The Red Admiral butterfly flitting on to my hand, and settling a moment to dust his wings. Feeling touched by magic…. The sound of the Wild Boar cracking fallen walnuts and snorting, close to the house… The necklace of Lapis Lazuli I was given by my boyfriend. It’s silver veins sparkling like sunlight on water. Feeling loved…
Read MoreWild in the City
in travel, conversations
I live in rural Southern France, on a mountain. Yesterday I got on a train going to Paris, heading into a throng of 2 million people.
My work is based around the natural environment. It’s about exploring the ‘wilds’ out there, in order to understand how to bring that quality into our words, to find freedom in writing. I’m interested in those parts of ourselves- the spontaneous, intuitive, instinctual- that we’re afraid of. Our fear is such, that instead of acknowledging these aspects within ourselves, we project them outwards, saying they’re out there ‘in the wilds’ , in the ‘wild animals’.
Read MoreWriting Resolutions
What if, when I wrote, I was to infuse the sheet of paper with the star freckled galaxy? What if I poured the seas into my pen? And made every mark on the page, the scratch of a lion’s claw? What if, in the capital letter, was the howling of wolves? In the underline the mole tunnelling? In the flow of words the swimming of dolphins? In the comma the river whirling round rocks? In the speech marks the tweeting of birds? In the full stop the grunt of a boar?
Read MoreHunting for Mushrooms
in conversations, nature
We head into the dark centre of the forest, where even the intense sunlight of Southern France can only sometimes penetrate, freckling the ground. The tall, skinny pines wave wildly in the wind. Underfoot is a spongy layer of pines cones, decaying leaves and the bristling shells of last year’s chestnuts. Everything is mud brown, except the swathes of green ferns that fill the clean mountain air with a smell like freshly cut grass.
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