Category: Reflections

Awen Fragments: London’s History

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Glimpses of spirit, story, and silliness...

Sometimes, standing in the middle of central London, I simply stop and breathe. It isn’t any one monument or street that calls me. It’s the weight of it all – the long, humming undercurrent that says: we have been here for a very long time.

Beneath the taxis and tourists, beneath the office blocks and shopping streets, there’s a pulse that stretches back through centuries. Romans laid stones here. Saxons farmed here. Normans raised their towers. The Great Fire raged; the Blitz thundered. And still the city endures.

I feel it most in small, unspectacular moments: waiting for a bus by an old churchyard, crossing a side street where medieval lanes once wound like threads. The old city never fully vanishes. It simply shifts its shape.

There’s a strange kind of comfort in that. The city has endured plagues and sieges, kings and parliaments, prosperity and ruin. It carries all of it: stories, scars, laughter, grief. And somehow, knowing that helps me stand a little steadier in my own small troubles. If London can carry its centuries, perhaps I can carry my own seasons.

The river flows as it always has. The stones remember. The city breathes.

A Reply: I Knew the Pre-Internet Age

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This blog post was inspired by this piece by Isabel Brooks in The Guardian:

Why am I filled with nostalgia for a pre-internet age I never knew?

Reading Brooks piece on growing up just before the internet became a way of life, I felt a strong pang of recognition. I’m part of that small and slightly haunted generation sometimes labelled xennials – old enough to remember dial-up tones and landline phones, but young enough to have adapted to smartphones and streaming. It’s not quite nostalgia I feel when I look back, but a kind of reverence for a world where everything wasn’t so immediate.

That’s why, for me, the ache isn’t for the pre-internet world. It’s for the pre-social media world. The world before we were expected to perform ourselves constantly, before everything we did needed to be witnessed to feel real.

In 1999, I moved to New York City as a student. New city, new country, new continent. There was no Instagram to scout out potential friends or TikTok to show what kind of person I was. No swipe-based apps to filter people into categories. Making connections was harder by today’s standards – but also deeper. You met people through shared spaces, not shared hashtags. You had to show up in person, not just in pixels. The friendships I made that summer – formed over late-night conversations, record shop excursions, and mismatched pub crawls – are friendships that have lasted 25 years.

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Awen Fragments: The Spider on the Ceiling

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Glimpses of spirit, story, and silliness...

There’s a spider in the corner of the ceiling above my desk.

She’s not weaving, not moving – just there, perfectly still. Legs tucked in, waiting

I’ve seen her before, in the same spot, several days in a row. Not nesting, not spinning. Just watching. Or maybe just ebing. I can’t tell if she’s dead, or meditating. Maybe this is their spellcraft.

There is no web – no visible one anyway – but I still feel it. A thread of presence stretched between her and me. The kind you can’t see, but that changes the room when you notice it.

I don’t want her gone, I want her to stay excatly wher she is: silent, unfussy, sacred in her not-doing. A reminder that sometimes your whole purpose is to simply be in place and let the threads of meaning weave themselves around you.

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Awen Fragments

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Glimpses of spirit, story, and silliness...

This isn’t a big idea. It’s a small one. And that’s the point.

Awen Fragments begins here – not as a fully formed concept, but as a practice. A gentle invitation to write something. Anything. A fleeting thought, a funny moment, a detail that snagged on the edge of attention. A way to get the writing flowing without the need to explain everything.

Each post will be short. Sometimes poetic, sometimes observational, sometimes a bit ridiculous. All I’m doing is noticing. The things that shimmer, that make me laugh, that feel slightly out of step with the rest of the day. The odd magic of a fox in the car park, a child’s drawing chalked on the pavement, the precise shade of sky that makes everything feel like a story waiting to happen.

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The Power of “Ish”

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It slips into conversation without ceremony. Six-ish, we say, or blue-ish, or done-ish, and with that single syllable, we soften the word. Ish is a quiet rebellion against precision – not as an escape, but as a gesture of truth told in layers. It leaves space. It breathes. It understands the world rarely fits clean lines.

I’ve long been drawn to ish, perhapds before I even noticed it. It was always there, padding around the edges of certaintly like a fox in twilight, saying: not quite, but close. it isn’t a cop-out. It isn’t indecision. It’s something gentler, something liminal. The shimmering place where something mostly fits, but not entirely. A way of honouring what almost is, without forcing it to become what it is not.

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When Conversations Stop Being Conversations

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We don’t always know how our words land – especially online.

In digital spaces, we write quickly. We reply while distracted. We skim, we type, we send. Along the way, we make assumptions about tone and forget the context that shaped what was said. We read more into a pause than a paragraph. And somewhere in all of that, something vital is often lost; not just the intended meaning, but its meaningfulness – the sense that what we offered truly mattered to someone else.

Lately, I’ve been sitting with the quiet ache that follows a certain kind of reply. The kind that begins with, “Yes, but..”

Yes, but I see it differently.
Yes, but that's not quite right.
Yes, but here's what really matters.

At first glance, it looks like engagement. Perhaps it even is, in the most techincal sense. Someone has responded, the conversation continues. But the energy shifts. What once felt like a shared exploration becomes a subtle contest. The offering I made is no longer being received or built upon, but is being reframed or replaced.

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What Is Druidry?

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The first time I sat beside the Thames and felt its breath moving through me, I didn’t call it Druidry. I didn’t call it anything at all. There was no ritual, no robe, no sacred chant whispered into the wind. Just a stillness. A sense that I had stumbled into a conversation already in progress – between water and stone, current and moon, memory and presence. That moment wasn’t a beginning or an epiphany. But if I were to map my Druid path from here to there, it might be the place I’d draw the first spiral.

I’m often asked, now, what Druidry is. Not academically, not even always spiritually – just… what is it? Is it a religion? A philosophy? A kind of nature-based mindfulness? Something old and mysterious, or something new and made-up? And where do I, a queer neurodivergent man living in suburban London with a Labrador and a growing collection of fox folklore, fit into that?

This is my answer – or at least, a glimpse of it.

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