Journey of the Heart

I’ve suffered, for many years, with a sunlight deficiency condition… It leaves me fatigued and prone to depression – especially during the winter months.  This poem visits some of my feelings at the turning of the year from Summer to Autumn and Winter, my resolve to embrace the seasons and to impute sunshine and warmth to my life, even during the heart of the Dark. Harvest As the days shrink and the nights invade the space where they should be, I will reach back to the heart of Summer and bring, cradled in my heart, a single Solstice Sunbeam. I will grow it, nurture it, feed it with candles and fragrant oils from tropical flowers, Yoga-stretch it and clothe it in colour until, in the depths of Winter’s ink-black gaze, I reach my arms wide, laugh aloud and with the power of equatorial days, blaze; my spirit bright, defy the night and with Spring in my heart and Summer in my belly, remove the season’s bushel and shin...

This poem is about life and death, exhilaration and depression… I wrote it quite a few years ago and it is, in many ways, a sort of autobiography. A reflection of how, if I stop and listen, I hear the sound of Time, marching... And it is my own footsteps I hear, echoing through the years, from physical birth to physical death, my own footsteps, carving out new roads, new journeys, across my soul. Photography by Katerina Plotnikova I’ve written happier - ecstatic, celebratory - poems about this journey and these ‘deep’ moments. “Quicksand”, however, represents the no less valid times when the darkness descends and all I can do is listen to the footsteps, and try to keep on breathing, when to struggle is to sink and I just have to hope that my feet will find solid ground before the quicksand swallows me completely. We all have out own versions of quicksand in our lives. This quicksand, too, is a part of the journey to be embraced and valued. These times are pr...