No sleep till Moulescoomb..

It's late, and I really, really, should be in bed. I'm sat up in the dark in my pink hooded top, my comfy jeans, and the room is chilly. I'm wondering again, wondering, wondering where it all will end - this mind of mine and this beating chest, these legs of mine that just want to run. Running away from; running towards. My legs go, fast as summer, like a young girl racing to catch the ball that spins through the air in a perfect arch between her parents' fingers.

I run from, I run towards. Across the beach. Through backstreets. Beside car parks. Past bushes and streams. Up mountains. In the rain. Down the front steps. And it's the shadow of the sun on my face that tells me how alive I really am.

I don't feel eloquent. Or articulate. I am back in the world trying to carve out some bread and butter and a way to hold my head up, but... I'd always rather be at home, under the cover of night, communing with the angels and demons that fly around my head. Inside my flat can be a bit of a raucous party, with all the interesting beings that gather there to cause pandemonium and guffawing, who light candles and sing and bring stars out from under their pleated skirts as gifts for me, and occasionally, throw up on my carpet. Evenings here are never dull, that's for sure. We sit together and eat and tell each other our stories. We dance and make love. We fight. We pore over ancient manuscripts. We invent new languages. Especially when I am disciplined enough to turn off Eastenders.

And of course, they all go back to from where they came, whenever guests pop by, or when I am forced out from behind my safe walls into the real world where people stare if you bring out strange creatures, and buses crash if the haloes around you suddenly start singing. No, I go with notepad and pen, a look of efficiency on my face. But tonight I got lost around Moulescoomb in the dark, and, as I wandered around searching for a house number 113 that didn't seem to exist, and waiting to get my head kicked in, I did wonder what the fuck I was doing there. Trying to earn my crust. And that's what it is. 89p, Co-op own-brand white crust. Without butter on. The dryest thing in the Western Hemisphere.

So I come to you, my keyboard and my letters, to cheer me up, and to keep me from falling on the concrete, and the narrow, narrow roads. I pray to you, poetry, like a guardian angel, to keep me always, always, safe at the hearth, in the homes where I belong. Let the creatures guide me across the sea and ice, let the holy ones light up my face when all has gone dark, and let the ones who will never see me, keep warm in their jumpers at night, when the moon has turned her whitest cycle in the reddest sky, for the very last time.

A history of my Religion

A couple of Saturdays ago, I went with a friend to Catholic Mass at a local Brighton church. The yearning to go there had started before Christmas, when feelings of grief over my Mum's condition peaked, and I couldn't see any real point in existence, if where it was to lead ultimately was simply dissolution, pain and death. The need for something big enough to hold this experience came to a crisis point.

What actually moved things on for me was listening to a talk by a Buddhist Order Member, Danavira, on death and dying. I sat, lights out, in my front room for two hours listening to the recording. The impact of it went directly into my veins and bones. It took on the horror, the devastation, the messiness and complexity of death, and ultimately, its utter profundity. Danavira's words were big enough to meet the immensity of my insights and emotions over what it means to live and to die, to be born and to decay.

Months earlier, in October, I walked up Snowdon with Bob, the first time I have ever hiked up a significantly large mountain. I found, in the climbing, that, having seen my Mum in hospital just days before, this was a mountain huge enough and powerful enough to take my grief, big enough even to hold Mum herself in her dying state. So tiny, I was, climbing the vast expanse of its stomach, I knew that the mountain understood and held me fast. Now, I am not speaking symbolically or poetically here when I speak of the mountain holding me, I mean it absolutely literally. I tangibly felt that presence and character of the mountain surrounding me. Because of that, all my grief and sorrow turned to amazement. That one primal, unanswerable question that I ask myself in every moment of grieving, "How come?" returned to me in the single voice of the mountain, not through words, but through a sound. It was a resonating hum, that the peaks and the valleys and the woodlands and birds and the small climbing bodies of hikers were all making. This is it. This is my answer. Everything I need is here.

I was surprised, then, when it was talking about Saints and Catholic Mass with some Catholic friends of mine that aroused such a strong feeling of yearning in me, rather than Buddhism. After over eight years of Buddhism being almost my whole world, in terms of way of life, friends, commitment and philosophy, I have drifted from it over the last few years, in order, I think, to go more deeply into my own experience of how things are and who I am, through writing, poetry and making music. Language, specifically poetry, and music, unlock realms of reality and experience I've never known before, and I can only seem to experience them through creating in this way.

And when I had what might be called mystical experiences some years ago, which totally tore down and rearranged my life, it wasn't Buddhist teaching that I felt was being revealed to me directly, but a direct and non-rational experience of healing, grace, and the presence of angels. This disturbed me greatly at the time, as it didn't fit with what I believed of reality, and not many people around me seemed to know what I was on about; only the the reiki healers, the lost shamans, the acid casualties, the people who had found God on the roadside.

I have always been attracted to the imagery of Christianity, to the blood and redemption, the wounds of Christ, the choirs of angels and the Saintly lineage. But there is more to it than that. I am drawn to the lineage of Christian mystics in the same way that I am drawn to the lineage of Nyingma cave-dwellers, or the seekers of Divine union in Sufism. The practice of direct communion with God, if you call it that, or with Reality or The Divine, if you call it that instead, feels like the truest form of practising any religion for me personally. It is helpful at times for someone to tell me about God or The Buddha or the holiness of existence, but ultimately, I have to plug into that directly myself. And that is never easy. But I relate to the convulsions and stripped back wonder of certain Saints, the fighting of demons in the mountains, the visions, revelations, hallucinations, the manifestation of stigmata, the terrible angels of beauty descending. And I relate because it feels like a world that I already live in.

Going to Mass that day blew my mind. The ritual blew my mind. No wonder the Spanish go to the bullfight on the Saturday and then take Communion on Sunday. The two seem inextricably entwined, to me, bullfighting and Catholicism. And the Mass spoke to parts of me that even Buddhism has not reached. It is poetry to me, amazing, cataclysmic poetry. And, if I look at it it as anything but poetry, in the biggest sense of the word, my fear is that it is also quite possibly a form of madness. In this way, I am still scared of Catholicism, rightly or wrongly, in, as one overseas friend described it, its strange rites of supernatural cannibalism. But then I have always been attracted to things that dwell in equal shares of darkness and light, and poetry did always tread those pathways between the sane and the crazily lost.

I was scared at the thought of returning to the Convent. I was scared that I would be disappointed by what I found there. I was scared that I would not be disappointed and that it would show me all I hoped for and suspected was there.

When I rang the Convent bell, an old nun came to the door and invited me in. I said to her "I used to live in the house next door, for over twenty years. But we moved out years ago." I had no idea if she was even at the Convent during that period, as I know that most of the nuns from then have either moved on or died. She smiled at me and said " Are you Clare?"

Diary of an Exquisite Morning

I went looking for God up the Breakfast Cereal & Tea and Coffee aisle of my local Tesco's.

Of course, I caught a glimpse of what I was seeking, I caught a whisper of it in my hair; a touch of gold, flaked on my forehead. I expected the Shreddies and Nut Clusters to hurl themselves from the shelves, in awe of what I was experiencing, and that in the space they left, from where they had fallen, a light would shine, right back at me.

I moved towards the Egg & Jam aisle, where black and red haired women with toddlers charged towards me, and I felt angry because I didn't want these women or these babies interrupting my search for God. I curled my lips into a harsh, wavy line. I ruminated over Free range or Organic Free Range, knowing really, this week, I just couldn't afford the latter.

And then I felt the touch of it again. I couldn't name it until I had left the store. It was only as I scoured the long aisles of the supermarket from the other side of the glass, edging myself toward the street, still hankering for a final glimpse, I could finally mouth to myself the word angel.

Sitting at home now, I understand that this compulsion towards God can take on many forms. And I'd like to think of it as holy. I would like to think of it as truthful. I would like to squeeze my palms together, making like a prayer and for it to be that simple.

The world is made up of religious fools, scraping the floors of cemeteries for the latest dust of truth. I will be there with them, falling on my backside as the gatekeeper comes, jangling his keys impatiently, already imagining his wife's stockinged legs in the bedroom waiting for him when he gets home.

This, of course, will not stop me looking. Nor should I stop. The presence of angels is a good enough reason in itself for me to blink, huge-eyed, when they appear. Silly as I am, daunting though the consequences may be, I am in it for life - a hunter after divinity, a shark for brilliant light, a presuming idiot who spills her breakfast when her head is turned towards this burning and burnt crater manifesting at the edge of her living room floor.

This may not make any sense to you, so I will not bother trying to explain. I bought what I needed to, then I walked away. My bags were mediumly heavy, I had numerous voices in my head, which I didn't bother listening to, for they were all bores. Instead, I walked home, and up the stairwell to the unpainted door of my flat, entered, breathed and put my shopping away.

Nunhead Cemetery

Four o' clock. The iron gates close at five and this is not the kind of place you want to spend the night in. My sister and I hurry up the gravel path, then stop suddenly to speak about our mother, taking it in turns to empty our hearts, spill our grief, hear the brown leaves crackle underfoot.

We walk up to the ruined church, without a priest or congregation, without stained glass or sermon. No hymn book. No bride. Only our two sad faces peering up into the light, past the crumbling pale stone, no longer seeking the holiness of perfection, instead loving the ruins of beauty, perfect in themselves.

And so we wander this way, wander that way, speaking in staccato through leafy alley ways, past grey tombs and mighty obelisks, under huge trees heavy with ivy, graves hidden in the bracken, overturned headstones, fallen angels with broken wings sliding, sliding into mud.

We stumble down a narrow dark tunnel of green, and there, in the squelch of mud, we speak our truth of grief and fear and losing, say things rarely spoken of life, except at times like these. Names and dates, old and young, men and women, loved and unloved, all pass through our unlit eyes.

To my right, an ancient tree is being lifted into the air by a cracked headstone which has subsided and moulded itself into its thick roots. My sister turns, spots a marble casket, its lid open some inches, sliding off. The blackness inside stares back at us like an unflinching eye.

We stagger out into daylight and a damp grassy glade filled with the graves of wives and mothers, plastic flowers in psychedelic colours in plastic pots dotting the horizon. And there, around the fresh churned soil of a newly dug grave, jump seven magpies, and a red fox, darting, moving.

I feel like we are intruders in this scene. The grass is all lit up, the trees are bowing. A strange current of silence is in the air. The grass is blowing. For this is their world, their language, of brightness and burial, tender woodland and no return.

The fox looks up and stares at us carefully, turns tail and leaves. The magpies scatter and disappear, and we are left alone once again in the singing daylight with only the trees, the dead and the ravens, and some distant echo.

We leave the gates of the cemetery. Back on the high street, I feel as though I am emerging from a murmured spell, a remarkable tune running through my head.

Next to the Angel Peace Statue at the point where Brighton turns into Hove, there was a huge crane towering over the seafront, looming tall next to Embassy Court. I wondered what it was for, with a metal grill box hanging from it, and I could just about make out the outline of two men. Suddenly a figure of a man jumped from the box and was dangling before my eyes attached by a white rope around his ankle.

I stood and watched as he was lowered back down and another man took his place in the metal grill box, and was lifted back high in the air.

Today the sea front is so alive with such sights, I feel almost airborne. Huge swathes of starlings line every inch of the West Pier, and seagulls float above me, immobile in the wind. Black silhouettes of men in wetsuits bob up and down in the waves around the West Pier, and occasionally, one struggles to his feet on a board momentarily before being swept under the foam and waves once again. In the distance, seven kites curve in the air, dragging more men and perhaps women above and across the surface of the choppy sea.

Even the clouds seem buoyant and adrift, turned orange by the fading sunlight, which casts a sheen over the sea like copper, which mixes with the turquoise of the five o clock sky and makes the rain on the pavement shine.

It feels good to take steps in such a swirl of brightness, like a lifting bird who does not mind if her feathers are ruffled or if it looks like there might be a storm over Shoreham harbour tonight.

Light, light, light. I pass the lawns I have passed so many times, the toes of my shoes turning darker with the wet from underfoot. I have a wind in my soul, clearing through cobwebs and the blackest dust, loosening the stiffened grey cogs of my machinery so that I can move again. I am surfing this moment, my hair, aflap with gulls and a single aeroplane trail. Air is billowing my dress and senses, the wind is sailing me home.

Tiny minds and Umbrellas

When I was little, I thought big. As I grew bigger, I learnt to think smaller. I realised that the visions I had as large as the Himalayas, I could never ultimately keep climbing. My knees would always break down somewhere half way up, or the snows would bury me. That no matter how many times I jumped off my front steps clutching an umbrella, I would never take flight across the roofs of Hawarden. Because there are certain laws to this universe that cannot be overruled even by imagination, such as gravity, and these laws are tougher than even our stongest idealism. There is always a pragmatic wind blowing through the landscape of our dreams, pulling it apart. Physics makes us all its bitches.
And so, from this perspective, this fatherly advice, creeps in that terrible phenomena which seems to haunt our world - the tinying of the mind.

I remember standing at my bedroom window when I was young and pointing to the night sky outside and saying to my Mum " but what about all this?"

I distinctly remember her reply " We all think about such things when we are young. You will forget. Life takes over".

I remember being devastated by this, more so because my mother had actually contemplated such things as the universe and what this life means, but then promptly seemed to set it aside when the correct time came. But I also felt defiant that I would never become what she said I would become - a forgetter.

Are we all forgetters, wandering the streets with convenient amnesia? It is a necessary condition of existence, huh, if we are not to go mad, run through the streets, our clothes torn to shreds, the predator of truth chasing us, chasing us to the edge of the endless drop? Every angel is terrifying, after all.

We are hardly going to look up from our bedsheets and our spreadsheets and our tiny calculations of life to stare at this winged being flapping its giant wings at us. But then, what about the loss? What is left when the dreaming departs, when imagination is crushed to the ground, and we stop believing in things we cannot see?

In and out of vision we can go. Grasp the mantle of a spiritual quest and follow until we are forced to let go, until we see even through the limitations of yearning for a quest at all. It is crushing. It is liberating, if you can stand the loss.

And so everything that ever meant anything, at some point, gets stripped away. And will continue to, as long as it is held and cherished as the answer clear. So that we can move on.

Dreams are born to live and to age and to finally, like everything else, to wither and die. We keep none of it.

And yet that is still not the end. How can it be? The walking is the best bit, we often just don't see it until the journey's over.

And so, when I was little, I thought big. As I grew bigger, I learnt to think smaller. Then I learnt to think big again, with the shadow of death and ending by my side, taking in all the little beauties on the way, whilst still walking the line, at least most of the time.

We bring into daylight the dreams that haunt our sleep, knowing even they will come to an end. To remember, and keep remembering, to keep jumping off that step, umbrella in hand, no matter what.

This is deep beauty, with these tiny, fragile eyes of ours, to embrace all that we love, all we know to be true, falling forever into the abyss.

Let us never forget.