Culture Articles
Fish tank
In an instant, every inch of existence lapsed. Small and infinite, my eyes gasped, sightless, nerves snipped, no sound passed through me. As if some greater one had tapped the glass, my being blinked. My self, more than my element, lacked notion, was a stillness beyond any sense of motion ...
Our ghosts, our machines
The objective was programmed into the machine without preferences: Cross, Skull Hill. Nails. Gethsemane was a divergence under stars, a tinge of unsmelt olive. The weeping friends were surplus. The kiss, unfelt, barely fulfilled its intended direction. The cross was not particularly heavy. Sacrifice seemed an inelegant equation.
Our ghosts, our machines
The objective was programmed into the machine without preferences: Cross, Skull Hill. Nails. Gethsemane was a divergence under stars, a tinge of unsmelt olive. The weeping friends were surplus. The kiss, unfelt, barely fulfilled its intended direction. The cross was not particularly heavy. Sacrifice seemed an inelegant equation.
Earth’s Voices: Messages for our times from nature’s guardians, by Laura Newbury
As an art student, Laura Newbury tried to capture the beauty of nature around the River Nairn, in northern Scotland. Thirty years or so later she returned to the moors and began to converse with the ‘nature guardian’ of the area. She calls this guardian a deva: Immortelle, an angel...
Brought to book: Kate Macdonald on Elfrida Vipont and The Lark on the Wing
In the 1970s, when I was reading my way through Aberdeen Children’s Library, I discovered an old novel from the late 1940s. It was about a girl who decides she wants to be a singer, and all the characters wete Quakers. I had never heard of Quakers, but I...
4am
A pencil of light pokes its way between the curtains. Plays upon your eyelids. You wake. Slowly your mind unscrambles. Your body moves stiffly towards the morning. Time future, past, present assemble. A choreography of space unfolds. A woodpigeon sings on a tree, somewhere. The patterns of yesterday’s fears...
Halewid
In a well slept morning sing senses from the first flush in lush language of birdsong, the choral chorus greeting the hāliġ(1) hour. Follow the sky’s creased curves of sunrise, its night rain pools puddle down the ground.
Neoliberal Religion: Faith and power in the twenty-first century, by Mathew Guest
As a Quaker pacifist, I’ve been shocked by the militarism of some Anglican spaces and ceremonies. Here in Durham, one sometimes encounters solemn processions inside the cathedral, led not by a bishop with a crook, but by a man carrying a large sword, just like Penny Mordaunt in the...
Chapel statue
Here on a cool, curled, college wall I stand between my fellows and above the world, a still stone figure on a pedestal, with a curved, carved canopy sheltering my head. Though lifted aloft from the earth, I am ...
Cherubims: Poems, by Edward Clarke
If you’ve ever sighed with relief when the children leave Meeting and go their own fidgety, smirking way, then shame on us all. Take a look at what we’re missing. Edward Clarke is happy running the Children’s Meeting, even when the kids are having tantrums, or interrupting...