Assisted suicide: a Valentine’s Day poem about love

  No need to load the bullet Or knot the rope I’m gone already If I found knowing, then what is this? What ignorance, tormented If I found life, then what is this? What else did I find? The room and the keys A vision of what will, what could Be But everyone sang In …

The Beautiful Risk: Self-other encounter

One of the best descriptions of relational encounter you will read, by therapist James H. Olthuis, in The Beautiful Risk: So when time and again—no matter what I throw at you or how I test you, no matter how I attack or pull back or digress—you continue to announce your availability without defense or without …

The babble recedes: Some general theories on love

Whether or not we all share the impulse to connect with another human being to the same degree, there can be no denying we all recognise it when it happens. Whether we are searching for it or whether we are satisfied to live without it, we know beyond any doubt when that strange something has …

Release the Bats

If you fail at basketball, you fail at basketball. If you fail at literature you risk failing as a person, because your full matrix of being is at work in it — DBC Pierre, Release the Bats

In love with love: Encounter with Pauline Gatto

It's too easy for me to forget that love is a force and not so much a feeling; a way of knowing, and not so much about the object of that knowing; and not really a glitch in the matrix as much as the mechanism that destroys it and offers us a fuller life. That's …

Remembering Gracetown: How life looks from the ‘outside’

To this day I am fearful of cliffs and rugged west coast beaches because of what happened at Huzzas in Gracetown, Western Australia, on Friday, September 27, 1996. Twenty-two years ago.  After days of rain, the limestone overhang beneath which surfers had sheltered for years before heading out to the surf breaks at Huzzas or …

Where love is, there is meaning: Jared’s final words on hope

The other day I posted some of Jared Noel's reflections on the meaningless of suffering, and how the realisation of that helped him to face five years of a terminal illness. This snippet is the second part of that reflection, in which he goes on to talk about love and hope. Unless we go there, …

Tear down the walls? No, transform them

Some unpublished thoughts on outsidedness, differentiation, and the transformative power of encountering the other The most dramatic event in the life of my childhood church was the day someone fired a gun during the Breaking of Bread service and almost killed old Mr Foster. Mr Foster, who was famous throughout the north-west of England for …