Dreaming Awake is where I share my travels between worlds over on the publishing hub Substack. Each monthly dispatch swims between the arts, nature, culture, literature, spirituality & Jungian depth psychology. You’ll also find depth writing prompts to facilitate creativity and support self discovery. You can do the prompts on your own or with a friend. Or you can join monthly pods to do the prompts in a dedicated online space.
See my latest dispatches below:
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In the future we'll all be shamans
It’s not possible to constantly hold onto a crisis. You have to have the love and you have to have the magic – Toni Morrison
As forests burn
Kerry and Helmut live on the edge of a forest in a remote part of southwest Scotland where the sky is so dark that, on a clear night, it rains with stars. On the fringes of the Sitka and its secret, hidden lochs, Kerry and Helmut keep bees, grow their own vegetables, walk their poodles Rosa and Cotton and make art. Helmut is an explorer of sound – the audible, inaudible and the imperceptible frequencies that can only be heard in the imaginal. Kerry makes ecological art in conversation with nature through walking, talking, listening, drawing and performing, alone and with others.
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The Sea Inside
“I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything” – Alice Walker
Holding onto imagination in an age of egocentric capitalism
When I was young, I imagined fairies lived in the circle of apples trees which stood like a convention of elders at the bottom of my garden. My greatest ambition was to be a flower fairy, like the ones in my illustrated collection of Cicely M Barker books, and grow my own wings. I also imagined that the actual wolf from Red Riding Hood freely roamed in the woods near my house and that - if I wasn’t careful - he would eat me up, too. Meanwhile, I loved writing stories and would lose myself for hours in the creation of my own imaginary worlds…
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Keep Your Eye On The Doughnut
On mystery, multi-dimensional planes and the visionary films of David Lynch
‘Most people’s lives are filled with mystery, but things move super fast nowadays and there’s not much time to sit and daydream and notice the mystery’ ~ David Lynch
Finding things underneath things
Sometime in the mid 1950’s on a sleepy, tree-lined street in Boise, Idaho, just as dusk was falling and the house lights were coming on, filling the dark with their warm, fuzzy glow, a young boy called David Keith Lynch was out playing with his brother.
It was the end of another ordinary day in small-town post-war America. And it might have stayed that way, had it not been for the naked woman, who appeared from out of the shadows, bleeding at the mouth and stumbling towards the confused boy, while looking straight through him….
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What Blooms & Sings
On darkness, dreams & our unknown ‘other’
‘To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is travelled by dark feet and dark wings’- Wendell Berry
Knee-deep in darkness
Little by little the light is rubbed out erasing the shaggy flank of the hillside and the muddy centuries-old path until, soon, we are knee-deep in darkness. Across the valley, only the spine of the moor is distinct against the fleece of low cloud where the night is slowly spilling through a tear in the lining.
From the slippery step of a style, I stare into the creases of the darkness. Somewhere stuffed inside is the hidden pearl of a full moon and the evanescent glitter of a Winter meteor shower. But there’s no chance of seeing either through the dense, dark padding of cloud. I can barely see the puddles that gleam on our path and can only imagine what’s buried further out…
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Plant a Flower at Your Graves
On pain, the shadow and honouring our ‘dead’
Take me to heaven
Blood is gushing from the woman on the bed. It jets and spurts from between her legs with an unstoppable force, reducing her body to a fragile red outline of almost nothing. Through the miasma, the woman appears to levitate above a pink stain clouding the bed, while a halo glows like a full moon at the crown of her head, as if somewhere between these two flimsy facsimiles, she is a witness to her own death.
I stand in the clinical, white gallery, which feels not unlike a mortuary, looking at this self-portrait by British artist Tracey Emin wondering if her pale apparition is weighing up whether the pain was worth it or not?…
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The Dream Life of Forests
On enchantment, extraction & doors to the invisible
You can possess a forest and be possessed by it.’ Ursula K Le Guin
Shadows and roots
Drawing on both ancient wisdom and science, Carl Jung viewed humanity as part of an invisible matrix that holds all things together in which we are not separate from nature, we are nature. In fairy tale and myth, the forest in particular is a place of magic and enchantment. Here in this dense, dark web of trees, the familiar gives way to the strange and the daylight realm of the solid dissolves into the mists of the ephemeral and numinous.
We wander the forest’s dark paths, temporarily plunged into a rhizomatic world of shadows and roots teeming with all that is invisible and hidden. The rustle of feathers, the swish of tails and the mycelial sprawl of what grows below ground invite us into an imaginal realm beyond the grasp of consciousness alone. In meeting with the wildness of the forest, we are called back to the instinctual nature of our own wildness. We may be eaten alive or learn to survive….
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When Doves Bite
On the vice of being too nice & the virtues of snakes
‘It’s not enough to be nice in life. You’ve got to have nerve’ - Georgia O’Keeffe
Lately, a pair of collared doves have been appearing in my back yard. They plumply waddle across the stone flags, scratching at seeds, before fanning open their wings and flapping into the branches of the rowan on the other side of the alley as if they were as weightless as the pale feathers swirling to the ground in their wake.
Then one night as I was sleeping, the doves flew clean out of the rowan and into my dreams. One by one they plopped, coming to roost beneath the eaves of a barn - a whole flock, too many to count, improbably squishing their ample bodies into the dark, cramped space, amid a frantic rustle of feathers and loud, peeved cries. But instead of tucking beaks into breasts and going to sleep, the doves became increasingly agitated until the next thing I knew, dove was attacking dove, tearing at each other’s throats and turning the barn red with blood…
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Kill the Monster, Sow the Seeds
The hero/ine’s journey for an age of collapse
‘All struggles/ Are essentially power struggles… and most are no more intellectual/ Than two rams/Knocking their heads together’ - Earthseed: The Books of the Living, (The Parable of The Sower, Octavia Butler)
Back in the early nineties before the ‘war on terror’, before the financial crash, before reports of wildfires became everyday news, before the forced displacement of hundreds upon millions, before the systemic rollback of basic human rights. Before we woke up one morning and wondered where have all the butterflies gone?
Back when Gen X (that’s me) were whipping ourselves into a trance to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and KRS-One’s Sound of Da Police, raging ecstatically against a machine whose death dealing tentacles still seemed far away enough in the future that - if you were privileged and western and white (also me) – it was still possible to believe their threat could be averted if you were smart enough and took the right coloured pills.
Back when Tony Blair and Bill Clinton arrived on the scene to captain a shiny new era of can-do centre-left positivism, the black American science fiction writer Octavia Butler was looking out of her Los Angeles window and noticing a few things…
