Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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What use is art?
‘What does modernity cost, and who pays for it?’ In the light of recent climate protests I wrote an essay for the Dark Mountain Project on the disabling rhetoric of emergency, the role of art as a life-cherishing force and what it entails to hold ourselves accountable to a generation facing catastrophe. Tell the truth. Act as…
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All this
How we can respond to the ecological crisis while trapped in a culture and infrastructure of denial? A reflection on the The Magnitude of All Things, Jennifer Abbott’s 2020 meditation on ecological grief. Published by The Dark Mountain Project October 2022 and adapted from the original essay in Borrowed Time: on death, dying and change (art.earth…
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Black Light : Dark Mother
All the errors and follies of magic, religion, and mystical traditions are outweighed by one great wisdom they contain – the awareness of humanity’s organic embeddedness in a complex natural system. And all the brilliant, sophisticated insights of Western rationalism are set at nought by the egregious delusion on which they rest – that of…
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It’s not over
Our best thinking got us here – Alcoholics Anonymous, traditional The question of what will and won’t change as locked-in global heating takes hold and it becomes clear that any remaining hope of even mitigating runaway ecological collapse has been squandered by our generation, is one I seem to have got stuck on. And there’s…
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A reckoning
Tracing the story of the idea’s inception one rainy night in a South Devon woodland, this became the Foreward to our 2022 art.earth publication Borrowed Time: on death, dying and change: Although several years were yet to pass before we turned fully towards it, the idea which would become Borrowed Time – a year long conversation…
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On the road to Hyde Park Corner
on blocking traffic as a form of prayer I’m staring at my screen as somewhere in America a handful of Extinction Rebellion road blockers are all but beaten up by a passer-by on his way to work. I keep replaying his high-pitched, furious shout: “What is wrong with you people?”. The young rebels’ vulnerability is…
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Get on your knees
But the sorrow is radiant, like light shining in the darkness of a black stone lying over the heart. Sr. Meinrad Craighead OSB, Lodestone. One year on, I’ve been coming back to this episode of The Great Humbling, where Dougald Hine and Ed Gillespie mull over what prayer does or does not mean to them.…
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Hatching a fly
An idea about drawing and language that means a lot to me comes from a writer, Ursula Le Guin. LeGuin calls it the handmind – a thought voiced by a potter in her utopian novel Always Coming Home: ‘Nothing we do is better than the work of the handmind. When mind uses itself without the…
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Look up
As the UK Government attempts to criminalise protest as such, why it matters now more than ever that universities join Extinction Rebellion when it returns to London in April – as if our lives and the lives of the young depended on it. On January 22nd 2019 Cornwall Council became the UK’s first Unitary Council…
Sea Crow 