Category: Uncategorized
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The one who’ll die
Another dharma glimpse reflection from a conversation at Bright Earth sangha. From time to time I fall into a pattern of waking around 3am, often when there’s some conflict or turmoil at work in me. I had one of these wakeful nights last week. As I lay there in a familiar pool of unease an…
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Ways of speaking
After turning away from the idea nine years ago, these Sea Crow letters track a cautious return to the notion of undertaking a practice-based PhD. Thus far ‘doing a PhD’ has remained a rather future-tense affair: the slow and careful re-packaging of pretty much the same question I rocked up with nine years ago. It’s…
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Grounding
On reading and writing in company, and the virtues of a snail’s-eye view. Somewhere near the start of the first Covid lockdown I picked up an open invitation from my old friend and colleague, the poet Alyson Hallett. Alyson had an idea to explore the creative possibilities of this new Zoom thing that had begun…
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What hope means
Dr Rachel Clarke joined art.earth as our first Borrowed Time keynote back in June 2021. Rachel spoke with us about some of those she encountered whilst working in NHS hospitals throughout the worst phases of the pandemic, and how she arrived at a new understanding of hope during those terrible months. She also made an…
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Hard times
Here in the epilogue to art.earth’s beautiful Borrowed Time publication Richard Povall and I ended with the question that’s run the length and breadth of this two-year symposium: In the context of biospheric collapse, what do we mean by hope? Of the questions that circulated through these Borrowed Time conversations, one of the most insistent…
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Remembrance, loss and gaslighting
Climate Psychology Alliance researcher Caroline Hickman joined us for Borrowed Time’s final session along with with Falmouth University Pagan Chaplain Zoe Young, in an open conversation about the love, longing and loss we may struggle to feel as we turn to remember lost species. Adapted from the book Borrowed Time: on death, dying and change,…
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Seeing voices
An interview for Raceme Poetry Journal #9 about picture-poem collaborations, and what thinking in images allows. The interviewer is my friend, colleague and Guerrilla College of the Free Arts writing mentor, the poet Alyson Hallett. AH: Mat Osmond is a poet and artist, and senior lecturer on the MA Illustration Authorial Practice at Falmouth University.…
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The life story
An interview with the online student journal Falwriting. We spoke about what it means to address biospheric collapse within a neoliberal university system, what art and poetry bring to that predicament, and what collaboration might have to do with ecological recovery. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and what made you choose the…
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Bowing to a snail
This autumn I’ve begun a lay ministry training with the Buddhist sangha Bright Earth. I’ve a long way to go yet and am feeling in no hurry at all. Apart from cultivating the slow and sometimes faltering rhythm of a daily practice, what this training means, for now, is reading of a series of books…
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Momentum
A letter about the Japanese spiritual principle of Tariki (other power), and about losing track of what I’d mean by hope and despair. Published with XR Buddhists in October 2022. Three years ago I took part in civil resistance for the first time when I joined Extinction Rebellion for their October 2019 uprising. On my…
Sea Crow 