I'm not claiming anything like sainthood - merely a native perception..

She [me muse] feels most at home in autumn, nonetheless, she is glad of the other seasons and loves them all. Without the others she would be unable ….

My muse can take the form of a landscape, an era, a style of writing, a piece of music, and, perhaps that which I find strangest of all for a muse, a….

To me the seventies represent normality, and, of course, it is a normality that is now anachronistic..

Zen is influenced by Daoism, which is not so much a nature-religion in the animistic sense as a nature-philosophy in a cosmic sense..

This strong sense of who I am that I've always had, since I was very young, is what makes me write..

I think I'm probably too close to the seventies to be able to analyse them (it?) effectively..

Some people have described Daoism as pantheist, and although there's something in me that resists this designation, I can see that Daoism is consiste….

I feel a little as if the Buddhism is creeping back, but I mention all this simply in order to illustrate that there is, in my life, a fundamental se….

I seem to be less depressed but also less hopeful now in my thirties. My widow's peak bothers me. I think a lot about the end of the human race. And ….

Western progress (from one damned thing to another) seems to be essentially the MO of nowhere fast. But, on the other hand, the don't-set-foot-outsid….

I suppose I could say that to be interested in innocence already suggests a remove from innocence, perhaps a longing for something that is lost..

The quality of that 'who I am', is what I hope comes out in the writing..

Anyway, yes, telephones but not mobile phones, fish and chips still wrapped in actual newspaper and still with some kind of flavour, people visiting ….

There's a possible qualification I can make here about a non-pantheist god that is in some way tenable, and that is the idea of a god that has in som….

You focus on the here and now in order to escape existence forever and vanish into Nirvana. There is another religious impulse that is the opposite o….

I seemed to recall some words from an old Zen master, something like, "My Zen cuts down mountains." My rejection of Buddhism was a cutting down of mo….

I'm constantly struggling with the futility and even sinfulness, from an antinatalist point of view, of creativity. And that struggle itself seems pa….

I understand that words can mean different things to different people, and, further, that people can have different relationships with complex abstra….

Speaking of [Philip] Larkin, in his poem about the First World War he wrote something like, "Never such innocence, before or since, that turned itsel….

I associate my childhood with two things, mainly: the North Devon countryside and a sense of connection to another world..