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…
You’re adopting the patriarchal, colonialist mindset when you ignore your heart’s wilderness, or when you feel that you have the right to shape someone to your will; when you know what’s best, when you ignore or minimise or pander to power; when you forget yourself in the pursuit of external values, or worse – when you ask this of someone else. Text reads:Just because you don’t understand what someone’s doing – doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Just because you can’t see…
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…
Why I don’t love a pruned hedge
June 16, 2021Hello 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…
The Senedd elections are next month and I’ve never felt so disillusioned with the entire political process. Democracy feels like fake news. Voting these days feels very much focussed on divisions instead of a beautiful cocreated future of inclusivity. Emerging from Covid, many of us are thinking about how we can actively create the world we want to live in instead of accepting what we’ve been given, but how does that translate in real life?Did you know that British nationals…
My work has always been political. How can an artist create and not speak to the wider context of community or land? One of the (many) reasons we moved into the van was in protest at Britain’s Brexit vote. We still very much feel European, and in times like these I believe we should be opening our borders to help those in need, not locking ourselves away to fight it out on this tiny island. I wanted The MthR Trilogy…
We’ve been incredibly lucky during this past lockdown year. The first half locked into Portugal then Switzerland, and even this winter in Cymru we’ve managed to park with family. There’s a certain amount of life that is shaped by our attitude, and positive thinking makes such a difference when, for example, getting through winter in a tiny home set up to travel but aren’t able to do so. Still, there’s a huge privilege in even being able to think positively.…
Some thoughts on food, freedom & the anti-trespass bill
March 25, 2021Living this nomadic life is a choice – we choose not to own property or land, we choose not to get sucked into the mass madness that is thirty years of slavery (or a mortgage).Successive governments have always fought to squash people who live any sort of alternative life as if we are an affront to their very existence. Perhaps we are. Perhaps our lives are the art that shows people that there is another way to live in this…
I’ve been working more with my anxiety of late. Instead of trying to squash it, I’ve been listening, applying a gentle ‘why am I feeling this now?’. The answers aren’t always apparent, but they’re slowly revealing themselves as I grow self-awareness. One of the things I’ve struggle with is how I want to share work with the world. It often appears as if everyone else has everything sorted: they go down the traditional publishing in magazines/publisher route, or they use…
It’s the last day of Spanish hunting season, which means that around 100,000 galgos hounds will be shot, abandoned, or sometimes quite brutally murdered because they’re now considered worthless. I’m trying really hard not to turn this into a rant, but fuck, I’ve seen a few things today that have pissed me off so badly. Even though I look to the social structures that cause people to behave cruelly: capitalism reduces every action, every product and every life to €…