Wilbur was entirely autumnal last weekend. Rain having passed through, there was a serene clarity to the low sunlight, and a sense – which came to me as I walked down the road on Saturday morning just as the sun was coming up – of moving gently through the stillness of nature. It was a […]
Rain arrived as forecast on Wednesday, and it felt like a deliverance. The air was markedly different, adding an extra depth to the sense of freshness that rain can bring. I was reminded of this time of year at Tassajara, sitting in the zendo, and hearing the first rain of the winter falling, first as […]
I am writing this on the first evening after the clocks go back. In England we talk about the end of ‘Summer Time’; happily in San Francisco, summer’s lease has been extended even into the first days of November. We may not have had a repeat of last October’s late heatwave, but there has been […]
Despite just landing back in my regular life in San Francisco, I was looking forward to getting away to Wilbur for a weekend. For the first time in several visits, I did not having anything scheduled on Friday morning, and having already picked up the car from my generous benefactors, I was free to leave […]
I am now at the stage of my trip where I summon up the energy to pore through the sixteen hundred or so photographs that I took, to see which of them are worth keeping, and then, laboriously, begin the editing process; I also try to pick up the various roles I inhabit in my […]
In Belfast, I started to have the sense of my trip coming to its close, though I still had some adventures ahead of me in the final week. On Friday we did go and sit in the zendo, and with a small number of people in attendance, Djinn invited me to be the doshi, so […]
When my father moved to Cornwall, during the years I lived in London more than two decades ago, most of my trips down to see him involved bringing my bike, and grovelling up and coasting down the endlessly folding land around his house: the green hills, narrow lanes and tall hedgerows tucked below the higher, […]
