Close Your Eyes Gray clouds float over the crimson and white lighthouse, while the earth, a blue marble, spins past other planets. It whisks by, bound by an invisible cosmic thread. In the way it moves, close your eyes and hear the spring breeze. Among the trees, capturing an unbroken flow. Our ecosystem weighs the fresh water running downstream, Where all connections meet. The tropical rainforest is a place with many species. Oh, what beauty...

Awaken Intuition Breathe the sacred breath of life, Attuning the vessel to the Higher Self. Focus on breathing, As those thoughts disappear. Rising like passing vapors. Observe and return to breathing. Relieve all anxieties, Of spirit, heart, and flesh. Notice the rise and fall of your chest. Manifesting the miracle within. In this moment, become calm in mind. Close your eyes, surrender those restless thoughts. Calming brain waves into ambient...

Hey everyone, Yesterday my new novel 'Family Man' received this great book review from The Herad. There are boxes of frogs that would boycott this mad novel for stealing their thunder. Family Man follows A Working Class State of Mind and Who’s Aldo? as the third book to feature Aldolfo Ali, the son of Portobello-based Indian restaurateurs, whose strategic thinking, daring and dramatic flair have carried him to the top of Edinburgh’s crime ladder...

Alan de Botton reckons that instead of asking potential partners what they do for a living, where they are from, etc, we should playfully ask; “How are you crazy?” Then proceed to tell them, “I’m crazy like this…”. I’d be there all night. However, it’s also an intriguing question to ask yourself. Are the ways in which I am crazy really that bad? Aren’t they just foibles? Creative ways of passing the hours? Of course, the juicier questions are...

I like Ruby Wax. I don’t know her, of course. I only know her projection on telly. She admits she had it good. She was the go-to person for the BBC to make quirky documentaries, which gave her the chance to meet other eccentrics. Then she hit 50. The unwritten rule was she was a woman and therefore too old. She admits she was hurt and jealous of her replacement, no, not Myriam Margolyes—that came late, like Bradley Walsh, that’s never off the...

Two events, one global, one local, changed the pantry forever. Both involved mooses; the Strait of Hormuz or blocking thereof, and a moose of the “Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie” kind - not the large Canadian variety. There is a wee, more sleekit than timorous, beastie loose about this hoose. In the pantry at approximately 10.30pm. Usually, there were only tins in the pantry, not sleekits, but there was also a packet of soy flour, which...

Does anyone here like card games? I have created an original card game called Thirteen Cabins . It is played with a standard deck of cards. It's theme is based on the "killer at summer camp" trope most commonly identified with the "Friday the 13th" movie series, but has existed since, at least, The Hardy Boys novels. Theme aside, Thirteen Cabins is one of the most unique card games that can be played without using a special deck (i.e. Magic the...

Ruth’s story, coercive control, Fab Swinging, BBC, Radio Wales. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0ns3q5d Broadcaster Cartin Nye suggests over one million people in Britain have tried Swinging. That’s around 1—60 of the population. I think that’s bollocks. While my sympathy here was for Ruth, I don’t quite get what for example choking, beating and hair pulling have to do with sex but I do accept they did happen to her. Rough sex is as foreign...

Reminder: Only 1 Month Left To Go!

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent For most of my career I have been refused. Ignored, deceived, shut out, looked through. I had come to think of it as the natural condition of my profession — that the writer and the correspondent stand on opposite sides of a glass, and the glass does not open. Then, at a literary reception in London in the mid-1960s, Patricia Highsmith agreed to talk to me, and I learned that there are worse...