"Firstly to cook for the Baba Yaga, (the forest witch) one lays a fire- a woman must be willing to burn hot, burn with passion, burn with words, with ideas, with desire for whatever it is she truly loves. It is actually this passion that causes the cooking, and a woman's original ideas of substance are what is cooked. To cook for the . . .
Even in summer there is darkness at times
The summer light has it's moments. This year summer in Ireland has been a beauty. Sometimes later in the evening there are long shadows of delightful darkness. Darkness and light. As my year's leave moves into the final quarter I need to decide whether to return to my busy day job or settle into a less secure full time role . . .
Dreamy summer
These dreamy days. The scent of meadowsweet. Foxgloves swaying in the summer breeze. Everything a tangle of lush green. I am following a whim to return to this special space. This small window on the larger world. Peace is always only temporary. But that's where things are at for now. There are daisies, there are blackbirds. There are . . .
A secret
Today I am letting you into a secret. I want to take a break from the internet. I have no idea how to do it, but it feels like a good idea. I've been blogging weekly for 6 years now. It's a fantastic discipline and has taught me a lot about just getting on and doing it. I never thought it would be possible to get over the shyness, the . . .
Unfurling in their own time
I hear myself saying- I don't know what I'm doing. And there's a freedom in that. I say it, often in the most inappropriate places, only to discover that I'm talking to myself. This phrase soothes me, puts me back on the ground, drags up my humility. Humility which is sometimes in the clutches of . . .
Be your own sanctuary
"To be a contemplative is to learn to trust deep time and to learn how to rest there and not be wrapped up in chronological time. Because what you’ve learned, especially by my age, is that all of it passes away. The things that you’re so impassioned about when you’re 22 or 42 don’t even mean anything anymore, and yet, you got so . . .
Savouring every moment
I started a one year sabbatical from my job of over 20 years in January this year. For the first couple of months I struggled with a bout of shingles and every other damn thing you could imagine. I even managed to fall flat on my face twice. For the first time since I was 10, I have two scabby knees and could enter any bruise comparison contest . . .
Interacting with art at the Tate
I spent two days absorbing the art at Tate Modern and Tate Britain the other week. The retrospective of David Hockney was a treat. I don't think I had ever seen an exhibition of his before. But those pictures were in all the books we read during my art college years. It was like re-visiting very old friends. On the south terrace of . . .
Reclaiming feminism
I was talking with an old friend, some one who has been around the block with me over the years. As with most women of a certain age, we got to the heart of the matter pretty quickly. I realised that for more than 20 years I have been inside the kind of job that steals your voice. Now I have loved this job, . . .
Using your voice
Last year the Editor of the News and Star invited me to write a guest column for this paper. She found me, because I blog away quietly every week on a site called Foxglove Lane (foxglovelane.com) As what she was asking seemed to be a one-off adventure, I wrote about some of my passions; creativity, imagination and happiness. Within a . . .
