Contemplative Inquiry

on a cool morning

a quiet hour after dawn:

sky, water and earth

Our 2026 summer has been dry as well as hot. ‘Unseasonable’ by the traditional standards that for me reference the later twentieth century. Some trees are already shedding leaves.

In Gloucester park, there are carpets of leaves on a hard earth. In the park, even around 6am, I am in a very different world from that of the hydrotherapy pool – see

The image above is from R. J. Stewart’s The Dreampower Tarot (1,2). The figure blissfully in water is the Queen of Souls, the water suit in this pack.

Yesterday I encountered a variant version of this image in an enhanced version of everyday life. My wife Elaine has a love of water, immersion in water and swimming. Her mobility challenges hav...

I have recently been investigating and tuning into prose poetry, getting to know the genre. Now I’m thinking about my own work.

As a start, I have reworked a poem I published in September 2024 (https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2024/09/17/). I have found that the ...

I walked today in my local park between 6 and 7am. These early morning walks have become my new normal this summer. After a 5am rise, the sun was climbing ever higher in the sky. I found my world delightfully sunny and cool, moving from 17C/62.6F to 18C/64.4F over the course of an hour. Now, at 11.23 am, it is 29C/84.2F. It will soon be 30C/86F and we will spen...