All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.

I sometimes wonder what those of us who are writers would become in a nonliterary culture - storytellers? Hermits?

Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.

Too many of us seem far too fond of narratives of our powerlessness, maybe because powerlessness lets us off the hook... But we don't need everyone on board; we don't need one magic person in office; we need ourselves. To act. It's the wind, not the weathervanes.

We are entering an era of heightened disaster, thanks to climate change. Being prepared for disaster will mean being prepared to sift truth from rumour, and being prepared to adjust our worldview.

A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.

The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces]; we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic.