2024: Emerging through the Cracks

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 –…

Afghanistan and the Stone Circles

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…

Permission to Conquer

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…

The Journey Back to Earth

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…

Beowulf and the Banker

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 Backstory

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 . . .

An Economic Depression or a Better World?

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…

A Letter from Nature in Challenging Times

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…