On marmalade making and leaving the church.

I am publishing January's Upstream a little earlier in line with the Solstice. Your next installment will arrive in early February. May I use this opportunity to thank you for supporting this writing venture, it means so much to me. Have a wonderful Christmas. There is no darker point of the year than the new […]

Sometimes, the river of our life disappears underground for long periods of time. As I return to novel writing after more than a decade, I am learning so much from the carboniferous limestone on which I live. May these stories remind you of the generosity of water.

Growing up in Northern Ireland, Halloween was seen by many as the glorification of evil. Come, let's probe the darkness for the sacred roots of this season and find meaningful ways to pause on this threshold.

Be careful, there are owls on the loose in this text...

At the hinge of the Celtic new year, I walk the boreen through hazel woodland and prepare to winter in the west.

Some parting thoughts as we hand our holding over to new tenants and begin our migration west.

If we look beneath the main text of our lives, we can find the subtext of small stories. They are the rituals that are hard to put into words because they become so integral to the fabric of our life that we hardly notice them. Here, I tell some of these small stories and a few that I have borrowed from dear friends in my community.

How the ripples of a revolution that began seven years ago will deliver us to the west of Ireland and how I will hear the silence I find there.

Robert walks his dog at night and strays from the path; Stephanie makes a decision from which she cannot return and Sebastián finds something he did not know he lacked. Three strangers, one dog and a campsite where people cross paths but do not know one another at all.

Notes from the road as we travel from the Cantabrian coast to the Glacial Cirques of Urbion to a National Park on the Mediterranean.