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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

11:04

Episode 23 - Full of emptiness

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/01

It gets harder to come back from the place of no wordsWithout access to sea edge and forest there are many thoughts I can’t have and many kinds of silence, too. Sensation, movement and perception roll along without words and take on the green tinge of leaf or the glint of grey flint. Last week the cove remade me in its image - tidal thoughts, harder, durable stone ideas, softer yet more tenacious seaweed feelings. Irascible mind chatter flies past, as persistently as the gulls diving for morsels

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9:17

Episode 22 - Pilgrimage

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/01

I am typing this just after packing to go to the bay I first wrote about online at Dark Mountain in 2018, when I made rock art for the cover of issue 13. I am also gently planning a pilgrimage to walk with two friends in a year or so to St Wite’s Spring, her church and reliquary in Whitchurch Canonicorum, and to Abbotsbury, on the Fleet, the site of the world’s largest tended flock of wild swans. Easter blessings from the south coast of this archipelago. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at

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10:26

Episode 21 - Jewels in your roots

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/01

How I see what is really there, what is not there, and what it has cost me.When I was a young child I saw shapes and colours around things and on things that were not the same as the shapes and colours of things. This was not the consensus view, but no-one bothered to tell me off about it. Had they, it would have ceased immediately, as I was terrified of censure. If I was wrong, surely I was unlovable?First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, April 3rd 2023. Get full access

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6:37

Episode 20 - Make cracks for magic

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/31

Begin. Open a space with your intent, like you do when you dream. Take all the care and love and unmet desire that you have, and right now in your mind’s eye roll it up into a tight ball as though of sharp-scented herb leaves. Now compress that for 40 million years, which will take the length of 4 breaths. Then see as it turns from coal to jet to diamond under necessity’s fierce pressure. OK, now you have a sharp, rough diamond and you can make a crack in anything with it. Including the edifice of

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17:06

Episode 19 - Intent

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/31

Correct mind intent, plus physical repetition over time, equals practice.Or, ‘If it ain’t raining, it ain’t training’.1Below is something I wrote as a practice aide-memoire for myself in 2018, then adapted for my students a few years ago, and have returned to this weekend though necessity. It’s been a hard week, not only for myself, but for several of my loved ones. The way this shows up for me is blinding headaches, my organism is very straightforward and unsubtle in expressing distress these days,

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10:01

Episode 18 - By the crow

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/31

Here are some things for you, continuing broad themes from the last few months, in one of my semi-regular breaks from essaying. First, a poem and some avian drawings. Then a letter to a friend from a very strange week spent dog and cat sitting for rich Londoners, while trying to make ends meet, both from 2018. Lastly, I press a mixtape into your sweaty palm whilst mumbling something about ‘Brian Eno’s amazing harmony vocals on this one…’First published here with full transcript, notes and more

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15:03

Episode 17 - I was beside myself

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/31

While I begin diving into the reading needed for future essays, I have been enjoying many other writers here, as we all grapple with the Machine, and how it famously co-opts our attention. I particularly valued Pilgrims in the Machine‘s excellent recent piece. It prompted me to publish this essay I wrote in November last year, as it is not only technology which keeps us separate from our hearts and each other. The Machine certainly seems to have a will of its own now, but it was originally born from

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14:44

Episode 16 - A low slanting ray

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/31

The temperature dropped below freezing that night in the woods, and my usual late spring camping set up wasn’t enough. In the small hours, I donned every item of spare clothing I had, including my huge rain cape, and squeezed back into my sleeping bag, shivering. I finally got up just after dawn to the May-time sounds of birds, seemingly annoyed at my presence in the clearing. This was after a pre-dawn hour of a tawny owl (unironically and loudly) calling the koan, ‘Who, who?’ directly above my

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17:33

Episode 15 - A Thousand Million Roots

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/30

My friend Martin is a woodsman. Last year he felled lots of western hemlock, unsuited to the wood in Devon where it was planted a few decades ago. Now, misshapen trunk by slightly rotten trunk, some of these failed trees are being laid carefully into peaty land on Dartmoor, damming drainage ditches dug by ‘improvers’, so that the land may once again hold its full quota of life-giving water. The sight of heaths and moorlands burning here in England last summer was an awful one, these landscapes

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50:56

Episode 14 - In Conversation with Iain McGilchrist

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/30

I was finally able to download and edit this recording made by Dougald Hineof Iain McGilchrist and me talking at his home last week. I first wrote to Iain in December 2010 to thank him for his book ‘The Master and His Emissary’ and to relay its profound effect upon my life, understanding of T’ai Chi and the Tao, and its beneficial outward rippling effect in my and my teacher’s T’ai Chi schools.First published here with notes and more images, February 15th 2023. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at

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12:30

Episode 13 - To Hone Uncanny Musculature

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/30

At 1am on 4th February, after a full 90 minute cycle of good deep sleep, I was awoken by the image of a vast bog or marsh, stretching between two conical mountains, such as found in the water-lands of Sutherland, in the far north of Scotland. But my mind was in the sphagnum moss and bog myrtle, not on the heathered high mountain sides. Over the next minutes a response flooded out of me to a question I have been asking myself for a few months now, about the predicament we find ourselves in, here in

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6:18

Episode 12 - Imbolc Interlude

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/30

I am taking a break from writing essays this week. Instead, here’s a poem from the autumn in France, an ochre story and a recent painting. I hope you enjoy them.First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, January 30th 2023. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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12:59

Episode 11 - Fire and Steel

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/30

Today I want to write about tempering.Years ago I went to make a knife with the skilful Devon blacksmith and experimental archaeologist Dave Budd. Two days working flint with renowned knapper Anthony Whitlock had felt approachable to my hands as it required only short, momentary percussion and careful intent to make a serviceable blade. Working with fire and steel was another matter…First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, January 23rd 2023. Get full access to Uncivil Savant

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19:21

Episode 10 - The Land Speaks

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/29

In October 2015 many forces came together in my life, the remaining ripples of which began to settle last year, when I turned 50. Looking back, over 7 years later, I see threads emerging that are now woven into my writing and art life, including here at Uncivil Savant.I want to share something of those beginnings with you, to allow a better understanding of how I came to be exploring this territory, and why I care so deeply about the embodied life as a gateway to wisdom, equal and complementary to

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9:08

Episode 09 - Talking About the Weather

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/29

Seemingly endless rain is lashing down on old England as my friends in New England write describing snowdrifts many feet deep in their ‘once in a hundred years’ storm. I am away in London for New Year, spending the evening peacefully alone by choice, reading, meditating and bringing you this piece.A year ago I wrote to my friend Dougald, having just found words for a rebellion in me against the disdain I sensed in descriptions of ordinary people, (especially ordinary women), in much contemporary

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4:19

Episode 08 - Steeped in Meaning

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/29

Join me appreciating plant kin this Yule, while I enjoy with family the flavours and scents of tannin-rich oak, cloves, raisins, mint and bay in our festive food, plus lashings of tea, of course. My gratitude to the plant kingdom has no end. When you raise your glass or cup, it likely contains blessed polyphenols… They, and we, are steeped in meaning.First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, December 26th 2022. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at

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7:25

Episode 07 - A Story Gift

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/29

Winter Solstice approaches and I am packing to go and see dear friends and beloved family over Solstice and Christmas, both of which I celebrate. I wanted to post something special for you, so here is one of my all-time favourite teaching stories, a Taoist parable, if you like. Make yourself a cup of tea, no matter if it’s finest jasmine, oolong, Yorkshire Tea with milk, or Barry’s Tea if you’re in Ireland, (ah, the golden elixir…) then, press play.First published here with full transcript, notes

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20:25

Episode 06 - The Now-Time of the Hand

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/28

This piece is a response to a recent essay by and an opportunity to expand on a letter to my friend . I’ll raise the case for haptic richness over the tyranny of frictionless surfaces, show how our ancestors left us plenty of medicine in unlikely places, and suggest that there is no time, or at least no linear time, in the palm of your hand. For help from Blake, my mother’s sewing kit and a German biker, plus several contrasting photos featuring my hands, press play.First published here with full

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9:53

Episode 05 - The Cook and His Cleaver

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/28

The piece below for Dark Mountain Issue 8 Technê was my first essay published in a book, or indeed anywhere other than on the T'ai Chi school blog which I started in 2005. Thankfully, it was edited down by Steve Wheeler from a rambling sprawl to this short essay, where I attempt to get to some of the deeper aspects of Chuang Tzu's wonderful teaching story. I have updated it very slightly for you today. I recommend getting Thomas Cleary's Taoist Classics Volume 1 for his masterful translations, but

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0:20

Episode 04 - Wildness Is Our Undoing

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/01/28

True wildness…Published here with full transcript, November 30th 2022. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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