Posts on Creativity
"Firstly to cook for the Baba Yaga, (the forest witch) one lays a fire- a woman must be willing to burn hot, burn with passion, burn with words, with ideas, with desire for whatever it is she truly loves. It is actually this passion that causes the cooking, and a woman's original ideas of substance are what is cooked. To cook for the Yaga, one must arrange that one's creative life has a consistent fire under it."
From Women who run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Breathe in experience
“Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.” Muriel Rukeyser I’m delighted to be a Finalist in the 2016 Littlewoods Irish Blog Awards, of course I am. If you can hear a “but” coming that’s because I sometimes feel a little like a square peg in a round hole in the blogging world. Blogging for me […]
The mad excitement of rural living
How did rural living get to be so exciting! When I started to blog in 2011 I didn’t have a plan or any idea where I might be going. In my work life I had chosen to follow an activist path rather than an artistic one. Gradually over the those years, I began returning to […]
Creativity, imagination and happiness.
It was 2010, I was a bit tired and depressed about the world. The every day news seemed to reduce everything to the fact that human nature was ugly and hateful. Politics was hopeless too, having worked for social progress all my life, change seemed to happen at a snail’s pace. Suicide was on […]
Listen to your own soul
It’s hard to stay on track with what’s authentic and enriching for the soul. At times everything gets out of whack. Since our economic crash we have lived with the challenges of stagnation and lack of opportunity. We dealt with it all as best we could. But now? Enough already. Time for new dawns […]
The Sea Horse
“As a conscious act, we document our inner and outer selves, meticulously curating the facets of our existence, both the painful and the triumphant, that we wish to leave behind in the world. And from these archives we hope that others can learn – to look inside themselves, to reconsider their stereotypes of those […]
Foxgloves in June
It’s been a busy time. The sun came out and that drew blossoms, bees and foxgloves into it’s light. Then, against all the odds, it came out the next day too, and the day after that. And the sun is still shining as I write this. It is unusually fabulous weather in Ireland. […]
In the bluebells
If you bear with me and my one minute video, you will share a precarious event, somewhere along the lane to Carrickavantry Lake. What you won’t see is that I have a jagged briar wrapped around one leg which left tooth marks all over my calves, and that I am trying not to breathe in case […]
Another new beginning
The maple tree, a present from my Dad, has always struggled with the prevailing south westerlies. Trees in Ireland are bent over towards the east, from gales blowing up from the Atlantic. This elegant maple has always been out of place in our wild and lazy couple of acres, home of beech, willow and pine trees. […]
Calm and creative
“There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.” ― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables On Thursday 12 May I will be opening an exhibition for photographer Kate Quinn in Ardkeen Hospital as part of […]
