“I became a student of older traditions, where time had another measure. My only essential tools were now pens, paper, a park bench. Poetry. I travelled through time and space; landing in the east of five hundred years ago, a thousand. Kenko’s Essays in Idleness, Chōmei’s An Account of My Hut, Bashō’s Records of a Travel-Worn… Read More Wild Patience Diaries: Wise Guides to Slow Time (Spoken Word Version)
“I am…an old silkworm spinning his cocoon. It is not a hundredth the size of the house of my middle years. As I complained my way through life, each passing year has added to my age, and each move reduced my dwelling.” After living through fire, famine and earthquake, Kamo no Chōmei (鴨 長明, 1155–1216) made in… Read More Wild Patience Diaries: Stories of Our First & Last Rooms (After Chōmei)
“Dear soothing, healthy, restoration-hours––after three confining years of paralysis––after the long strain of the war, and its wounds, and death” Walt Whitman After each hard and slow return to the world I’ve had to make after serious illness, I turn always on my first days back up (as again now, after ten days with Covid-19… Read More Wild Patience Diaries: Wrestling Trees (After Whitman, Following Illness)
A decade after the cluster-bomb of events that shattered my early thirties, I think now that what saves us – once medics have healed our bodies, and friends or social care systems have supported us through a sudden loss – is neither what we own nor even whom we love. I think our essential survival… Read More Wild Patience Diaries: The Romance of Maintenance
in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times, when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things Rilke I call it The Slow Time of Accidents: what happens when – through loss, illness or emergency – our sense of time stretches and slows, both immediately and in the long-term. Cut… Read More Wild Patience Diaries: Wise Guides to Slow Time
On his lifelong practice of list-making, prolific author Ray Bradbury said: Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer…I tell people Make a list of ten… Read More Wild Patience Diaries: Lists of What We Love
Creative writing teacher Natalie Goldberg calls it ‘The Dead Year’: the time when – at whatever age – a person decides that they want to be a writer so bad that they are prepared to begin. To draw up some sort of regular schedule and attempt it. To a friend who embarked on what she… Read More Wild Patience Diaries: Beginner’s Mind
“A wild patience has taken me this far…” Adrienne Rich At the start of my late and strange life as an artist, I spent two summers beside England’s oldest lido determined to write a mile on scrolls of paper as long as the pool. In the aftermath of my sudden near-death a decade earlier – when I… Read More Wild Patience Diaries: An Invitation
The urge to observe and write about the outdoors has come up through every setting & circumstance of my life. Even when chronic pain and the care of small children have kept me house- and town-bound, I have still made notes on birds, weeds and wildflowers. And yet my finest times are when I can –… Read More Exercises for a Nature Writer
Being short audio recordings of place and people begun a decade after a sudden near-death. At the age of 33, just days after becoming a new mother, I began dying – fast, and without pain or warning: an arterial haemorrhage that happened at home on an afternoon so quiet I could hear my baby breathing in his… Read More One Minutes of Life
