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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

16:21

Episode 102 - Handmade Prayers

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/10/11

Oak comes to the rescue, yet again. This laptop sits on a cork mat which prevents the cold hard aluminium edge of the camping table, which provisionally serves as my writing desk, from digging into my my wrists. I send heartfelt thanks to the cork oaks of Spain, Portugal and southern France, where the raw materials for this mass-produced natural cork-fragment mat were likely harvested. Years ago, visiting the chalet in Provence belonging to a family friend, I was struck by the cork oaks on the

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11:34

Episode 101 - Thoughts from Inside a Hollow Tree

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/10/11

I pack a box, clean a table, write more. The day is all mixed up. I cut my toenails then cry into my phone at the beauty of a message. The world is mixed up. The aspect ratio of verity and simile is not even. Joy is still joy. Hate is still hate. They were so before, during, and after, I wrote this post, which likely changes nothing except for the itching in my two typing fingers and the density of knots in the wild yarn ball of my 2am mind.Acorns sustain life, whether eaten as the common of mast by

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76:02

Episode 100 - A Word in Your Shell-like

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/09/11

Welcome to the 100th podcast episode! There’s an off the cuff intro plus the full audio from my recent Zoom conversation with Paul Kingsnorth from his Machine Sessions1 for the launch of his upcoming book Against the Machine. As soon as I have read it, I’ll write about it here. But for now, enjoy our conversation. If you’d like to watch the video of it, and all Paul’s other conversations in this series, you can go straight to The Machine Sessions, on YouTube. Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported

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10:49

Episode 99 - A Heart like a Harbour

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/09/03

Ships of differing flags have come to moor inside myself, anchoring in the part of me which welcomes-in mystery. Here come the big ships - Goodness, Truth and Beauty. Are they from one fleet or from opposing navies? I do not recognise their flags and pennants nor do I understand the movements of the crews. But I have a deep interest in their cargoes.My two beloved wisdom traditions have such contrasting approaches to some of the deepest conundrums and predicaments of my life, with sometimes just a

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15:41

Episode 98 - Friendship is the Muse

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/08/17

It’s coming up for three years since I started this Uncivil Savant, and for the first time in many months, I have been taking a look through some of the pieces from the years before I opened this particular writing space. The space before this one was letters and emails to my dear friends and trusted colleagues. Thinking in conversation. It’s still a joy, but with so many of my gang of friends now writing, both here and in our books, I find I miss the daily and weekly typed missives, punctuated with

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18:57

Episode 97 - Escape from the Cloud of Knowing

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/08/07

The function of the Machine is onslaughtThe oil that allows its gears to turn is provided by your mind.The mill which expresses the oil from your mind is precisely calibrated to extract the maximum levels of anxiety from your thoughts, as, like the industrially mined and finely micronized graphite additive in engine oil, your raised cortisol and adrenaline levels greatly aid the smooth functioning of the Machine.The large and small gaps in the onrushing overwhelm of information, provided by family,

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5:12

Episode 96 - Pine and Fisherman

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/07/31

The oaks bear it. The brunt of the sun. Turn their bitterness to acorn and gall. Buddleia is wilting, the weight of the butterflies barely registers. Whispering - ‘Remember how to be gentle before the burning time’.The forest always goes past at 80 miles an hour. My eyes are impatient lovers, the purple bruise of heather spreading under my proprietorial gaze. Yet the shimmering heath renders beauty, even unto seizure.I walked here two weeks ago, deliberately stamping so that the adders could make

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7:13

Episode 95 - Finding the Words

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/07/16

In a time of the unsayable not only being said, but being enacted, I have withdrawn into speaking less. I haven’t been calling people, (my generation still phone each other), only leaving occasional short voice messages, like my younger friends. I love to talk with people, but I feel a time of silence is needed, so by the time you read this, I will have had three days quiet time with the sea and the horizon. There is something about opening my heart up to that impossible line which slows down the

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24:21

Episode 94 - Afloat on Dry Land

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/06/26

I spent most of last week on an art residency. For those of you from other walks of life, this is where you are invited and sometimes paid, to go away from home and make your art, often in response or relation to some aspect of the venue, people or institution that invite you. Perhaps it's easier to sit a 7-day Zen retreat. My mind, stripped of all stimuli but my body and a blank wall, quickly quits struggling and at least attempts to settle to the task at hand; counting breaths, say. I am in a

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16:49

Episode 93 - Ultra Processed Things

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/06/05

Every six months or so, inspired by thoughtful writing by Ruth Gaskovski , I end up writing a tactile / haptic response or addendum to something rich from School of the Unconformed. In this case Architecture for the Free Mind was the prompt and my desire is to add a little detail to a possible materiality for a free life. I contributed some snaps of my studio areas, full of unmade objects and hand-worked natural materials. For me, these are a source of something almost akin to a vitamin; I receive

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10:07

Episode 92 - Don't Proffer Your Neck to a Vampire

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/05/15

This week, glimpses from a week wrestling with good.The Great Mystery, as I experience it, is in all things and makes itself known hour by hour. We have never had a pugilistic relationship. Instead, I struggle with good, that is, how people, including myself, behave to one another, especially online. Online is where I must sadly spend a large amount of time at the moment to make certain projects that I care about take place. Screen-life can have the effect of hollowing me out. Here are sundry recent

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75:43

Episode 91 - In Conversation with Iain McGilchrist

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/05/10

This week, I’d like to share a film of a recent conversation with Iain. As so often happens with friends, one wishes it were possible to capture the deep, spontaneous conversations that arise around meals or while relaxing. That not being possible, here’s us discussing a little of what we’ve been talking about over the last couple of years since my last visit to Skye in 2023 with Dougald Hine. (You can watch the conversation he had with Iain here).It’s not possible for me to fully delineate the

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5:37

Episode 90 - Hold an Edge

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/05/01

This week, four poems. Some take years to find a shape, others arrive fully formed. Their promptness or tardiness to the party, their languishing in my laptop or notebooks in various states of déshabillé - none of these correlates to whether they will be good mixers, or that they’ll skulk in a corner, eyeing the host’s impressive bookshelves morosely.Also this week, my, what interesting times to be a woman.Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe now so you need never miss an

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12:18

Episode 89 - Hearth Person

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/04/18

This week, a story gathered fresh from the wild last week about how we unwittingly get caught in serfdom, and how we might walk away free. Some things that seem to be dead can haunt an unwitting culture or even possess it. A way of life as old and long-lived as feudalism, which persisted in diverse forms for centuries in Europe and Japan, and millennia in China, amongst other places, rears its head this week. Before you listen to this piece, first listen to Ursula K LeGuin’s masterful short story

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19:12

Episode 88 - It's Just Dogs Barking

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/03/06

‘That which circles moves from its centre’1Perhaps you too have something like this: a conundrum from which you can never turn away, which you do not feel as a curse, but a generative, endlessly revealing, probably insoluble, puzzle. In Ancient Greece and Norse myth it is part of your Fate. In Old English, it’s part of your Wyrd. It’s a now-smooth pebble you can endlessly turn over in your hand, replete with crooked hole through which you can peer, to see the horizon transformed through

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8:46

Episode 87 - Tidal / Wilding / Softening

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/02/28

With the sound of courting herring gulls hark hark harking on the roof opposite my desk, I just sat down to complete the next longer essay and briefly looked through my ‘drafts’ folder in the Substack editor. Words jumped up and said ‘hear me now!’ So, this week, while I continue writing the longer essay, perhaps completing my current delve in ‘not resisting evil’ and yielding, here are some fragments - shorter thoughts and thinking points - which wanted to be shared with you. Also, you might

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19:04

Episode 86 - What Cannot Be Dissolved is the Real

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/02/23

This week’s podcast is an expansion on a voice letter I sent to Dougald Hine this week, which is part of our years-long ongoing conversation about how people can show up for one another in the strange times in which we find ourselves. My tone might sound different compared to other pieces but I have decided to leave it unsweetened. Forgive my rant, or perhaps just rant along.Leaving aside the slew of land-expropriation news from elsewhere, in my country right now, rich landowners are seeking to

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14:36

Episode 85 - Yielding, Sincerity, Integrity

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/02/06

Caught as we are in the seasonal gales of bawling and chest-beating of barely literate tyrants, there is much we cannot hear. Where I live, this last week of storms has left the low tide strand scoured and giant boulders half the size of cars are strewn about the upper shore, going nowhere. Meanwhile, and for some months, I have been considering the three seemingly unpopular qualities after which I named this piece.On these Isles, both the pagan religions that arrived by foot over Doggerland or by

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5:59

Episode 84 - If the Mind is a Lake

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2025/01/07

I begin writing this from within a storm.Hogmanay was cancelled in Edinburgh and most towns in the country were battered by high winds when New Years’ Eve parties and fireworks were due to be in full swing. A sou’ westerly blows hard and fast up the English Channel and greets my windows with a thousand salty kisses. I just gathered rosemary from the overgrown bushes in the clifftop gardens and snuck a peek at the sea: whitecaps as far as the eye can see, which to be fair, isn’t far. New Year

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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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102 results

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