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PODCAST

Uncivil Savant Podcast

The complete audio version of my regular posts. Notes from the Way, words from the woods, waters from the springs. carolineross.substack.com

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

11:07

Episode 83 - Saying It and Doing It

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/12/24

TrespassesOn one of the first mornings of January 2024 I woke from a dream which had only the simplest and starkest of content. Instead of my usual dream adventures, quests, meetings and challenges, there was simple black text on white in bold capitals-A YEAR OF FORGIVENESS OF DEBTNo sound, no commentary. I opened my eyes and made a note of the words but I needn’t have bothered, as they have stayed with me all year like a guilty secret. I turn around and the words are still there, now like a promise

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8:14

Episode 82 - Under the Hill

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/12/05

A DoorYielding to Land1 is a rigorous art. To make yourself soft to a hard place is to open something akin to opening a faery-door - not some pretty fabrication glued to a tree by a well-meaning parent - but a gaping cave mouth in reality. There is darkness in there and the possibility of madness beside the real prize, wisdom. There is also a price to pay: everything you had constructed on top of the ground of yourself, before.Wisdom flows downhill, like water. Unless you lower yourself, and present

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11:43

Episode 81 - AI Is A Tick Upon the Body of the Earth

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/11/26

Ordinary people, artists, creators, farmers, workers, parents, lovers… we did not ask for AI but it was made to seem inevitable, first by Science Fiction and Horror books and films, where at least it was almost always solidly critiqued. Later it was made real by the tech overlords of Silicon Valley whose inhumane imaginations2 have set loose artificial species of energy sucking-ticks, of livelihood removal-ticks, of truth replacement-ticks.I’ve had it with the enshittification of the internet. It is

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13:41

Growth Rings

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/11/07

Where the Light FallsLook again at the growth rings in the photo above. Notice how slender and crowded they are in the top of the circle compared to the area on the lower-left. This tree was likely felled near where it was used, near North Adams, Massachusetts, sometime in the late nineteenth century. In heavily forested areas like the hills and valleys around the Hoosic river, conifers such as pine and spruce grew tall and were used in buildings as pillars, structural timbers and flooring. At Mass

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7:33

Episode 79 - To Keep the Wolf As the Door

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/10/24

Why do you write?Why I write depends on what I am writing; there is a vast difference between why I first wrote a book about natural art materials4 and why I write this Substack5. Similarly, the reasons why I wrote a T’ai Chi blog for my students for 15 years6 and why I write song lyrics7 have barely anything in common. That is ‘why’ as motivation or hoped-for outcome. That’s not quite what I’m stalking.8About 3 hours ago, I finished writing and illustrating my second book, after six months’ work

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8:13

Episode 78 - Unsuitable Loves

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/10/03

This week is a between-essays week. Here are two short fiction sketches, written in 2007 and 2015, and recent photographs from near my home and from a very nourishing week in Suffolk. Greetings from sunset hour in York, where I am away working on the last edits for my next book. Back with a longer piece and ‘this week’s good thing’, next week. Go well, all, into the season’s change.Thanks for listening to Uncivil Savant. To receive invitations to online classes and support my work, become a free or

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12:14

Episode 77 - Before the Feast, a Fast

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/09/29

I want to write about music and silence. It’s a few weeks earlier than planned, as yesterday I got the heads up from Lydia Catterall that our episode on her podcast Survival Songs was coming out on Sunday 22nd September, a month before I expected. So why not listen to that now, before reading this? You can click here. It’s only 20 minutes long and it’ll give you more depth on some of the topics in today’s post.Have you ever just stopped doing a thing you really loved for a decade? What happened when

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17:01

Episode 76 - Love is the Ache of a Bone Mending

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/09/14

This week I am sat here at my desk with a hard stone in my belly. I could write what I would have written and not mention the chill in my guts, but apart from plainly being false, it would also not serve anyone. Perhaps I will always be a teacher at heart, like both my siblings and most of my cousins, aunts and uncles. To fight the explicatory urge to find lessons in almost everything would be as futile as pulling out my own thumbnail. I’d be useless for a while and it’d only grow back. And then I’d

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5:54

Episode 75 - Three boats on a Horizon

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/09/01

I am away somewhere there is no electricity. I come to town to look at this screen, drink coffee and send pictures to my mum.Here are three fruits from my larder of letters, thoughts, poems. I send greetings from a day with SSE winds and an abundance of bats at dusk. The mackerel’s bellies are full of baby sprats, a first. The local swimmers report huge silver shoals of them around their legs. The grey seal rested all day yesterday and gazed at us with huge black eyes. I watched the rise and fall of

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9:06

Episode 74: What Is Your Mission?

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/08/16

I-thouThis ‘you’ I am writing to, it’s really ‘thou’ or ‘ye’ or ‘thee’.I tried ‘I’ and ‘my’ for this piece but that’s not it, and using ‘we’ would assume far too much. So, rather than affect an archaic pronoun that would get in the way of communication, I must address ‘you’, but not in an accusatory way. This ‘you’ includes the part of me to which I write when I also write to you.English is a strange and speckled beast and when not quick to heel, turns to sniff old walls and piss on them. But it is

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16:41

Episode 73: A Walk That Never Ends

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/07/27

It is time to write the last of these See With the Body Eye pieces for a while, and to return to the implicit over the explicit again, next week. Last night for an online talk I gave for PRI, it was both a joy and a big leap for me to be so ‘out’ about my inspirations and sources of sustenance for the work that is mine to do in the world. In a few week’s time I hope to share the recording and the resources. But for now, it is just good to know the week ahead comprises days in an ancient octagonal

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12:57

Episode 72: The Drop, the Splash and the Ripple

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/07/16

This momentYou are at your desk and your hands, shoulders and eyes feel so tired. You roll your shoulders back and squint at the screen, did it always seem so blurry? Your partner comes in bringing a cup of tea wondering when you’ll be free to help with a small household task. The cat stretches lazily by the door and requests, with an exceptionally sweet ‘raaorll’, that she would like to be let out, to prowl her inscrutable night paths.So many requests in a day, from our loved ones, from the wild

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14:14

Episode 71: Imperfect Forms Are Just What We Need

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/06/27

It is summer 1985 and I am crouched in a dusty attic bedsit at the top of a large, run-down Victorian building in Bournemouth, peering at the bookshelf wedged behind a potter’s wheel. Worn paperbacks I have never seen before are in a row: Tao - The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts, Zen Buddhism by Christmas Humphries, several books by Idries Shah including the exploits of Mulla Nazruddin, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Suzuki Roshi, A Potter’s Book by Bernard Leach, poems of Hafez and Zen Flesh, Zen

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10:39

Episode 70: To End a War, Be Unafraid to Fight

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/06/12

Pax CorporisYour body is not an enemy to be subdued, it is not evil and does not need transcending.1You do not need to mortify the flesh, neither is it advisable to indulge it.2 3It is not a peripheral matter that the intelligence beaming out of you at this moment, meeting my words in that ancient embrace of sense-making together, (like strangers clasping hands and forearms to make a new peace), is embodied.4Embodiment is not an accident, a trap, a curse, a trick, an inconvenience. The Great Mystery

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10:04

Episode 69: The Mead of Litha

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/06/08

Mind sneaks glances from behind the door of the room where heart and hope lay sleeping in a tangle. Lists accrue in layers on the desk as chestnut pollen tints the bay window yellow and further warms the (already golden) evening sunlight to a tone not seen since Proserpina’s last return. I have three more days of the very best company before I must make my third Lenten month of the year and work and only work. So, poems, pilgrimage and images are how I can be here with you this week, in one of those

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11:45

Episode 68: Three Vials of Unconforming Beauty

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/05/26

AspirantI have long been in search of a way to write about the real1 without lapsing lazily into superlatives nor anatomising a now-lifeless corpse of the beloved. I have a duty to speak for wisdom only accessible by the body and to somehow say-into-being the unspeakable, and to not just allow, but speak up for, the flawed, the exiled, the tiny, the marginal.The untethered word is to the real what the virtual world is to lived reality: merely a representation. When words are true, they remain

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10:15

Episode 67: The Wondering Guest

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/05/26

Loose EndsI am accustomed to being away from home, but it is a new and tricky thing travelling so far away when one’s love is 3600 miles and 5 hours east. Conversations between hosts, friends and strangers are woven together, the beloved is included. How do we stay in communion with what and whom are not physically present? How do we do this without drifting away from the present moment, from what is close at hand? Maintaining a thread between myself and family, friends or partner has been an

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8:51

Episode 66: Mind Regains the Green

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/04/25

I am in America, and inexplicably have no phone signal or data here despite paying for it, right after a couple of weeks in Italy. Here at last are deep green thoughts beneath the Georgia trees, where it is hot and humid and the shade of early evening is welcome. Good conversation and wonderful birdsong fill the air. There is due to be a ‘Biblical storm’ tonight, so people are leaving the camp, but we are trusting in our new tent and the fact that in Britain’s south west, we’ve just had the wettest

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10:59

Episode 65: All This Is Muse

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/04/24

On the seventh, and final, celebration of the anniversary of the initiatory circle of the Incorporation of Muse. Below are some extracts of the many meetings of the participatory Beings and the Mistress of the gathering basket. Losses are recouped. A new door opens. We draw a crooked line under everything with charcoal made from our brothers’ vines, and heave a glad sigh.This week, an unknowable horizon beckons, we go to pack old hurts away and find them turned to thick black ink.This post was first

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16:15

Rivers of Knowing

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/03/31

A month or so ago, David Knowles, a writer I love to read, asked me to write something about knowing, after I had written this in a short Note about an earlier piece:Somewhere between the fort-town of Facts and the river of Knowing is a meadow where I gather leaves of wild faith.I was making notes, mulling it over, as you do, when a friend died. Washed downstream into a gully of grief, several of us swam together and kept each other afloat. Now, on the banks of that peaty force, I sit to regather my

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