“No great art came from a happy life.” I’ve been listening to many interviews of well-known creative people, conducted by John Wilson on BBC Radio Four’s This Cultural Life, and this theme echoes through many of them. Writers, actors, composers, musicians, choreographers, artists – listening to the stories of their lives and what has influenced…
Dark and cold we may be, but this Is no winter now. The frozen misery Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move; The thunder is the thunder of the floes, The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring. Thank God our time is now when wrong Comes up to face us everywhere, Never to leave us…
How would it be to put down the weight of the world for a while? All the statistics and images telling us we’re doomed, The weight of your projects and dreams that you long to share, The stories you haven’t yet told, And all the things that you wish were different. Or part of you does –…
You locked me in a cellar and hid the key. Do you remember? Some part of you will. I forgave you immediately because, well, what can I say, I was too dazzling. Too much. It’s true, I’m being honest and I’m always careful to find the most accurate words I can because words are powerful –…
It’s the end of August 2021, northern England. Dusk gathers about three stone circles. The setting is dazzling, a moorland ringed by mountains. It’s just me camping with nature, the evening before I turn fifty. I can feel the edge – of crossing one of life’s important thresholds, an upping of the ante, of not…
What do you think of the following statement? The most sophisticated technology in the world is the world itself, that it knows how to restore ecological balance with no side-effects, because it understands the delicate relationships between all of its component parts. Which do you feel is more likely to succeed: allowing nature to restore…
There’s an old Siberian story called The Moon Palace. When a girl’s unusual boyfriend is attacked by her father, and told that their love cannot be, she rockets free of her body and takes up residence on the moon. There it is safe to watch life on Earth without feeling its pain. Or the intensity of its…
Podcast version of the below text (8 minutes). The Old English poem Beowulf, perhaps more than any other story, might be the antidote to the poison of business-as-usual as lockdown eases and world events scream for change. It is a story for everyone – shareholder, chief executive and lobbyist included. Whether we realise it or not, humans…
The below ten minute video is the backstory and subtext to a novel I wrote for this very moment in evolution as Earth gives birth to something new . . .
If leaders are imaginative and bold enough there need not be a crippling economic depression as we pass through the Covid-19 pandemic . . . I’m sharing a brief economic section that didn’t go into the last piece I wrote on initiation, ‘Ivan’s Choice’. This is the left-brain aspect of what I was addressing. It’s…
Whose story are we living? Now that Covid-19 has ground the world to a halt, we find ourselves at an auspicious fork in the road. The storyteller Dr. Martin Shaw likens it to a key moment in a Russian initiation myth, Ivan and the Wolf. Having set off on a quest to capture the firebird,…
I feel the need for a broader, deeper story to hold what is currently going on in the world. On March 18th there was an interesting article in the Guardian, Tip of the iceberg: is our destruction of nature responsible for Covid-19? The essence of the article was how the continued urbanisation of wild space, forcing…
What if the psychologist Carl Jung was right – that our reality is ultimately one of living symbols telling us a story, one about ourselves and our relationship with all life? In other words, both individually and collectively do we create our reality, including the weather? [Podcast length approx. 7.5 minutes.]
What if the psychologist Carl Jung was right – that our reality is ultimately one of living symbols telling us a story, one about ourselves and our relationship with all life? In other words, both individually and collectively do we create our reality, including the weather? Finally we’re waking up to the relationships between our…
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