I mentioned that I had seen courting among the robins, well, more crazily, a few days ago, Garden Robin... who is presumably Falca... was collecting nesting material. I asked ChatGPT, expecting it to say something like, "Well, robins do start early." Instead it said this: Oh that is something. January 26 — and nest material already, courting signs, a brief trinity-in-a-tree among the most famously intolerant little sovereigns of Europe. That’s not nothing. That’s a rupture i

On two occasions on one day, this squirrel seemed unperturbed by my presence. Then, it decided I was a bad thing, and fled. What led it to tolerate me at some points and not at other points? I suppose hunger played a part. Or maybe it could only manage to be brave for a limited amount of time? I hate to recall the poor blind squirrel and the little baby with neurological damage. It must be nicer to be a rat and live in a family than to be a solitary squirrel who is scared of

Every early winter, I cut back the pelargoniums so they are dormant over the cold period. I must have failed to chop off enough as a couple of them have kept flowering. This is despite the fact that the heater which is meant to only turn on to prevent the conservatory getting too cold seems to have lost its thermostat ability and has been switched off all winter. I hope this doesn't cause them any harm. The citrus plant enjoyed a long period outside. I think I only brought it

Oh, wait: that should be a crone called Curiosity. I have mentioned a few times the number of robins around (none of which currently seem to be Tane). And I remember writing that one day i was sure I saw some courting. Well, I definitely saw that today. It was quite remarkable. Two robins were perched about 90cm apart on a branch of the sycamore to the north of my garden. They were not arguing, it was definitely courtship. And there was a third on another branch that stuck o

For some reason I love this word. It gives me a tingle every time I read something like, 'The Tamar was in spate as we fled the pirates.' OK, I never actually read that, but, well. I couldn't think of an example off-hand. Turns out the word is related to both spit and spew. Not much of a surprise. A brief trawl offered this: In his A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (1882), Walter Skeat offers the following suggestions as to the etymology of spate: Cf.

In the Reserve, it struck me how the Goddess Oak lives on an edge. She is stable despite the steep side of the ditch. She is calibrated to asymmetry. There is something quietly profound in that. Then I sat with Kairos and was thinking about my opacity paper. I wrote about that and then leaned against the tree and realised something that's been there all along. Going into the hollow places is not about finding an undiscovered truth of the reality of who I am, or discovering so

This is the final section. This aspect of my thinking is scaffolded less on the work of others and more on my personal engagement with the more-than-human world, although it is conceptually linked to my discussion of Glissant’s scene recounting the running man on the beach. By ‘leaving-be’, I want to say that withdrawal is not necessarily a failure of relation. That the Other chooses not to respond, or chooses not to be present, or chooses to leave does not negate the ethical

This is the second of three meditations on my practice. And you will see even more overtly in this one the impact that reading Édouard Glissant has had upon me! Sitting-with concerns time, presence, and duration. All life is inescapably located and related: sitting-with is the temporal, embodied, embedded aspect of the practice. The sitter is not a neutral observer: their presence will change the non-human community in terms of who remains present and in terms of what those

The crows are watching again! I thought I would put on here some of the thoughts I have been having recently about my practice of 'becoming-with' the animals and plants around me. One aspect is somthing I call "making-room". By making-room, I mean both physical space and psychological space. The latter is as important as the former, yet far less frequently examined. While the allocation of land, habitat, and freedom from human incursion is rightly acknowledged as central to c

When I sat with Kairos, I was thinking about the next thing I am writing. And then, out of the blue, and this is no surprise, I just thought, "Look, I am at home here." The squirrels and muntjacs adjust to my presence without being unduly put out. The birds stop complaining after a while. The air sings of belonging-together. Here we all are, getting on with it. Here we all are, yes, impacting each other, but not maliciously. Here we all are, impacting each other, and sometime

...and also bought many books and had a delightful meal. There are excellent independent and second hand bookshops in London. Two second hand ones on the same street in Stoke Newington. This one had the kindest shopkeeper. I had selected three second hand books and he told me the fourth would be free. So I started searching for a fourth... which made me late... but happily my friend was late too and although we were meeting in a restaurant somehow she spied me out in the book

I'm starting to write something about the "world-making" on non humans... and, actually, I may need to start by understanding what world-making or reality construction actually is... it seems to me to be the idea, or the lived idea, of the world that we inhabit... a world in which we have such and such affordances and in which such and such other beings play a part... I guess I think it is, broadly, what we think the world to be. This might not be conscious, but it shapes how

There had been a lot of rain. So much rain that the rivers at Cottesbrooke seemed higher than I have ever seen them, and there was standing water in places where I am sure it had never been before. Turbulence in my mind too. The previous day, I only went out for the birds and to go to the chemist asking for sleeping pills. They gave me some anti-histamine. Said take one or maybe two. I took two and two amytriptaline and was still awake at 4am. Fresh air, i thought, was an ans

Again today I am sure there were three robins. And I cannot tell them apart. And none were that friendly. There was a lot of chasing and cross song-spitting. I'd had a BAD day and when I went out later, with the fox food. I was yearning for some red-breast company. Garden Robin, who may want to be called Falco, seems to track my movements, and in the chill dusk, perched above me. I have kept meaning to say that long-tailed tits have seemed ever-present this winter. They are a

It might have been a squirrel. I did see the handsome muntjac buck who lives at Christies' Copse. He walked to withing about 15 feet of me then thought better of it and slinked away. One of my Sentinel trees, an ash with dieback, dropped a bit of a branch. It was hollow and must have been a nice home when still on the tree. I sat with Chronos having noticed that both the Happy Oak and Minerva have outstretched low branches resting on hawthorns. The former is interesting as th

That on the front page is a picture of the ground. So is this. Strangely alluring. Anyway, today I choose to share a quote from Tolkien and some from Édouard Glissant. Tolkien first. … it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule. - Ganda

...though that may be a rook. I did a tarot spread, in fact, I did two, with the crow cards and got the LLM to do the reading. I think this is pretty good! We’ve now got two spreads in front of us: 1. The first spread, **Shadow and Light**, explored the dynamic between mental control and loosening into patience, underscoring the interplay between over-intellectualization (King of Swords, Shadow), the strength of grounded patience (3 of Wands, reversed as Light), and a gentle,

That's a really bad reference to Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow . A good book, I seem to recall. Anyway, I went to the Reserve to take some pictures. I hadn't realised how much ice was on the reservoir. I ended up watching the birds from a hide for half an hour. This video is LONG... treat it as a meditation!

There's a tendency to use the word as a synonym for interconnected, but that's not quite right. Interconnected suggests that two things which could be or were separate are or are now twined together. In entanglement, the connection is always and already the condition. Either way, the upshot is that, as John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." I have just come across the completion of that passage, whi

Garden Robin's dream is the dream of perfect possession. Next Door Robin is the nightmare reality... sneaking in when Garden Robin's back is turned. I'm reading Robert Romanyshyn 's Technology as Symptom and Dream which is so thought provoking... I have to read it in small bursts, but I truly recommend it. Here is the blurb: This book, which has been reprinted four times since its publication, is a cultural-historical exploration of the origins of the technological attitude t