Just Being One

Or is it Being Just One? Perhaps they are one and the same?

A beautiful book of poems, inspired by Ray Andrew’s love of haikus, but where he makes little or no effort to conform to any syllable rules. Ray is a retired carpenter who regularly recites at Rupert Spira’s retreats in Wales (when in person meetings were the norm). The story behind this book is that Ray’s daughter had secretly collected all of his poems and created a photo book to present to him on his birthday (70^th from memory) and he brought this along to one retreat. Each page was a little heart-opener, in four short lines – we couldn’t just allow there to be one such copy in existence.

Anna Fraser, who in the end so beautifully illustrated this book, asked if Swirling Leaf Press would be interested in helping to publish it. It was a very easy yes! And so we got to work, with very little work needed on the body of the text and Anna working on creating the images by hand. It took us a year, outside of work to finish the book, mostly because Anna is a perfectionist when it come to her illustrations. And then a year on from the book being a mere idea, Ray’s book had been published and he had carried 150 copies to another winter retreat in Wales to gift away to whoever wanted a copy. You can imagine, there weren’t many books left and here are some of the poems from his book…