Uncivil Savant Podcast

Time has flown and Uncivil Savant has taken its own shape. When I draw, no matter if I have very specific plans for a piece, the ink, paper and brush always conspire to make a far more interesting and lively, if sometimes unexpected, translation of the movements of my hand, (and by inference, the movements of my unconscious, as well as my so-called conscious will). Thankfully, the same happens wit...

I have been thinking lots about boundaries, edges and limits, partly around the use of electronics, my engagement with ‘the machine’, and my own personal energy. There have been some good posts over the last few months from several writers I follow here about their own need for, and strategies around, such things. I have found this a fertile and timely area of reading, and have a few thoughts to a...

There is a saying in the Taoist Classics: ‘The Sage is sick of being sick of sickness.’ Well, I am no sage, but I have been sick. I am as well, physically, as I have ever been, but I have been experimenting with many aspects of life this year, sometimes mindfully, sometimes by accident, and both ways have taught me, and continue to teach me, a huge amount. In a living culture, we would have elders...

Once, everywhere, the land was storied. Here is where uncle Joe met your auntie, this is where we rest the sheep during the droving, here is where we found the best cherries, on that hill is where our ancestors made a vow… My late nan told me about Bealach na Ba , the Pass of the Cattle , high above Applecross in the west of the Scottish Highlands, how she had seen other farmers drive a herd down...

I have been thinking about thinking. This is nothing new. A couple of decades doing T’ai Chi with the cotton-slippered elephant in the room being my own tedious thoughts going round and round was, as you can imagine, educational. Over the years I have approached the use of words by the mind in several distinct ways, some methods were classical meditation techniques taught by my teacher or learned...

The bioavailability of nutrients to the body is like the mytho-availablity of earth to the soul. Without regular physical contact to the ground, stories untether and become fragmentary, denatured, even toxic. We cleave to the broken parts like children hoarding rounded flints, not knowing it’s the sharp edges that spark fire from steel. Those sharp edges that can also do the cutting. If you are go...

I am freshly returned from my favourite woods in the world , the woods near Stonehenge that I know and love best. I have my ‘forest face’ back, softer, though perhaps grimier, than my ‘town face’. I have been coming here since 2015, according to the kit packing lists file on my laptop, though it seems like longer. Here, I gather chalk dug by badgers for my art and paints, pignuts for nibbling, chi...

A change Twenty feet outside my window, the chestnut, oak and pollard lime trees sway. For over a month this coast, whose trees habitually bow their heads and turn their backs to a prevailing sou’westerly, has experienced cold, insistent winds from the east. This happened last year, too. Despite the sunshine, whitecaps rise in the sheltered bays, swimmers huddle in the surf, eyeing their expensive...

What sets them apart from us is twofold. Firstly, their remarkable lives or deaths. Secondly, that their lives are no longer their own. A saint’s life is for us , far more than any monarch, minister or hero, who usually have a hand in how their story is spun. In death, saints’ lives are plucked up to be placed into the common basket of goodness, to become apples of instruction. Or at least they we...

This week, a letter between gods, from January 2018. The verbatim account of an everyday yet mythic encounter in a bank in Wimbledon in November 2017. A poem / lost song from 1999. All alongside new works from my drawing desk, this May. I am home, floating strangely between jetlag and the task of levigating deep blood red ochre for my next class . Wish me luck, as I am not yet quite here , nor sti...

This weekend sees 6 months since I began to write here on Substack. You can read my first post again as to why I started, but why I’ll continue, and what I hope to cover, is the subject of this post. First I’d like to thank all of you who read this and subscribe, whether paid or free, and to all of you who post such interesting comments. I always read them all. I had no idea that I would find a re...

Today I wanted to give you something really useful that took me years to develop and hone, but has been proved effective by many people who have tried it. Over fifty artists, writers and T’ai Chi colleagues have used this practice to feed into their work or to gain connection to a wellspring of unconscious creativity. I hope it is of benefit to you. Please do get in touch if it is. First published...

Here are three poems that feel right for this moment. The first is a glimpse of how I write or draw and brings a recurring childhood dream and menopause together. The second gathers all my gathering into one place and queries the compulsion I have to unearth. The final one, from last autumn, is about class, and seems apt given the aristocratic shenanigans in my home country this weekend. I am 5000...

The embodied life For me, even though I write almost every day, a hearty physical life is non-negotiable. There are thoughts I can’t have and feelings I can’t reach without access to the green. Similarly, I may be well in myself and reasonably fit, but if I spend whole days glued to the screen, I end up jittery and stiff, even if I don’t watch or read anything untoward. It is not only the timbre o...

This week, while I settle into the refuge of the roads in USA, I’ll share something from my archive. This piece was originally commissioned for Dark Mountain 22 - ARK , and returns us once more to the shore. I have added photos and a map. I hope you enjoy it. See you next week with something new. First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, April 24 2023. Get full access to Un...

It gets harder to come back from the place of no words Without access to sea edge and forest there are many thoughts I can’t have and many kinds of silence, too. Sensation, movement and perception roll along without words and take on the green tinge of leaf or the glint of grey flint. Last week the cove remade me in its image - tidal thoughts, harder, durable stone ideas, softer yet more tenacious...

I am typing this just after packing to go to the bay I first wrote about online at Dark Mountain in 2018, when I made rock art for the cover of issue 13. I am also gently planning a pilgrimage to walk with two friends in a year or so to St Wite’s Spring , her church and reliquary in Whitchurch Canonicorum, and to Abbotsbury, on the Fleet, the site of the world’s largest tended flock of wild swans...

How I see what is really there, what is not there, and what it has cost me. When I was a young child I saw shapes and colours around things and on things that were not the same as the shapes and colours of things. This was not the consensus view, but no-one bothered to tell me off about it. Had they, it would have ceased immediately, as I was terrified of censure. If I was wrong, surely I was unlo...

Begin. Open a space with your intent, like you do when you dream. Take all the care and love and unmet desire that you have, and right now in your mind’s eye roll it up into a tight ball as though of sharp-scented herb leaves. Now compress that for 40 million years, which will take the length of 4 breaths. Then see as it turns from coal to jet to diamond under necessity’s fierce pressure. OK, now...

Correct mind intent, plus physical repetition over time, equals practice. Or, ‘If it ain’t raining, it ain’t training’. 1 Below is something I wrote as a practice aide-memoire for myself in 2018, then adapted for my students a few years ago, and have returned to this weekend though necessity. It’s been a hard week, not only for myself, but for several of my loved ones. The way this shows up for me...

Here are some things for you , continuing broad themes from the last few months, in one of my semi-regular breaks from essaying . First, a poem and some avian drawings. Then a letter to a friend from a very strange week spent dog and cat sitting for rich Londoners, while trying to make ends meet, both from 2018. Lastly, I press a mixtape into your sweaty palm whilst mumbling something about ‘Brian...

While I begin diving into the reading needed for future essays, I have been enjoying many other writers here, as we all grapple with the Machine, and how it famously co-opts our attention. I particularly valued Pilgrims in the Machine ‘s excellent recent piece . It prompted me to publish this essay I wrote in November last year, as it is not only technology which keeps us separate from our hearts...

The temperature dropped below freezing that night in the woods, and my usual late spring camping set up wasn’t enough. In the small hours, I donned every item of spare clothing I had, including my huge rain cape, and squeezed back into my sleeping bag, shivering. I finally got up just after dawn to the May-time sounds of birds, seemingly annoyed at my presence in the clearing. This was after a pre...

My friend Martin is a woodsman. Last year he felled lots of western hemlock, unsuited to the wood in Devon where it was planted a few decades ago. Now, misshapen trunk by slightly rotten trunk, some of these failed trees are being laid carefully into peaty land on Dartmoor, damming drainage ditches dug by ‘improvers’, so that the land may once again hold its full quota of life-giving water. The si...

I was finally able to download and edit this recording made by Dougald Hine of Iain McGilchrist and me talking at his home last week. I first wrote to Iain in December 2010 to thank him for his book ‘The Master and His Emissary’ and to relay its profound effect upon my life, understanding of T’ai Chi and the Tao, and its beneficial outward rippling effect in my and my teacher’s T’ai Chi schools. F...