Filling a glass with cold water, I sneak a look outside and am met by the face of the moon.

To keep things in perspective, begin your morning by washing a newt who's covered in carpet fibres after slogging across the expanses of the living room.

After nine days in a different world, my old life feels like a coat with too-short-sleeves.

Process

After a week of painful wrestling with death, sex and impermanence, I walk into the garden and see a bumblebee, hear birdsong.

frilled daffodils sing yellow even when nobody's there

Morning service

Dharmavidya and the blackbird bow together.

Door open wide onto the garden, she yells: Zen! Zen! and the leonine black cat with a wisp of smoke at his neck steals back into the house.

In the shrine room

Above the licking golden flame
a column of shivering air.

1000 nembutsu

in the thick of a swarm of friendly bees

Group process

She wraps herself in red: a casualty of letting in love.

glass noodles: a roiling seething mass of creatures trawled from the depths of the sea

sunlight on the wingnut leaves, the peacock whorl, the golden Buddha's face

Journey to Amida with Helen

Three and a half hours of driving telescopes to no time at all.

remains

hot cross bun crumbs, trickle of scarlet cranberry

the sun returns, as we always knew it would

'the octopuss', not quite in time with the music

I grow impatient with men who's bodies won't do what they want them to do

in the art class

bright tangerine chalky pastel crumbles into bright tangerine dust

Draped silver scarf: lit up in a million places by this late and welcomed spring sun.

Safe salsa

He holds the tension in his hands and moves me where I need to go.

...the morning air is gravid with almost-rain...

sometimes even ice-cream doesn't help

finally, scraps
of gold and purple
begin to appear
in rings around
the trees

For the woodpecker, the dry rattle of peanuts sliding into the metal feeder. Over the fields, fire-crackers from the barracks.

On the walk to the pub: naming a chaffinch, splintered hedge-tops, other people's big houses, fields and horizon opening up, a clutch of snowdrops, noisy sparrows, friendlove.

salsa party

his odour circles his body like a warning

I make a decision to eat much more than I want.

Fatty watches the birds

A jaggedy cat-shaped shadow on the curtain.

The shock of the red on the tissue brings my head between knees.
This is the stuff inside that keeps us alive.

Salsa night

Rather than seeing him as a terrible dancer, I see him as a challenge. Can I make him look good?

splash!