The beauty of mere being There is the world you can touch, and the world that touches you. A glass of water stands beside the bed. Morning light passes through it and lays a trembling shape across the wall. Outside, a diesel engine turns over. Someone is already late. You
Why the existence of anything is stranger than God Yesterday, walking the Cliffs of Moher, I watched the Atlantic hurl itself against the cliff face. Waves rose with enormous volume and ferocity, travelling across open water before exploding against a wall of stone. Light moved across the surface. Wind howled
Waiting Without Promise We want transformation to be elegant. We want healing to reveal itself in a clean sequence, each wound becoming wisdom, each ending opening obediently onto a new beginning. But there is often a void between death and rebirth. A long, horrible interval in which one life has
When diagnosis becomes identity The modern world has too much psychology and not enough psyche. Psyche is the ancient Greek word for soul, carrying within it the sense of breath and life. The word psychology still contains it, yet the soul has almost entirely disappeared from the practice. What remains
On borrowed wisdom and the deadness of knowing He sits lofty on an empty cloud, whittling sticks, spouting others’ utterances, working his afflictions through borrowed shafts of wood and wisdom. His meagre hands, not without art, momentarily, sated. So he reaches endlessly for more sticks, more words to whittle down
On divine goodness and the suffering of the innocent. God’s will is more life. And we are all fodder for its new beginnings. Yes we are all in its web. Threaded through the hunger of something vaster than mercy or malice. The moth did not sin. or the spider
The garden as a meeting place of nature, culture and soul. The garden is a portal to the soul. The nexus point of nature and culture. The birthplace of civilisation. A gateway drug to wildness. A microcosm of all of creation. The birthplace of human consciousness. It is the place
On nature, reverence and being human Cultivating a connection with nature is part of cultivating a connection with ourselves. It seems an obvious thing to say, yet we have arranged so much of our lives as though the two could be separated. We speak of nature as somewhere we might
On the certainty of being alive One thing is certain... We are here. And it will break your heart. We will die. And someone you love will go before you. A mother. A brother. A child. It won’t seem fair. It isn’t. So don’t turn away. Meet
Caravaggio, empire and the capture of a living truth In Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, Judas has already closed the distance. His arm locks around Jesus, his brow furrowed, his face pressing towards the kiss. Jesus is pained but resigned, his hands folded low as though the decision not
On allowing the mystery be a mystery I went to a talk many, many years ago, and one of the speakers was Michael Harding, the Irish writer and former priest. He was speaking to a room full of men, mostly young men in their twenties and thirties. And Michael, being
A close encounter of the absurd kind Yellow early light throws shapes across the bed, and I, sitting up, beleaguered by my life, try to meditate. Knees bent beneath the quilt, forearms resting on my knees, one parched eye reaches out into the garden to feel the light and then