Almost Composed

Meditation and curiosity

The Moon Thief in Urthona

February 28, 2017

I’ve written a poem in response to a zen koan. The Moon Thief will be published in the forthcoming spring issue of Urthona. “‘The Moon Thief ’ came out of an encounter with the koan in the poem’s epigraph: the great Zen poet Ryokan, meditating in a mountain hermitage, offers his clothes to a thief but cannot […]

categories: reflections

Concentration

February 15, 2017

Breath hisses like a burning log. The cracked black wood burns red, smouldering in a deep iron heart. Too much air, it flares and flickers out. Too little, it starves and we get cold ash. But when the grate is open well enough it breathes hot and constant. Sometimes a blister, a spark, a crack. […]

categories: poems
tags:

Failure

July 20, 2016

The ship’s design pictured is the Titanic. The cross-section is drawn at full scale and the length at quarter scale. I visited the Titanic exhibition in Belfast recently. The timing couldn’t have been better as I’ve been reading Matthew Syed’s Black Box Thinking, about how we learn from failures both catastrophic and small. The ‘unsinkable’ […]

categories: essays, reflections

Dharma Dudes: Bubble

July 11, 2016

categories: comics

Dharma Dudes: Death Waits For No Dude

July 4, 2016

categories: comics