The Self – Marcus Demetrius Link

Moulting

On parting as its own kind of death, and how keenly the loss is felt at first. Essay

The Quality of the Fool – Part V

Part V of The Way of the Fool: the Fool not as a philosophy but as a quality of consciousness — a way of meeting life rather than a doctrine to hold. Essay

A Medley of Fools Heralds the Journey Within the Journey – Part IV

Part IV of The Way of the Fool: the many faces of the Fool — holy fool, jester, innocent — and the journey within the journey they herald. Essay

Wholeness is the Fool’s Business – Part III

Part III of The Way of the Fool: why wholeness, not cleverness, is the Fool's true work — and the inner guides who teach what no human master can. Essay

A Wondrous Fellow Appears Out of the Darkness – Part II

Part II of The Way of the Fool: the Fool appears as a guide out of the darkness, and what it means to recognise oneself among those who belong to him. Essay

About the Boy – Part I

Part I of The Way of the Fool: how the Boy — an inner companion first met at nineteen — became the figure through whom a lifetime of writing finds its voice. Poem

Descending Into Myself

A meditation for the Fool, worked at across two decades, from 2001 to 2020. Poem

this One will live yet

Written alongside The Boy Jumps Ship, narrowed to the Stinger and the Stirring. Library

The life of every man is a way to himself, an attempt at a way, the suggestion of a path.

But every man is not only himself; he is also the unique, particular, always significant and remarkable point where the phenomena of the world intersect once and for all and never again. That is why every man’s story is important, eternal, sacred; and why every man while he lives and fulfils the will of nature […] Library

But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.

It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 391 People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, […] Poem

The Little Man Dancing in My Heart

Perhaps we do not find God so much as make God, a little more with every day we live. Library

Until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do…

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower; until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and […] Poem

Promise of a Man

The awkward attempt at being human, with so much lizard still under the tailcoat. Poem

There are things we cannot do on our own

Written on 13 February 2016. Poem

My Gallows Star

A rope of light let down from a distant star, and the darkness that both lights it and holds us apart. Poem

Out of the World, Into its Middle

Written in May 2004 for my first-born son