Music, listening,writing, composing, perhaps as a secondary background whilst writing stories, painting, drawing, making sculpture. I’m at peace when I’m thinking about nothing. Music takes me to its postcard view.
Inthe background will be incense, smell, that great untapped sense we all neglect that enlivens and brings back memories. I tend to burn ‘liminal’ incense, that which conjours otherworldly auras, smells of Samhain, Hekate, Egyptian Kyphi, Morrigan or Cerridwen.
Reading- ambient music, incense and now transported to an authors vision, perhaps some gothic fiction, some tales of the Fae, travelogues and escapism. Imagining for moments I’m there, what it would be like to be the person talked of in the book. Still at near 60 years old being that child in the playground who play acts the star of last nights tv show, except it’s in my mind.
Gardening, potting about, at home with nature or walking through woods and abandoned places, being under the canopy of stars and feeling that I am absolutely nothing, and it’s liberating.
It would be contrived and predictable to mention meditation. Yes I sit there, with the best will in the world, when it should be no will. Focused, when I should focus on nothing, and as every fibre of nerve that is reaching outward for sensory awareness stills, and as every sound becomes distant as my hearing reaches outwards until only the feint hum of the universe is heard, I feel my body energise, numb, to shut down so it doesn’t react to images arising. A wave of vibrations like the echo of a trumpet roars through my head, sometimes I react and come back to the real world, the waking. Sometimes I become …it. That vibration, and it is like laughter in the stillness, it is like tears of recognition, it is being home.
there I am in the garden, but also -am the garden, there I am the music, there I am the smell, and there I am not me. One sensation, that arises, that always happens and always brings me back, is laughter.
So back I am, in the room, with incence, music and creativity. And I am at peace, and I am alone, and I am still laughing.
header illustration;- Titian’s Pastoral Concert (c. 1509–1510)
The Western Gate 
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