“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.” Kamo no Chōmei After living through fire, famine and earthquake, Kamo no Chōmei (鴨 長明,Continue reading “Wild Patience Diaries: Stories of Our First & Last Rooms (After Chōmei)”
Tag Archives: creativity
Wild Patience Diaries: The Romance of Maintenance
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 survivalContinue reading “Wild Patience Diaries: The Romance of Maintenance”
Wild Patience Diaries: Wise Guides to Slow Time
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 off or cast adrift from the routines that make our days tick past, we arrive unprepared by the tempo of modern life intoContinue reading “Wild Patience Diaries: Wise Guides to Slow Time”
Wild Patience Diaries: Lists of What We Love
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 tenContinue reading “Wild Patience Diaries: Lists of What We Love”
Wild Patience Diaries: Beginner’s Mind
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 sheContinue reading “Wild Patience Diaries: Beginner’s Mind”
Wild Patience Diaries: Creative Practice Prompts…
“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 – whenContinue reading “Wild Patience Diaries: Creative Practice Prompts…”
Wild Patience Diaries: Exercises for a Nature Writer
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 –Continue reading “Wild Patience Diaries: Exercises for a Nature Writer”
Tanya Shadrick 