Twinn Swan

In the earliest years, my world was composed of newsprint and deadlines. Journalism was my apprenticeship, the craft I pursued at the University of Melbourne and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It was a discipline of observation, inquiry, and precision. That foundation was solid, but soon, the boundaries of reporting proved too shallow for the deeper currents stirring beneath the work.

Artistic expression demanded entry, calling for creativity that wasn’t confined to fact, but welcomed subtlety, silence, ambiguity—everything that the inverted pyramid rejected. Spiritualism was never absent. It traveled quietly at the edge of my awareness—a river below the packed earth of journalism and creative writing. Only much later did I step directly into its stream, a shift unexpected and absolute.

At Twinn Swan, I found myself not dabbling in spiritual topics, but buried in them, surrounded by layers of insight that demanded the long patience of unhurried study. This field does not yield easily. Specialising here means wrestling with old, frequently re-translated texts, their meanings subtly shifted by each hand that carried them forward. Reading a line, a paragraph, a page can become an act of endurance. There is a kind of stubbornness required—the capacity to return again and again to words that resist, that shield their purpose in the folds of another era’s vocabulary. And there are years where the work gives nothing back but fatigue.

One must arrive at the right moment, both in age and in mindset, to begin appreciating these texts. The reward is invisible at first: nothing to show for months of effort, save perhaps a growing tolerance for silence and ambiguity. The journey is neither quick nor glamorous. It is often lonely, sometimes punishing.

With enough practice, something remarkable transpires—the resistant text becomes animated, a living force, line by line drawing breath through you. I describe this metamorphosis in latest book Sacrifice—a word that in itself is nothing simple, nothing sentimental.

Arriving at this maturity is not a birthright, nor a simple progression of years. It is the slow outcome of sustained attention and humility in the face of what refuses to be simplified or rushed. I do not romanticise the path. If anything, I warn those who wish to write on these themes that the journey is both arduous and unavoidably slow. To research and write well on spiritual subjects is to accept the long road: a commitment not to answers, but to the discipline of return.