'Blinded by the Light' review

“Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.”

Extract from Everyone Sang by Siegfried Sassoon

I must confess to feeling a tiny bit anxious whenever I see a musical advertised at the cinema, and not for the reasons you might imagine. While the uncanny appearance of Radius patron, Dame Judi Dench, in a computerised fur suit for the trailer of the forthcoming Cats movie is a sight that is undeniably difficult to put out of anyone’s mind, for me there are often much deeper disturbances at work.

A Year of Haikus : Work

A haiku is a Japanese poem that aims to capture a surprising or touching moment in words, often connected with nature or the changing seasons. They’re usually 3 lines long, with a strict syllable count for each line, so that composing them is often a bit like solving a crossword puzzle.

I've been keeping a daily haiku diary for almost 5 years that gives me a kind of alternative snapshot for the day, and, over time, the year. Many of them are work related, covering moments of poignancy, risk and humour. This is a selection of haikus from a random year before the lockdown began.

Asklepion Art Galleries

I've created an online art gallery to showcase several decades of my transpersonal artwork, visual depictions of spiritual emergency experience and holotropic breathwork mandalas. 

It's called the Asklepion, named after the temple that the ancient Greeks visited when they wanted to have dreams of healing.

Visit the Asklepion art galleries experience here.

"A Monster Calls" Review

There's a scene midway through J A Bayona's new film A Monster Calls where a boy and his mum are curled up on the sofa watching a scratchy print of King Kong (1933) on his granddad's rediscovered 35mm projector. The mother falls asleep before the end and the little boy watches wide-eyed as the mighty Kong, swatting bi-planes on the Empire State Building and harassed to the point of exhaustion by the modern world, lets go and falls to his death. 

'This is your imaginative inheritance', the filmmaker seems to say to him, 'and you're going to have to cope with it on your own, because the adults in your life are not awake to it'.