Almost Composed

Meditation and curiosity

How we frame meditation retreats has an effect on our experience

November 4, 2022

I wonder if there’s a placebo effect on meditation retreats that helps the mind gather and calm. Equally, if you approach a silent retreat thinking, “Argh, I can’t talk or have fun for days” maybe you’ll have a bumpier start. To be clear, I think the placebo effect is something real that we should take […]

categories: essays, journeys, reflections

Dartmoor Glamping in February

February 12, 2017

Full use was made of the firelighters. Not so much the rest of it. Matthieu Ricard’s book would have given me much happiness in the form of blessed heat but it didn’t come to that. The burner was one of those US Boxwood stoves. They look quite iconic and can fit a lot of wood inside. […]

categories: journeys, reflections

The Chalk Path – poetry PDF

July 24, 2016

My latest poetry pamphlet is now available as a free PDF. In The Chalk Path, Joe, Hugh, and myself turn our attention landward from the coast. The poems are drawn from walks over chalk downs, train rides beside white horses etched into hillsides and, in contrast, the bright red sandstone of my Mercian homelands. Read it online […]

categories: journeys, poems

The Hero’s Inner Journey

November 14, 2015

This morning I belatedly saw a connection between two ideas I’m interested in: the hero’s journey and attachment theory. The hero’s journey is a fundamental narrative that’s claimed to be at the root of all stories. It was proposed by the mythologist Joseph Campbell in books such as The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The theory goes that […]

categories: essays, journeys, reflections

Of storms and night walking

September 20, 2015

There was a great piece in Tricycle recently, A Gleeful Foreboding, excerpted from Clark Strand’s book Waking Up To the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age. Strand describes what happened when his town near the Catskill mountains was bumped off the grid by a hurricane. “That the larger storms sometimes turn deadly does little to chasten […]

categories: essays, journeys, reflections