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,…

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.…

What does it mean to you, to pray for you’re heart’s desire?‘ The question was put by a friend, Perdita, someone I’ve come to know through a loose-knit interfaith rosary fellowship called The Way of The Rose. Wondering how to reply my mind went back to an evening in Penzance a few years ago: to…

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…

Some notes from a conversation with friends at Bright Earth buddhist sangha about awakening, Buddha Nature and bodies of one kind or another. Years ago I watched a snail, and realised something that’s never really gone away. I don’t recall much now about the actual snail, but what I do remember is how it felt…

Some notes on the Japanese Buddhist ethic of tariki – other power – and on losing track of what I’d mean by hope or despair. (A previous edit published with XR Buddhists in October 2022.) Five years ago I took part in organised civil disobedience for the first time when I joined Extinction Rebellion for…

‘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…

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…

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…

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…