Uncivil Savant Podcast

‘That which circles moves from its centre’ 1 Perhaps 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...

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 frag...

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 sle...

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 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 sn...

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 commentary. I opened my eyes and made a note of the words but I needn’t have bothered, as they have st...

A Door Yielding to Land 1 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 o...

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 imaginations 2 have set loose artificial species of energy sucking-ticks, of livelih...

Where the Light Falls Look again at the growth rings in the photo above. Notice how slender and crowded they are in the top of the circle compared to the area on the lower-left. This tree was likely felled near where it was used, near North Adams, Massachusetts, sometime in the late nineteenth century. In heavily forested areas like the hills and valleys around the Hoosic river, conifers such as p...

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 materials 4 and why I write this Substack 5 . Similarly, the reasons why I wrote a T’ai Chi blog for my students for 15 years 6 and why I write song lyrics 7 have barely anything in common. That is ‘why’ as motivation or hoped-for outcome. That’s not quite what...

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 lis...

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 i...

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...

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. Th...

I-thou This ‘you’ I am writing to, it’s really ‘thou’ or ‘ye’ or ‘thee’. I tried ‘I’ and ‘my’ for this piece but that’s not it, and using ‘we’ would assume far too much. So, rather than affect an archaic pronoun that would get in the way of communication, I must address ‘you’, but not in an accusatory way. This ‘you’ includes the part of me to which I write when I also write to you. English is a s...

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...

This moment You are at your desk and your hands, shoulders and eyes feel so tired. You roll your shoulders back and squint at the screen, did it always seem so blurry? Your partner comes in bringing a cup of tea wondering when you’ll be free to help with a small household task. The cat stretches lazily by the door and requests, with an exceptionally sweet ‘raaorll’, that she would like to be let o...

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,...

Pax Corporis Your body is not an enemy to be subdued, it is not evil and does not need transcending. 1 You do not need to mortify the flesh, neither is it advisable to indulge it. 2 3 It is not a peripheral matter that the intelligence beaming out of you at this moment, meeting my words in that ancient embrace of sense-making together, (like strangers clasping hands and forearms to make a new peac...

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 a...

Aspirant I have long been in search of a way to write about the real 1 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 w...

Loose Ends I am accustomed to being away from home , but it is a new and tricky thing travelling so far away when one’s love is 3600 miles and 5 hours east. Conversations between hosts, friends and strangers are woven together, the beloved is included. How do we stay in communion with what and whom are not physically present? How do we do this without drifting away from the present moment, from wh...

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, b...

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...

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, severa...