don't build your house...

...on shifting sand



Photo is the author's own

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

fall back

Image
Autumn seems to have arrived very suddenly, seemingly all at once in the last few days. The wind and the heavy rains are dragging leaves off the trees and heaping them into soggy piles on the pathways, making a trip to the local shops a slippery and treacherous affair. And a lot of fungi, enjoying the damp and still relatively warm air, are sprouting in the verges around tree stumps, and giving off the earthy scent of decay. Indoors, I'm dusting off fat church candles, to help light the dark corners of the room at night, and shaking out the thick sofa throws I'll use for extra warmth and to draft-proof myself on the sofa in the evenings. I've already made my first pot of minestrone soup of the season, and will be swapping out my summer salads for bowls of macaroni cheese, and veg chilli in the coming days.  At the end of the week, at 2am on Sunday, the clocks will go back one hour, and the nights will draw in alarmingly quickly, and daylight will be all but done by 5.30pm. ...
Read more

woolf and sackville-west

Image
Last week, in the company of dear friends, I was lucky enough to visit two beautiful English gardens, blooming in the June sunshine. Luckier still these gardens were attached to two different, very slightly 'stately', homes, once owned by two wonderful women writers. The first was Monk's House, in Sussex. A 17th century retreat, once owned by Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard. The few rooms in the house that we were allowed to walk through were gloomy, and atmospheric, and fascinating. But the room of real interest was Virginia's writing room. It was in a large summer house, set apart from the main house, further down the garden, amongst fruit trees and cottage garden borders. Unfortunately visitors weren't allowed to enter the room, but could gaze into it through large windows set in three sides of the building. The room was full of items that had once belonged to Virginia, and were arranged around the room, and on the desk, as if the room was still in use and...
Read more

julia cameron

I wrote a post recently (see 'ponder and mull' below) extolling the virtues of staring into space, daydreaming. I'm satisfied to (re)discover that someone I have a lot of time for, Julia Cameron, says we shouldn't feel bad about doing this and we should consider it a way of refilling the well of creativity. That is a great way to think of it, and I like this concept a lot. I would always listen to Julia's advice since I read her book The Artist's Way years ago. She really helped to focus my mind at a time when I wasn't so able to do so myself. I still write my 'morning pages' to help clear debris out of my mind and keep on the right track, I don't write them every day but maybe a couple of times a week. I'd really recommend checking out her books if you are stuck, have writer's block and can't move forward.
Read more