“Go to the limits of your longing,” wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in his Book of Hours

Hierophany is the experience of perceiving all the layers of existence, not just seeing its surface appearance.

the ability to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through our minds and bodies, to be sustained by it.

We have not understood this earth’s full potency until we have recognised fire.

So much of what we give to our children is shallow terrain: the shiny plastic surfaces of soft play centres and toys whose purpose is so specific that they run out of joy after a few minutes.

One of my favourite meditations is to drop through layers of sound. You start by asking yourself what you can hear, then absorbing that fully for a while. The background hum of the everyday opens up and separates, and becomes composed of many different actions, many different lives all surging around you as you forgetfully go about your business,

It occurs to me that I am resting. It is not the same as doing nothing. Resting like this is something active, chosen, alert, something rare and precious.

I don’t want to sit like a brooding hen on the nest of my past achievements. I want to keep on going deep into the uncertain act of making, to see the unknown world stretch out before me and to devote myself to exploring it.

She offered me instead the act of knowing, rather than the static fact of the known, a lifetime of enquiry.