Getting on With It

Before the situation with Covid-19 had touched all of our lives so closely, and in so many strange ways, we all had plans. Despite the widespread feeling that things are in a heavy period of change, crucially with regards to the global ecosystem, most of us were by and large continuing as normal. I think…

Screaming Tubes & Untraceable Stress

The adaptive ability of life is a constant marvel. It accounts for the proliferation of all manner of species in every conceivable environment on Earth, provides countless fascinating anecdotes (like the fact that a hummingbird’s tongue goes all the way around the back of the skull before coming out of its mouth) and is –…

Autumn Into Winter

As the year turns, it is worth reflecting on how things change, and for what we have to be thankful. After such a glorious summer, the richness of autumn is now exploding, and this transition seems to be reflected in people too (the ones I know anyway). New endeavours are being embarked upon, prosperity is…

Away

After a lifetime of living in the city, I have finally made it back to where I started, to where we all started, really: to a natural environment. At least an environment where the tree to concrete ratio is correctly weighted to the former. Last Monday I moved to Scotland to the northwest of Glasgow…

Film Review: The Cured

From the first minute of The Cured (directed by David Freyne), the deeply unsettling presence chaos and violence made itself tangibly felt. An outbreak of a disease known as the Maze Virus has been supressed in Ireland and the infected people (for the most part) cured. The film begins with them returning to their lives,…

Reading Material: Mortal Engines – Philip Reeve

For any fans of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines quartet with an iota of respect for The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (the extended versions of course), the news of the upcoming film adaption of the former by the director of the latter will be very, very exciting. After a gap of several years, I re-read the books quite recently,…

Open & Closed

Working out what to do when there seem to be so many options – so much openness – can be tough. Working out what to do when you want to choose as many of those options as possible is even tougher. Limitation is one of the defining features of being alive, and it permeates its way through…

Feel the Rhythm

Patterns of being, behaviour, motivation and movement. These seem to make the world: they are the world. As living things, when we look to the world around and in us, we don’t see lifeless objects bumping into each other at random, we see patterns. These are replicated at every level of magnitude. Electrons orbit a nucleus, moons…

Cultivating the Witness

Ram Dass, one of the most prominent spiritual figures of our time, talks about developing the witness with regards to freeing yourself from detachment. This is a Hindu idea stemming largely from the Baghavad Gita (its central text), which I understand to be the mind clinging to the world, essentially in a bid for permanence….

Daily Post Response: Simplify

As the world spirals ever onwards into unimaginable complexity, there is a big move to pull back into a more simplified mode of being. This is part of the eternal balancing act that goes on at every level. If you have too much of one thing, you tend to then get pulled towards its opposite….