My father, Cornwall.

Pathways to Home is a work in progress of creative non-fiction – a story of a search for the meaning of home, inheritance, loss and the healing power of love for place. It is an enquiry into the restlessness of contemporary life, our struggle to put down roots, and to connect and belong to land. Exploring the conflict or tension between reconciling “the countries of our childhood” (Griffiths 2013) and our search for individual growth and freedom, the book develops the idea that being at home is about how we relate to the past in the present. Through an archaeology of landscape, memory and family, that is both personal and collective, it advances a radical and liberating view of belonging and inheritance as rooted not so much in the transmission of concrete things or rights, nor in closed or static communities, but in ways of knowing and engaging with the world.  Each chapter will explore the power of metaphorical junctions between past and present, and the role of walking, swimming, writing, work and craft, art, literature and love, in attending to the world, and through such attentive perception and embodied engagement, finding a way to be at home in the world.

Watch this space!