About

These poems emerged out of darkness and pain. I didn’t sit down to write them. They arrived and asked to be written. They were a gift from beyond myself. They remind me that I have survived, that I’m still here.

In 2007 I did a long meditation retreat in the USA. I’d been meditating at that point for about 25 years. I was very interested up in Buddhism and Buddhist practice because it really seemed to me to provide a pathway out of suffering, and I was living with chronic physical pain and emotional/ psychological pain.  

I saw this long retreat as a great opportunity to get to the end of suffering.

Most of my time there was fruitful and productive, but in the final days of the retreat I could feel a growing sense of unease and then, on a particular evening, I recognised that my mind was unravelling. 

I was in a place I had never been in before.  

And despite the help and support of the he teachers at the centre I was in a waking nightmare.

“Unmoored” is a poem is about that experience of being radically out of control.