Uncivil Savant Podcast

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 piece, originally a voice-letter, to a dear friend from the middle of an ongoing conversation about the Eastern Christian saints, who when I read about them, sounded so much like the Taoist saints. Animals co-existing companionably with sages. Bears keeping hermits warm. Today it brought to mind one of my local saints, St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, and the otters who breathed on his feet to warm them, after his long nights praying whilst stood up to his waist in the cold North Sea. Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate it. And blessed spring to all, including all the creatures, especially the worms. The art, writing and and audio at Uncivil Savant is available to all with no financial barrier to access. Please become a paid subscriber for a while to help me keep this publication goingThe full version of this podcast with footnotes, links, images and full transcript was first published on Substack on 9th April 2026. Click the button to access it. My art, music, writing, research, audio and teaching is created without the use of AI. I am part of Writers Against AI. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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, writing and and audio at Uncivil Savant is available to all with no financial barrier to access. Please become a paid subscriber for a while to help me keep this publication going.Mind-weedingA few days ago, a man from USA complained that an article I restacked was verbose, a waste of his and my readers’ time and that I should keep things streamlined and to the point. I politely suggested that we can only waste our own time and that maybe refraining from telling people off on the internet would be a good way to claw some back. He apologised for his initial brusqueness but then doubled down on his critique of the essay, (which I mostly agree with). Substack is less than intuitive, since Notes and all the doodads have been added on, so he clearly didn’t understand that the piece was not written by me but by another man from USA, whose profile link I added to the reply, to help him out. For me, none of this was a waste of ‘my time’, as learning how to disagree or differ with humour, not taking things personally, without immediately ‘blocking and deleting’, and without the grip of fear around my heart, has been the work of many years, even for low-stakes things.For some people, electronic communications are water off a duck’s back, for others, like two of my dearest friends, even a lovely text or email takes huge amounts of energy to engage with, let alone answer. I lie somewhere in the middle of this scale, thankfully moving in the direction of the ducks… This podcast was first published on Substack 2nd April 2026 with full transcript, links, footnotes, images and more. You’ll find links to all the Substacks, books, TV, film and music mentioned in the podcast at the button.My art, music, writing, research, audio and teaching is created without the use of AI. I am part of Writers Against AI. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 can only be achieved by a kind of projection, the poetic aspect of ‘projection’ not explained by psychologists, a thread of what will pull you onward through life begins to spool out from the spinning crimson yarn cone of the heart. The leap can only occur while you do not yet know that the beloved object of your attention is likely as riddled as yourself with doubt, self-aggrandisement (or his sister self-abasement) and fears.Later, this knowledge, which must come to us all to fully become adults, will be the cap stone on the gushing spring of youth. The stone itself need not be the final word on springing forth. It forces a necessary halt to looking to others for everything that we should become and asks us to commit to our own source, however meagre or chalky, so that we might in time learn how to build a font, a basin, or even a simple hand-dug little pool, to collect our waters and be of benefit to others, rather than just an annoying source of path erosion and cold feet. Staying capped, asserting that one is ‘self-made’1, self-contained and dry, (the goal of every spiritual miser who has ever lived), is nothing to be proud of. It is the tight-lipped grimace of the hoarders of the world’s resources. You know what it looks like, you see it daily on your screens.2This podcast was first published here on Substack on March 26th 2026, with full transcript, footnotes, links, images and extras. No AI was used to research, create or edit this piece, nor any of my art, books, music, writing or crafts. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

A tree offers an uncontrived responseA 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 throng of wildly gesticulating half-time big-screen football fans. Will he stay upright? We shall see. The deep green clad evergreens further back are full-on dancing and it’s more 90s Acid House than graceful Calypso. When the wind stops for a moment, so do they. As soon as it resumes, they move again. There’s no gap, no ‘shall I or shan’t I?’ I would never say that trees have no intelligence1, but they are not encumbered / blessed by individual minds. Only a mind can say, ‘Something is happening, but I think I will not respond…’Well, something is certainly happening. I shall respond, but how?Uncivil Savant is available to all with no financial barrier to access thanks to the generosity of paid subscribers.Read the whole piece, with full transcript, footnotes, photos, links and more, here on Substack, first published March 12th 2026. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 on a Formica table like two eggs in a nest. Damp air has buckled the essay’s nine printed sheets, the broadside print poem, and the other concertina book I left out overnight as an experiment. Wood fibres, even at so far a remove from their arboreal beginnings, cannot help but draw water into themselves.Similarly, given space and time, now reconstituting myself after three months’ absence from your inboxes, I find I must write. Capillary action: clay drawing-up water, paper soaking-in ink, is at the heart of my visual arts practice. Dry materials drink to create the longed-for form, whether pastel stick or drawing. Back in the flat fields of the once-was-fens, new to me in sodden guise, the chilly damp atmosphere, much to my surprise, hydrates the Muse, desiccated by a hard winter of additions and subtractions. You cannot account for the imaginal, nor factor its flow. The book of Uncivil Savant did not send up shoots this winter, it is still germinating in the dark. Artemis Scribe shot up instead; a little letterpress chapbook with a poem distilled from last summer’s scorching art residency in the Imaginal Field, in the East of England. You can read the essay I wrote there, here. The heat of those June days lifted pollen high into the air, which descended at dusk to land on us, nestled four feet below sea level on these pumped-dry fields. I sniffed and sneezed and wrote and talked with my hosts. This time, all the artists who took part in residencies are here and the conversations we are sharing over the weekend feel like spring water to me.Read the whole piece, with footnotes, photos, links and more, here on Substack, first published March 5th 2026. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 visible even than the stretched shire that is the Isis. Tidelandia. Today I know that it is the rock of this liminal country that I feel in my bones, the stone that gives me a sense of belonging, strength to carry on, and provides for me the ballast of my joy. It is those myriad innumerable pebbles that make up the fractally endless shores of the tidal riverbanks and coastline of the British Isles that are my home rock. At last, it makes complete sense to me, as someone occasionally irritatingly multifarious, that my heart-stone would be any small stone that can be found in the intertidal zone and is cyclically covered and revealed by water, according to the interaction of time of tide, rainfall and season. If it can fit in the palm of my hand. If it contrasts with its mate that lies beside it. If it only hints at its true colours, being covered with the modesty of silt, requiring dousing and scraping to reveal itself. Or equally, if it shouts its vibrancy in hue and cry. If it sits among five hundred of its fellows. If it is the only one of its kind for miles around. I cannot adequately describe the humming power and immediately raised spirits which come from squatting on my haunches in half an inch of water - sweet or salty - where pebbles jostle for my attention, all of them somehow bursting with stories without a word spoken. Uncivil Savant which available to all with no financial barrier to access thanks to my paid subscribers. Thanks for listening.This podcast was first published here on Substack on 27th November 2025 with full transcript, footnotes, links and images. If you’d like to make a one-time donation towards my work, feel free to use this button!I don’t use AI to search, research, edit, alter or create my writing or images at all. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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, goddess of wisdom, justice, law, trade, victory, crafts, sponsor of the arts, patron of trade and of strategy. On its reverse, the day-coin sports a basket, miniature ridged and woven weavers form the bas-relief image of ancient-yet-still-current containment in fingertip-tempting texture. I run my right index finger over it and sigh through a smile. It is easier to describe the muse-currency of my mind’s eye than it is to gather all today’s thoughts into its basket, but I must try.We will need craft, strategy and wisdom if we are to attain victory against dehumanising forces, both over us, in the mad rush towards transhumanism and the technological panopticon our states all seem to crave. But we will also need these qualities against the dehumanising forces inside ourselves, the ones that scapegoat others, insist on ‘us’ and ‘them’, or conversely, inwardly berate ourselves as worthless and unworthy. Beauty, belonging and beloved-ness (giving and receiving love) are our birth rights. Connexion is the natural state of affairs. How has this been so comprehensively foiled, so quickly? How can we cultivate, grow and share our remedies?By now, you will have noticed how the net has tightened. Once seemingly everyday tasks, simply performed, now require the kind of digital form-filling fitting, perhaps, for someone who has witnessed a crime, and must recount to the authorities every inconsequential detail, and yet, even after doing so, feels somehow complicit despite not personally being party to any wrongdoing. Posting a book to a friend abroad yesterday became a two hour project in the tolerance of fastidious yet strangely inexact classifications. Drop down menus opened little trap doors in my mind: which mood is the machine trying to conjure? You may choose from annoyance, irritation, ennui, rage, confusion, doubt, exhaustion or exasperation. You may not uncheck the box which reads ‘you will experience the sensation of being watched and measured at all times’. Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.This week I finally put down my copy of Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth after an interrupted month which meant a slow reading pace was all that life and health allowed. It was no bad thing to be forced to read and ponder, rather than devour a book in my usual manner. In the front of my copy, Paul has inscribed ‘for Caro, fellow warrior!’ But I have not felt like much of a warrior of late. Today the low golden slanting rays and the boldness of my friends’ and co-conspirators’ words and actions, in writing, art and community building, give me the inspiration to get back to my practice.What is that practice? Perhaps I will never have the definitive words1 to describe the what of ‘the work that is mine to do in the world’ but I know where the work is situated, at the crossroads of embodied work, hand craft, writing and the way of nature2. An important part of this crossroads is that it is a public place, where others pass through. The paths I am interested in are not just for me.This week my new-old path became clear again and I stepped back onto it. If you’d like to walk along some of it with me, you’ll be most welcome. This podcast was first published here on Substack on October 30th 2025, with full transcript, images, links and footnotes. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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, where the raw materials for this mass-produced natural cork-fragment mat were likely harvested. Years ago, visiting the chalet in Provence belonging to a family friend, I was struck by the cork oaks on the hillsides. Pale, stripped of their precious bark up to the height of the pollard, they looked like strange arboreal lambs after first shearing, likewise suffering no harm, perhaps only a sensation of sudden bareness to the elements no human could ever know. Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To receive weekly posts and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber.I am experiencing the period of adjustment of a newly transplanted shrubby herb. Great care has been taken over the siting, aspect and soil. Water, air and light are provided gratis by the Great Mystery, via the condensation of the angel’s share of the Tyne, the action of gravity on bodies possessing mass, and the electromagnetic emanations of our nearest star. I thank Physics for its pared-back beatitudes, rarely bettered by a poet. Although I feel I certainly will, whether or not I root and sprout well again is truly out of my hands. And so I turn to silent, spoken and embodied prayer. This podcast was first published with full transcript, footnotes, links and photos here on Substack on October 8th 2025. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 this post, which likely changes nothing except for the itching in my two typing fingers and the density of knots in the wild yarn ball of my 2am mind.Acorns sustain life, whether eaten as the common of mast by pigs in the New Forest, or gathered, shelled, soaked and ground by people. This year, we have one small bowl of leached acorn pieces which will become flour and then food once we are firmly settled again. Life-death-life - life is fulfilled in death, it is death which allows life to be renewed, as all myths worth their salt will tell you. Whether Pagan or Christian, Taoist or Sufi, stories unfold with the sense of a space set at the table for the final guest we will ever meet. Not so in tales of the Machine which abolishes death (and thereby bans acorns), which seeks only an infinite plantation of sterile trees, each of which they hope will live forever. I shiver. To seek to hoard life itself, as well as all the money, housing, natural resources and land, what a truly mad mindset. You might as well try to only breathe in.Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To receive weekly posts and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber.This podcast was first published with full transcript, footnotes, links and pictures here on Substack on 22nd September 2025. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 our conversation. If you’d like to watch the video of it, and all Paul’s other conversations in this series, you can go straight to The Machine Sessions, on YouTube. Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts each Monday morning and support my work become a free or paid subscriber.This podcast was first published here on Substack on Monday 8th September 2025, with links and extras. Thanks for listening to Uncivil Savant. I don’t use AI to research, write or edit my writing, nor to make my art or music. If you’ve enjoyed the first 100 podcasts, feel free to Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 the crews. But I have a deep interest in their cargoes.My two beloved wisdom traditions have such contrasting approaches to some of the deepest conundrums and predicaments of my life, with sometimes just a slim band of connective tissue linking them…Polarity affords a voltage gap. Sparks leap across this void: it is not fair. Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, and come to subscriber meet ups online, consider becoming a paid subscriber.This podcast was published here on Substack on 1st September 2025 with full transcript, links, footnotes and photos. To enjoy 3 years’ worth of Uncivil Savant podcasts, essays and articles for free, click here. If you have enjoyed my work, feel free to… Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 trusted colleagues. Thinking in conversation. It’s still a joy, but with so many of my gang of friends now writing, both here and in our books, I find I miss the daily and weekly typed missives, punctuated with the occasional phone call.At least fifty such fragments, filed away on my laptop, have found their way into the pieces here over the years. Each month I share one of my favourite archive pieces, and there’ll be one later this month. For now, you can investigate my whole archive here and all my recorded voiceovers in my podcast here. This week’s podcast contains writing from the last few years, I hope you enjoy it. This podcast was first published with full transcript, footnotes, images and links here on Substack on 11th August 2025. I don’t use AI to make my writing or art. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

The function of the Machine is onslaughtThe 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 graphite additive in engine oil, your raised cortisol and adrenaline levels greatly aid the smooth functioning of the Machine.The large and small gaps in the onrushing overwhelm of information, provided by family, community, happenstance, weather, geography, responsibility, religion and work have been abolished by the One Device.Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.This podcast was first published here on Substack on 4th August 2025 with full transcript, footnotes, links and images. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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, the purple bruise of heather spreading under my proprietorial gaze. Yet the shimmering heath renders beauty, even unto seizure.I walked here two weeks ago, deliberately stamping so that the adders could make their excuses and go elsewhere to bask in peace. Some diamonds should not be seen; reptiles spurn the recognition gemstones seek.(This week’s recording has the ambient sounds of the pigeons and other birds of dusk in balmy south London, as it was too hot to close the windows at my brother’s house, before the storm broke.) All the writing, audio, video and art at Uncivil Savant is available to all with no financial barrier to access. Please support me if you can by becoming a subscriber whether for a month or a year. Thanks so much. This podcast was originally published here on Substack July 28th 2025, with full transcript, photos, links and footnotes. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 silence is needed, so by the time you read this, I will have had three days quiet time with the sea and the horizon. There is something about opening my heart up to that impossible line which slows down the jumpiness, the teetering verticality, of head-first thinking. There are many other ways of working with words.One of the ways of working I love best is to be asked to find words for music, for art, for a moment, as in improvisation, or for something more long lasting. Collaboration is a discipline I missed hugely after pausing my music life. For a while I poured that desire for connection into my books and teaching, finding a great editor and colleagues. But still…Last month, it was good to be asked to spend some time finding the words to respond to contemporary artist Nicky Hirst’s sculptures in the current show PLAYTIME also featuring Giulia Ricci and Ian Dawson, at Ubicua Gallery, 85 Charlotte Street, London W1T 4PS.Ubiqua says, ‘This exhibition of three artists blurs the boundary between image and instruction within a performative language, working with sculptures and drawings that have the possibility of being visually ‘played’. The works can all be viewed as musical scores and will be interpreted by various musicians. A space for collaboration, translation, and play.’ It is on until 22nd August and I will be performing these spoken word pieces live on the 17th from 6pm. You are welcome to join us if you are in London. Musicians have improvised live in the space but sadly I was not able to attend, as I was in the woods.You will hear my two audio pieces for the show which include sound settings for spoken word. The text of the pieces is also below. The process of finding these words was more like drawing than writing an essay. I made sketches of phrases, scribbled on paper, while staring intently at photographs of the art in progress. Speaking out the syllables, skirting meaning, allowing words1 to tumble, feeling for the spaces between things, the rhythm of the pauses, until something coalesced that had the right relation to the artworks; a sort of oblique symmetry. Drawing from a moving life model and improvising lyrics for music or art have some fundamental similarities. There’s a line you are stalking. You must finish before it’s over-worked. If you try to pin everything down and ‘make it make sense’2, it will almost certainly fail.There needs to be gaps for the reader / listener / observer to leap across. Given the chance, wouldn’t you rather risk hopping the rocks than clomping over the wide bridge, with the crowd? The salmon spotted from atop slippery granite is a gift not seen from behind railings. So close to the water, one is still kin. This podcast was first published here on Substack on July 14th 2025 with full transcript, footnotes and images. Uncivil Savant is available to all with no financial barrier to access thanks to my paid subscribers. Please join them for a month or a year if you enjoy my work here. Thanks! Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 to sit a 7-day Zen retreat. My mind, stripped of all stimuli but my body and a blank wall, quickly quits struggling and at least attempts to settle to the task at hand; counting breaths, say. I am in a field, constantly stimulated, yet rebuffed, a whole day here and I am only at the surface, on the grass, looking down from human height. I'm using my late friend Mark Watson's beautiful book The Plant Pamphlets as a guide and method for being here. Starting last night and finishing this morning I reread his book cover to cover and reminded myself of the simple but effective ‘hanging out with plants’ practice which is found within it. This morning after breakfast, I headed out into the field and walked around until I felt a particular plant calling to me to pay it my undivided attention. If you've never walked around anywhere noticing whether a plant, landform or rock is asking you to communicate, then you'd be forgiven for assuming that it's an outlandish practice and that I am officially woo. But I know you will have stopped to notice a pavement dandelion at some point in your life, the craggy beauty of a winter oak, or the sheer spiky effrontery of a bramble shoot thick as your thumb making its way through a fence, up into the elder tree and back down again, laden with pink flowers of blackberry-promises. You will at least have stopped for a rose.This week’s podcast was first published here on Substack on Monday 23rd June 2025, with full footnotes, photos, links and extra sections. All the audio, video, writing, art and tuition at Uncivil Savant is available with no financial barrier to access thanks to my paying subscribers. Many thanks!If you appreciate my work please take out a paid or free subscription, or you can make a one-time donation here. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 materiality for a free life. I contributed some snaps of my studio areas, full of unmade objects and hand-worked natural materials. For me, these are a source of something almost akin to a vitamin; I receive something lifegiving and nourishing when I work with or use these things.Much is being written4 about Ultra Processed Foods (UPFs) being a feature of the modern urban diet almost worldwide, causing illness and disease. While I am not here to argue that spending up to 18 hours a day swiping almost frictionless screens or pressing plastic buttons is going to give you heart disease or directly cause obesity, I am suggesting that it is unhealthy, and related to the narrowing of simple, natural dietary and behavioural choices available around here lately.5 Paid and founding subscribers to Uncivil Savant mean I can keep it available to all with no financial barrier to access. Thank you!This podcast was first published here on Substack on June 2nd 2025, with full transcript, footnotes, links and images. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 online. Online is where I must sadly spend a large amount of time at the moment to make certain projects that I care about take place. Screen-life can have the effect of hollowing me out. Here are sundry recent Notes and notes from the bone marrow of my soul as I attempt to fill back up after what feels like a puncturing and the sense of having briefly become an uncanny drink to a malign and greedy being. Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber.This podcast was originally published here on Substack on 12th May 2025 with full transcript, footnotes, links and images.Thanks to my paid subscribers, I can keep all my writing and this podcast available to all with no financial barrier to access. You can also… Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 talking about over the last couple of years since my last visit to Skye in 2023 with Dougald Hine. (You can watch the conversation he had with Iain here).It’s not possible for me to fully delineate the influence of Iain’s work on both my own thought and practice, as well as that of many people in the T’ai Chi schools of which I have been a part. I go into some details about it in the film we made two years ago, which you can watch here.I have added links regarding some of the things we mention in conversation. Mostly these relate to points Iain makes. So many of the things I talk about pertain to creaturely knowledge gained over years in an oral tradition, taught week-in, week-out, in a physical environment and understood in an embodied way before any words coalesced around the knowing. They mostly remain ‘unsearchable’ online, but they are nonetheless real. These understandings are possibly the thing I discuss most with my trusted friends; it is rewarding to compare insights gleaned from their particular realms of study and expertise. We see where shafts of light that have percolated through our own unique vessels refract and finally, together, illuminate a tiny portion of the beloved shared table that is our too-brief time on earth together.I hope that my gestures, analogies and stories go some way to giving you a little insight into my particular area of study and begin to explain why encountering The Master and His Emissary and more recently, The Matter with Things, was so important.Of course, the real joy is simply knowing Iain, to whom I am profoundly grateful for his time in making this film, for his encouragement, and for his ongoing friendship.Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. Your generous subscriptions mean I can keep everything available to all with no financial barrier to access, thank you!I would like to thank my partner Jonny Randall for beautifully shooting and editing the film. We currently have a very good and equitable skill-swap going on (I mend and sew things and he films and photographs things) but if you’d like to show him some extra appreciation, please feel free to:All tips from the appropriately transformed ‘buy me a coffee’ button will go to Jonny this week! Thank you.This podcast was first published as a video here on Substack on 5th May 2025 with full show notes, links, footnotes, images and extras.Selected notes: (h:m:s)5:00 Newgrange Spiral carvings5:35 Heartwork, T’ai Chi lineage9:40 Dōgen finger pointing at the moon11:20 Ultramarine extraction from lapis lazuli11:40 ‘The fining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold: but the Lord trieth the hearts.’ Proverbs 17:v3, Old Testament, KJV Bible14:44 Keats’ Doctrine of Negative Capability16:34 Niels Bohr deep and shallow truths24:25 Dreyfus brothers’ model of acquisition of skill26:51 Sincerity, Jonathan Monks32:53 D H Lawrence we are transmitters of life33:30 Goethe uniting the divided38:46 Matter and consciousness41:36 Rabbinical saying ‘you are not tasked with completing the work…’44:08 Dougald Hine the question that is yours to carry48:13 Necessary distance49:38 Henri Bergson time, duration, paradox50:08 Dōgen If there were no time there would be no mountain51:28 Zeno’s paradoxes52:05 Heraclitus Panta rhei / everything flows53:19 Marcelo Gleiser the same situation cannot occur twice55:45 The third heart, connexion, longing56:49 Max Scheler1:01:15 Paul Kingsnorth Past, People, Place, Prayer from ‘Against The Machine’1:04:05 Jan Zwicky (also of interest - The Experience of Meaning)1:05:59 Love Story ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’1:06:46 Orangutan rofl1:07:35 Marcel Theroux ( of interest - In Search of Wabi Sabi)1:08:24 Commedia dell’Arte1:09:10 John Cleese1:13:00 Stewart Lee1:14:00 Life of Brian, new stage show Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 corner, eyeing the host’s impressive bookshelves morosely.Also this week, my, what interesting times to be a woman.Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe now so you need never miss an episode. This podcast was first published here on Substack on April 28th 2025 with full transcript, footnotes, links and art. If you enjoy my work but can’t afford a paid subscription, feel free to buy me a coffee! My paid subscribers allow me to offer everything at Uncivil Savant with no financial barrier to access. Thankyou. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 diverse forms for centuries in Europe and Japan, and millennia in China, amongst other places, rears its head this week. Before you listen to this piece, first listen to Ursula K LeGuin’s masterful short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. This podcast was first published here on Substack on 14th April 2025 with full transcript, footnotes and links. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

‘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 Old English, it’s part of your Wyrd. It’s a now-smooth pebble you can endlessly turn over in your hand, replete with crooked hole through which you can peer, to see the horizon transformed through the-nothing-that-is.In writing this piece, I wanted to name it, this perennial circling of the heart-mind, as I know it’s not just me who experiences it. I went downstairs and I knocked at my partner’s door, requesting a moment of his insight into the language he has been enjoying in Old English Word Hord and Beowulf.2 I said that I was searching for a traditional two-word phrase to name the centripetal dance around my life’s great koan, (like the famous ‘whale-road’ for the sea). ‘Ah, you mean a kenning,’ he said. We talked of wyrd and fate, questions and purpose, interior places to which, no matter where you wander, you always end up returning: is it like a tor? A well? A magnet?No, it’s the hearth, we realised. That bright place to which we will always be drawn.3So, I will from now on call it my hearth-riddle (heorþ-rǣdels)4Tangled lifeNo matter where I turn and how far I wander, the challenge and practice of yielding are always present. This is my hearth-riddle: how not to resist life, yet keep my centreline. How to balance softness and firmness, adaptability without flimsiness, stay in touch with things, yet not become enmeshed. In short, how do I stand my ground using softness, when all around the laws of iron5 and silicon6 are followed ten thousand times more widely than the rules of any wise well-tried path or the natural process itself?It can seem that we are in a particularly terrible time right now with domination being a popular policy instead of dialogue, in so many contexts, whether at home or abroad. The great paradox of yielding in relation to this is how do we resist ‘evil’ (such as rule by force) without getting tangled up in it, or perpetuating it ourselves? If we constantly dwell on everything awful, do we not internalise it? If we ignore it and seek a safe hermitage somewhere, metaphorically or physically, aren’t we just abandoning our fellows to its ill effects?Thanks for listening. To receive my podcasts regularly you can subscribe here.This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, footnotes, illustrations and links on 3rd March 2025. If you’ve particularly enjoyed an episode, please feel free to… Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 longer essay, perhaps completing my current delve in ‘not resisting evil’ and yielding, here are some fragments - shorter thoughts and thinking points - which wanted to be shared with you. Also, you might appreciate a break from long-form essays from me.Wet, windy, not-yet-spring-but-something-has-changed greetings from me.Thanks for listening. You can help me keep my podcasts and writing free to all by becoming a paid or founding subscriber. This podcast was first published with footnotes, links and photos here on Substack on Monday 24th February 2025. If you have particularly enjoyed an episode of Uncivil Savant but don’t want to take out a paid subscription to my Substack, you can buy me a coffee. Thanks! Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 have decided to leave it unsweetened. Forgive my rant, or perhaps just rant along.Leaving aside the slew of land-expropriation news from elsewhere, in my country right now, rich landowners are seeking to turf-off everyone from even being able to walk freely on ancient paths on ‘their’ land. Meanwhile the guardians of national parks in America were laid-off this week, and soon we will watch as every last piece of Earth that can be parcelled and sold is grabbed by the richest and most powerful. It is a travesty.Without access to land, ordinary people begin to doubt that they are part of nature, and cease to be able to care about it, thus a vicious cycle ensues. This has been the shadow side of ‘progress’ for many hundreds of years here in the UK, as we were the first country to industrialise.1 Without consideration for the public good, an environment of individual kleptomania has been normalised. If Earth is the creation of The Great Mystery, we are beholden to the Creator to care for it. If Earth is ‘just’ a wonderful planet, we are still beholden to each other and to our descendants to care for it.It should not be seen as radical to say ‘slow down’ to all this carving up. My long-term small ‘A’ anarchism and my intermittent small ‘C’ conservatism2 go hand in hand in saying, ‘Let us keep what is good for those who come after us. Let us consider needs other than just our own in our decision-making.’ Too hard to swallow? How about, ‘Consider the future needs of your own children, grandchildren and those of the people you love!’When I am at my lowest ebb with what goes on in the world, I wonder, do those who hoard all the wealth, land, power and goods not love anything but money, ownership, power and goods? It is not my mission to depress myself or others, so follow me on a line of thought today that leads to practical resistance to both instrumentalist machine-thinking and the idea that success in acquisition is the best measure of human flourishing.This podcast was first published here on Substack on 17th February 2025 with full transcript, footnotes, links and images. You can subscribe here for free to access all previous articles and podcasts from Uncivil Savant. I greatly appreciate all tips, paid and founding subscriptions which help me keep my writing and research freely available to all. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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. Meanwhile, and for some months, I have been considering the three seemingly unpopular qualities after which I named this piece.On these Isles, both the pagan religions that arrived by foot over Doggerland or by boat across the North Sea, or via the newly formed English Channel, and the religions of One God that came here by curragh from Ireland, then by ship and plane, have a deep current in common: the communal telling of stories of great lives. At differing times, or at overlapping nights around the fire, tales of heroes, goddesses, gods, kings, saints and villains were told, and the way in which these tales could inspire or instruct were at each time largely held in common. The ground water of these tales were the one great aquifer common to our thousand islands. Springs sprung up differently here and there; a variant, a telling detail, a differing parentage, a new tale seeping in. But it was clear that self-sacrifice for family, friends, kin, village, or for your principles, to give hospitality to ordinary people, giving away what was precious to the down-trodden or the hungry, were seen as good and noble things. This is as common in ancient myths I have read and heard as it is in words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. Until very recently, these qualities were seen as universally good amongst all but followers of Machiavelli…This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, footnotes, links and photos on Monday 3rd February 2025. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 thousand salty kisses. I just gathered rosemary from the overgrown bushes in the clifftop gardens and snuck a peek at the sea: whitecaps as far as the eye can see, which to be fair, isn’t far. New Year swimmers are scant, the extant ones are smug after a ninja dip. What spirit!The rain began as I wrote the word ‘watershed’, an ideal synchrony.After Epiphany the new plans, essays and news will be ready to share with you, here at Uncivil Savant.Today, an embrace and a loving glance at possible landscapes of mind.This podcast was originally published here on Substack on 2nd January 2025, with full transcript, footnotes, links and images. Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts, podcasts and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

TrespassesOn 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 DEBTNo sound, no commentary. I opened my eyes and made a note of the words but I needn’t have bothered, as they have stayed with me all year like a guilty secret. I turn around and the words are still there, now like a promise rather than a threat.This podcast was first published with full transcript, footnotes and links here on Substack on December 18th 2024. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

A DoorYielding 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 madness beside the real prize, wisdom. There is also a price to pay: everything you had constructed on top of the ground of yourself, before.Wisdom flows downhill, like water. Unless you lower yourself, and present something empty, you cannot gather it…This podcast was first published here on Substack on December 2nd 2024, with full transcript, footnotes, links and images. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 Valley whose inhumane imaginations2 have set loose artificial species of energy sucking-ticks, of livelihood removal-ticks, of truth replacement-ticks.I’ve had it with the enshittification of the internet. It is almost impossible to look things up easily and effectively any more. Those of you who know me in what we 1970s kids still quaintly call ‘real life’, will know that I am not usually a complainer: if I want something done or changed, I generally just go and do it myself. Can’t get a record label? Start one. Want more people to get excited about using natural art materials and not plastic ones? Write a book, or two, about it and then go round in person and teach it. But I can’t make myself a new internet. Even my brother, author of the UK’s most widely used school technology textbooks can’t do that, and he can make most things. That’s possibly beyond almost anyone’s power, now. I’d be happy with the old one back, from about 2006, perhaps.This podcast was first published here on Substack on November 11th 2024 with full transcript, images, links and footnotes. You can support my writing and podcast simply and quickly by buying me a coffee! Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

Where the Light FallsLook 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. Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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.8About 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.10Having 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. Thanks for listening to Uncivil Savant. For online classes and extra posts, become a free or paid subscriber.This post was first published here on Substack on October 7th 2024 with full transcript, photos and copious footnotes. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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.Thanks for listening to Uncivil Savant. To receive invitations to online classes and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber.This podcast was first publish here on Substack on 30th September 2024 with full transcript, links and footnotes. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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…Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.This post was published here on Substack on 10th September 2024 with links, footnotes and images. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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. Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber.If you cannot afford a paid subscription but would like to comment, or to come along to the online movement workshops, just answer an Uncivil Savant subscriber email and I will comp you 6 months for free.If my writing has been useful to you or inspired you, or you’d like to say thanks for a particular piece, then you can buymeacoffee.com/carolineross. It’s a virtual tip jar for small one-off payments. I really appreciate it! Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

I-thouThis ‘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. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

This momentYou 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. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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 Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

Pax CorporisYour body is not an enemy to be subdued, it is not evil and does not need transcending.1You do not need to mortify the flesh, neither is it advisable to indulge it.2 3It 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.4Embodiment 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.6This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, footnotes, images and links on 10th June 2024. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

AspirantI 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. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

Loose EndsI 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. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

FateIt'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. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

The DragonIn 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. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

Talking with friends is like spring water to me, which also means I sometimes neglect it in favour of another cup of strong tea when I should return to the source… Some years, it can seem like our energy is scattered and broadcast in all directions. It can feel like all the work we are doing, the research, the admin, the writing, the organising, doesn’t seem to add up to anything, let alone something grand. Talking with Dougald Hine last month, the image of a meadow came to mind, and set my heart at rest. Perhaps you too are sowing seeds by the handful, hoping that some of them will take. They will: not all of them, but some, for sure. Writing job applications or writing songs, digging an allotment, mending a marriage, organising a community event, making a living, studying, recovering from illness. Maybe this year will be a meadow year for you, a bit of this and that, a few weeks of flurry then a pause, for it all to begin again. It won’t look like much from the outside, or the inside, sometimes. Some days we’ll compare ourselves to illustrious friends and momentarily feel like failures. But one day by sunshine, grace and good rain, our meadow will bloom.First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, February 12th 2024. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe