Sky Ground Sky

Sky Ground Sky is a story of essays that explore how landscape and culture create individuals, and how our relationship with the living world can ultimately redeem us. It questions what it means to drop and descend in a world that often seeks to reach higher, ascend or escape.

A hand-built cabin beside two silver birch trees becomes the ground for reckoning with illness, childhood, and a series of survivals.

This book is about finding belonging in the blurring of time and change, where memories pass through crumbling ground. It is a narrative delicately layered with sparkling webs, dust, streams, cracks, roots, dreams, waterfalls, strangers and stranger places, landscapes both pretty and painful. 

In a generous weaving of eco-poetry, travel writing, and lyrical reflection, this book explores the complex interplay between family and home, the society of the ‘self’, and the true nature of healing. It follows a life in search of autonomy and community. Using the earth as a metaphor — ever-changing, never finished — it offers a vision of healing without closure, and a heart that stays open and centred.

I will publish this book once I reach 200 preorders. All of the funds will go toward printing, editing, formatting, and the wonderful cover designer Adrian Robb. If you are appreciate my work, I would be honoured if you can support me in the creation of this book. I have emptied the contents of my soul into it. Everyone who preorders a copy will get a signed copy of the physical book three weeks before launch and a hand-painted bookmark.

A little more about….

I began writing this book in 2018 as a way of 'making sense' of time as it moved me: transient, ethereal, embodied and always. What began as a personal reclamation of my voice became a creative act of remembering, forgetting, and remembering again, a constant retrieval of self and sense away from all the noise and nonsense of what, when, or why why why. This book is about the healing power of community. The act of writing my life as it passed was embodied yet disembodied enough it proved able to balance the tides and salt my eyes, taking me safely away from ‘the moment’ as it edged me ever closer toward it. This book was written on the back of buses, bushes, scribbled down at dawn in my note book or app, midnight sleepless hostel dorm rooms, bustling cafes, crowded city streets, alone in my own head and full of cares, but also full of the raw pulsing of everything - the past and present iridescent, colours passing by the train-wreck, the sensation of falling, the silent music of it all. My head torn between two places. Moving about every few months, shifting grounds and stifled air. It was the will to both contain and release the narratives I had stored inside safely for so long, the ones felt I could no longer hold. Like snowballs, they gathered momentum inside me, taking on new layers of meaning with every motion forward. I wrote much of this book in the tissue of the wounds as they healed, and so much the narrative is found in the dreamy space between selves. Structure was the biggest challenge, and it was only through trial and much error that I was able to fit a crooked and incomplete life into a story.

The prose is both heavy and light and is full of the weight of gravity, of descent, the healing power of the land and the destructive and constructive nature of the beings we share it with.

But the stories, written down, are no longer mine. We are not what happened to or through us, after all.. we are a million hearts beating as one, the whole world across. And that is why I wrote this book. I believe that connection and openness heals most things, and that creation is a powerful act of circularity, of continuance, of passing on the flame…

I have emptied the contents of my heart into this book, but the stories are no longer mine. Make of it what you will.