Episodes
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Where the Light Falls
Look again at the growth rings in the photo above. Notice how slender and crowded they are in the top of the circle compared to the area on the lower-left. This tree was likely felled near where it was used, near North Adams, Massachusetts, sometime in the late nineteenth century. In heavily forested areas like the hills and valleys around the Hoosic river, conifers such as pine and spruce grew tall and were used in buildings as pillars, structural timbers and flooring. At Mass MOCA I could have filled my camera reel with pleasingly crunchy textures from almost every post-industrial wall, flaky painted pillar or unevenly glazed old bricks, but this tiny section of floor stole the show, despite the array of art visible in every direction.
Listen on for more on music, friendship and knowing which way you are growing.
This podcast was first published with full transcript, photos, links and footnotes here on Substack on 4th November 2024. No AI is used in the creation of my writing.
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Why do you write?
Why I write depends on what I am writing; there is a vast difference between why I first wrote a book about natural art materials4 and why I write this Substack5. Similarly, the reasons why I wrote a T’ai Chi blog for my students for 15 years6 and why I write song lyrics7 have barely anything in common. That is ‘why’ as motivation or hoped-for outcome. That’s not quite what I’m stalking.8
About 3 hours ago, I finished writing and illustrating my second book, after six months’ work and a further six months’ preparation. I’d had a good day at the drawing board9, finishing pastel, metal point and charcoal drawings for various sections, and the last of the element logos. I thought I’d take myself out for a coffee and a cake to celebrate but had left it too late in the day and so headed down the wooded walk to the clifftop to clear my head. Apart from awaiting a few images from guest artists and writing some captions when they are all in place, the main work of Drawn From The Wild is over for me, and the designers can take charge until it’s time to proofread.10
Having just spent my first two full days drawing since March, and despite the deep pleasure of that, it feels very clear that my creative energy seeks out words and that has not changed over my two years on Substack.
So, in lieu of coffee and cake, which will have to wait until morning, I am celebrating by making two of my favourite things, a list and copious footnotes.
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This post was first published here on Substack on October 7th 2024 with full transcript, photos and copious footnotes.
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Episodes manquant?
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This week is a between-essays week. Here are two short fiction sketches, written in 2007 and 2015, and recent photographs from near my home and from a very nourishing week in Suffolk. Greetings from sunset hour in York, where I am away working on the last edits for my next book. Back with a longer piece and ‘this week’s good thing’, next week. Go well, all, into the season’s change.
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This podcast was first publish here on Substack on 30th September 2024 with full transcript, links and footnotes.
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I want to write about music and silence. It’s a few weeks earlier than planned, as yesterday I got the heads up from Lydia Catterall that our episode on her podcast Survival Songs was coming out on Sunday 22nd September, a month before I expected. So why not listen to that now, before reading this? You can click here. It’s only 20 minutes long and it’ll give you more depth on some of the topics in today’s post.
Have you ever just stopped doing a thing you really loved for a decade? What happened when you came back to it? Had anything changed?
Links to the song mentioned in the podcast: Mount the Air - The Unthanks.
Scroll to bottom of the original post for The Shape of Prayer - Tells.
And here’s the Survival Songs podcast homepage.
This podcast was first published here on Substack on 23rd September 2024 with full transcript, footnotes and links.
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This week I am sat here at my desk with a hard stone in my belly. I could write what I would have written and not mention the chill in my guts, but apart from plainly being false, it would also not serve anyone. Perhaps I will always be a teacher at heart, like both my siblings and most of my cousins, aunts and uncles. To fight the explicatory urge to find lessons in almost everything would be as futile as pulling out my own thumbnail. I’d be useless for a while and it’d only grow back. And then I’d find it was a perfect metaphor for…
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This post was published here on Substack on 10th September 2024 with links, footnotes and images.
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I am away somewhere there is no electricity. I come to town to look at this screen, drink coffee and send pictures to my mum.
Here are three fruits from my larder of letters, thoughts, poems. I send greetings from a day with SSE winds and an abundance of bats at dusk. The mackerel’s bellies are full of baby sprats, a first. The local swimmers report huge silver shoals of them around their legs. The grey seal rested all day yesterday and gazed at us with huge black eyes. I watched the rise and fall of its sighing bulk and found myself exhaling in time. Mammals relax in similar ways. This morning I returned to the flat rock near where it had lain and spent a good ten minutes on my side enjoying a vertical horizon.
This podcast was first published on Substack on 27th August 2024 with more images, links and a full transcript.
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I-thou
This ‘you’ I am writing to, it’s really ‘thou’ or ‘ye’ or ‘thee’.
I tried ‘I’ and ‘my’ for this piece but that’s not it, and using ‘we’ would assume far too much. So, rather than affect an archaic pronoun that would get in the way of communication, I must address ‘you’, but not in an accusatory way. This ‘you’ includes the part of me to which I write when I also write to you.
English is a strange and speckled beast and when not quick to heel, turns to sniff old walls and piss on them. But it is my beast and I must walk with it. I won’t use a choke chain, and besides, it wouldn’t help. Disciplining English only makes it howl.
So, this week I have questions and a poem. The questions are mine and the great poem is by a friend and fellow ‘what is this I am doing today, is it writing / music / poetry / art?’ person David Benjamin Blower. I asked him if I could read you one of his poems, of the several that jumped out during his performance two weeks ago. His words reached into my glassware cupboard, pulled out a goblet and filled it with good wine, which I have been drinking all week.
He said yes.
This podcast was first published here on Substack on August 12th 2024 with full transcript, footnotes and links.
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It is time to write the last of these See With the Body Eye pieces for a while, and to return to the implicit over the explicit again, next week. Last night for an online talk I gave for PRI, it was both a joy and a big leap for me to be so ‘out’ about my inspirations and sources of sustenance for the work that is mine to do in the world. In a few week’s time I hope to share the recording and the resources. But for now, it is just good to know the week ahead comprises days in an ancient octagonal keep in deep work with the Philosopher’s Stone, lapis lazuli, while evenings will be spent quietly editing my next book Drawn From the Wild. One cannot only breathe out.
I look forward to meeting some of you in person for the online workshop on 3rd August, details are in last week’s post. In the meantime, let us step out, and in, together into the labyrinth which is pilgrimage.
This podcast was first published on July 22nd 2024 here on Substack with links, images, and full transcript.
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This moment
You are at your desk and your hands, shoulders and eyes feel so tired. You roll your shoulders back and squint at the screen, did it always seem so blurry? Your partner comes in bringing a cup of tea wondering when you’ll be free to help with a small household task. The cat stretches lazily by the door and requests, with an exceptionally sweet ‘raaorll’, that she would like to be let out, to prowl her inscrutable night paths.
So many requests in a day, from our loved ones, from the wild world, from our bodies: are these things truly separate, anyway?
Our requests for aid, for freedom, for connection, for movement and for love are entirely natural, infinitely nuanced and secreted within the most mundane of everyday activities. To spot the influence of the tender heart of our beloved in the angle of a tea mug handle’s placement is to discover a fairy door to the kingdom of Grace. There, we may find that the royal throne is only one of the props in an endless game of musical chairs, where somehow giving up our seat with good humour, while paradoxically giving our all to the frantic dash, is the opportunity to laugh and drink from the side lines with all the other creatures. Here, we watch just a few craven humans cling to their driver’s seats, thrones and presidencies, not realising the whole point of the game was to stay in motion with the others and to end up laughing so much we could barely stand and may even spill our cup of punch.
This podcast was first published on Substack on 12th July 2024 with full transcript, links, images and footnotes.
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It is summer 1985 and I am crouched in a dusty attic bedsit at the top of a large, run-down Victorian building in Bournemouth, peering at the bookshelf wedged behind a potter’s wheel. Worn paperbacks I have never seen before are in a row: Tao - The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts, Zen Buddhism by Christmas Humphries, several books by Idries Shah including the exploits of Mulla Nazruddin, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Suzuki Roshi, A Potter’s Book by Bernard Leach, poems of Hafez and Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled by Paul Reps. 1
‘You can borrow what you like, any time. Just bring them back when you’re done,’ says Pete.2 I pull out The Watercourse Way and Zen Flesh, Zen Bones and start flicking through them. I am drawn to the picture of an empty circle and look at it, transfixed. What is this? I ask myself. Why are the drawings of ox herding interrupted by an empty frame? Slightly horrified by a creeping sense that I might not know anything near as much as I think I do about… anything, I pick up the second book, and read,
“[T]he world as described is included in but is not the same as the world as it is. As a way of contemplation, it is being aware of life without thinking about it, and then carrying this on even while one is thinking, so that thoughts are not confused with nature.”
What is life without thinking? Who am I if not this narrative voice telling myself everything as it happens? Hastily, I stash the books in my army-surplus satchel and offer to make a cup of tea, already always the serving girl. These are questions I’ll shelve for twenty years, while I make myself busy with doing.
This podcast was first published here on Substack June 24th 2024 with full transcript, footnotes, photos and links. Photo credit: Jonny Randall
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Pax Corporis
Your body is not an enemy to be subdued, it is not evil and does not need transcending.1
You do not need to mortify the flesh, neither is it advisable to indulge it.2 3
It is not a peripheral matter that the intelligence beaming out of you at this moment, meeting my words in that ancient embrace of sense-making together, (like strangers clasping hands and forearms to make a new peace), is embodied.4
Embodiment is not an accident, a trap, a curse, a trick, an inconvenience. The Great Mystery is not mistaken, and neither is everyone who loves you.
Do not worry that you are a body for no reason. Your ability to reason depends upon your body, as everything you can conceive of is measured by a proportion you learned before you could speak, when you were quickest making sense.
You are not trapped in a body, you were not born in the wrong body. There are no wrong bodies.
If your body is in pain, even in chronic pain, is injured, exhausted, ill or dying, is damaged, is unwieldy, unwilling, unwanted, then remember you remain in good, ordinary company at the endlessly long feasting table of life. All of us will one day be most of these things, or already have been.5 Indeed, it is why we can have any compassion for anyone else.6
This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, footnotes, images and links on 10th June 2024.
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Mind sneaks glances from behind the door of the room where heart and hope lay sleeping in a tangle. Lists accrue in layers on the desk as chestnut pollen tints the bay window yellow and further warms the (already golden) evening sunlight to a tone not seen since Proserpina’s last return. I have three more days of the very best company before I must make my third Lenten month of the year and work and only work. So, poems, pilgrimage and images are how I can be here with you this week, in one of those occasional interludes. Discursive brain cells rest, knowing they will be needed soon, and so are currently lounging in long grass, chewing stalks. The nettles in the abandoned churchyard are growing longer and shortly will be picked for cordage, as the Schumacher College course is full and I cannot scrimp on twist away, pull towards, twist away, pull towards materials.
The phenomenal world is ever present. We are not lost in thoughts and words do not steal energy from events. What is said is what is already being done. We bow to the day and to each other, to the sun, the Great Mystery and to Providence. In west Dorset, the Milky Way roared above us at 3am. Outdoors for a pee, my old glasses permitted only a blurry Plough and Cassiopeia, but we could still orient ourselves well enough and laughed southwards, sky-clad, ridiculous.
This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, footnotes, links and images on June 3rd 2024.
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Aspirant
I have long been in search of a way to write about the real1 without lapsing lazily into superlatives nor anatomising a now-lifeless corpse of the beloved. I have a duty to speak for wisdom only accessible by the body and to somehow say-into-being the unspeakable, and to not just allow, but speak up for, the flawed, the exiled, the tiny, the marginal.
The untethered word is to the real what the virtual world is to lived reality: merely a representation. When words are true, they remain nestled into the fabric of being, connected by an umbilicus to the matrix of real life. When they have finished being useful they can and should return to the nourishing silence that surrounds all speech and action.
The Great Mystery is in all things.4 Matter matters. Sacrifice involves physical loss, even death. The container of insight is material, even though the insight is immaterial. This is the great paradox of embodiment, the heart of all wisdom traditions worth their salt, the current lack of which makes empty husks of men, women and children.
This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, images, notes and links on 20th May 2024.
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Loose Ends
I am accustomed to being away from home, but it is a new and tricky thing travelling so far away when one’s love is 3600 miles and 5 hours east. Conversations between hosts, friends and strangers are woven together, the beloved is included. How do we stay in communion with what and whom are not physically present? How do we do this without drifting away from the present moment, from what is close at hand? Maintaining a thread between myself and family, friends or partner has been an ongoing conundrum over the many years where touring with bands or teaching T’ai Chi took me to Poland, Canada, USA, Scotland, Sweden or elsewhere. Now, older, though perhaps only marginally wiser, I realise the importance of puncturing the mystique of that perfect distance achieved by international travel. It can attenuate connection to a point at which it breaks. I have seen friends and myself swept up in that seemingly inviolable self-contained bubble which can accompany anything other than very low-budget travel. Marriages have faltered. Bands have broken up. What starts as a semi-mystical experience soon becomes an excuse for not bringing ourselves fully back home even as we dump our dusty bags by the front door.
In the recent past I have sat on one end of a string and felt nothing but emptiness greet my hopeful pulls. At other times I have let my own loose end dangle, ignoring the tension in the line, refusing to be in connexion, and yet expecting to be able to pick it up on my return.
But these are not those times, thank goodness. So I will write of host-guesting and then of a shawl the size of an ocean.
This podcast was published first here on Substack, with full transcript, notes and links on 6t May 2024.
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I am in America, and inexplicably have no phone signal or data here despite paying for it, right after a couple of weeks in Italy.
Here at last are deep green thoughts beneath the Georgia trees, where it is hot and humid and the shade of early evening is welcome. Good conversation and wonderful birdsong fill the air. There is due to be a ‘Biblical storm’ tonight, so people are leaving the camp, but we are trusting in our new tent and the fact that in Britain’s south west, we’ve just had the wettest winter on record. So we don’t feel fazed. My belly is full of the quesadilla and refried beans I cooked on the little camping stove. I have hard seltzer beside me and my travelling friend in front of me. My beloved is 3600 miles away, and so I console myself with the real beauty that is present and the deep conviviality of the people around me.
May you feel it too.
This was first published here on Substack with full transcript, more photos and footnotes on 23rd April 2024.
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On the seventh, and final, celebration of the anniversary of the initiatory circle of the Incorporation of Muse. Below are some extracts of the many meetings of the participatory Beings and the Mistress of the gathering basket. Losses are recouped. A new door opens. We draw a crooked line under everything with charcoal made from our brothers’ vines, and heave a glad sigh.
This week, an unknowable horizon beckons, we go to pack old hurts away and find them turned to thick black ink.
This post was first published here on Substack with full transcript, photos and footnotes on 8th April 2024.
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A month or so ago, David Knowles, a writer I love to read, asked me to write something about knowing, after I had written this in a short Note about an earlier piece:
Somewhere between the fort-town of Facts and the river of Knowing is a meadow where I gather leaves of wild faith.
I was making notes, mulling it over, as you do, when a friend died. Washed downstream into a gully of grief, several of us swam together and kept each other afloat. Now, on the banks of that peaty force, I sit to regather my thoughts and find them changed. I cannot write about epistemology1, not only because I have not read the requisite books, but also because I do not keep a kenning that could be culled and flayed thus.
So, I will describe some of the different ways I ever know anything, (if I ever do), as I have never tried to list them in words. Perhaps it will chime with how you know what you know.
Then, I will speak of a recent long moment spent outside time with my pack.
This piece was first published here on Substack on 25th March 2024, with full transcript, more images, links and footnotes.
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Fate
It's my fate to work with the fragmentary, the partial, detritus, the discarded and the unwanted.
Matter is holographic. If the Divine is in everything, then any one thing is a holograph of the whole. Completeness can be accessed through incompleteness more easily than through the search for completeness. Searching for ‘wholeness’ is a fool’s errand.2 Attention to the unwanted, the vestigial and the marginal always yields more than expected. The devil is not in the details, the devil is in the Grand Unified Theory. The Great Mystery is in the tiny details, the unforeseen events, the mysterious turns, the strange, small objects and strangers well-met on the path. It's found in the unexpected embrace, the impromptu dance, the fireside gathering bursting into song, the sudden meal assembled from scraps that tastes delicious, full of unlikely combinations: sausage and mango? Amazing.
This piece was originally posted here on Substack with full transcript, more images and links on 10th March 2024.
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The Dragon
In the Taoist Classics, dragons signify many things, depending on context, but the one I want to talk about is the sky dragon as the spirit of nature and the nature of spirit. In many Chinese artifacts and art you will see a joyful, sinuous dragon, mouth open, wide eyes, and wider smile, front legs outreaching with all its energy towards its goal - the pearl. What is this pearl? Well, talking of it with my old friend and T’ai Chi teacher Mark Raudva this weekend, he raised his eyebrows and smiled, ‘Ah, the mysterious pearl of great value…’
What it often represents is true wisdom.
How the dragon is portrayed shows us how we too could gather all our vitality, energy and spirit1 to pursue this great prize. That this is our true nature.
But our vitality is drained by the dopamine cycle. Our energy is wasted chasing complicated accoutrements and enervating experiences, which cannot replace simply being at home on the earth, which we ancestrally crave. Our spirits are tranquilised by fake ritual which numbs, but never kills, our longing for connection with each other, the living world and Great Mystery.
This was first published here on Substack on 26th February 2024, with full transcript, more images links and footnotes.
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I have been grinding bone ash, marble dust, chalk, oyster shell white and ochre into various binders: gum Arabic, aquafaba, linseed oil, gum tragacanth, cherry tree gum, oat gruel… My cunning plan, to one day wean people off plastic marker pens when they see how great metal marks made on prepared grounds can look: bold, permanent, soft, shiny, grey, black, brown, golden… And so I mull things over on the slab while listening to this and this. The work is long and full of haptic richness, smashing, grinding, milling, then long strokes of the brush as I lay the grounds down on watercolour paper before making test marks on them next week. Shop-bought grounds are expensive and often made of acrylic (microplastics which go straight down the plughole, which is where the sea starts…) Tapping the sieve to let the yellow ochre through just enough to tint the various subtle whites. The splash of water droplets from a pipette before scooping them up with a palette knife on the speckled granite slab, a 1990s placemat from the charity shop.
First published here on Substack with more images and links on 19th February 2024.
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