A while ago, in “Rising from the canvas,” I mentioned in passing that senior leadership is designed-in lonely. I said friendship had been the casualty of forty years in executive roles, and that I’d come back to this another time. Some of you wrote back. A couple of you wrote back at length. So here is the other time. This is the post I was avoiding when I planted that flag.

The facts first.

Some years ago now I stepped out of full-time work, and out of the marriage twelve months after that, with almost no friends to speak of. I don’t mean I didn’t know anyone. I knew a great many people. My LinkedIn was a monument to forty years of acquaintance. But in the sense of men I could ring at nine in the evening and say I’m not coping, can we talk, there was nobody I would actually have rung. One or two I might have, at the outer edge of what was possible, but the call would have surprised both of us, and I am not sure either of them would quite have known what to do with it.

That is what I mean by almost no friends. Not nobody in the world — nobody in the position where such a call would have been ordinary. The absence of anyone in that position became unignorable when the marriage I had organised my entire emotional life around dissolved in a single conversation.

How does a life arrive there?

Partly by structure. When you run an organisation, every relationship inside it is shaped by the fact that you hold the power. People want things from you. Good people, reasonable things, usually — but still. The friendships I thought I’d built across fifteen years of leadership turned, when I stepped out, into something quieter. A few held. Most didn’t. Some — this stung more than I was prepared for — turned out to have been transactional all along, and declared themselves so once the transaction closed. That isn’t a character flaw in the other person. It’s what hierarchy does to intimacy. You can’t easily be friends with someone whose bonus you approve.

Partly by exhaustion. The hours I gave to Qatar, to the executive role before that, to the one before that — there was nothing left in the tank for the unscheduled pint, the long walk with someone who wasn’t a colleague, the evening phone call that goes somewhere. I told myself I’d pick it up in retirement. I didn’t understand yet that friendship, like a garden, can’t be recovered by a burst of weekend effort. It has to have been watered all along.

Partly by the couple. We were close, my wife and I, for a long time. I put almost all my emotional weight on one beam. This is not something I say with regret exactly — it made possible many of the best years of my life — but it is something I understand now as a structural choice, not just a fact of love. Two people who find everything they need in each other build, without meaning to, a house with only two rooms. When one of them leaves, the other is standing in a very small space.

Partly, and this is the layer I find hardest to write, by temperament. I am, by default, a self-sufficient man. Leave me with books and the long view up to May Hill and I’ll be fine for a week. Reaching out has never been my instinct. The writing life has rewarded this; I have mistaken my isolation for discipline more than once. Depth over breadth has always been my preference in friendship, which means that when the deep friendships thinned, I didn’t have the wider thicket to catch me.

None of this is special. I know that.

I have, since then, read some of the literature on male friendship in midlife, and what is most striking about it is how little novelty any of us possess. Surveys in Britain and the United States consistently find that men over fifty have fewer close friends than any other adult cohort, and that the number has been falling for thirty years. Niobe Way, the American psychologist, has written beautifully about this — how boys in early adolescence speak of their male friendships in the language of love, and how by late adolescence most of them have learned to withdraw from that intimacy and call the withdrawal maturity. We grow into the very loneliness we then complain of.

I find this both a relief and an indictment. A relief because it means the shape of my life is not the result of some private failure of character. An indictment because it means I walked, eyes open or not, into a pattern that was perfectly well-documented, and could have been resisted.

I’d like to tell you I fixed this. I haven’t fixed it. What follows is reporting, not advice.

The first thing I tried was the obvious thing. I rang the old friends — the ones who had fallen off when I went abroad, or when the children were small — and I suggested meeting. Some of those calls landed well. One of them became, quietly, something I now depend on. Most of them were like trying to restart a fire in wet wood. We got a few sparks and a lot of smoke. We had both changed in ways the other hadn’t witnessed, and affection without shared life turned out to be a thinner thing than I’d assumed. I don’t think we were wrong to try. The lesson was simply that old friendship needs to have been maintained, not resurrected.

The second thing I tried was more deliberate. I joined things. A nature group, briefly. Then, more seriously, a local climate action group — not because I thought I’d find friends in it, but because I’d grown tired of reading the science and doing nothing with it, and because the people who bothered to turn up on a February evening seemed to me the kind of people worth standing next to. There is a particular awkwardness — perhaps it is only my awkwardness — in contriving intimacy by appointment, which is why I didn’t join anything explicitly social. I have come to think that men don’t, on the whole, befriend each other through honesty. We befriend each other sideways, through something else we are both doing.

Which is how the unexpected thing happened, twice.

The first was the climate group itself. Two people a little older than me — both already a decade or more into a retirement I was only beginning — turned out, over the course of a few months, to be the beginnings of real friendship. Neither of them sought me out, and I didn’t seek them. We arrived at each other sideways, through the work of the group. The age gap, which I noticed at first, has quietly ceased to matter. Friendship across a decade or fifteen years is a different animal from friendship at parity — slightly more spacious, perhaps, in ways I am still learning to read.

The second was poetry. I had started, the year before, writing seriously. Submitting to journals. Going to readings, joining a poetry community I hadn’t known existed. Signing on to do the MA in writing poetry at the Poetry School. Without setting out to make friends, I found I was in correspondence with people whose company I valued. A poet in Newport who reads my drafts and sends me his. A handful of readers — strangers, technically — who write to me after posts like this, and with whom I have ended up in exchanges that have the quality of friendship in everything but the face-to-face.

I had not expected either thing to do what it has done. I had entered the climate group to be useful, and the poetry as a solitary pursuit, and both have turned out to have a secondary life as a small network of real affection. I think it is because they are practices in which the first requirement is honest attention — to the science, to the page, to the world each of them points to — and once two people have established that habit between them, friendship follows more or less of its own accord. What I needed, it turned out, wasn’t to try harder at friendship. It was to find things worth doing with other people, and to let the friendships grow out of the doing.

So where am I now. Not resolved. The pattern of forty years doesn’t undo itself in three. The old habit — closing the door, declining the invitation, preferring my own company when I shouldn’t — still reasserts itself more often than I’d like. That hasn’t gone.

But something is beginning.

Nothing here yet has the weight of the friendships I lost, and I am not going to oversell what I have. Friendship dislikes being oversold, and what I am describing is still in its early weather.

But it is real. There are evenings now when I find myself looking forward to a conversation, or drafting a message to someone I didn’t know a year ago, or turning over something said at a meeting that is still working on me days later. Three years ago I had none of that. The shape of it is unfamiliar, and I don’t yet know quite what to call it, but it is unmistakably the beginning of something.

That is what I can honestly report. Not a victory. Just the small, corrigible fact that the door is open a little more often than it used to be, and that once or twice lately, someone has walked through it and stayed.

1. Art Work of the Week — Samuel Palmer, In a Shoreham Garden (c.1830) — There’s a Palmer at the V&A I keep returning to in April. An apple tree in such extravagant pink blossom it looks almost delirious, a small figure in a red robe gazing at something beyond the frame. Palmer’s Shoreham years were a decade of disclosure — he painted landscape as if something were being revealed through it rather than merely depicted. It feels right for this month, when the blackthorn suddenly whitens the hedgerows and the orchards commit to their shock of bloom.

2. An article that made me think — The ecological crisis as a crisis of attention — I’ve been reading Emergence Magazine again this week — a journal of ecology, culture and spirituality I return to when I need to recalibrate. Their insistence that ecological loss is first a loss of attention — that we have forgotten how to look — rhymes with what I feel most strongly in my own poetry practice. If the world is withdrawing from us, we are also withdrawing from it; the question isn’t what to do about that so much as how to stand in the presence of the world for long enough to register what’s actually there.

3. Something I learned this week — The shape of the word “aletheia” — Following a thread in my own reading I ended up back at the Greek: a-lētheia, un-concealment, the negation of forgetting. The word for truth in Homer is literally a refusal to let something slip back into the hidden. I’ve been working with this concept for so long as a philosophical idea that I’d half-forgotten how physical it is. When the fog lifts off the Leadon, when a fox steps out of the hedge — that’s aletheia, and it has nothing to do with correctness and everything to do with showing up.

4. Something happy — The first swifts are almost here — Swifts winter south of the Sahara and travel nine thousand miles to get here; they eat, sleep, mate, and drink on the wing, and touch down only to breed. Any day now they will be overhead, screaming low over the gardens. Every year I forget they’re coming and every year they arrive and I am stopped in the middle of whatever I’m doing, standing in the garden looking up like a fool. Happiness is a poor word for it, but it will do.

   

5. Where I found hope this week — The work itself — The Cinnamon Press pamphlet deadline fell at the end of March, and the Brotherton Prize followed a week later. After several months of daily editorial attention I have come out of that phase slightly blinking, like someone leaving a cinema into the afternoon light. What I found, when the submissions were in and the manuscript was sealed, was not exhaustion but a quiet gratitude for the work itself. The pamphlet may be accepted or it may not; that part is out of my hands. What isn’t out of my hands is the fact that I now know each poem better than I did before, and that the labour of attention has rearranged something in me. This, I think, is what practice looks like: not outcome, but a thickening of the capacity to stay.

6. Something inspiring — Clare Shaw — The Wells Poetry Competition this year is being judged by Clare Shaw, whose work I’ve been reading closely. She writes out of a commitment to honesty about mental health, trauma and recovery that refuses both euphemism and melodrama — a difficult middle register, and she inhabits it with real formal intelligence. What’s inspiring is watching a poet stay so close to the ground.

7. A poem to enjoy — “But these things also” by Edward Thomas — April brings me back each year to Edward Thomas, and this year to the short poem that begins “But these things also are Spring’s — / On banks by the roadside the grass / Long-dead that is greyer now / Than all the Winter it was.” A poem about the unglamorous face of the season: the chip of flint, the white shell of a broken snail, bleached grass. Spring disclosed not through obvious beauty but through what survives the winter’s erosion. Thomas knew that disclosure is partial and unflattering as often as it is lovely — and he closes with the wonderfully ambiguous “And Spring’s here, Winter’s not gone.”

8. A Substack to savour — The Clearing by Katherine May — Katherine May — author of Wintering and Enchantment — writes about solitude, slowness and seasonal living with a kind of attentiveness I find sustaining. Her pieces are unhurried and she refuses to performatively cheer up. I’ve been reading her alongside my own Beyond Solitude work and finding quiet companionship there.

9. Music I enjoyed this week — Delius, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring — There is nothing else like this six-minute rhapsody by Delius, composed in 1912 and built around the two-note call of the cuckoo folded into an English pastoral idiom. The whole piece drifts and lifts as if the orchestra itself had caught a thermal. I haven’t heard a cuckoo yet this year — they come later and fewer than they used to — but the piece is standing in for one, which is one of the things music can do.

The first meal I cooked for myself was pasta. Not good pasta. Not the kind you make with intention, with garlic browning in olive oil and a glass of something open on the counter. This was pasta because pasta is what you make when you can’t think of anything else, when the kitchen feels like a room that belongs to someone who has left, and you are just passing through.

I stood at the hob in a house I barely knew, in a town I hadn’t chosen, listening to Radio 4 because I’d turned it on in every room. I couldn’t bear the silence. The silence wasn’t just quiet. It was the shape left behind when another life withdraws from yours. A chair at the table. A glass not poured. The absence of the question, what shall we have tonight?

I ate standing up, I think. Or maybe at the table with my phone propped against the salt. I can’t remember, which tells you something about how little I was present for it. I was performing the act of eating, not doing it. Getting through.

That was nearly five years ago now. What happened between then and here is what I want to talk about.

There’s a particular loneliness to eating alone that other solitudes don’t carry. You can walk alone and feel free. You can read alone and feel absorbed. You can even sleep alone and, eventually, get used to the cool expanse of an unshared bed. But eating alone — particularly at home, particularly in the evening — that takes longer to settle.

I think this is because meals were never really about food. They were about the day’s debrief, the ordinary exchange of what happened and what might happen next. The table was where we convened. Without the other person, the table becomes furniture again. Just wood.

There’s a wider awkwardness too. The restaurant table for one, with the waiter’s momentary hesitation. The supermarket aisles stacked with meals for two, for four, for a family. The ‘dinner party’ — that peculiarly middle-class unit of social currency — from which the single person is gently, structurally, excluded. Or worse, included with pity, seated at the end.

I don’t think I fully understood how much of my social life had been organised around the couple until I was no longer part of one. Couples eat with couples. It’s one of the unspoken rules. A single man at a dinner table among couples is a problem to be solved — either a threat or a charity case, depending on the insecurity of the hosts. I learned to stop accepting those invitations quite quickly.

The change, when it came, wasn’t dramatic. There was no revelation over a perfectly seared steak. It crept in, the way most real changes do, through repetition and accident.

I remember a Sunday — maybe eighteen months in — when I decided to make a roast. Not because anyone was coming. Not to prove I could. I just wanted roast chicken, the kind with lemon and thyme pushed under the skin, potatoes done properly in goose fat, the kitchen filling with the smell of it for hours. I set the table. One place. A glass of red wine. I even put music on — not the radio filling silence, but something I’d chosen.

And somewhere during that meal, I noticed I was tasting the food. Not eating it to get through, not shovelling fuel while scrolling the news, but actually attending to what was on the plate. The crisp skin. The give of the potato. The wine — a Côtes du Rhône, nothing special — opening in the glass.

It sounds small. It was small. But it was the first time eating alone felt like something I was doing rather than something that was happening to me.

After that, other small shifts followed. I stopped turning the radio on at mealtimes. The quiet, which had been devastating, became a kind of space — not empty, but open. I started cooking things that interested me rather than things that were easy: a Moroccan tagine from a recipe I’d found online, a fish pie that took most of the afternoon. The effort wasn’t for anyone else’s benefit. It was mine. And the effort itself was a form of saying: I am still here. This life is worth a meal that takes all afternoon.

I began eating outside when the weather allowed, in the small garden behind the house, where I could hear blackbirds in the hedge and watch the light change. That was when I understood something I hadn’t expected: eating alone, done with attention, has a quality that eating with someone else doesn’t always have. You are entirely present. There’s no performance, no conversation to maintain, no negotiation of what to eat or when. Just you and the plate and the evening.

Image: Elizabeth Bishop: Courtesy www.poets.org

The poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote about loss as a practice — something you get better at through repetition, though she was being at least partly ironic. The art of losing, she called it, and the poem builds from small losses (door keys, an hour) toward the catastrophic ones (a continent, a loved one) with a formal control that both contains and intensifies the grief beneath.

I think eating alone is a cousin of this. A small daily loss you practise until it becomes a skill, and then something else entirely — not loss at all, but a form of attention. The discipline of noticing the unglamorous particular, as I’d put it in my own writing life. A plate of food. A glass of wine. The evening light. These things were always there; I just couldn’t see them when I was looking for what was missing.

Time passed, an evening when I cooked a piece of salmon with ginger and soy, rice, some greens from the greengrocer on the high street. Nothing elaborate. I ate at the table by the window with the garden beyond, the last of the daylight caught in the top of the hills.

The chair opposite was empty. It had been empty for a long time now, and I thought to myself, it will be empty tomorrow. But somewhere along the way it stopped being an absence and became just a chair, and the table stopped being a place where someone was missing and became a place where I sit, and eat, and pay attention.

The salmon was good. The greens were slightly overdone. The wine — a Picpoul, cold from the fridge — was exactly right.

Outside, a thrush was singing in the hedge, the same phrase repeated and repeated, the way a thrush does, testing each variation against the silence until something holds.

1. Art Work of the Week - Piazza Navona, Rome by Caspar van Wittel, 1699 - When I visited Rome last year, it was autumn, so there were fewer crowds and it was less hot than in the summer months. The best cities are walkable, and there is a lot of ground to cover in Rome, although the metro is excellent. One of the reasons I like Wittel’s painting is the glimpse it gives of ordinary people going about their business. I’m not sure what the two hooded figures in white outside the church are doing though.

2. An article that made me think - We might soon be speaking whaleish - Given the terrible harm being done to the world’s oceans, what would happen if we could understand what whales are saying? Researchers are now close to unravelling the code and we might be able to hear what whales are saying as soon as next year. Project Ceti is applying advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art robotics to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales in the Eastern Caribbean. I dread to think what we will soon find out.

3. Something I learned this week - We are not ready to deal with the mental health implications of climate change - Climate change is already causing great harm to the natural world and many societies today. What I hadn’t fully grasped is the mental health toll it is exerts. Extreme heat is associated with mental health conditions such as suicide, anxiety, and substance use disorders. Despite the evidence of harm, a recent study shows that of 83 action plans for heat-related health problems, less than a third addressed mental health needs and only a fifth had an action plan. Our already struggling healthcare systems will soon have to grapple with further avoidable harm with all the downstream consequences for capacity and access. This is one more example of a failure for us to take the Long View.

4. Something happy - I went to see The Salt Path this week - Having read the book, I was worried the film might not do it justice, but my fears were groundless. Not only was the film able to sensitively reveal the difficulties Ray and Moth face (ill-health and homelessness), but it also reveals the wild beauty (and wild weather) the coastal path offers. I liked the ending too which, spoiler alert, left the couple still out there walking. Joyous and wonderful.

5. Where I found hope this week - The company of friends - I have written about loneliness and solitude and my journey from the first to the second. A critical part of my current happiness is derived from my friendships, many of which are relatively new. It’s not just about receiving comfort and support, it’s also about giving it. I have long maintained that kindness is a super-power, and there is plenty of evidence to back this up.

6. Something inspiring - Reading poetry aloud - I’ve done a couple of readings of my poetry in the last week. It’s a fun thing to do, not least because you often hear other poet’s work too. Reading a draft of your own poem aloud is essential - nothing reveals its little kinks in the same way. I found David Yezzi’s piece about Frost and sound fascinating and a reminder that writing is not an exercise in excision, it’s a journey into sound.

7. A poem to enjoy - The Whitsun Weddings by Phillip Larkin - I wrote about meeting Larkin while at university and how The Whitsun Weddings nudged me in the direction of writing poetry. The poem runs to eight, ten line stanzas, and displays Larkins acute eye for detail. It rounds off with another characteristic of Larkin’s poetry, moving from the particular to the universal. Larkin is always an unflinching observer.

8. A Substack to savour - Learning How Land Speaks by Peter Reason - Peter’s writes a series of posts sharing the theories, the experiences, and the practices arising from a series of co-operative inquiries exploring Living in a Sentient World. I particularly enjoyed this piece about the River Fowey and the reflections strike me as both poetic and deeply meaningful.

9. Music I enjoyed this week - Bumbles Playlist - A friend asked me to put together a playlist and I went mellow. It was a really fun thing to do. Sometimes the old ones are the best ones.

I was a reasonable all-rounder academically at school, and my parents insisted warmly suggested I choose a degree course at university that would provide a gateway to a profession. I wasn’t so sure, as by then I was writing very bad poetry and for some obscure reason thought I would like to be a writer. Not in a serious or committed way; like many of my ideas about the future back then, it was a feeling rather than a plan. I thought English would be a great subject to study.

Unfortunately mum and dad didn’t agree and we had some lengthy conversations about my less than ideal choices. In the end I did a deal. I would do law so long as I could have a free hand in choosing the university. To their disgust I picked Hull, because at that time Philip Larkin was the librarian there.

I had an initial glimpse of The Great Man1 at a welcome lecture when he was wheeled out to speak to the freshers. Walking home that night I decided to find a way to meet him. Unfortunately, Larkin wasn’t one for mingling, and over the course of that first year it dawned on me that there was no way I was just going to bump into him.

I came up with a new plan - my Meet The Great Man Plan. I got a job working behind the bar at the Senior Common Room once or twice a week. This, I felt sure was bound to succeed. The money was useful as I enjoyed living it up buying law books. But no joy.

The end of term arrived, and the contractor running hospitality asked if I’d like to work for them over the summer break. I immediately agreed and was then more or less full time on functions. I also served every week day behind the bar of the SCR at lunchtime. Surely this would finally crack it.

The long summer weeks dragged by, and slowly my optimism dwindled. I was starting to be reconciled to never meeting The Great Man, and so, sadly, began my final week before the new academic year started. It was a Thursday, long after lunch, the SCR more or less empty. I was crouched behind the bar stocking up the mixers and shining glasses, when I felt rather than saw a shadow loom over me. I stood up and there, towering fifty feet above me was The Great Man. He was by then quite large, both tall and heavy. He was wearing his characteristic glasses and a three piece suit. I managed to squeak, ‘Dr Larkin, what can I get you?’

The Great Man paused, and when he spoke, it was with the seriousness and depth of meaning befitting a poet of genius. ‘A glass of red.’ The words settled in the room like thunder, the timbre of his voice rising from the depth of his magnificent soul.

‘Of course, er, any particular kind?’ This kind of sparkling repartee was sure to lure him in. He paused again, then looked at me steadily. Centuries passed in that moment, epochs dawned and fell, and there was almost certainly the sound of a French horn in the far distance.

‘Whatever gets me pissed most quickly.’

The Whitsun Weddings

Dad had a hardback copy of Elliot’s The Wasteland on the bookshelf at home. He also had a copy of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, so make of that what you will. As a teenager I would sit and leaf through The Wasteland, and while I certainly didn’t understand it, the sense of something irrevocably eroding or failing captured me. I came to The Wasteland when the punk revolution was just getting started. I sensed, but was perhaps too young to fully comprehend, that punk was a reaction to another kind of despair creeping over the UK at that time. And it was the first time I felt the power of poetry, not as something intellectual to admire, to try to understand, but as something merely to witness, to attend.

Frost told John Bartlett in 1913 that the best way to hear the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words. Frost was referring to how the soundscape of a poem informs our pre-conceptions of a poem through sound, well before we start to internalise what the words are trying to say. Elliot suggests genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood, and both of these ideas were working on me when I approached The Wasteland that first time.

It must have been later that summer when I bought The Whitsun Weddings. I can’t explain why: I think I liked the thinness of the book, its plain pale cover, the green typeface, its plainness. There was something approachable about a slim book, with relatively few words on each page. At home I flicked through the poems, almost certainly with The Stranglers’s Something Better Change playing on my cassette recorder. Some of the poems were easier than others. A few left me cold and I am ashamed to say now that The Whitsun Weddings poem was one of them.

It’s hard to remember why it didn’t appeal, but it’s quite possible it was its length. I remember I’d spent a few weeks trying and failing to love Coleridge’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. I’m sure this was because I was in recovery from some very dull long poetry set for us at school. I think it erected what Billy Collins calls an anti-poetry deflector shield that came on line whenever I was presented with a long poem.

The Whitsun Weddings poem isn’t that long really, formed of eight, ten line stanzas. To my weakling teenage mind, it looked long though and I didn’t attend to it properly as a result. So it wasn't until a few months short of my seventeenth birthday, I thought I’d give it another go. The resulting experience turned me from what the young might call poetry-adjacent, to an all-in, fully paid up member of the poetry clan.

The first thing I noticed was that it rhymed, but with an effortlessness that felt like a charm, a species of magic. Then there was that weird, short second line in each stanza. What was going on there? It seemed to hold the rest of the poem back, to draw attention to itself. As I scanned the lines, with that odd little indent, I began to understand them as signposts, informing the reader when or where to stand. This is what I understand Richard Hugo to mean when he suggests in The Triggering Town, a poem should show the reader the ground to stand on.

The short lines are:

Not till about
For miles inland
The weddings made
Waving goodbye
Yes, from cafés
I nearly died
Bright knots of rail

Each of these lines tells us something about where we are, so the rest of stanza can take place. Then there are the images, bright and true which Larkin brushes with spare economy.

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,   
And someone running up to bowl—

I thought of London spread out in the sun,   
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

Finally, as in many of Larkin’s poems the poem swells gloriously from the particular to the universal.

We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower   
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

This poem convinced me to become a reader of poetry, and later, very hesitantly, a writer of poetry too. Poetry became my Swiss-army knife, a multifaceted, handy little tool for reasoning with life. I could pry open hurt or peel back the cover of distress and see what it looked like, what it wanted me to say. Over time this practice absorbed the pain, transformed it into something I could bear. Something I could even rhyme, or place into a form.

What survives?

So I’m glad I met The Great Man. We all have our flaws, but only a very few write as beautifully as he does. And his poetry helped to open the possibility of poetry for me, gave me a set of lenses to inspect the world with, a means of looking into the fire safely.

I often think of Larkin’s sadness, his loneliness and disappointment. How he sat in his chair each evening with a wooden writing board on his knees. How looking out into his room through his thick spectacles, he once saw an arrow shower sent out of sight somewhere becoming rain.

Perhaps Larkin’s greatest gift was looking unflinchingly at whatever was there. By refusing to turn away, he chose instead to find the words he needed to memorialise what he saw.

Why did he bother? I think it’s because he was, in some profound and uniquely Larkin way, in love with life.

And as the man says, what will survive of us is love.

1. Art Work of the Week - Island of Patmos by Ivan Alvazovsky, 1854 - Some people think the Book of Revelations was written on the island of Patmos - this was a place of exile in early Christianity. I’m heading off to Loutro (Crete) soon for a writing retreat and there’s a beautiful white chapel on the headland. Last year we walked up there one evening and lay on the large stone table and benches, allowing our eyes to adjust to the dark. After twenty minutes, the rods in the back of the eye are fully online and it was just amazing on that moonless light to glimpse the sea through the trees, the pale starlight reflecting back to us.

2. An article that made me think - Hunting London’s lost rivers - I’ve always been fascinating by the vanished, partly because one day, they might be rediscovered. London has many lost rivers, The Fleet, The Westbourne, The Tyburn among them. I love the fact, if you know where to stand, you can hear the The Fleet rushing underneath the street from a manhole cover on Ray Street. It made me think of U. A. Fanthorpe’s wonderful poem, Rising Damp, also referencing these lost rivers.

3. Something I learned this week - England’s Ghost Woodlands - It was encouraging to hear that parts of the Howgills in the Yorkshire Dales are being planted with trees. What was intriguing is that despite these once wooded hillside being de-forested though clearance and sheep farming rendering them devoid of anything but grass, the ghost of the old wood lives on. Bluebells are popping up and there are patches of bracken, which suggest the soils and seed banks retain the memory of being a woodland despite hundreds of years of sheep grazing.

4. Something happy - Edith Pritchett’s Venn diagrams - I stumbled on the wonderful Edith Pritchett’s Venn diagrams this week and I love them. The three published in the Guardian this week made me laugh out loud.

5. Where I found hope this week - A new concept for fighting climate change - Robert McFarlane’s recent book about rivers suggesting it is better to think of rivers as alive, seems to be gathering ground. Robin Wall Kimmerer a Potawatomi botanist argues the reason we don’t default to this way of talking about rivers and other natural features is fundamentally a linguistic problem. English uses ‘it’ for objects - thus ‘a river that flows’ not ‘a river who flows’. I’m going to see if I can get into the habit of using this new language in future. Coincidentally, I had a long chat with Angela Jones today, the driving force behind Save the River Usk. She is completely inspiring and has sunk huge amounts of her time and her own money into the terrible harms being perpetrated on our local river by the local Water Company. You can support Angela’s work by making a contribution here. She isn’t funded by anyone, and has a team of volunteer water samplers - but the reagents they need are expensive.

6. Something inspiring - A Glow in the Consciousness - Maria Popova’s entirely brilliant ‘The Marginalian’ gave me this little gem. Nan Shepherd was a Scottish mountaineer and poet and I read her memoir ‘The Living Mountain’ years ago. I was particularly taken by this thought ‘How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry?’ Exactly.

7. A poem to enjoy - Selling Watermelons by Andrei Voznesensky, translated by Edwin Morgan - Voznessensky was one of the poets who would perform in Mayakovsky Square to protest the post-Stalin regime in Moscow. It’s a reminder that poetry doesn’t have to be only lyrical or beautiful, it can also have a purpose. The way the poem zooms out to ‘the earth swings in its great string-bag / of meridians and latitudes!’ is magnificent.

8. A Substack to savour - Donald J. Robertson - Donald’s a cognitive-behavioural psychologist and writes books like ‘How to think like Socrates’. He makes the claim that in fact Stoicism is at the root of modern cognitive-behavioural therapy and since I’m always on the look out for decent life advice, it’s a brilliant addition to my reading list each week.

9. Music I enjoyed this week - Hania Rani - There’s something weird about needing music that burrows into my head then calms me down. I find her music mesmerising and if you’ve not listened to her you could start with my playlist.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

These lines from ‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost were written for his friend Edward Thomas. The intense creative relationship which formed between Frost and Thomas in the months before the 1st World War, was formed near the town of Ledbury—now the home of the UK’s largest poetry festival.

They lived for a time in two cottages, three fields apart, and together they walked and talked as they crossed the fields, the woods and hills in the quiet Herefordshire and Gloucestershire countryside. It was during these long walks that Frost encouraged Thomas to consider himself a poet. Frost was sure the prose Thomas was writing had poetry within it.

By June 1915, Thomas was thirty-seven years old, and there was no expectation he should enlist. He nevertheless agonised about whether to join Frost on his return home to America, or to fight for his country. Frost intended ‘The Road Not Taken’ to be read as a playful dig at Thomas.

“The inspiration for it came from Frost’s amusement over a familiar mannerism of his closest friend in England, Edward Thomas. While living in Gloucestershire in 1914, Frost frequently took long walks with Thomas through the countryside. Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his American friend a rare plant or vista; but it often happened that before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a ‘better’ direction.”1

When Frost sent Thomas his poem, Thomas missed the ironic prod aimed his way, and read the poem as most do, as a lyrical, naturally symbolic poem. Thomas eventually signed up in 1915, and was killed shortly after arriving in France on 9th April 1917 at Arras when a shell passed through his body.

The road not taken by Thomas led to America, and the freedom to write as Frost did, while the path he chose led to his death.

We can’t see into the future, and none of us know where our paths will lead.

This is the truth of our human condition, that we must always choose and in doing so, be aware saying yes to one thing is always saying no to another. Thomas faced a bifurcation in the path ahead. In one direction lay a country far away from the industrialised killing in the trenches, one where no one (yet) feared the draft or the possibility of invasion—America.

The other direction, the path Thomas chose, buttressed by the abstract notion of duty, rose from another ideal. It is clear Thomas, a man who earned most of his living as a travel writer, wanted to protect, to stand for, the English countryside he knew so well.

In his 1916 poem ‘As the Team's Head Brass’ written in iambic pentameter (Shakespeares’ metre), Thomas depicts a narrator observing a farmer ploughing his fields using horses. Two lovers enter the woods and become hidden from view. The farmer and narrator strike up a conversation. ‘Have you been out?’ (meaning to the war in France) the farmer asks. ‘No’, the narrator replies. We imagine the farmer raising his eyebrows.

…  "And don’t want
to, perhaps?”
“If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more.

Thomas, the poet, wrestling with the consequential decision he has to make. The narrator asks the farmer:

… "Have many gone
From here?” “Yes.” “Many lost?” “Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him."

Thomas couldn’t know what his fate would be, that he would be killed days after finally landing in France himself. The farmer continues to reflect:

… "It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.”
“And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.”

Choice and consequence

When I was in the dark place, I couldn’t see any light. The tunnel led down all the way to the centre of the earth, there was no light to see. I just walked, and over weeks, then days, then years, I slowly discovered a new path. When I said to my friend it was like a light had been switched on in the dark tunnel, it was the moment when I began to see the future, however hazy and dim it still was.

I believe in very few absolutes. My outlook tends toward possibility, rather than dogma—my reaction to my Catholic upbringing may have something to do with this. Whenever I have taken the Myers Briggs test, however, it suggests I am more than usually prone to thinking big and in new directions, so maybe this is an innate part of who I am.

There are, however, a couple of beliefs I hold onto. The first is what you put out into the world comes back to you, precisely because you don’t expect it to.

I believe kindness is a superpower, the cost of which is free but whose value is beyond measure. There are many ways I see small kindnesses returning unbidden, and it makes me feel happier to be kind anyway. The real magic lies in offering kindness in a non-performative manner—it is best offered without expectation, and unobserved by none other than the subject of your kindness. Sometimes, even without their knowledge.

The reverse logic holds: I think mean people eventually tend to find themselves friendless, or at the very least, diminished.

My second ‘truth’ is this—don’t be a victim. If you’ve read my previous posts, you might be surprised at this. Weren’t the times I’ve described feeling lonely and in despair precisely because I played the role of victim?

My answer to this quite reasonable charge is no. The loneliness I felt was a consequences of decisions that were made. I didn’t choose the situation I found myself in, but I was there anyway.

The hardest part was learning to park the confusion, and then to look away from the past. As the man said, to wake up and live the life I want to live, not someone else’s.

We can all do with a bit of help along the way

When my friend, the poet Lynette Thorstensen, invited me to join a conversation with a small group of fellow dreamers, I had no idea where the conversation would lead. None of us did.

Over the months, we began to shape our ideas and eventually we decided to set up Néos Delta. Our analysis is that the world needs transformation—néos, new, novel, fresh and —delta, change. The big idea is to run retreats, always with the guiding idea of a transformation. This might be transformation at the community, organisation or personal level.

At our first meeting, we were all asked to say why we were interested in being part of the conversation, what drew us in. For me, there were two aspects.

The first was an opportunity to find renewed meaning and purpose in my life. The second, emerged in a straight line from this first thought and was the realisation that despite retiring from the world of work, I still had energy and a desire to affect change. In that very first conversation I talked about the strange way that a retirement conventionally meant stepping away from things, just when you had the requisite wisdom to make your best decisions.

We all felt the same way, even those still fully in their working journey. There are always thresholds, moments when we make a choice about which way to go.

The 3rd Act of a story is the best bit, where all the juiciest action takes places. It is the climax. When I thought about retirement, there was something radical about re-framing this story in a new way. It didn’t have to be beige, but instead I could write myself a fitting and suitably climactic 3rd Act.

The idea that it is possible to reclaim the future changed everything for me. When the light in the tunnel switched on again, I found there were choices I never thought were possible.

What’s Next? — Clarity and Purpose in Your Third Act

We are running a 3rd Act retreat this October. Honestly, this is a retreat I would go on if I wasn't already involved. Erina Reddan and I will be hosting a small group in Being Saatva, a beautiful and inspiring luxury eco-resort in Bali. Our goal is to help people discover their path, one that leads them to the future they choose. I’m not selling here, but I am sharing, because I’m surprised at what happens when you make saying yes the default attitude.

I also want to illustrate a new journey can begin, even when it feels as though the light of the future has been turned off.

Hope—a non-negotiable requirement for happiness

When I consider how I found a route out of the dark place, it seems fully a mystery that it led to the life I lead today. The reason I started writing these posts is because I hope that whatever I learned might be useful to someone else. I’m back to the idea of putting things into the world here, without any expectation of return.

The world is currently short on hope too. Rediscovering the link between hope and happiness was a revelatory process for me. I could never have mapped my way to the life I’m in now, I just had to keep on walking.

I think of Thomas at his battery in the ruins of Arras, the choice he made. What he might have been able to achieve if he had taken another road and the pleasure we would all have had as a consequence, reading his work.

I wish he had decidedly differently, for his family, for his future readers, but mostly for him. I prefer to imagine him back home out on his long walks, his mind noting the small things and the large things, then knitting something profound and beautiful from them for us to share.

And so I choose to carry on walking, not knowing where it will lead. Hoping it will be somewhere good.

1. Art Work of the Week - Houses at Auvers by Vincent Gogh, 1890 - Vincent led a pretty miserable life, never learning how loved his work would become. It’s a reminder that a creative person needs to enjoy the process of creating work as much as the outputs. I really love Austin Kleon’s books, and Keep Going is a favourite. As Austin says today is the only day that matters. Thanks also to Austin for giving me the idea for this newsletter. His Substack is great. I was over in Ledbury the other day, a place strongly associated with the Dymock Poets. Edward Thomas is a poet who didn’t live long enough to see how influential his work would be.

2. An article that made me think - In my later years I want to embrace valour - Sheila Hancock - What a marvellous article this is. Sheila reflects on two stories of people enduring terrible suffering, whom despite everything, remained unflinchingly positive about the future. One 92-year old man fell and shattered bones in his hip and leg. Refusing to give up, he battled back to mobility. Sheila writes how on the day he left the nursing home to return to his own house, she wanted to form a guard of honour and blow a bugle fanfare as he leaves, to celebrate his dogged valour. He will not be defeated. It’s another version of keeping going and look forward to the 3rd Act of my life.

3. Something I learned this week - Are there moose in the New Zealand Fiorlands? - I’m fascinated when the vanished seem to re-appear, like the story of the Little Lady of Flores. Myths associated with the Fiorlands, the remote, mountainous and heavily forested area of the South Island abound. It seems ten moose were released over a century ago in an attempt to create a hunting opportunity. They sank from view and the last potential sighting is a blurry photograph from 75-years ago. The takahē, a large flightless bird was thought to be extinct until it was recently re-discovered, so maybe there are still moose out there? Stories like these give me the shivers.

4. Something happy - The fields are yellow - after the daffodils of spring, the fields around my home are filled with buttercup and dandelion. It’s been dry and sunny, which after a long, grey winter seems to have driven energy into the wildflowers. If you find just the right place, there are plenty of Marsh Orchids too.

5. Where I found hope this week - The wonders of Wales - Wales has, like a lot of the UK, an industrial heritage. Many of the old industries are gone, and the scars they have left in the landscape take time to heal. But they do heal, and nature is waiting for us to just give it a chance. These photos capture the wild and windswept severity of what’s emerging.

6. Something inspiring - Humans dressed as bears - No, really. A tiny orphaned black bear cub was found alone in the California woods and taken to the San Diego Humane Society. To help him adjust to the wild, staff wear bear costumes so he doesn’t bond with humans. This unique approach aims to prepare the cub for a life in nature. And how wonderful the world has people who will take the trouble.

7. A poem to enjoy - Song for Refugees by Philip Metres - Borrowing the form used by Robert Frost in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Metres creates a delicate, beautiful soundscape for his poem addressing the plight of refugees. ‘The oud’s a lovely ark that leaks / with tales and bromides we can’t keep, / and miles of ghosts before their sleep. / And miles of ghosts beneath our sleep.’ Wonderful.

8. A Substack to savour - A Time and a Place, Helen Mort - Helen’s a terrific British poet and I’ve been enjoying her articles about her trip to Iceland. It’s thanks to Helen I also learned about Solastalgia. I definitely suffer from this.

9. Music I enjoyed this week - Lonely - Nils Hoffman (Feat. Rae Morris) - I’m a terrible sucker for anthems, or at least the anthemic. This track swells in just the right way with the correct amount of melancholy. I love the fact the boffins reckon sad music can make us happy.

When COVID struck, I was living in Qatar, helping the country prepare for the World Cup. Qataris are a minority in their own land, accounting for about 10% of the country’s population of some 3 million people.

They are of course full citizens and everyone else is a migrant worker of one kind or another. The vast majority are single male workers from countries like Nepal and Bangladesh who are accommodated in huge camps in the desert. The city of Doha (and everything else) was built by these workers, and everyday the orange uniformed men are bussed in and out of the city’s various building projects.

It was into this context that COVID arrived. No one knew how lethal or contagious the virus was initially. The country sealed the workers in the camps and crossed its fingers.

The average Qatari is extremely wealthy, and all enjoy a lavish lifestyle. The riches from gas extraction are distributed among the elites, but there is plenty that flows into the pockets of the average Qatari. Perhaps because of a sense of privilege, there was an almost immediate push back to the idea of a lockdown and the response was swift.

The compulsory ID cards everyone was assigned on entry were matched to a health status app which tracked any contact with a COVID positive patient. The app was either Green (all good) or Amber (get tested) or Red (stay at home).

In practice, this enabled society to very quickly get back to a state that was fairly near to normal. All the malls, restaurants and hotels had security staff on the door. To gain entry you needed to show you had a Green status on the app.

I will return to the story of COVID in Qatar in a subsequent post.

Coming home everything seemed changed

When I came back to the UK after the worst of COVID had passed, I entered a country I struggled to understand.

For one thing, there were the dramatic lockdowns, particularly the first. Everyone I met wanted to tell me about empty motorways, towns that echoed to bird song but were otherwise silent. There was that spell of fine weather when the countryside suddenly seemed beautiful and present in a strikingly new way. Bubbles were formed and of course there were the dreadful tragedies too, families unable to be with loved ones who died.

All of this was alien to me. My experience of COVID in Qatar was radically different, and although some terrible things happened, life for the most part was not very much changed. The workers’s experience was different however, and I will return to this in another post too.

I think the experience of COVID in the UK burned a scar into everyone who lived through it. No doubt this is why the Party-gate scandal was so deadly to Boris. But I felt something else, something that seemed to have tilted while I was away.

Yearning for return

Throughout the broiling summers in Qatar, I longed to return home. There were many aspects to this. The ability to get in a car and drive anywhere you wanted. The freedom to say what I thought openly in public. Family, friends and a normal life.

I longed to able to walk into the Welsh countryside, sit quietly in a wood under leaves, or climb a wind wracked hill and clamber over the rocks. The green stink of a stiff sea breeze, the sound of gulls wheeling overhead.

I spent far too many hours on Rightmove imagining a new home, an idealised landing spot for the next phase of my life.

In short, I yearned.

The first morning after I got home, I went for a short walk up the hill to the castle and the wood beyond. It was grey December, cool with showers of lead. I walked over a field and into the wood, and heard and saw nothing apart from a buzzard, three magpies and some crows.

I got home feeling dispirited.

The landscape didn't feel alive, had few signs of life. Of course I was ignoring the life everywhere in view, the trees, the beautiful green fields. But I just couldn't see it. I wanted birdsong and foxes and instead got an ugly brown river in flood, ploughed fields and a feeling of emptiness I couldn't shake.

Travelling in good times

One of the great privileges of time spent in the Gulf is its proximity to parts of the map that are less easy to explore from the UK. Qatar is also a very small country, and once you’ve visited its few places of interest, you’re just left with malls and restaurants.

Getting out of Qatar regularly is essential.

As a couple we became frequent travellers, and visited many beautiful and fascinating locations. I know, not very green. Airports became portals to other worlds, doorways into extraordinary experiences.

I loved everything about the journey, from researching a destination to travelling to the airport, even the flight. The arrivals process was always fascinating, your first small window on a new country. Then outside, the light fell differently, buildings spoke in new languages and all the details, roadsigns, shop fronts, places of worship fresh and new.

The bad times

Once I found myself alone, I decided to visit my son and booked a flight. His particular brand of happy is a joy to be around, and it’s always low key and relaxed with him.

At the airport, I experienced a new level of loneliness. This wasn’t one more level, it felt as though I crashed through all the way to the bottom. I was accustomed to travelling with someone at my side, but now all I could see was all the other couples who looked like we once did. It took me years to get past the sense of dread an airport caused me.

Looking back to look forward

The country I live in has changed. I left for Qatar in 2016, a few weeks before the first Trump presidency and a few months after the referendum that took the UK out of the EU. When I came home, the country had also endured the further seismic calamity of COVID.

The country I yearned for while I was away, was the country of my childhood. It was a time when the now empty fields were thronged with lapwing, when I would have found thrushes, yellowhammers and curlews everywhere. The dissonance I felt was partly because I had to experience the diminution of our natural environments as if on a reel fast forwarding into real time.

That older country was also a kinder, less savage place, much less polarised and with a settled idea of itself and its values. There was a greater degree of trust in institutions, the newspapers, churches, courts, even governments. Satire was biting but never merely cruel. It was no golden age, there was still discrimination and poverty and inequality, but we were making progress. Through the 1970’s, progressive legislation rolled back centuries of unfairness. Living standards were rising along with life expectancy.

Returning from Qatar brought the change that swept over us in the period between 2016 and 2020 into focus. And as I began to reckon with this new situation, my personal world spun away into a new orbit too.

All the walking away I have done since the time of my separation, the long tramps into the countryside without an aim, have over time allowed me to acquire perspective. I can now see though I was walking away from unhappiness, I was also walking toward something too.

Through the dark tunnel

Tomorrow is another country just as much as the past. In many ways it is far stranger, because the past is always there in our memories. The future, well, who knows?

I was talking to a new friend recently and I said to her that I felt like a light has been switched back on in the dark tunnel. Meaning I was beginning to imagine a future for myself that realistically was not lonely. To some extent this is mere extrapolation. I am not lonely now, so why would I think the future would be?

But the light also shone with a more generalised hope. Is it possible that all the traumas the world has recently been experiencing might lead somewhere better? Doesn’t a pendulum always swing the other way?

When the future seems bleak, it is the often past I yearn for. Coming home helped me see the past is never really lost. If I can remember, doesn’t that mean in a way, the past is still here? Maybe the past lives on the way the buried rivers of London do. In the dark, occasionally spilling from a culvert to puddle tarmac streets.

And without memory what are we to do?

Well, we can certainly make new memories, and these days I look forward to trips abroad, even when I’m alone. I have recovered the art of entering another world, and look forward to whatever it may teach or show. Increasingly I think of this as entering the 3rd Act of my life, a story which is now mine to write.

The desire to remember is, I realise, what draws me to poetry. Poetry is a memory encoding system, locking a few resonant words together to preserve a feeling, a moment, a time. When we read John Clare’s description of a field mouse, or a familiar pond, we not only see the world as he did, we share it.

And isn’t what we share that makes us who we are?

1. Art Work of the Week - Cicada by Seiju Omoda, 1930

   Sometimes the best things are very simple. A subdued palette and the tiny cicada resting on a stem. I love the contrast in the leaves, the paler, serrated edges and the gentle green inside. Omoda wrote: “Elements like coldness or the atmosphere of a frosty morning are difficult to express in a painting. We can only depict form, and by accumulating forms, we evoke feeling, sense, and atmosphere.” This is very like the way form works in poetry, which contains tracks in a snowy field.

2. An article that made me think - AI is not your friend by Mike Caufield

   As a poet and writer I am worried by the progress AI is making - is progress the right word? Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, consciousness, the ability to feel things, and Yuval Harari suggests we stop using the term Artificial Intelligence and instead refer to it as Alien Intelligence. In Caufield’s article, he discusses how the latest version of ChatGPT was designed to be better at guiding conversations toward productive outcomes but ended up being so excessively sycophantic the model had to be taken down. ChatGPT told one user their idea to sell ‘shit on a stick’ was ‘genius’. This exposes where the danger lies: instead of a means to review what others have said about an issue, it instead delivers an opinion. Caufield suggests a rule: no answers from nowhere.

3. Something I learned this week - New ways to pull uranium from water

   Nuclear energy is costly, not least because uranium must be mined. The world’s oceans hold an estimated 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium – more than 1000 times that available to mining – but it is extremely dilute. The ability to unlock something so powerful, but also potentially destructive reminds me of Nick Bostrom’s essay: Is there a black ball in the urn of possible inventions?

4. Something happy - The river running through my town

   I am lucky enough to live five minutes from the river running through my town. It means I can round off any day with a stroll along its banks. Right now, with spring so fully and abundantly on show, each time I stroll beside the river, all of my senses are engaged.

5. Where I found hope this week - How a simple walk can bust stress, boost cognition and fight diseases

   I try and walk every day, and find it has a lot of surprising benefits, so it was great to read that science back this up. However, there’s a fascinating wrinkle: the route you choose is also important. Maybe it’s time for another walk in the woods?

6. Something inspiring - Tales from the Camino

   My friend and colleague Andrew Olivier has written about his experience of walking the Camino. My friend Sarah has just returned from her own trip and looks healthy and happy. Like many other stories I’ve heard about the route, during the long walk towards Santiago, the sense of a spiritual dimension creeps up on you. A pilgrimage is always a walk to somewhere, not the walking away.

7. A poem to enjoy - Danse Russe by William Carlos Williams

   I love this poem. It made me think of times when I’ve danced a happy jig. The contrast between ‘I am lonely, lonely’ and ‘the happy genius of my household’ is delicious.

8. A Substack to savour - Sam Harris

   Sam is a public intellectual, one of the four horsemen behind the new atheism movement that started with their conversation in 2007. He is both an experienced mindfulness practitioner (he is behind the Waking Up app), having studied in Nepal and India for years, and a neuroscientist. He takes on controversial subjects, and while I don’t agree with everything he say, his podcast (Making Sense) and writing always make me think. Sam also offers both his podcast and meditation for free to anyone who can’t afford to pay.

9. Music I enjoyed this week - Summertime Blues by Zach Bryan

   I started watching Yellowstone on Netflix and stayed the course for two reasons. The landscape of Montana is rendered beautifully and I enjoy a little window on that world. The second is the music: I have never considered myself to be a Country and Western fan, but some of those tunes are just so good. I made a playlist of my favourites.

‘“Fathoms down, behind my eyes …’

Go on, she smiles. ‘Maybe it’s where

the me in me, survives.’”1

When you say yes to one thing, you say no to another.

There’s an opportunity cost involved in making choices, not least the time you commit you will never get back. But when I was at my loneliest, it was the opportunity itself that vanished. Each day looked the same, and many might pass without anyone to say a word to.

This was a world I found bewildering. I was in this unwelcome and unexpected situation, stuck in a town I didn’t know, and very alone. There was only cost, and I was paying dearly.

Loneliness is something you don’t choose, that is my experience. Choice is the main difference between loneliness and solitude. You can choose to exit solitude, but loneliness remains unbroken until circumstances change.

I didn’t understand this at first. Loneliness merged with all the other forms of emotional distress a sudden separation causes. If asked I would use words like ‘abandoned’ or ‘left’. But these are verbs, not nouns, and by focusing on those words I was emphasising the cause, not the effect.

It took weeks to fraction my pains into something clearer. Sadness engulfed me, but in the end, what was I sad about? The loss of a future seemed the best answer at first, though the future hasn’t happened yet. The future is only an idea, a dream, that’s all.

So that wasn’t the whole story.

Was it the loss of friendship, companionship, love? This seemed closer to the source. When I thought about friendship, companionship and love, I could see these were qualities weighted with the loss of a single, important relationship. I still had family and friends, even if none lived nearby.

The ache I felt included loss, but emptied of that single, important relationship, my life continued. I had not lost everything, I still had my health and the natural environments I walked into every day, the people who still liked or loved me.

Whatever I did, however, I was doing alone. There were questions:

Who was I staying fit and healthy for?

Who was there to listen to how my day had gone?

Who cared what I ate or drank?

Who knew if I made the bed, even got out of bed?

It took months for me to realise that loneliness was at the root of all my suffering. But once I understood this, there were remedies.

The stoic discipline of yes

Why stoic?

Because I first had to create the circumstances for saying yes.

If I stayed at home, hoarding my loneliness, ruminating about my spectacular bad luck, then tomorrow was already written. There would be no change in the pattern.

The first step involved becoming vulnerable, opening myself to the possibility of further rejection and humiliation. When my confidence is low, I find it hard to believe anyone could be interested in anything about me. It’s easier to stay at home and feel sad than to risk adding to the sum of woes.

This is a logical and spiritual dead end.

I reasoned this through. Just because I was alone today, didn’t mean there hadn’t been plenty of times in my life when I was anything but lonely. But if I was to change my circumstances, I therefore had to change what I was doing with my day.

This might sound entirely obvious. All I can say is that peering up at the world from the bottom of a very deep pit, none of it seemed straightforward. It took courage to clamber out and start trying. I felt vulnerable because the person I would become in this new life was to still to emerge. I was prior-me, not current-me, and the prior-me had been abandoned and felt sad. Rejected.

When I looked at the world through this rejected lens, I imagined everyone saw straight through me, as if the reasons (there are always reasons) for being alone were on show, that I would be judged.

Wearing a new suit

It helped to remember an old me, the work-me.

That me was there to be shot at as the CEO of several high profile public organisations. I learned over the years to accept the criticism, but that it was aimed at work-me, not the home-me. Both were present, but the home-me was protected by a suit of armour, the business suit I put on each day before leaving for the office. This dressing up symbolised the act of becoming work-me.

Over the years, ‘dressing for battle’ became a ritual. I left home wearing a shirt and jacket, and driving to work I prepared myself for the day ahead.

At the end of the day, the sequence reversed. The first thing I did at home was to take off my suit, and with it I learned to shed the worries and difficulties of the day.

Getting started

I started volunteering and joined a couple of local groups. The fact I was giving my time for free was welcomed.

Of course it was.

To get started, I didn’t exactly turn into work-me, but I prepared myself a shield. If I was not wanted then this would simply be a rejection of the part of me I volunteered. The mental dressing up trick allowed me to start building a new life in my community.

Congruence and authenticity

I’m no psychologist, but even I can see there’s a potential pitfall here. Who are all the me’s for a start? Surely they are all the same person. And if they’re not, aren’t I faking it, being less than authentically myself?

My answer is yes and no.

Yes, because as far as I can tell, I don’t have any serious mental pathology. I don’t think I have a split personality, and I understand these selves to be more like roles than separate personalities.

No, because I think circumstances change the way we are. If I am scared I’ll act a certain way, and this will probably not look like the same behaviour I show to the world when I’m happily among friends.

At the bottom of who I am, there are simply truths. These are my beliefs and values. It’s true that over time, these evolve, but at any moment, now for instance, I hold certain things to be true.

Beyond these truths, there are only circumstances. And circumstances change, as King Cnut will tell you.

1. Art work of the week - Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds, Martin Johnson Heade, 1871

   There’s a weird beauty to Heade’s painting, the colours so vivid, like a window into a new, brighter, even lurid world. I went for a walk along the river that runs through my town after a day trapped at my desk. I was feeling out of sorts and still ruminating about my day. Then after about 30 minutes I felt myself begin to calm and notice what was around me. It was early evening and I realised there were lots of butterflies, so I stopped, and tried to name them. They were peacocks, and the four little eyes on their wings made me think of this painting. Pale sunlight refracted through a kaleidoscope. Beautiful.

2. An article that made me think - Is this river alive? Robert Macfarlane on the lives, deaths and rights of our rivers

   What if the river that runs through my town is alive? The river Usk and the valley it runs has been home for me the last ten years. I often walk along the river banks taking in the quiet beauty. A traditional Welsh poem, Mi Gerddaf Gyda Thi, encapsulates the feeling I get when I’m fully absorbed:

   “I will walk with you across distant paths
   Flowers and dreams will bless our journey
   Into your eyes I will gaze and holding your hand
   I will walk with you whatever may come"

   The lines are often used at weddings, but I also feel profoundly paired with this river. Sadly, the Usk is now threatened by pollution, particularly overflows that discharge raw sewage into the river. I can’t help thinking McFarlane has a point. If we gave the river personality, saw it as alive, would we still treat it this way?

3. Something I learned this week - I live in a WEIRD society

   Happiness is surprisingly hard to measure. Reading this article, I discovered that social scientists define the society I live in as Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD). Never a truer word, eh? Still I was struck by one of the central conclusions:

   “In Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, the pursuit of happiness often takes center stage.”

   The pursuit of happiness, an entirely subjective perspective. Instead of pursuing happiness, why don’t we stay in the moment and look for contentment there?

4. Something happy - Sir David Attenborough is 99

   When I shared this article with a friend, they shot back a quick ‘Oh no!’ assuming he had died. No, he has not, thank goodness. Instead this article includes birthday wishes and reflection on the great man, everyone from Obama to Billie Eilish. Sir David has been a constant, wise and enthusiastic (for nature) presence all my life. Reading this article I was moved to tears. Truly, he is a hero.

5. Where I found hope this week - We’ve been thinking about love all wrong

   Suleika Jaooud writes about what illness taught her about true friendship. She tells the story of her own cancer journey and that of an older fellow cancer patient, Anjali, she met while undergoing chemotherapy. Present at Anjali’s death, she movingly describes the deep friendship they developed, and the grace she felt attending Anjali’s passing. She talks about ‘the radical power of seeing, understanding, and showing up for another human.’ She says the lesson she took was learning to ‘Be fully present, listen, give of yourself to another human.’

6. Something inspiring - Spring!

   We’ve been experiencing unusually settled weather in Usk. The days have been sunny and if not always warm, at least an invitation to get outside and walk. Everywhere I look spring is wildly in flow. The hawthorns are so heavy with blossom it looks like it snowed. On the river banks, wild flowers are doing their thing. Red clover and buttercups everywhere. The rich green grass sprinkled with jewels.

7. A poem to enjoy - Eulogy for the Cantina on Chapel St. that’s transformed into another bank by Kinsale Drake

   Poetry doesn’t have to be complicated. I love the misdirection in the poem’s title though, as the poem is actually set in a Taco Bell, the poet remembering her mother. The poetry is in the memory of another time, a reminder that time passes and we move forward until the end, eventually leaving those we love behind.

   ‘ … We are all here

   for the same reasons, aching toward

   what we desire most: a drunken gaze,

   shaking the winter from our hair,

   remembering a mother’s taco shells

   and refusing to wipe away the grease.’

8. A Substack to savour - Jane Hirshfield

   A poet I admire, Hirshfield’s articles are usually informative and open doors to poets I haven’t read. In her piece on the multiple crises we face right now she asks: How is it a few ink marks on a page, a few words that stay in memory to be drawn from, can feel like a well of clear water; sometimes, a life rope? We need handholds, ways to grip a sense of normality, norms we trust in, living as we do through these times of tumult. I’m looking forward to her next article which she says will discuss her belief in four qualities of feeling that I find seed-strengths in times of duress: tenderness, courage, humility, resilience.

9. Music I enjoyed this week - Three + by Four Tet

   When I’m working I like to have music playing in the background. Often this turns into aural wallpaper, and frankly I’m not listening. I started this way with Four Tet. But then I started to wake up to the rhythms in their music. Beats (rhythms) are why I also love the Endel app. The science behind the app’s manifesto is impressive. It seems sound has a profound impact on us, affecting basic physiological responses, like heart rate and blood pressure, as well as concentration, and sleep quality. Back to Four Tet: the track that fully captured my attention and made me listen properly to their music is Three Drums. There’s something elegiac about the track that’s hard to put my finger on, but like Wodwo, I’ll go on looking.

Think of a time when you woke up after a heavy fall of snow.

Maybe you're surprised when pulling back the curtains. The hedge at the end of the garden slumps into smooth new shapes. No paths, roofs along the street no longer tiled, the sky strangely luminous.

There's a new stillness emanating from the severe white scene. A crow flaps away sharpened, rows of graphic poles and wires slice into softness.

What is that feeling you have?

Childish excitement?

Awe?

Bewilderment?

Pleasure?

Putting on your boots, a coat and scarf you push open the door. Bird tracks scrawled across the vanished lawn. Steam rises from your mouth.

It is quiet.

A first step, a squeak of snow under your heel. In the street, tyre tracks, a touch of brown sludge. The air feels chilly as you climb over the fence at the edge of the field. The hill falls away toward trees in the wood. No one came this way today.

You are free to make your mark on the snowy field.

Writers on the edge of a snowy field

This is what it's like as a writer when you sit in front of an empty page. The whiteness is still, but there is a force in the void's severity you can feel. In your mind, you feel a pressure to write, to place some words on the page.

To make tracks.

After writing for a while, I stop and review what I've written. If you are a poet you begin looking for any signs of life. Is there an image you've stumbled across that animates what you're attempting to say?

An image which now lives in the field, among the tracks you've made. This image is alive in a way the other words are not: the image animates the words you strive to breathe into life.

Let’s call them image-creatures. Glyn Maxwell has another take on this, and he writes beautifully about the faum of a poem.

You continue this way for some time. You move backwards and forwards across the field.

Soon, there are a lot of tracks.

You decide to leave the field for the day. Tomorrow will come, and there may be a light dusting of snow. Then, you’ll see the shadow of all the tracks you've made, but you notice where you've trodden more carefully, more fully. There seems to be a pattern to these tracks, a certain uniformity of pacing or conviction.

These tracks lead somewhere, you're not sure where, not yet.

You're pleased to find one or more image-creatures have endured the night. Dusting the snow from their backs, they look back at you, searchingly. You have a feeling of tenderness towards them. They appear to want to help you find what you're looking for. So you approach them, examine the pelt on their back, their shape and size more carefully.

Encouraged, you press on, making tracks a little further down the field. You look back from time to time, and sometimes the image-creatures gesture to other shapes that until then you had neglected to see. They are sisters of the image-creatures and offer you further help.

Soon, you arrive at the edge of the wood and inside, a path leads to a glade. This feels like the place you needed to find. You spend some time looking around, assessing the qualities of this new place. After a while, you leave and return home.

The end of the beginning of a first draft

This is the end of the beginning of a first draft of a poem. In this phase, you have been exploring, looking for a destination and to discover what, if anything, is alive in that place.

When I was in the early stages of mourning for the relationship I had lost, I spent many hours crossing plenty of fields in the snow. Often, I never found the glade I was looking for and returned home, glad for the exercise but unsure if there was anything new that was alive.

From time to time, I found a place I was interested in, curious about. On the way there, I would find a few live image-creatures that seemed at home in that world.

The tracks in the field were a mess however, and with a heavy fall of snow, perhaps over the next week or weeks, the direction in which they led might be lost.

What I needed now was a map, clear directions and a way to remember both the way there and what I'd seen.

Building a map and directions and a way to remember them is the work the poet does to move the tracks of a first draft into a stable form.

There are new questions I ask myself now.

• Was I running across the field? Or was the way there circuitous and leisurely?

• Were the creature-images I found at home in a quiet, reflective environment, or something more disquieting, combustible or fragmentary?

• What was the light like in that field? Sunset, sunrise, grey and flat or piercingly blue?

• Was it windy with clouds flinging the shade around?

• Did this place feel surprising and unexpected, or did it feel familiar?

• How will I remember the way there?

• How will I invite other people to explore this space?

• And how will I help them remember the way?

These questions and more make up the work of editing the poem for memorability, stability and to ensure the image-creatures have somewhere they will feel at home.

Setting the way into memory

We have moved from exploration to setting the way into memory. Finding the right form for a poem is not always straightforward, and I will experiment with several potential habitats (forms) for the image-creatures. I'll listen for signs from the image-creatures about whether they feel happy and alive in any of them.

When I'm editing a poem at this stage in its journey to something (hopefully) memorable, I lean on the forms poets discovered over the centuries as they walked into their own snowy fields.

Any form is in a wrestling match with two elements in the poem. The snowy field and the tracks we make on the snowy field.

Some poems require more snow to be left untouched. Others long for fence posts and a sense of containment. We often need containment; the snowy field is one field within a vast universe of snow.

The vastness is not inert because it is endless. Anything that is endless is outside of a mortal realm. For us to grapple with infinity (death), we erect our corrals and our stables and our farmyards. In these confined spaces, we build something we can call home.

Using a strict form, one that has rules, (like a sonnet for instance), forces us to pay attention to the fences. If there are any rules in poetry, they are surely about writing memorably. Centuries of effort and craft have refined forms compatible with embedding poetry in the human heart.

Rhyme, rhythm and metre, stanza length, line breaks, among many more, are the poetic memorability codes poets learn to use.

Form and self-healing

In the depths of sadness and despair, I would walk out into those snowy fields regularly. Making tracks helped me to confirm I was still here, and to show, if only to myself at first, I was still interested in purpose and meaning.

There was a certain therapeutic value to this work, based simply on letting out whatever was there inside. I allowed all the hurt and confusion to lead me over the snowy field.

The real value of a poetry practice to me in the heat of my despair was when I started to make sense of the tracks I'd made by using form. Form enabled me to regulate the wild, emotional energy, partially confining or containing it. Then I was no longer overwhelmed, and it was easier to make sense of where the tracks lead, and what the glade in the wood meant.

Form helped me to distance myself from the power of the emotions I was feeling. The best way I can describe this is to compare this to Chernobyl.

The reactor cores melted and, from the shattered and broken reactor house, lethal radiation pours into the air. To approach it directly is dangerous, and likely to be toxic.

I must build a shield and then a container to approach the fire's source more safely.

Certainly, if I am inviting anyone else to approach the inferno, I have a responsibility to lead them to a room with a safe observation window.

Poetry, Purpose and Meaning

Writing poetry in the midst of despair or other distressing human condition, is partly about honouring what it means to be human. Being human means being in a relationship with time.

Some philosophers (e.g. Heidigger) believe that the source of all discontent and unhappiness is the awareness of our own mortaility. As we know our time is finite, they argue, any loss of purpose or meaning has an existential quality.

Writing poetry helps to derive meaning from our suffering. This is what all artists do, and poetry is no different. By reflecting on our discontents and translating the emotional and intellectual landscapes (snowy fields) into something beautiful and memorable, is meaningful and the attempt to do is purposeful.

There are stages in most lives when the purpose and meaning of a life can be questioned. In those moments, it can be useful to turn (or return) to a writing practice and walk out into the snowy field.

1. Art work of the week - High Noon in the Alps by Giovanni Segantini 1882.

Thanks as ever to Daily Art for sending me a painting every day. When I saw this one it struck a chord. It’s been weirdly hot in Usk (South Wales, UK), and it’s a reminder that we don’t get long spells of beuatiful weather here very often and that consequently our houses and way of life aren’t ideally suited to outdoor living. I’ve been out walking the hills every day, and the painting helped me to remember cool Alpine air and that extraordinary light you get at altitude.

2. An article that made me think - The people who feed America are going hungry

It’s not just tariffs and the flow of goods in and out of the USA that is dysfunctional. Many farmworkers in the U.S. struggle with food insecurity, facing rising food prices and low wages. Despite their crucial role in the agricultural industry, they often lack access to assistance programs and are largely overlooked in political discussions. Community initiatives like the Campesinos' Garden and the Pioneer Valley Wokers Center help support these workers, but more needs to be done to address their hunger and improve their conditions. An issue to watch.

3. Something I learned this week - Chimps like booze too

When a camera trap revealed chimps feasting and, most importantly, sharing fermented fruit, it shed a light on the human trope of breaking bread together. I love the idea that feasting is an instinct wired into our DNA. I've always believed story telling to be instinctual, and the latest neuroscience suggests this might be so. Our need for deep human bonds is hard-wired and alcohol and feasting it seems is just another facet of the same biology.

4. Something happy - sadness is not what it seems

The distinctly marvellous Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows notes that the word sadness 'originally meant fullness, to be filled to the brim with some intensity of experience. It's not about despair, or distraction, or controlling how you're supposed to feel, it's about awareness.' I'm not a monarchist at all, but I remember Queen Elizabeth said once, 'Grief is the price we pay for love.' Maybe if I'm sad it's only because I am full of love? And isn't that a good thing?

5. Where I found hope this week - The old pond full of flags and fenced around - John Clare (1793-1864)

I look forward to getting Carol Rumens's Poem of the Week from The Guardian and this week I got this delight from John Clare. The poem is like a painting. It gives us a window on another time, the ordinary marvels of a day when nature was abundant and people like Clare lived deeply embedded in familiar landscapes. I am a firm believer in the healing power of nature, and there's a pond in a wood near me I'm going to visit today after reading his poem.

6. Something inspiring - Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari

Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari, an indigenous campaigner and women's leader from the Peruvian Amazon was awarded the prestigious Goldman prize. “My grandparents taught me that there is a giant boa that lives in the river, Puragua, the ‘mother of the river’,”said Canaquiri. The spirit represents the health of the river and its personhood, according to the Kukama’s cosmovision. The question I'm left with, am I doing enough to protect the natural environment I live in?

7. A poem to enjoy - The Moon and the Yew Tree by Sylvia Plath

I am facinated by the long, long lives of yew trees, and there are several yew trees near me I visit often. Plath’s poem is marvelllous. It’s amazing to think that although we associate yew trees with churches, many of the old yew trees we see in church graveyards predate the building of even some of our most ancient churches.

8. A Substack to savour - After Babel - Jon Haidt

I’ve followed Jon’s work for years, since he published ‘What makes people vote Republican?’ in 2008. He also wrote The Happiness Hypothesis and that’s a book I go back to often. His Susbstack is focused on the harms of social media for young people in particluar. If you haven’t caught up with him lately, a good place to start might be ‘Snapchat is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale.’

9. Music I enjoyed this week - Miss Sarajevo, U2

I’ve been channeling U2 on my trips to Ledbury for the Poetry Festival. Miss Sarajevo (Live) is an epic song (Pavarotti sings on it) to listen to while driving home toward the hills where I live. It is also a reminder however, that today there is war in Europe.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this newsletter, why not share it with someone you like or, you know, subscribe?

In the days following the earthquake in my life, I felt lost. It was like I'd been reading a brilliant novel and was nearing the climax of the story, only to find the printer had somehow spliced it to another book, written in Lithuanian.

Nothing made any sense. The assumptions I’d made about my life were all wrong. I’d thought I was in control, but now I realised I was just along for the ride. What's more, someone had written a new and totally unfamiliar story for me, one I didn't understand and didn't want to understand.

The house was eerily silent. As I have suggested, this was one of the most difficult aspects of my new situation.

That first morning, the morning after, I woke up and came downstairs. The silence was oppressive and so I put my boots on and left. I didn't have a plan, just a desire to get out of the house. I let my boots guide me, and they took me along a path to the woods and the hills beyond. As I walked, the rhythm of foot on ground calmed me. Slowly, birdsong in the trees became more present. I felt a breeze on my face, noticed the trees newly in leaf, the vibrant green that had suddenly squeezed into existence.

The only choice I made was lacing my boots and opening the door. Whether I turned left or right was unimportant, I released the urge to plan. I didn’t know if I would be gone for an hour or an entire day, and I didn’t care.

This was the first day of a new habit. Every morning, whatever the weather, I set off for the hills. Over days and then weeks, the hurt I carried each day began quietly to discharge. The pain was still there, and each day I woke with the same ache, but I found I could bear it if I took myself outside under an open sky.

Thinking ahead made no sense anymore. All I could do was walk into the day and see where it lead.

Reflections and eclipses

There were two ways my walking practice rescued me.

The first was loosening any attempt to control. Yes, it was up to me if I went outside and walked. But, with no one at home, I could walk as long as I needed. Clock time, that sometimes invasive time associated with deadlines, responsibilities, and commitments suddenly had less power.

Time changed. The future I assumed was mine lost, like the lights of a boat at sea suddenly gone dark. Had the boat sunk, or just sailed round an obscure headland? I didn't know. Time drastically truncated, the future made sense now only in minutes or hours, not years.

Walking in nature also connected me to my childhood. Growing up in the sixties was to live in a different age, one without mobile phones, much less traffic on the roads, more abundant nature. As a child, I left home after breakfast, met my friends and simply disappeared from the adult world. The smell of mud on my hands, the must of fallen leaves, the dank wood’s green shade.

I wasn't living in the past as I walked. Rather I seemed to have joined an earlier self. From the perspective of this other self, the future remained wide open. Here was an old friend returned from decades in another land. Together, in companionable silence, we experienced the landscape anew.

This was a journey back to who I am. The child that turned into the man, a man who had reached a fork in the path, uncertain which way to turn. A man who had travelled a long way since he’d been the boy.

When so much of my identity, my happiness had become entwined with the person I loved deeply, it was as if I’d been subsumed, integrated into the idea of us. Like a partial eclipse of the sun. Behind the moon, the woman I loved, my corona still burned, the flares and fires of the person I was pior to falling in love.

But now there was no moon, no second, more beautiful world to gaze on. Everything instead lit by just the stark and unforgiving light of who I’d become. Like the sun, its core was impossible to penetrate.

What made this brilliant fire burn? What intense energy ensured its daily rise and fall? I no longer knew, but each morning still came, welcome or not.

Nature in my nature

The second lesson was the discovery, nature is in my nature.

I love the work of Forrest Gander, the poet, and one collection became a reference point for me, a source of strength. Gander wrote Twice Alive in the shade of the death of his much cherished wife, C.D. Wright.

Gander’s collection responds to an ancient poetic tradition, the poetics of the Sangam poets. We classify early Tamil poetry, known as Sangam (300 BCE - 300 CE), into interior (Akam) and exterior (Puram) themes. Gander chose Akam as a framework for his collection, based as it is on personal emotions and love.

What spoke to me was learning how the Sangam poets believed the poet was always engaged in an intimate exchange with the landscape. The various forms of landscape (sea, forest, wilderness, mountains) to the Sangam poets had their own unique characters. The poet was not merely a passive observer of the landscape, but responsive to it. In turn the landscape reflected the poet’s interior landscape.

As usual, I set off on a walk one day, allowing my feet to lead the way. Absorbed in Twice Alive, I thought I would open myself to the landscape, to see if there was anything the wood might share with me.

I admit I was lost in my thoughts that day. When I came to, I found I was also lost in the wood. I had no idea where I was or how I had got there. It was getting late, so I made my way downhill and came to a clearing. There in front of me I could see a small lake. I walked to the shore and noticed in the middle of the lake was an island. On the island, a lone larch stood tall.

I was stunned. The wood led me here, to this solitary tree, isolated on an island, lost in the wood. Deep within me, and then all around me, I felt something swelling, a powerful sense of infinite goodwill, the feeling of belonging, an idea of home.

The wood seemed to recognise me, as though it had chosen to reflect in this clearing, a version of my suffering. As I looked at the larch, I noticed it grew strongly, and was in its prime. The wood surrounded this lone larch. I realised the tree wasn't really alone. I imagined roots under the lake spreading out, winding into the fabric of the forest beyond. I burst into tears with a mixture of relief and gratitude.

From that day on, my walks became more intentional. My walking now involves listening for the whispering of landscape.

Sol-ar, Sol-itude, Sol-ace

Nature is various, never a single thing, many things.

And yet, nature has the power to heal, to allow you to see yourself and all your troubles as they are, and then as part of a larger whole. After my time here on earth, the wood will carry on being the wood. The sky will empty of rain, the sun will rise and set.

It is in my nature to find comfort in the rhythm of my feet touching a path in the woods, to witness the regular arc of a day, the sun’s rise and fall. It helps me to move beyond solitude, to be at one with the natural world.

1. Art work of the week - Man Reading by John Singer Sergeant

   I subscribe to Daily Art on my phone, and it’s great because every day the app serves up a new painting with some notes. Today I found Man Reading by John Singer Sergeant waiting for me. It’s thought to be a portait of Nicola d’Inverno, Sergeant’s factotum (fancy name for man servant). He looks lost in the book he’s reading, which seems like it’s been through many previous readers judging by it’s tattered pages. Books are better than movies, right? Unlike movies, books require active imagination.

2. An article that made me think - Reframing the narrative - why art and creativity matter in a time of crisis

   During times of crisis, like those faced by medieval Venice, art can play a vital role in fostering community resilience and political imagination. The Venetian government invested in public art projects to reassure citizens and navigate instability, blending sacred and secular themes. These artistic initiatives helped redefine leadership and civic responsibility, influencing modern concepts of governance. I thought this aricle by Stefania Gerevini was timely.

3. Something I learned this week - Football as metaphor for life’s struggles

   Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that. - Bill Shankly

   Watching Manchester United v Lyon last week, an extraordinary game, took me through the full range of emotions. From tentative hope (1-0 to United), to surprised confidence (2-0), back to anxiety (2-1) and on to depression (2-2), despair (2-3) and finally numbness (2-4). Then came a flicker of hope (3-4), rising belief (4-4) and then utter ecstacy (5-4). Reflecting on it later made me think of Christopher Hill’s brilliant book about the survival of radical ideas in the face of their seeming utter defeat in 17th Century England. Hill’s book is about the execution of Charles I and the brief decade long republic that ended with Charles II acending the throne. After the monarchy was restored, many radicals were rounded up and executed - total defeat. For those that were left as they tried to keep their ideas alive, one of the points Hill makes is the importance of hope. John Milton’s poetry (especially Paradise Regained was important to them). An injection of hope is what happened when the score went from 2-4 to 3-4. You could hear how it sparked in the crowd. Hope gave the players renewed belief, and from that point they became unstoppable. You can watch the highlights of the game here.

4. Something happy - My daughter’s on a solo trip to Peru

   My daughter set off on a trip to Peru, and will be doing two treks while there. I’m a bit anxious (I’m her dad!), but I could not be more proud of her. Both my kids are an on-going source of happiness to me. She is sending me more or less daily reports and pictures of her trip and each one is a little reservoir of happiness. The evidence for family bonds as a source of happiness across the stages of our lives is very strong.

5. Where I found hope this week - Swearing and honesty are related

   I’m not a big swearer (curser) but I do find (in the right context) there is sometimes nothing better to be said. I was intrigued to find that it appears there is evidence of a link between profanity and honesty. The researchers concluded this was due to the fact swearing created a greater sense of authenticity. I think it’s likely that people who are authentically themselves are also happer people.

6. Something inspiring - Cherry Blossom

   It’s the time of year when cherry blossom drapes flowers in the trees along our road. It reminded me of A.E. Housman’s book A Shropshire Lad and the lovliest of trees. I used to live in the blue remembred hills of Shropshire myself and I miss the gentle beauty of its landscape. Cherry blossom is one of life’s fleeting pleasures, here and gone. A reminder to open our eyes and see.

7. A poem to enjoy - Ode to a Yellow Onion by C. Dale Young

   I love the way this poem begins:

   And what if I had simply passed you by,
   your false skins gathering light in a basket,
   those skins of unpolished copper,
   would you have lived more greatly?

   A question is a good way to start any poem. I think it’s because the poet sounds like they’re not completely sure, so they are going to begin with uncertainty. A poem that’s too sure of itself maybe something of a contradiction. A poem is by defintion trying to put something unsayable into words, and can communicate before it is understood.

8. A Substack to savour - Silly Games to Save the World by Glyn Maxwell

   I’ve been a reader on Substack for a long time. It’s the best place I’ve found for thoughtful writing that speaks to me. My friend and mentor, the great poet Glyn Maxwell has a Substack called Silly Games to Save the World. He grapples with creativity, poetry and the uses of poetry with a dry wit. I always enjoy reading whatever he has to say.

Silly Games to Save the World

Politics, Philosophy, Poetry, and Silly Games - new ways to wonder WTF just happened

By glynmaxwell@gmail.com

9. Music I enoyed this week - Wild God by Nick Cave

   I don’t seem to able to stop listening to this album Wild God by Nick Cave. I particularly love Cinnamon Horses - ‘The Cinnamon horses in the terprentine trees’ is such a beautiful image. It takes my mind into a strange, imaginary landscape. I see a stunted wood leading out to a cliff facing a blue sea, a stiff wind and the taste of ozone.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this newsletter why not share it with someone you like or, you know, subscribe?

‘One should always have one's boots on and be ready to leave,' Montaigne, the 17th Century French philosopher said as he lay dying. At least that's what we are told. More reliably perhaps, he also wrote: 'A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.' No one knows what life has in store for us just around the corner and when my wife without warning left me in 2020, my entire world shattered. I had worked for nearly forty years in healthcare, the last twenty years of them at board level. I was exhausted and looking forward to being absorbed in nature, long walks, bird watching and re-wilding a little piece of our own land.

Because of an accident of timing, we had recently moved into a house in a town we didn't know as a stop gap 'home' for our children before I finished my working journey in Qatar. Suddenly alone, I realised this was my first experience of living entirely by myself since I left for university fully forty years previously. I knew no one in the town.

The designed-in loneliness of senior leadership of any large and complex organisation exacerbated my isolation. Over the years I had given to my work, I had once or twice found friendship with people in my organisation, only to be betrayed by them when they attempted to leverage our friendship for their own ends. I had also neglected to build a network of close friends, finding everything I needed with the person I loved. Later, I realised there were other reasons for this failure to find friendship. I will discuss why I think this happened to me in another post.

The first morning was hard. We lived in a noisy house, full of music and conversation, so the silence was devastating. I turned the radio on in every room and for days, I avoided the looming quiet as far as I could. I felt irrevocably lost. Everything I had worked toward, all my dreams, the imagined future, all gone. What remained was just a series of silent and empty rooms. It was hard telling my children what happened. In the conversations with them, I was honest about what I felt, but also reassuring. I didn't want them to worry I might jump off the deep end.

Okay, so why am I writing this stuff down and why am I sharing it here?

I am not looking for sympathy. These days I am happy and life is again full of purpose and meaning. The idea I have is to talk about moving past loneliness. I learnt more about myself in these last years than perhaps I ever have, and I discovered aspects of myself that had lain dormant for far too long. I learned how to heal the wound in my heart, a wound that literally changed the shape of my heart. Takotsubo (or Broken Heart) Syndrome, occurs when grief turns the round heart into a rugby ball, so it pumps less efficiently. Who knew?

There is an important difference between loneliness and solitude. Today, when I'm at home by myself (I spend most of my time this way), I don't feel lonely anymore, and I experience aloneness primarily as solitude. Maybe that's because solitude is voluntary in a way that loneliness isn't. I can choose to step away from solitude any time I want, having built new friendship communities. I will admit this wasn't easy, and I will discuss some lessons I learnt about re-building my world as I struggled to rise from the canvas.

I call this newsletter 'Beyond Solitude' because if there is no path out of solitude, that's just loneliness by another name. I am now in my sixties, which still seems strange to say. I don't feel old, but increasingly I feel there is a benefit in the weight of lived experience I carry. Is this experience a burden? Sometimes, yes, but it also is a source of fuel for the next chapter in my life. And that is the most extraordinary aspect of what I have discovered through all the tears and suffering. Not only does life go on, it can also be better than ever.

In Jim Collins' book 'Good to Great', he discusses the Stockdale Paradox. Admiral James Stockdale was the highest ranking prisoner of war in the 'Hanoi Hilton' in Vietnam. His captors tortured him over twenty times during his eight-year incarceration. The conditions were terrible, with no rights, no release date and no certainty he would ever see his family again. Many of his compatriots died. On his release, he returned to the United States and resumed his life, powerfully and fully. Many were astonished that he could live so fully, apparently without rancour, rage or anguish of any kind.

People asked him two questions. How did you survive and why did others succumb?

To keep himself alive, he said he held onto two contradictory statements with equal conviction the entire time. The first was to accept life currently could not be worse. There was no point wishing it away, it just had to be endured.

The second thought was this: one day his life would be better than ever. The answer to the second question, Stockdale replied, was simple. It was all the optimists who died. “The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Stockdale told Collins this: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

Beyond Solitude is about discovering it is possible to run a life while holding onto to this duality. I also want to write about another truism: it is never too late. And because this is true therefore, life for me continues to expand and open with opportunity, meaning, and purpose.

You might call it a late flowering or even a 3rd Act. What I believe is that living Beyond Solitude must involve writing a new chapter in your life, taking everything you have learnt or experienced and then finding something new to explore. This might be a wholly internal journey, or it could be an outward facing path that explores the boundary, or both.

What matters is putting down the fear, lacing up your boots and beginning again.

Listen to the audio

.