Begins another step towards communication, engagement with my wide world. There are deep questions, and difficult ones to be asked and to be answered.

I won’t pretend I have any (answers) but I will try to lay them openly before us, so that we can challenge and examine them to bring out their own answers. Perhaps together we can discover something new. Perhaps ideas or answers will ‘leap off the page’ of your flickering screen.

Perhaps at certain times I or you will shout ‘Eureka!’ and share what we’ve found, like some ancient philosopher, discovering a divine source, some mystical well of sparkling truth.

Perhaps it will be – for you – empty and echoing. Perhaps there will be a trickle, a sound of water flowing as we explore this unexplored world of thoughts of ours, together.

Perhaps the waters will be full of healing warmth and perhaps some vitality will be shared as I, as we peer in together to some of the unaccessed recesses of our shared existence on this earth together.

‘Gods’?

Once, as a child of eight or so, I remember looking down at my finger nail, I can almost remember exactly where I was standing – in the lane, to the rear of our modest little terraced 2 up, 2 down rented house in Lamanva, near the twin metal gates that led to adjacent fields and the substantial granite stile that somehow – awkwardly, in my mind – linked the two.

I looked down at my finger nail and I saw the line of black grime underneath and I imagined that – perhaps – I was ‘God’ and that in the grime in my fingernail there was a whole microscopic universe that I was somehow aware of, as a benevolent master and with this sense of incredible, gentle authority (I wasn’t a mean God, or a Dictator) I imagined that I could with one sweep of a slim, stainless steel pointed nail file wipe out this little world (I know, it sounds terrible!). They would have had a good life, perhaps over aeons of ‘time’ and it would have been a due and good end.

And my mind and my imagination exploded with the possibility of life on another scale, in another dimension, different, but adjoined to ours. I knew this was a Big thought for a little boy and I kept it to myself. Hidden, like some found, cute and wild animal that I could keep to myself, hidden beneath the folds of my coat, or under my shirt, keeping me company, keeping me warm.

It spoke to me of having imagination: a benevolent power – something which I was utterly unaware existed, apart from that carried, in her own broken way, by my Mum – to change and form a world around me and certainly, if I was able to wipe away one universe under my nail, surely I could also breathe new life into another world or even many new and different worlds….

I was secretly so proud of my thought, I’m pretty sure I glowed (like the Ready Brek boy) with contentment for days after it!

I didn’t know it, but this was a creative thought (perhaps my first?) and perhaps it equipped me with the seeds of what I was going to become, of what I am now: a Dreamer and a bringer of a connected ‘world’ where newness and goodness are a possibility, closer than you think.

At our fingertips.