After a weekend of wonderful busyness, the hound and I potter around slowly outside.

Stalked by an insomniac night, I flee into the greedy clutches of the sun-filled morning.

Sitting beside our slumbering hound, wrapped in a cocoon of peaceful warmth, we while away the hours

From busy to quiet in the blink of an eye, planes carried the men of the house to far away destinations yesterday.

Our son is home from university during his Easter vacation, and the house is full once again these days.

The morning has dawned, soft and full of yearning, and I steal myself away into a moment of solitude.

We went walking on the beach this afternoon at the close of a getaway snatched from the jaws of everyday time.

The day dawned blue bright as I stepped outside for my morning walk. The sun’s warm embrace, filtered through the breeze, kissed my face

It’s a summer born of sunshine and vanishing. Light bleeds through the essence of every evaporating moment and I can only think and feel in fragments.

Walking up the steeply winding slope, I pull away from the city’s warm embrace and into an ethereal world

It’s Thanksgiving Day here in the USA. I sit in our tiny garden spilling over with flowers and watch the hummingbirds hovering on their jewelled wings of speed.

Shifting sands move under our feet as we find ourselves back on the beach. The scene sharpens and we talk through the landscape of a gathering evening.

We flew home into the blue of beyond two weeks ago. In a few days we will catch a plane to the tomorrow of a southern French sun.

I found myself  on an eye wateringly early flight home to Los Angeles this morning after a wonderful few days in Mexico City.

I arrived in the land of the ‘master of the macabre’ quite by chance and without any roadmap whatsoever.

I discovered Wilfred Owen and his poem Dulce et Decorum Est as a school girl in an English classroom long ago on a sunny afternoon.

The shades of life’s colours as it paints its vanishing way around us have been much on my mind these days.

I’ve been thinking about East and West in this dream world of ours; about the fading cultural influence of the Classical and Christian traditions and of the space for Buddhism amidst such a forgetful time.

It’s so quiet. There’s something about a southern Californian afternoon that can catch you by surprise and have you almost falling through a space where time resonates at a different frequency altogether.

It’s been a quietly special time here in Los Angeles, punctuated yesterday by a trip to the movies to see A Complete Unknown.

There’s a Bob Dylan song that‘s been rolling along the tracks of my mind for some time. Even now, as I’m walking on a slowly sunny Los Angeles afternoon with the hound, I can hear it.

I’m always on the look out for resonances which return me to the truth of the dream-like nature of our experience. It’s why I love Inception, Christopher Nolan’s exquisite creation from 2010.

It began with Keats. Walking through the enchanted world of Ode to a Nightingale I left the beaten track, mesmerized by a summons from the favorite American writer of my youth.

I spent a hot and tired hour crawling through Sunday afternoon traffic on the 405 today and experienced one of those rare moments of musical transcendence when the world fades away. 

Where is modern education leading our children?

Through the quiet air of a family evening the songs from Rough and Rowdy Ways float from the stereo. We sit gathered together in the absence of our son who has departed for London Town.

Casting my mind back, one of my favourite early memories of Joe Ruggiero is from England in 2012. We were already seasoned US residents at that point, or so we thought.