Episodes
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Episode 116 - Retrace Your Steps
The tchk tchk tchk of the wren in the crabapple tree supplies the sound effect for my mind as it skips across the surface of things. I pick up another thought and skim it. It flies away too fast for me to notice where it sinks. No matter, another thought lies glistening on the strand,...
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Episode 115 - How to Open an Invisible Door
The sun refuses to relinquish summertime hours, the bumble bees on the marjoram flowers are not complaining. We take our breakfast bowls outside and move the metal chairs into the light beside the crab apple tree. Morning warmth feels like a blessing. Like the British weather, I am aware my tone...
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Episode 114 - The house that Trust Built
Opening Today’s 6am lineup went like this: robin, gull, pigeon, me. The set list was lost; no matter, we improvised. A scant hour of song for the holiday weekend. For three months I’ve been away with trees and rock, gums and roses. Turns out the beauty is in the doing, the being, the singing, the...
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Episode 113 - Beauty is Essential
There was a thoughtful piece on beauty by Anja Byg this week about things I have mulled over for many years too (and which Ted Chiang wrangled meaningfully in his short story “Liking What You See: A Documentary”.) For me, the crucial pivot which supports the always-ambivalent weight of beauty is...
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Episode 112 - Crooked but Lit
I set the twisted candle in the holder and lit it. Heat may have melted it S-wise but its light remains undimmed. Something so skew suddenly so dear. To burn while the Great Bear is in the south and my north star with him. A whole week in another land and yet at home. Incomparable gifts. The…
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Episode 111 - Towards an Embodied Philosophy
Winged beings Red-tailed hawk is always nearby. She swooped down from the veranda rail corner as I opened the door, the exhalatory sigh of her wings the first intentional sounds I heard from another being yesterday. We both like to spend the early morning facing west, sun behind us, meadow lit up...
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Episode 110 - Slipping Between Words and Worlds
I am thousands of miles from home but amongst dear friends. I’ve only been here 28 hours and I have been moved to tears several times by the hospitality and love that comes from the humans, creatures and land that I meet, some deeply familiar, some new to me. I can’t write about it all now,...
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Episode 109 - Grace and Earthworms
Years ago, when I first began this Substack, I regularly included excerpts from the many letters, emails and long-form voice messages I send to friends, and with permission, from our correspondences. It’s been a while and as it’s Easter Week and I am taking time off with my loved one, here is a...
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Episode 108 - No Such Thing As Wasted Time
I have a spring basket full of good things for you this Easter week. As is appropriate to the season, some are sweet like chocolate, some are wrapped in colourful sleeves and others partake of endings and difficulty, before the beauty of transformation is apparent. I hope you enjoy them. The art,...
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Episode 107 - She Moves Through the Fair
When did your heart first leap out of itself, wanting to reside in the body of they-who-had-just-walked-past? They were surely more you than your own self, yet without ungainly stoop, spot-free, gaze level rather than downcast, half smile rather than self-conscious frown. With that leap, which…
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Episode 106 - Sensing, Stillness and Sovereignty
A tree offers an uncontrived response A strong westerly is blowing and there’s a ‘yellow warning’ of high winds. The still-bare trees outside my window are bobbing and weaving like a lad in a pub, hands over-full of a large round of drinks, somehow making his way back to his mates through a…
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Episode 105 - Evade the Constrictor
Back in the Imaginal Field, skylarks spill their trailing cascades above the field like sugar on the tea break tablecloth. Sweetness above, mud underfoot. The last week of winter neatly folds down the sheet on spring’s bed. Dock seeds scatter the floor of the shepherd’s hut where my new books sit...
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Episode 104 - Tidelandia
I have often remarked to friends that the River Thames is a hidden, long, thin county of England, with its own customs, rules and celebrations which only boat dwellers, river users, lock keepers and island dwellers know. But there is a longer, thinner complete country, more vast and yet less...
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Episode 103 - It's In Our Hands
It is Wednesday, named for Woden, Odin, he of the one baleful eye. With it, even without the parallax view, he would see that today is a golden coin, unearthed from the ploughed field of autumn. Bright, chill to the touch, marvellous. I reach down to pick it up. Whose face glints on it? Minerva,...
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Episode 102 - Handmade Prayers
Oak comes to the rescue, yet again. This laptop sits on a cork mat which prevents the cold hard aluminium edge of the camping table, which provisionally serves as my writing desk, from digging into my my wrists. I send heartfelt thanks to the cork oaks of Spain, Portugal and southern France…
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Episode 101 - Thoughts from Inside a Hollow Oak
I pack a box, clean a table, write more. The day is all mixed up. I cut my toenails then cry into my phone at the beauty of a message. The world is mixed up. The aspect ratio of verity and simile is not even. Joy is still joy. Hate is still hate. They were so before, during, and after, I wrote…
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Episode 100 - A Word in Your Shell-like
Welcome to the 100th podcast episode! There’s an off the cuff intro plus the full audio from my recent Zoom conversation with Paul Kingsnorth from his Machine Sessions1 for the launch of his upcoming book Against the Machine. As soon as I have read it, I’ll write about it here. But for now, enjoy...
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Episode 99 - A Heart like a Harbour
Ships of differing flags have come to moor inside myself, anchoring in the part of me which welcomes-in mystery. Here come the big ships - Goodness, Truth and Beauty. Are they from one fleet or from opposing navies? I do not recognise their flags and pennants nor do I understand the movements of...
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Episode 98 - Friendship is the Muse
It’s coming up for three years since I started this Uncivil Savant, and for the first time in many months, I have been taking a look through some of the pieces from the years before I opened this particular writing space. The space before this one was letters and emails to my dear friends and...
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Episode 97 - Escape from the Cloud of Knowing
The function of the Machine is onslaught The oil that allows its gears to turn is provided by your mind. The mill which expresses the oil from your mind is precisely calibrated to extract the maximum levels of anxiety from your thoughts, as, like the industrially mined and finely micronized...
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Episode 96 - Pine and Fisherman
The oaks bear it. The brunt of the sun. Turn their bitterness to acorn and gall. Buddleia is wilting, the weight of the butterflies barely registers. Whispering - ‘Remember how to be gentle before the burning time’. The forest always goes past at 80 miles an hour. My eyes are impatient lovers…
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Episode 95 - Finding the Words
In a time of the unsayable not only being said, but being enacted, I have withdrawn into speaking less. I haven’t been calling people, (my generation still phone each other), only leaving occasional short voice messages, like my younger friends. I love to talk with people, but I feel a time of...
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Episode 94 - Afloat on Dry Land
I spent most of last week on an art residency. For those of you from other walks of life, this is where you are invited and sometimes paid, to go away from home and make your art, often in response or relation to some aspect of the venue, people or institution that invite you. Perhaps it's easier...
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Episode 93 - Ultra Processed Things
Every six months or so, inspired by thoughtful writing by Ruth Gaskovski , I end up writing a tactile / haptic response or addendum to something rich from School of the Unconformed. In this case Architecture for the Free Mind was the prompt and my desire is to add a little detail to a possible...
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Episode 92 - Don't Proffer Your Neck to a Vampire
This week, glimpses from a week wrestling with good. The Great Mystery, as I experience it, is in all things and makes itself known hour by hour. We have never had a pugilistic relationship. Instead, I struggle with good, that is, how people, including myself, behave to one another, especially...
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Episode 91 - In Conversation with Iain McGilchrist
This week, I’d like to share a film of a recent conversation with Iain. As so often happens with friends, one wishes it were possible to capture the deep, spontaneous conversations that arise around meals or while relaxing. That not being possible, here’s us discussing a little of what we’ve been...
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Episode 90 - Hold an Edge
This week, four poems. Some take years to find a shape, others arrive fully formed. Their promptness or tardiness to the party, their languishing in my laptop or notebooks in various states of déshabillé - none of these correlates to whether they will be good mixers, or that they’ll skulk in a...
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Episode 89 - Hearth Person
This week, a story gathered fresh from the wild last week about how we unwittingly get caught in serfdom, and how we might walk away free. Some things that seem to be dead can haunt an unwitting culture or even possess it. A way of life as old and long-lived as feudalism, which persisted in…
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Episode 88 - It's Just Dogs Barking
‘That which circles moves from its centre’ 1Perhaps you too have something like this: a conundrum from which you can never turn away, which you do not feel as a curse, but a generative, endlessly revealing, probably insoluble, puzzle. In Ancient Greece and Norse myth it is part of your Fate. In…
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Episode 87 - Tidal / Wilding / Softening
With the sound of courting herring gulls hark hark harking on the roof opposite my desk, I just sat down to complete the next longer essay and briefly looked through my ‘drafts’ folder in the Substack editor. Words jumped up and said ‘hear me now!’ So, this week, while I continue writing the…
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Episode 86 - What Cannot Be Dissolved is the Real
This week’s podcast is an expansion on a voice letter I sent to Dougald Hine this week, which is part of our years-long ongoing conversation about how people can show up for one another in the strange times in which we find ourselves. My tone might sound different compared to other pieces but I...
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Episode 85 - Yielding, Sincerity, Integrity
Caught as we are in the seasonal gales of bawling and chest-beating of barely literate tyrants, there is much we cannot hear. Where I live, this last week of storms has left the low tide strand scoured and giant boulders half the size of cars are strewn about the upper shore, going nowhere....
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Episode 84 - If the Mind is a Lake
I begin writing this from within a storm. Hogmanay was cancelled in Edinburgh and most towns in the country were battered by high winds when New Years’ Eve parties and fireworks were due to be in full swing. A sou’ westerly blows hard and fast up the English Channel and greets my windows with a...
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Episode 83 - Saying It and Doing It
Trespasses On one of the first mornings of January 2024 I woke from a dream which had only the simplest and starkest of content. Instead of my usual dream adventures, quests, meetings and challenges, there was simple black text on white in bold capitals- A YEAR OF FORGIVENESS OF DEBT No sound, no...
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Episode 82 - Under the Hill
A Door Yielding to Land1 is a rigorous art. To make yourself soft to a hard place is to open something akin to opening a faery-door - not some pretty fabrication glued to a tree by a well-meaning parent - but a gaping cave mouth in reality. There is darkness in there and the possibility of…
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Episode 81 - AI Is A Tick Upon the Body of the Earth
Ordinary people, artists, creators, farmers, workers, parents, lovers… we did not ask for AI but it was made to seem inevitable, first by Science Fiction and Horror books and films, where at least it was almost always solidly critiqued. Later it was made real by the tech overlords of Silicon…
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Episode 80 - Growth Rings
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...
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Episode 79 - To Keep the Wolf As the Door
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...
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Episode 78 - Unsuitable Loves
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…
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Episode 77 - Before the Feast, a Fast
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…
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Episode 76 - Love is the Ache of a Bone Mending
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...
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Episode 75 - Three boats on a Horizon
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...
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Episode 74: What Is Your Mission?
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...
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Episode 73: A Walk That Never Ends
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…
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Episode 72: The Drop, the Splash and the Ripple
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...
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Episode 71: Imperfect Forms Are Just What We Need
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...
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Episode 70: To End a War, Be Unafraid to Fight
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...
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Episode 69: The Mead of Litha
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...
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Episode 68: Three Vials of Unconforming Beauty
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,...
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Episode 67: The Wondering Guest
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…
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About this show
The complete audio version of my regular posts. Notes from the Way, words from the woods, waters from the springs.
carolineross.substack.com
Hosted by
Caroline Ross
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