Often I can relate to that magnificent poet Mary Oliver when she writes:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
which is what I have been doing all day.
I have taken days off work to be idle and blessed. As part of my idleness I am reading the new Phil Rickman novel, the Fabric of Sin.
I really like Phil’s writing, and he is about the only fiction I read these days. This new one features his regular protagonist, Rev Merrily Watkins, an Anglican exorcist who mixes sole motherhood, earthy good sense and spiritual combat in a very delightful way.
The novels are billed as a cross over supernatural-crime genre, and Phil obviously knows more than a little when it comes to the topics of magic, exorcism, ghosts and haunting. All the exorcism and cleansing descriptions read very true to home. I have often thought of getting students expressing an unrealistic and glamorous desire to cleanse houses to read these novels. It would shake them into reality a bit 
As Molly would say, ‘do yourself a favour’ and go and grab a novel or two.
I am also being idle with the first two seasons of Jonathan Creek, and this time wishing I could make overly sentimental and undiscriminating students watch these DVDs too. The series, a few years old now (I never seem to watch anything contemporary) involves the partnership of the lead character, Jonathan Creek and his colleague Maddie Magellan. He is the designer of complex conjuring tricks used by stage magicians and she is an investigative journalist. Together they scrutinize and solve seemingly impossible questions, like how does someone murder a person in a sealed nuclear bunker, locked from the inside, and somehow escape.
The mind bending application of logical and lateral thinking is wonderful to watch, and I have found my mind expanding in a similar way to that induced by some Qabalistic word processes. The show is also funny with great lines and acting. However, I expect ‘any airy-fairy-lets-believe anything’ occultist forced to watch it would be carried away with the coincidental matching of the initials of the main characters and delve into their Da Vinci Code before the end of the first episode
"We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured." ~
“A religion without a goddess is halfway to atheism” ~
How does my spiritual practice and daily life serve the earth?
How does my spiritual practice and daily life affect the poorest third of humanity?
How will my spiritual practice and daily life affect the generations to come in the future?
"It is through your body that you realize you are a spark of divinity."
“For most of us, however, we only think seriously of food or sex or money when it becomes a problem, which is to say when we feel we are not getting our share. When we find ourselves in that situation then I regret to say that meditational visualisations are really not the best way to remedy the lack. … We are here in a physical condition in a physical world and while in that state we have to abide by the laws appropriate to it.”
"The biblical texts have been strained out through a Greek/Latin mindset, which is very surface and static. I sometimes think it would have actually have been better if Western culture had based so called "Western religion" on Greek philosophy, rather than middle-eastern, because then at least you'd have all one thing. It would be eternally consistent. But what we have now is sort of half of each. And you're left with a basically schizophrenic tradition." 
I’m currently reading “The Chalice” by Phil Rickman and enjoying it immensely. I’ve also enjoyed all the Merilly Watkins titles I’ve read (but I struggled to get into “The Man In The Moss”). Any-way thanks for steering me in the direction of Phil Rickman he is a good read.
If I recall correctly it was also a combination of yourself and Philip Carr-Gomm in “The Druid Way” which lead me to Mary Oliver who has become one of my favourite poets. It’s good to know that you are allowing time to “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
Glad to see another Phil Rickman fan out there.