The World that God Made

This book, by Jan Godfrey and illustrated by Peter Adderley, is essentially a child-friendly paraphrase of Genesis chapter 1 (albeit with better or at least more colourful pictures than most Bibles). I've recently moved back into my family home and was surprised to see it's still here, and read it in two minutes out of pure nostalgia. It's alright I guess, for its target audience, and if compared to similar books long-sat upon the same stretch of shelf it sticks to the gist without trying too hard to indoctrinate small children into anti-science views, so I can't really decry it too much.

The Warmaster

This book, the fourteenth of the Gaunt's Ghosts novels by Dan Abnett,* more than lived up to the high-bar expectations set by its predecessors. Dark and grim as are all stories told in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the characters are as well-fleshed-out as ever and the stakes for our beloved Tanith First regiment have seldom been higher - Chaos-worshippers and Imperial stalwarts alike screwing together a tightly-driven plot that is as deft as it is unpredictable. My one gripe is that it ends on a gigantic cliffhanger which by dint of my now having finished this one compels me tomorrow to visit my local Games Workshop to get a copy of the next instalment.

* A writer who has never failed to entertain me. I will tell this tangential story here cos I may as well own it (even though in past years it has been a fact I've tried not particularly hard to share with friends or acquaintances); when I was a teenager I loved this series of novels to such an extent that when faced with the medically-informed possibility of death and offered something along the lines of Make A Wish Before You Pop It my chosen dream-fulfilment was to attend Games Day, meeting there not only the creative teams behind my much-loved armies (orks & tyranids, go hard or go back to Terra) but also had lunch with Dan and was privileged to talk at length with him about the writers' life, inspiration, and just how damn good of a universe to write in/about 40k is. He was incredibly kind & accommodating to this morbid nerdy adolescent - and though I didn't realise it directly at the time, inspired me lots to simply write. So if you're reading this, Warmaster - thanks, and expect a solid mention in the acknowledgements if I ever get my own novel finished.

Tao Te Ching

This book* is a collection of eighty-one short poem-chapters about life, the universe, and everything. Purportedly written by Lao-Tzu, who himself may or may not have been a real dude (although if he was real he was definitely a dude), it is an extremely ancient text and forms the basis of the philosophy-religion known as Taoism, which was of immensely influential stature in the development of much Chinese culture and thought.

   This is the first time any of the books I've reviewed on here has actually been any core religious texts, and I'm not sure how I feel about that, but it clearly hasn't stopped my try to write some kind of thunk. Maybe not? So much could be said that would be pointless in this case. You should read this whole book and maybe meditate for five minutes after each chapter - they're only very short. You could read the whole thing in an hour. But you might never understand what it was talking about unless you are already open to the Tao; that is the essentially mysterious ridiculousness of what I am currently doing, an endeavor to "explain" what this book is "about"...

   Let me just say this: having read and pondered this book,** I do no longer in full or clear conscience think I can consider myself to be, in the religious sense, *only* Christian, but that I must be at least somewhat a Taoist also, and further that if any readers of this are confused or enraged by this heretical presupposition - I would suggest it is because your mental faculties are too familiar with the ways of errant human civilization above the Tao which is the eternal Way of Nature, under and above all, compatible with and containing of all, the fundamental explanation and essence of what is***: how do I know? Like this!

* That link leads to a website which supplies seven different translations of the whole text - although the one I read was Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo's translation. Given the nature of ancient Chinese's linguistic differences to English, and the consistent levels of ambiguity present in the poetic-philosophic text itself, the perfect translation has been elusive, even though this little book is the world's second-most-translated text in history after the Bible.

** I must admit also that initially when I started reading this I found its sheer evasiveness offputting, and ran away to get a beginner's introduction to the underlying philosophy in the manner of examples with A. A. Milne characters, and frankly I'm glad I did, it really helped, and I was able to approach this text with a deeper appreciation of the gists which underlied and animated the nuanced flow of the book itself.

*** If you're "so Christian" that Lao Tzu and Winnie the Pooh can't convince you, then how about C. S. Lewis?

the Tao of Pooh & the Te of Piglet

This book (or rather pair of books, their having originally been published separately but are nowadays generally distributed as a two-in-one compendium, just like their  founding inspirational scriptures of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner), by Benjamin Hoff, is a delightfully accessible and remarkably profound introduction to the general kind of shape and texture and colour of the principles of Taoism.

   Replete with extracts from A. A. Milne's beloved original classics (as well as illustrations from these) as well as from the writings of Lao-Tzu, Chuang-Zhu, and a number of other ancient Chinese sages, Hoff adroitly demonstrates how Pooh lives in harmony with the Tao of the Hundred-Acre-Wood and its various inhabitants in ways that we could learn a great deal from in our crowded rushed modern world; while Piglet's very smallness and oft-fearful-but-never-insincere eagerness to help or reassure insofar as he can encapsulates much of the Taoist virtuosity of Te... all this in ways I would be doing both the philosophy and Hoff's wonderful children's-fictional exposition of it a grand injustice to try to give a pat summary of. But I must say it was quite wonderful to have characters like Eeyore, Owl, Rabbit, Kanga, Tigger and Roo, in their deceptive charming simplicity, be shown to quite perfectly embody the positive or negative or fluid aspects of un-Taoist living or un-Tefull being that pervade and restrict so much of the natural mystery of living and being, particularly in our over-intellectualized over-systematized technological mess of what we consider passes for contemporary civilisation.

   Pardon my rant. I kind of gonzo'd this post in an attempt to avoid falling into the very same kind of Heffalump trap that I'm trying to gently warn about, and which Hoff, through Christopher Robin's assortment of imaginary friends and various evasive apothegmic koans or jokey anecdotes about Confucius, will kindly and accurately help you to see wherever they may pop up in the footsteps in the snow you're following round and round the copse. Anyway, this is a fantastic entertaining enlightening book and probably the best introduction to Taoism I could, in my inexperience, recommend to a Western reader.

"Safe Metamorphosis!!"

This book is the first full poetry collection from Otis Mensah, himself Sheffield's esteemed Poet Laureate and an incomparable jazz-rapper.* His words (which I'll get to) are bolstered with an enigmatic series of illustrations by George William Stewart, Luke Featherstone, and Miroslav Kiss.

   Okay - the title, what's that about? Imagine there's a spacestation, and everyone on it has never left it but knows they need to - how terrifying! So, once the moments inevitably come for people to be shuttled onto their capsules and shot out into the inky void, a few cheery veterans of this process, who know the pains and processes of going from embryo to Full Moth or Whatever - shout sarcastically as these pods fly past "[title]!" Which is a weird image but a comforting one when you know who's shouting it and why, and Mensah's book fulfils that role perfectly.

   The poems in here are profound meditations on identity, change, anxiety, technology, trust, creativity, race, class, loss, love, and so much more. A few of them genuinely have prompted more genuine philosophical questing in myself than many full books of "Actual Philosophy", and do so with a readableness and perspicuity that gave me pang after pang of poet envy** for the skill with which he spins vivid metaphors off their own axes again and again in truly an alchemical application of uncluttered language. Just rereading that sentence I am not in the slightest shocked that I envied this skill [that of uncluttrdness] LOL.

   Poems to be read aloud - for sure, as each quivers to their brims with audible zigzags wordplay and little resonances that bring even more life from the verses penned. Though if you want to hear them in full fat you'd do no better than to see this brilliant artist*** live. His book, like mine and Raluca's, was initially a self-publication, so unless we're in a fortunate future where this has been picked up for mass-distribution, you may struggle to get you hands on a copy, in which case I can only apologize for now for getting you all excited about how bloody good this collection is.

* Check out his hiphop on soundcloud - he's a bona-fide lyrical genius, and his backdrop beats are sick to boot. Also to make a completely unnecessary claim-to-fame I feature very briefly in one of his music videos, and do somewhat regret the mustard cardigan as it may have been too loud for the surrounding colour scheme. Liam, if you're reading this, sorry for over-yellowing the aesthetic.

** Difficult to pick an overall fave - but 'Speak Light into the Dark', the untitled one [signed no name], and 'No-one Here Hears Me' are just unfetteredly incredible & spoke to me with so much poignancy that I got paranoid I was misreading certain lines because it seemed too close to certain trains of thought I'd been trying not to own.

*** And an absolutely lovely man, I'm not name-dropping I genuinely know him through Sheffield poet life stuff

Adulthood is a conversation about what we used to do as kids

This book* by Raluca de Soleil** is an absolute treasure. Some quivering with righteous and articulate rage, some fluttering like reflective sage moths between the light cast by the drives to expressively unify oneself and the shadows cast of traumas we should rightly be wary of how we talk about, more still dancing wholesome pirouettes of singular pure poetic "well, and that's like how that is, right?"***

* Because she self-published I wasn't sure where the best place to direct that link was. If you're interested in trying to get your hands on a copy probably best to ask her via message on her artist facebook page.

** A true poet-peer of mine on the Sheffield spoken word scene. In fact we both had our first ever open-mic experience at the same event, a Mental Health Matters night called Speak Your Mind; we were both very nervous, until we smashed it and weren't anymore, and I'm delighted to still belong to that wonderful community; "not with entitlement, but safety and uncharted possibility" [quote from one of her's].

*** Of course right.

the Lotus and the Cross

This book is an imagined conversation, by Ravi Zacharias, between Jesus of Nazareth and the Buddha - without wanting to deride its author too much, I think anyone will easily be able to instantly recognize that to faithfully and authentic-seemingly construct such a conversation would be an immensely delicate task of anyone's imagination, even without "taking a side" - which Zacharias does, for the Christian camp. That said it is not a dogma-heavy dismantling of Buddhism - or at least not as much as it might well have been if, say, certain other evangelical thought-leaders had written it - and while I think Zacharias's ultimate finished work in this book is a relatively generous, nuanced and thoughtful one, I do not believe he truly grasps the nature of Enlightenment as Buddha taught it, as to my own hunching there would be substantively more fruitful overlap between the thinking and praxis of the two were they to actually have met and talked; it concludes not with an intellectually-humble Kingdom-seeking consideration of possible both-ands, but Zacharias putting the nails into the "Buddha wrong, Jesus right" signpost - which is fair enough given its authorial purpose, but all things considered I think is a very ideologically blinkered way of dealing with both camps - insofar as one wishes them to actually come to respectfully and honestly understand one another, which is presumably sort of the point of writing a book like this.

Another thing, that has virtually nothing to do with this book but which I'm going to talk about on here because I need to process my thoughts on it and this blog has always sufficed as a place to process similar thoughts and this post seems to be a poetically apt place for the discourse I need to shart.
   I've left my church.
   This was an incredibly difficult decision, as I've been going there since the age of eight - in 2002, when the church itself was also young; I was baptised there, and pretty much all of my significant discipling relationships up until my joining Church Army's Research Team have been through it. My reasons for choosing to leave are many, complex, and deeply difficult to talk about - but I've been dithering over whether to go, and then when to go, and then how to tell my elders that I was going - for probably several years by now. But as you'll know if you read the recap post for 2018; my spiritual development has been accelerating a great deal and is rather unpredictable as of late - part of this has been through the nature of my work itself, part through ongoing exposure to a greater diversity of Christian expressions - as I've said in previous posts I've joined the Anglican Mission Community of which my work is a part - and even found myself visiting quiet corners of Christendom that I two years ago never would've dreamed myself to be seen in; and underneath or alongside all of this, is another aspect of my changing identity that has felt all-but-impossible to raise in TCH - even though if I'm being honest with myself looking back I should have heard the warning klaxons in my own heart years ago. So yeh, and yep I'm writing this in summer 2020, as this whole mess was probably the main bulk of reasons why I developed such an awful blog backlog, because my mind-heart was just not in a place where I could easily reflect on anything relevant to the posts I needed to write because it was all too fresh, too harsh, too painful and sad: but - I can't actually remember exactly when it went down, but some time during May or June of 2019, already having had a thoroughly unhelpful conversation with my elders about the fact that I'd joined the Church Army Mission Community and so I couldn't in good conscience 'sign up' to the formal TCH membership, as this denies anyone who does so from being part of any other Church communities - I came out as the gender non-binary problem-child that I am to my head elder and told him up front that I knew, Acts 29's position on gender-stuff being as it was, that to remain even a non-member but attender in the church I'd grown up in would entail the constant expectation from them as my pastors that I would someday repent of my personal identity - and this was not a situation I felt was healthy, or thus acceptable, so I'm leaving, sorry, please... thank you.
   I'm not writing this to make any kind of victorious or vindictive point. I'm fucking heartbroken.
   I just need some place to put this whole story down, as none of my brothers and sisters from TCH are likely to want to hear it, and few if any of my closest friends outside of church life would be able to grasp the emotional point of it, and the only other people I could talk to about it would have been in the office from which I've just been fired, or else my parents, who left the same church several years ago, but for very different reasons, and I'm not 'out' to them yet and I have no idea what they'd think. Anyway, it's all so close to the bone, that even now [as time of writing being summer 2020 I've had some time to process all this but it's still raw as heck], when I am 'out' to my parents, they just don't seem to give much of a shit and I'm not really sure what they think of what I told them of my actual triggering reason for leaving the same church. But - what's in the past is in the past. Jesus is good, and God's great grace is sufficient for all. Even genderqueer Quaker shitshows like me.

the Universal Christ

This book by ecumenical thought-leader Richard Rohr is an astounding treasure. It dives into the wholesale glorious mysteries of the biblical gospel, reminding us of the meaning of 'Christ', the freedom of forgiveness, the reality that Creation was God's testimony to us of heavenly truth long before scripture was written, the nature of spirit and incarnation, the sheer uncontainable universality of grace and peace and love...

   I don't have anything particuarly clever to say in reflection on this book. It simply pulled off the boots of my own Christian faith, shook them upside-down to dislodge a few large lumpy pebbles of English-evangelical intellectual cowardice and tribal complacency, then gently eased them back onto my feet as a liberating send-off back to the Jesus I had always known but now saw afresh. It is written accessibly enough for non-theologians, even non-Christians, and has a moral sensibility and wholesome common-good heartiness that I defy you to not find beautiful, challenging, and totally eternally counter-cultural: this is not Rohr's ideas unfolding themself but the very basics in implication of the gospel of Christ crucified and risen. A dazzling pragmatic inclusive truth, that has so long since been contained and constrained by overthinking underliving Christian commentary, the stultification of which Rohr here does a supremely excellent work in decolonizing Christ-consciousness from, yet never descending into partisan critique.

   I am giving this book to my mother and buying another copy to lend out.

Plum

This book, a collection of poetry written both recently & way-back-in-her-youth by Hollie McNish, is as lively and entertaining as I was worried it wouldn't be. I saw Hollie live last year and her delivery of spoken word is just so full and engaging that for some reason I'd developed an apprehension that reading it written wouldn't be as good. To be fair it's not, but that's not the point cos they're still good poems. Aside from all that fluff I do actually really like her audacious choice to include stuff she wrote when much younger - there are recurring themes of growth, failure, learning and changing across the wide variety of topics reflected upon, and seeing the stark gear-shifts on certain matters with age really helps a lot of the gaps in between her poems hit home harder than they otherwise would. Thoroughly enjoyable.

transforming

This book by Austen Hartke was a breath of wonderful fresh air after reading a totally different book on the same theme. Discerning readers may well write this off as basic confirmation bias, where I read a book about a thing and it argued for a conclusion that I wasn't entirely comfortable with so I discounted it and read another one which argued for something that I was more comfortable with, so I took this one to be better - and you may well be right. I'm not infallible, gender is complicated as fuck, and I've been on the fence about coming out as non-binary for the best part of a year.

   But in all honesty, Hartke is a better authority on this issue than Vaughan Roberts, given that he has experienced first-hand the community and theology alienation from evangelical Christianity that Vaughan is all too keen to say 'yes well this is not ideal' but then makes the kind of theological points that keep transgender and non-binary people from actually feeling comfortable in church; he has also approached the issue with much more than a cursory intellectual rigour - and draws on perspectives from church leaders, churchgoers, trans and otherwise, as well as a rich variety of scientific and social theory, but all grounded very much in a contextual and generous reading of scripture,* considered through the lenses of everything from the ambiguity of the Creation narrative poetry to the person and ministry of Christ and its carrying by his apostles to the varying significant re-namings in the Bible to the gender-bending roles eunuchs played and how they were still very much included in the early church.**

   Ultimately this a highly affirming and challenging book about the sovereignty of God, the fluidity of Creation, and the necessity of unity in the Church - an absolute must-read for Christians who are personally experiencing transformational elements in your life and gender identity, and should also be compulsory reading for anyone with any speck of pastoral responsibility, as there are guidelines on how to be meaningfully inclusive given as an appendix which go far beyond most of what I'd seen before.

* Even given my own views and latent identity, the depth of the tendrils of evangelicalism I've grown up in made me feel somewhat uncomfortable at parts of his argument. Though I suppose this could be a good thing, as it has maintained and renewed my vigour to not just settle for 'an answer' but to keep reading and exploring. That said, the general points Hartke makes are probably the best Christian perspective on the issues around gender fluidity that I've read so far.

** Transphobic Christian readers will do well to note that Philip didn't even demand the Ethiopian to grow his cock-n-balls back before receiving salvation!***

*** It was only upon googling this passage that I noticed for the first time that another Ethiopian eunuch features in the Bible, and pulls Jeremiah out of a dunghole.

A Call for Revolution

This book is a short, impassioned and timely reflection from His Holiness the Dalai Lama - as the title suggests, calling for a global insurgency - albeit one of empathy, of deep love for all beings and our shared world, for compassion, forgiveness, listening, breaking down the walls of the mental prisons we have traumatized ourselves into inhabiting across our history and creating spaces for new, urgent possibilities. It is a call I very much endorse.

No-one is too small to make a difference

This book is a collection of speeches made over this past few months by Greta Thunberg - whom you've probably heard of by now, unless you've been living under Boomer Snowflake Rock - since pretty much all of these speeches are available online or were covered in the news media, the only real reason I can envision buying a copy of this book might be for someone a necessarily recommendable act is as a present for people living under that aforementioned rock. Not that they'd probably read it, because hey, who's going to listen to an autistic Swedish teenager if you're already not going to listen to a united consensus among our planet's most dedicated minds on questions of ecological action?

Letters to a Young Poet

This book, a collection of letters written from Rainer Maria Rilke in response to one Franz Kappus, who was studying* at the same military academy Rilke had, and wanting to become a poet, reached out to his school's most famous-thus alumni: you can guess who. It is not super easy reading - Rilke was a master wordsmith as well as a pretty mentally troubled and emotionally complicated man, and while the overall tone of his letters is of an immense generosity of spirit and optimistic view of man, nature, art etc; the tortuous route he makes it sound like to truly go into and get to know oneself in objective truth at all enough to make a halfway interesting poet - it is, he repeatedly states, a role one can only take up by committing oneself endlessly to purity of perspective, to unlearning and relearning and revising and revolting, to solitude so deep that one's own thoughts burst out of you and onto a page with such urgent strength that to suppress them would be suicide. These letters are a potential goldmine for those who want to devoutly follow the classic (and dumb) trope of the 'tortured artist'; who prioritises their inner struggle above all else as it feeds their work; but however much he could've benefited and probably lived longer with a bit of therapy the general views offered here by Rilke are not, I don't think, supportive in themselves of this view, but are provocative, spiritual even, in ways that are challenging & ambiguous - and as a poet should know, Results on Readers May Vary.

* There is appended another longer essay, which may Rilke wrote to one 'Mr V.', entitled Letter from a Young Worker - which delves into much more sociopolitical critiques of the hegemonic repressive Christian ethics and expectations, especially around sexuality and personal expression; he rails against the hypocrisy and cultural stagnation he sees as being symptomatic of this deeper religio-philosophical malaise.

milk and honey

This book by Rupi Kaur is among those gigantic few poetry books of the past decade that are responsible for helping mass-popularize poetry among new audiences - namely, people who search through self-affirmation/breakup/trauma hashtags on Instagram.* My thoughts on this book may come across as sounding priggish and judgmental but I'd like to try to assure the reader this is far from the case. Okay - so I really genuinely 100% do not think the poems in this book are that good. Most** read more like a youth's private derivative heartbroken scribbles than anything of any particularly noteworthy originality or heft. That's not to say they're bad - it just requires one to step back and ask what poetry is for - moreso, who it is for.

   I'd say it's for everyone. Does that include people who have never really cared for poetry*** but who share similar traumas to an artist willing enough to expressively carve out the niche of their own struggles and recovery to help others reflect on their fundamental similitude? Yes, absolutely. And those folks, speaking objectively from the sales statistics, wanted a book of poems that apparently didn't exist before this one - and how many people do you think were inspired to process their own traumas, plot out their own paths to wholesomeness, forgiveness, forgetting or wellbeing, through their own bespoke lenses of creative writing - by this very book? The figures here don't even bear estimating but by my very asking even if the answer were to be Just One you'd know it's a worthy attributation of priceless evidence that this book - whatever the haters in their ivory towers wanking off to T.S. Eliot's most obscure & esoteric academica might say - has DONE something good, and that is infinitely better than everything said by the critics**** who would be the arbiters of Is [x] Thing Good.

   This is my blog and I will arbite here: this is a very good book and would make a strong heartfelt present to anyone (even if they don't generally give a hoot about poems) who is going through a rough patch after surviving abuse or having a bad breakup. Kaur's poems will sit with readers through their grief and may genuinely help disentangle webs of self-doubt, fear or other negative emotions, and they won't even have to keep cross-checking Sparknotes to ensure they're following their feels-journeys properly.

* Don't @ me, it's a big fucking market

** I say most because there are quite a few that I properly enjoyed too, for their creative content and not just pathos-bombing.

*** And for many people rightly so, because maybe for they the sole initial means of encountering poetry has been through rigorous pointless academic study and never for enjoyment or personal growth or exploration. Do you think some of the people who read milk & honey who had never read a poetry book before went on to read more poetry and found that in fact they found poets who they decided were better than Rupi Kaur? Maybe! Does this make Kaur less of a fantastic poet for having created a book which both helps people & induces them onwards into the world of words?

**** Yes, I am fully aware that I do write a whole blog effectively critiquing every book I read - but I approach the entire endeavour rather laxly, and always try to consider context & intended audience & such with stuff, and don't usually rate the books rather preferring to recommend who might enjoy it and for what - so I'm not really a critic, more a sort of pan-biblioliterary speculative cartographer.

Single-Minded

This book by Kate Wharton is about singleness; a vital counterpoint to the mass of extant Christian literature about its alternative. Rooted in personal experience to demonstrate the veracity of her case, as well as very much in Scripture - the "ideal" individual disciple's experience of primary intimacy with God in Christ rather than any worldly relationships - throughout she makes powerful arguments and highly encouraging ones to anyone who, like me, may have felt somewhat left out of the all-too-often world-conforming Christian culture of "oh well we may as well get married to someone as soon as possible because isn't that just what all the nice Christian couples at church have done?"
   It's likely to be an uncomfortable read for many on that side of the divide just as much as it is an affirming one for single people: but Kate's right in saying that Jesus very much emulated the ideal of a single life, well kept and well lived, to and for God alone; it's a message so deeply counter-cultural both inside and outside of the Church & I can only applaud her for having put forward the view so poignantly as here given the fat enormity of this particular lacuna not only in Christian literature but most church communities too.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

This book is of course the children's classic by Lewis Carroll - & I'm not going to talk here about the literary impacts of nonsense writing, nor the many & myriad cultural spinoffs or references strewn across Western book/screenwriting like flecks of shit out of a hippo's arse aimed across the wasteland of post-Victorian Anglophone normativity, nor even the whole paedophilia question; because this YouTuber has already done a better job talking about these things than I could be bothered to do.

   One thing I will talk about instead is that recently, and I forget the context exactly of how or why or if this revelation was prompted, but smack-bang in the middle of my inner angstful dithering over whether & when to come out as non-binary, my dad told me that had I been born without my Y chromosome my name would've been Alice - and this was - a lot, as discerning empathic readers will probably long have realised that I've been well on my way down a variety of rabbit-holes anyway and my life is even to me somewhat topsy-turvy nonsensical at the best of times.

   I can't think of an appropriate segue for this but I'm mentioning it anyway - I've been fired.* Yes, from my dream job that I was really quite good at and had foreseen as being as close to a lifelong fruitful career as someone like me was likely to find - without moving to London, which is still very much fuck that. I don't know what the next chapter is apart from it definitely entails moving out of my flat that I can't afford anymore. I can't say however that I don't know why this happened. It happened because my mental health has been All Over the Damn Place recently and I've been too irregularly unreliably missing days at work given this, and have consistently failed to develop means of communicating with the rest of my team in mitigating any inconveniences this causes to our work. I got my first formal disciplinary warning less than a month ago, and my head being where it is at the moment, I think part of me just went "okay this is happening, fuck it" and I've got the second and third-final within an impressively neat time-frame.** It sucks. I will miss that job, that whole office, like anything, and I really hope that in time God will help me to work through my shit enough to even get a handle on why it all happened the way it did. But for now, I can only press onwards, through the mystical horrible wonderland that is my life, in the hope that things will get - if not easier or better - then at least clearer.

* I mean, not like right now, I'm on holiday with my family at the moment. But last week.

** As I don't want to run any sort of risk of people thinking I'm bitter or trying to slate the Church Army folks or their HR personnel here, let me state that they've handled things with incredible patience, generous kindness and proper formality.
   The first warning only came in after the problems kept manifesting when they'd already given me several sessions of counselling, which weren't much help, and repeatedly asking me what if anything they could do to help my situation, which I could only say I didn't know, as I don't. Tim, Faye, Mark, Des, Andy, Neil - you have my utmost apologies, thanks, and sincerest reassurance that I hold nothing against anyone and you made the right call. If I wasn't as mental as I obviously must be I'd have fired me too.

the Saint of Milk and Flames

This book, a collection of poetry by the fantastic Kate Garrett,* is among my favourites of recent reading. I read the whole thing in one sitting while on a family holiday, going back during that same long weekend to re-read certain poems over a third or seventh time.** Its themes are broad and deep, touching on faiths lost and wavering and refound, the human challenges of self-realization as mother or daughter, the isolations and solidarities found in disability and disappointment - ultimately there is a strong vein of hopeful healingness throughout and the subtleties herein should prompt most discerning readers to reexamine their lives through lenses of everyday myth, reverent grief and life-affirming love.

* To whom apparently I am 'grand-padawan', she having mentor-inspired my own primary mentor-inspiration in the spoken word world Kinsman.

** Including possibly my favourite of Kate's poems that I've read thus far - Everyone needs a friend when the world begins to end, which for my money sums up the beauty of poetic community in these strange dark times better than anything.