I’m not sure any of us knows what true freedom is. A friend said to me recently that we experience our first personal violation when schooling begins & I felt that ring true in my bones. More of us question the systems that have nurtured & dismantled us in equal measure & we’re trying to carve new ways of living out of the rockface of capitalism. Freedom is the freedom to be a total shit, & this is where people’s…
I had thought to write an inspiring caption for this short film of yesterday’s beautiful wild encounter (swipe left). I took off clothes, swam naked and free, but sometimes I find it hard to write with joy when there’s so much misery in the world. I read the words of a man who worked in an industrial pig farm and the disgusting ways he abused innocent animals just because he could exercise some power. I then felt overwhelmed by the…
It’s occurring to me why Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree has struck such a chord in my heart. Yesterday I remembered this poem written over a decade ago (first poem in the Prophecy: conversations with my Self pamphlet, from 2010, available as free download from my webshop, link in bio). What Simard is writing about, I knew all those years ago. Well, I didn’t have the understanding that Simard writes of because I’m not a scientist, I’m a poet,…
Long summer evenings are light as butterfly wings. Even late in the day, the sun rides high in an impossibly blue sky. The trees here do not know me, but there is time, and the will to bring my open heart so that a dialogue might begin. I’ve had difficult first meetings with some trees (Ae forest) but then in later days had some of the most spiritual experiences of my life in those very same places. Those of us…
Visiting some forests is the most difficult thing. Over a decade ago we rode through Ae forest and it was the first time I felt a genuine hatred from the trees towards humans. It’s not something I’d experienced before and it horrified me, that we’d farmed these beautiful beings to the point that they felt this way towards us. Part of the promise I made to myself with this OUTSIDER blog was that I’d speak honestly about my experiences. Part…
Give me filthy-faced grandchildren slurping fat cherries with thick dirt slicked beneath fingernails. Give me time spooling generously out across a long summer evening of push-bike races & hen chases & lazy hounds’s sleepy faces. Give me bowls of fragrant lemon & fresh coriander rice, earth-dark kidney beans spiced with the stomach-deep-warmth of cumin & paprika; lip-smacking bursts of tiny-fresh tomatoes with diced, sharp-tongued red onion & a bright cider vinegar tumbled into bowls along with juicy-sweet pan-charred peppers demanding…
It’s the strangest thing, finding your way in the world, and I’ve written before about the many circular or dead-end paths encountered on this journey of self-discovery. During early sessions of studying Kung Fu (in my late 20s), I couldn’t get my head around the feeling I was a blackboard being wiped clean in order for a new text to be written across me. I didn’t then have the self-knowing to understand this was not the kind of teaching I…
An interesting conversation growing from my recently published novel, The Madness of Sara Mansfield (link in bio), is people wanting to discuss why I’ve put it out as Copyleft.I love this. I love that people are thinking about the implications, and want to talk to me about it. The main response I get is people worrying that I’ve spent six years writing a book only to leave it wide open to interpretation, that someone else could take the book and…
Figuring out the language of my body is a lifetime’s work. Does anybody else feel they’re balancing so many elements – like keeping a very long line of plates spinning? And I drop them, sometimes a lot of them, even if less often these days. I write often about self-directed learning because this is the pathway into understanding that resonates most strongly, especially so with my body.Maybe this is a ridiculous approach because there’s so much to learn from others.…
Hello friends,I’m aware that some people get a bit upset about my original use of grammar and punctuation. This is absolutely okay. I’m not the writer for everybody and I fully embrace that. However, instead of presuming that my writing is inferior because I don’t follow the rules, I wonder if they might consider the fact that writing this way is an act of rebellion – a way for me to fully embody this wild and natural world that inspires…