Arts Articles
After God
Get real, raven, on your highest perch – winter sun can catch your beak yet, O, silhouette on the empty sky. Larch has lost her colour now. Cattle hold their peace. Lichen prospers on the ancient cherry.
‘Perhaps textile art can be a form of prophecy?’
It can be difficult to engage deeply with environmental challenges. But if our faith has real value, it should help us to address challenges like these, and guide us in our actions. The Loving Earth Project (LEP) aims to help people address some of the challenges of environmental breakdown without...
‘In the fullness of the Spirit there is room for all forms of creativity.’
For nearly thirty years I have had the privilege of making music with people in day centres, mental health hostels, hospitals, residential homes and prisons. I have been witness to the power of music to overcome disability, like the Parkinson’s sufferer putting a tambourine on his shaking leg and...
The Christmas ghosts
In the keenest of winter-black air I hear them march up East and Manor Streets: Basil with his barrow cock-eyed over sliced up tree stumps; Megan, a gin glass tipped across her breast; balding Bertrand haughty in his black hat tilted to the sweep ...
Yud, Hay, Vav, Hay
Jackdaw, take your turn – ravens are breaking bread before you, under the ministering eye of morning’s winter moon.
A Quaker Woman Sends a Christmas Card to a President
This woman burns a mouse-bitten pinch of wax that passes for a candle, as she focuses the diamond of her mind on Donald.
Why I Wear Your Socks Today
I wear your socks today so that I can see more deeply into the old woman ahead of me in the post office. She is ashamed to be so slow. She says sorry, sorry to the queue as she shakes in her girlish jeans. I repeat the words you taught...
‘There is no audience quite like a prison audience.’
October was Domestic Violence Awareness Month and those who noticed were encouraged to wear purple to show their support. I have to ask, who actually did know? At Journeymen Theatre, as we engage with audiences all over the UK, performing our play on domestic abuse Rock And A Hard Place,...
Poem: A Friend reads Psalm 139 in Meeting
I sit in a different seat today. Cutting it fine, Friends slip in, join the deepening stillness. The crunch of tyres on gravel, a door-tongue carefully released, the known slow tap of ferrule on floorboard: the small sounds stir the silence which settles again, as water over a pebble or...
Silent school
Three high windows deliver the movement of summer trees and light on a central table, water jug, vase, flowers, books.