The mystics describe the peak but not the descent. They speak of touching infinity but not of how to pay bills with hands still trembling from the encounter. They chart the way up the mountain but leave you to find your own way back to the village.
The Living Path: Between Worlds explores this unmapped territory.
If The Ascending Path mapped the essential qualities of spiritual growth from gratitude through wisdom, this second collection explores what comes afterwards: how we live these insights in the space between cosmic consciousness and the ordinary reality of daily life.
These fifteen poems arose through the same natural process as the first collection - not through deliberate craftsmanship, but as genuine expressions emerging from direct experience. They embody a lifetime of travel, clinical practice, and deep meditation, from the Algerian Sahara to the silence of the Alpujarra Mountains, from the forests of Borneo to an Oxfordshire grave where a locked box finally opened.
THE COLLECTION'S JOURNEY
Foundation: the infinite woven into the earth beneath our feet. Initiation: crossing thresholds into expanded awareness. Deepening: consciousness explored through direct experience. Integration: navigating between mystical realisation and practical living
THIS BOOK IS FOR YOU IF YOU:
- Have glimpsed something beyond ordinary awareness and wonder how to live with it
- Know the tension between transcendent experience and everyday demands
- Seek poetry that honours both the cosmic and the mundane
- Value wisdom earned through lived experience, not borrowed from books
- Recognise that the real spiritual work begins after the vision fades
ABOUT THE POEMS
From fractal patterns in forest floors to the mathematics of transformation, from visionary experiences to the quiet work of living wisdom in everyday moments, these poems explore the territory of advanced spiritual practice. A silver cobra dissolves into geometry. A grave in Oxfordshire releases sixty years of sealed grief. Morning coffee becomes a sacred practice.
This is the living path: not avoiding the world, but engaging with it more deeply from a place of understanding. Not a permanent dwelling in transcendent states, but the daily act of remembering what we already are.
Fifteen poems. The journey continues.
Martin, Andy: -
At 76, Andy Martin offers something increasingly precious: wisdom earned through a lifetime of direct experience.
Childhood in Malawi taught him interconnectedness as lived reality rather than philosophy. The Yao people, among whom he grew up, wove ancestors into daily life; a few steps from the classroom, an entirely different understanding of the sacred was being lived. Decades of exploration followed: contemplative traditions in Southeast Asia, mystical practices in Europe, shamanic journeys in Siberia and Oxfordshire, always as practitioner, never merely as an observer.
Years as a clinical hypnotherapist deepened his understanding of how transformation unfolds: not in straight lines but spirals, not through escape but through engagement, not suddenly but through patient, repeated returns to essential themes.
Thirteen years ago, in the Algerian Sahara, seventeen words crystallised during meditation. They required thirteen more years and seventy-five years of life to mature into complete poems. In 2025, after a retreat in Oxfordshire woods, The Ascending Path: From Gratitude to Wisdom emerged fully formed. A second collection, The Living Path: Between Worlds, followed almost immediately, exploring the territory between cosmic consciousness and ordinary reality.
Now caring for his mother in Devon, Andy lives the wisdom his poems explore: presence in ordinary moments, service without fanfare, the recognition that profound spirituality often wears everyday clothes. A third book, The Earth Remembers, is forthcoming.
