I’ve written before about the astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson and her remarkable collection A Responsibility to Awe, written when she was terminally ill with the blood cancer that killed her at 39. Her poetry is full of hope in the midst of facing her own mortality, but there is nothing romanticised or saccharine. Rather, […]
Why writers need to sing
There are competing theories about how human language originated, from sign language that became associated with gestures. It may have developed from a combination of anatomical and brain evolution or, perhaps from song—rhythmic sounds that began to accrue meaning. The archaeologist Steven Mithen thinks that music comes before song which comes before language. Something he […]
Why writers need a sense of perspective
The human species is wildly and wonderfully imaginative. We plunge into the tiniest intricacies of our world—exploring DNA and finding the parts of a molecule. We compose music so energetic it alters our thinking and so sublime it transports us beyond ourselves. We search the stars and we go on chasing the mysteries of […]
Why writers need the intelligence of all living things
Learning from the forest I recently watched a documentary called Intelligent Trees, featuring the work of the Canadian professor of forsest ecology, Suzanne Simard, and the German radical forester, Peter Wohlleben. The intelligence of trees is extraordinary, but it is also a deeply foreign language—we have to proceed by metaphor rather than imposing anthropomorphising language […]
The art of receptivity
Over the last few blogs I’ve been considering the threefold values of inspiration, intuition and invocation. In all of these values there is a balance of the the contractive and the expansive. We go within, we get out of our own way and we allow the unconscious to make those links that no amount of […]
Writing and life as invocation
It is always enriching and empowering to make space for inspiration—to nurture our creative practices and allow for intuition as we listen to our bodies and the earth, as we work with dreams or metaphors or whatever the unconscious brings us… Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about inspiration and intution in creative […]