Our Lost Sense of Smell is a Real Loss
Many of us don’t have a very good sense of smell and this ability doesn’t tend to be seen as that important in our lives. To give a rather bizarre illustration, in a recent survey, 1 in 6 US college students, when asked to choose, said they would rather lose their sense of smell than […]
Jung and Living Right with Nature
Carl Jung’s Bollingen Tower “People are no longer involved in nature and [have] lost their emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had a symbolic meaning…Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god… No river contains a spirit… no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. […]
Being Present & Whole
Learning from cats and dogs Six o’clock in the morning and I feel a light bump on my belly. Edie has jumped onto my lap for her morning greetings with some friendly chirrups as she jumps. Edie is a cat, in case you’re wondering. Then she settles down on my tummy with a powerful deep […]
Living Rivers
I say river who flows rather than that flows as a mark of respect and acknowledgement to the life of the river. Let’s not ‘which’ or ‘that’ her into inanimate ‘stuff’ or mere commodity.
Consciously changing our use of language in itself can help to change our habitual and unthought through attitudes of ‘othering’ and deadening the home that we are inseparably part of, by seeing our surroundings as inanimate.
Letting Mind Return Home
It’s a still hazy Spring morning as I gaze out on my balcony; not a whisper of wind and the horizons are drawn in, not misty, but with an intimate feeling of enclosure that lends itself to contemplation.
Soft Rebellion
“Soft rebellion is not retreat—it is a return. A return to the slow intelligence of forests and fungi, of root and rock, to the cyclical wisdom of the moon, the spirits of the Earth and the ancestors of kith and kin, to the understanding that nothing in nature rushes toward its own destruction. In every […]
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, lying on my stomach on the grassy river bank on a warm summer’s day,
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 are no grey clouds as such but rather a weighing down in a featureless vista which is neither near nor far.
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 decline.
Environmentalists can lose heart that the liveable advances that have taken so much struggle to secure, are often now being rolled back.
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.