From adolescence until quite recently I was, as popular idiom would have it, a waster. I had a couple of ostensibly respectable careers in IT and then in countryside management, but behind the scenes I was a chronic daily cannabis user immersed in the worlds of role-playing games and fantasy literature, coming up for air every half-decade or so to savour the arguably more edifying avocations of poetry, philosophy and photography. Near the end of 2018 I had a profound psychotic experience, birthed like the Cosmos from the Chaos of excessive THC consumption. I spent the next seven weeks sectioned under observation, and emerged, blinking, into the watery light of a February morning. The next three and a half years were spent bedbound, introspecting and reviewing my life with disbelief and regret – plucking fluff out of my navel, if you will. And then, in June 2022, I started meditating and reading voraciously, picking up the dangling threads of poetry and philosophy from previous assays and following them like Theseus through Iain's good books and many others. This continued apace until my mum was hospitalised following a massive cerebral haemorrhage at the beginning of January 2023. Since then my time has been twined with whatever remains of hers. (I'm happy to say, she continues to confound so-called experts with the pace and extent of her recovery, so it may be that both she and I can escape the underworld for another spring or two.)