philosophy

A Tiny Adventure

Last week, the husband and I went on a tiny adventure: five days in Ireland. It ended up containing almost all of our favourite things: yoga and geeking out, permaculture and earth politics, faeries and standing stones, prehistoric sites, epic landscapes, road trips, old friends and new, and a lot of laughter. Oh, and a …

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Wild Ones

Back in May I wrote a post asking about radical and deliberate connections with deity – the wild and wondrous gods of protest and resistance. What would they look like? Who would they be? What would their sacraments be? Then followed a really lovely series of conversations on social media and in person, and a …

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Radical Deity – a call

Phil and I were at the Beltane Bhakti Festival last weekend, drinking deep of that rebel heart of devotion within alternative British yoga culture. This is the latest in an occasional series of events at which the UK bhakti community gather. There were devotees of multiple gurus, and more besides like ourselves who have no …

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Breathe

Breathe. Paying attention to the whole body, reaching and opening. Breathe, and the world breathes with you. Each breath that enters you is the world breathing in to you. Each inhalation has been exhaled and inhaled; warmed and changed by its passage through the lungs or gills or cells of another a thousand times. Breathe, …

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Epistemology

Epistemology. It’s one of those words commonly used by academics that sounds like jargon to other people. But like a lot of common scholarly words, the reason it’s not used in everyday speech isn’t because it refers to something with a simpler, common name. There isn’t a common word for epistemology, because the whole concept, …

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Pain

I’m co-writing a paper with a friend at the moment. It’s a fascinating process of inspiration, negotiation and long periods of not knowing what to say next. On her suggestion, we each wrote an autoethnographic piece on our own relationship to the subject matter. They’re just short  fragments of our own, deeply personal experience to …

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For the love of a planet

It’s all about perspective, in the end. Uma tells a version of the Hindu epic Ramayana that I love…it often brings me to tears. It’s essentially Sita’s story, rather than Ram’s. The story goes that a royal couple, blessed in many ways but not with children; prayed and made offering after offering to the gods …

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Spiritual practice

That which is funny cannot be serious. That which is practical cannot be clever. We divide the world into this and not-this, because the world is complex, and these separating frameworks help us to understand it, even when they are wrong. Within our lived regular and ritual practices, one such separation that is overdue for …

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