Glorious!
What does that word — glorious — suggest to you? A beautiful scene in nature, perhaps? An art work by some renaissance master? A symphony? Probably it’s not the first word that would spring to mind at the sight of…
Category words
The Problem with Words
Asher’s relationship with words has been unusual, to say the least. For the first six years of his life, he was a solitary and almost silent child. He avoided social contact and, he tells me, spent much of his time…
Magnetic Attraction! How Asher Pulled Me In.
What follows is a true story. I thought you might like to see in detail what a remarkable (and devious!) little kid Asher was. Imagine a classroom in a primary school in the south of England, in the closing years…
Three sides of a coin
Coins, when you think about it, do have three sides. Certainly, we’re more accustomed to seeing the familiar, flat heads or tails surfaces, but there is also that narrow, curved rim that connects the two. In rare circumstances, that is where our…
Do I Really Sound Like That?
‘Voice Confrontation’ is a thing, apparently. It’s the psychological term for that cringing feeling some of us experience when we hear a recording of our own voices. I didn’t realise how badly I suffered from it until my book publisher…
More Minds Join Us
Perhaps you have had some interesting psychic connections with others. There are more of us than you might think. “As you share our story, others like you will acknowledge the wisdom and knowing they have seen in children or…
The Man with Blue Eyes who had once read a book
It was his eyes I noticed first, the clear, stunning blueness and openness of them. He was youngish, twenties or thirties, and quite alone. His complexion told me he lived a life outdoors, in nature. A traveller, perhaps. Our town…
Of Yogis, Anchorites, Shamans and their like
Wisdom in Solitude? I’ve often mused that if, like some latter-day Carlos Castaneda, I claimed to have ventured deep into little-known lands — a rainforest or desert, perhaps, or three-quarters of the way up a mountain in Bhutan — to…
The Wide Web of Communication
By now, just about everyone is familiar with what has been termed the ‘wood-wide web’: Susanne Simard’s stunning discover of the tiny threads of mycelium or mycorrhizal network that lies beneath our feet in a forest, connecting tree roots and…
The Day we made Paper Aeroplanes
It was way back in the 1980s. The National Curriculum (government imposed) was in full swing and they’d started to send out OFSTED inspectors to check that we teachers were dumbing the kids down to a suitable degree — teaching…