before us at every turn. Adverts are rife on every social media…

In The-World Ending Fire, essayist and poet, Wendell Berry raises a rallying cry against compromising with myths that are destroying the earth. We are destroying our … land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction…

We are kith with all life. Our connections are to all — everywhere and always what defines life is relationship. Mindfulness may slow us down, make us more aware, but it is our bodifulness that often goes unsung and under-nurtured. To relate, fully and with attention, demands all our senses. Attending to the networks of life

To see beyond the self, to see the journeys others are making, without judgement, requires what Iris Murdoch, in The Sovereignty of Good, calls ‘unselfing’. The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the…

Part 2: taking risks when the world is unravelling Being an artist or writer is emotionally, spiritually and intellectually demanding. If we are working with a sense of vision and integrity it is all the more so. But what when we are working not only without automatic fame and approval, but in difficult and extraordinary times? The difficulty might…

Part 1: creating, not catering Creative life is a privilege. Recently, I read a manifesto for the creative life that disgusted me. It oozed advantage and entitlement. Life is simple? Not for those whose homes have burnt in bush fires due to ecological degradation. Not for single parents working two or three minimum wage jobs…

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom…