There was a time recently when this space fell quiet — not for lack of thought, but for lack of confidence about thought itself, and where it should go if it were to go anywhere. Rubem Alves’ gentle rebuttal to Descartes, ‘Where I think, there am I not,’ perhaps prompted it. I have always carried words within me, but the world – relentless, loud, urgent – seems to have narrowed, and continues to narrow, the space where quiet attention might live.
And yet here I am, returning to the page. Not with the sense of having arrived, but with the quieter conviction that I must return to where attention meets intention.
In earlier reflections – such as Discovering the Song Within – I asked why the bird sings, borrowing Anthony De Mello’s question as both riddle and compass. In Symmetrical Asymmetry I explored paradox as the shape of lived experience – how life can feel at once ordered and unresolved.
But in the months that followed, life posed its own questions: duties, disruptions, distractions – small and large. Like many of us, I found myself suspended in that familiar interior tension between wanting to write and sensing that the world’s momentum was too swift for words to catch. The sense of overwhelm – cultural, technological, personal, geopolitical – did not disappear. It softened into a quiet pressure, as though meaning had migrated from the centre of life toward its margins.
In the interim, much of my attention turned inward and underground. I completed a first draft of A Thousand Swords, sequel to my novel Everything That Stands – a story set in the long shadow of Rhodesia’s war, wrestling with conscience, memory, and the thresholds on which lives turn. Around the same time, I began a PhD that seeks to think alongside this fiction – not to explain it, but to explore how story, the sacred, and the tensions of our cultural moment might still speak to one another.
Both undertakings required a distinct silence.
Not absence. Not retreat. But an attentiveness that must be protected for a season – where language is still forming, still testing its weight, still listening for what might emerge.
I have also felt, as many have, the acceleration that marks our present moment – the pressure to react quickly, to declare positions, to keep pace with a world that rarely pauses. In such a climate, writing that lingers can feel out of step. And yet it may be precisely here that attention becomes most necessary.
That conviction led me back to more regular public writing through More Than Littoral – a weekly notebook of threshold notes where story meets the sacred. It is a space for provisional thinking, for essay-fragments, for reflections that resist haste. Writing there has helped me reclaim a practice of sustained attention. It is not volume that matters, but wakefulness.
This website remains something slightly different. It is the longer shoreline – a place where those notes may gather, settle, and shape-shift into slower reflection.
So, this post is less an announcement than a return.
Not because the pauses have resolved, but because they have clarified something essential: writing does not wait for certainty. It begins again at the threshold.
I will post here more regularly – not to fill space, but to keep company with the edges of experience.
And if you would like to wander a little further, you can find my weekly writing at:
https://morethanlittoral.substack.com, or wander through the reflections here on this site.
No urgency. No pressure.
I am simply glad to be writing again.
jwh