THE URBAN ANIMIST

ECO MUSINGS FROM EAST LONDON

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20201010_090105

The Cosmos in a Foot of Water

I still vividly remember the shock and wonder of gazing into the waters of the shallow little river near my home when I was a young kid. There I was,
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Meditation with an Unseen Robin

Sitting on my favourite bench overlooking my allotment on a cold winter’s day, the sky and the day are grey and leaden and my fingers smart with the cold. There
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Rewilding

With all the bad news of recent times, it’s easy to feel that collectively we're going backwards and that the planet’s living systems are heading in the direction of terminal
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Winter Solstice

In the consumer frenzy leading up to Xmas, what gets almost entirely missed is the event that to me is the most significant in the whole year: The Winter Solstice.
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Living more Simply so Others can Simply Live

Each evening before our meal, my wife and I pause a moment for a little ritual of saying grace and wishing well to all our fellow beings. Something along the
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The Urban Animist

Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst. Therefore that which fills the universe
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Awe

I just had a revelation about a subject close to my heart. A friend sent me an article in which I discovered that in recent times there have been various
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Living with Heartbreak

I used to think that grief is a very powerful emotion which visits us in times of loss, and then after varying amounts of time, depending on the degree of
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Home

Hitching out on the road as a young man, I loved the sense of wandering free, with all I needed on my back. Standing on the roadside waiting, sometimes for
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Living in the Earth

I love gulls. I watch them wheeling and soaring, effortlessly riding the winds above the waters of the old docks where I live. Whatever the weather, the big herring gulls
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Cat Consciousness

These days, it’s unfortunately the case that most of us are pretty estranged from Nature. Over fifty per cent of the world now live in urban environments and this percentage
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Chalk Stream

I come to your banks with reverence, in the green serene of your cool stream Gravel beds where golden trout lie Waving carpets of crowfoot, lime green with starry flowers
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I’m not really a birdwatcher

Acquaintances often tend to refer to me as a birdwatcher or a birder. On my allotment I’ve heard that I’m known by fellow plot holders as ‘the Birdman’ due to
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My Life with a Wooden Log

For a number of years now, I have made it a point to regularly spend time sitting on my bench which looks out on my vegetable plot. This is my
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A Spring Walk into my Nature

As far as I can see in all directions, there stretches an endless expanse of marsh and lagoons. I’m completely alone in the conventional sense that there are no other
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Being Animal

I’ve always felt a kinship with the living world ever since I was a toddler. I still vividly remember my first attempt at composing a sentence to accompany my crayon
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Remembering an Endling

You loved to collect nectar from flowering trees in the forest with your long curved bill. And you sang with a flute-like melody; a haunting sound which carried far through
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Soul Loss

Could you be losing your soul? If I suggested that you may be suffering from soul loss, you might reasonably wonder if I’m losing my grip on reality. Let me
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A Faerie Tale

On a hot Spring day, I’m walking through the open woodland pasture, zig zagging my path to stay mostly in the shade. Spying a spreading May tree in full bloom
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Into the Fens

Early morning and I’m out walking on the fens before the heat of the day ramps up. The sky glows vastly over a swaying ocean of sedges and reeds. Far
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Gratitude

I’ve been harvesting asparagus on my allotment. The spears emerge almost magically out of the ground at this time in Spring, thrusting through the crust of the dry soil; vibrantly
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Cuckoo

The magical sound resounds over the lakes and scrubland: cuck-coo…. cuck-coo! I listen transfixed, but find it difficult to know from what direction it’s coming from or how far away
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Practicing Animism: Back to the Future

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The Sanctity of All Life

We modern humans have constructed a peculiar walled off status for ourselves, entirely divorced from the vast realm of the animal kingdom. This is of course, completely fictitious, and ironically
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The Cult of the Car

We’re drowning in a tsunami of cars, suffocated by their sheer numbers and fumes. For over a century, we’ve been in the grip of a collective madness around automobiles. How
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Edgelands & the Wild

Walking across the car park of my local ASDA superstore I am struck by the sheer acreage of tarmac which never becomes remotely full of cars, even though there are
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The Darkling Thrush: A Harbinger

Winter Solstice has come and gone and we’re now well into mid January in the Northern Hemisphere. The sense of bone dead winter seems unchanging – and then suddenly I
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Walking the Path to Nowhere & Everywhere

“Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility”
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Kith & Kin

When I got up to space, I looked at the blackness of space. There were no dazzling lights. It was just palpable blackness. I believed I saw death. And then
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Times like these…

You can’t get over it, round it or under it. Whatever your opinion, there’s no escaping the overriding truth that we – and I mean every single one of us
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Wonder

Clambering down the rocky cliffs to a small sandy cove on the wild north Cornwall coast on a blustery October day, I was watching the breakers rolling into shore. The
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The Value of Sit Spots

’ve been going outdoors to my favourite little spot to sit down for years and it was only recently that I read about the phenomenon and the popularity of ‘sit
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Why aren’t we Devastated?

I’m attempting to write about an issue for which I have no answer and it’s puzzled me for a long time. Just to say at the outset, in writing about
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 Kafka in the Courtroom

I look around me in a mixture of shock and disbelief at the bizarre setting I’m in. I realise I’m alone in the courtroom – or rather I’m not alone;
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A Nightingale Pilgrimage

So it was that after almost three weeks of recovering from the fatigue and coughing of a mild, but nevertheless very unpleasant covid infection, following right on the heels of
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Walking in a Place through All Time

I love walking out on the marshes of the upper Thames estuary in all seasons. It’s a wide open edgeland landscape: rewilded nature reserve and brownfield wildness bordered by a
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Touching and being Touched

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the renowned phenomenologist philosopher, pointed out that we can only touch things with our hand because our hand is itself a touchable thing and therefore completely part of
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A Yew Pilgrimage

A dull chill day, hard after the Winter Solstice, found me on a trek to visit an ancient tree I feel much reverence towards: the Ankerwyke Yew.
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Living in an Existential Crisis

This isn’t meant to be a gloom and doom post, but rather my attempt at grappling emotionally with the reality of being alive in the 2020s.
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Air, Sea & Gannets

The gale smashes into the metre thick stone walls of the lighthouse cottage I am safely within, sheltered from the elements.
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Cat Contemplations

I have a cat companion called Edie and I feel fortunate to be learning about myself from our relationship and I think in her own way, she may feel likewise.
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The Power of Place

My favourite spot to sit is on my garden bench at my allotment, shrouded by creepers and thorn bushes and sheltered above year round by a big evergreen bay tree.
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My Witness Statement

I’ve found this very difficult to write. I’ve been trying to set down these thoughts on paper for a while now. I don’t know quite where to start or finish
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We’re never Alone

I love going out walking whether it’s in urban, edgeland or wilder places. I usually walk alone though I’m always in company. The more-than-human world is always all around and
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Vimala Thakar: Spiritual Revolutionary 1923 – 2009

I wrote this tribute to Vimala Thakar back in 2009 after she passed away. I had the privilege of meeting her on several occasions and have always been inspired by
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Coming to our Senses

“These days I don’t think of myself as a gardener, birdwatcher, or even a nature lover – it seems more that I’m just inextricably part of it all, and that
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Urban Gardening in the Anthropocene

Anthropocene: the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.
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A Requiem for Nature in Britain

Our hearts go out when we see one of those awful pictures of a disoriented, lost Orangutan in the debris of clear cut rainforest somewhere in Indonesia, which up to
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Belonging

Spring evening, still and glimmering gold Walking along the allotment path, my legs feel weighty. Sinking consciously, pulled earthward with each step My steps are not my own I somehow
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From Seniors to Elders

Senior citizens, OAPs, retirees. Doesn’t sound so inspiring, in the way this vast and growing segment of our population is sometimes referred to, does it? Now of course I know
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