Sky Ground Sky

Sky Ground Sky is a narrative exploring 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 the past. The building process itself reflects a journey through place, memory and moment, an enquiry into how we can move with our own history, and that of the land.

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

In a delicate weaving of eco-poetry, travel writing, and lyrical reflection, this book explores the complex interplay between family, community and home, and the nature of the ‘self’.

To support this project, you can make a reader deposit. This will contribute to the cost of printing, book editing and the cover design. Everyone who contributes will get a thank you note, original hand-painted bookmark and an early discounted copy of the book. Thank you so much for your support!

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 the senses, away from all the noise and non-sense. This book is about the healing power of community and the ground we walk upon. 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 pulsation of everything - the past and present iridescent, colours passing by the train-wreck, the sensation of falling, the silent music spinning out of it all. My head torn between two places. Moving about every few months, shifting grounds and stifled air. It was the will to hold and release the narratives I had inside my harddrive heart. Like snowballs, they gathered momentum inside me, taking on new layers of meaning with every passing place, new face. I wrote much of this book in the soft tissue of a path unfolding, and so much the narrative has a foggy, momentary feel. Structure was the biggest challenge, and it was only through trial and much error that I was able to fit a crooked story into a book. The book explores how the land heals itself, and the destructive and constructive nature of the people we share it with.