Clay Lowe is a blogger and text-based ontologist exploring narrative alchemy, imaginal psychology, self-authorship, conscious living, and the reality-shaping power of story. His blog, soulcruzer, is where he walks, wonders, writes, and follows the rhizome wherever it wants to go.
This morning I am sitting in Bonnie, our caravan, with a cup of coffee and Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals open in front of me. We are in a field near Ashbourne on our first trip away in her. Dorothy is writing about walks, weather, meals, visitors, William, and the small movements of days lived more than two hundred years ago.
A lot of it is ordinary stuff. That is partly what caught me.
Why is Dorothy’s ordinary life more interesting than mine? Her journals entered the world within the aura of her famous brother. If Oprah held up my journal and told people it was worth reading, the words on the page would not change, but the quality of attention brought to them would. Fame has a way of deciding whose breakfast, walk, quarrel, and passing observation deserve a closer look.
But William Wordsworth is not the main reason I am still reading. The journal lets me borrow Dorothy’s eyes for a while. I am interested in what she notices and how she notices it, in the things she records without knowing what a reader in another century will make of them. The distance between her world and mine makes the ordinary strange again.
Then the editor’s note disturbed the sense of looking directly through those eyes. The first publisher omitted passages and altered some of her words. What I am reading has passed from the lived day, through Dorothy’s perception and handwriting, through preservation and editorial judgement, before reaching this caravan table. Even the original manuscript would not be the day itself. It would be Dorothy’s selection from the day: what she saw, remembered, cared about, misunderstood, or decided not to say.
I am also reading her journal as someone who keeps a journal. Mine tends to move quickly towards interpretation. I notice something and soon I am following it into another book, an old memory, a pattern, a question about how reality gets made. Dorothy is reminding me to remain with the visible world for another beat.
So I want to try something simple: for every stretch of reflection, preserve one thing that was simply there. The coffee beside the book. The light through Bonnie’s window. Ruth nearby. The field beyond the glass on our first morning away. Not because every detail needs to become a symbol, but because this is the world in which the thought occurred.
Perhaps that is one thing we learn by reading another person’s journal. We learn what their attention made visible, and begin to notice what our own attention has been leaving out.
Reading Tools for Thought, I keep coming back to Alan Kay’s idea of the computer as a fantasy amplifier.
It’s such a different way of answering the question: what are computers for?
Not productivity machines. Not devices for writing more emails, managing calendars, filling in spreadsheets or shaving another twenty minutes off the working day.
A fantasy amplifier.
A machine for taking something that exists in the imagination and giving it form.
And I’m beginning to wonder whether generative AI is bringing us much closer to Kay’s original vision of computing than almost anything that has happened in the intervening years.
Last night Ruth and I were talking about reversing the caravan. She was trying to get her head around the physics of it: why the caravan moves in the opposite direction, what happens at the hitch, how steering the car changes the angle of the caravan.
Normally I would explain it. Maybe draw something on a piece of paper. Perhaps find a YouTube video.
Instead, I vibe coded a caravan reversing simulator.
Twenty minutes later we had a little computational world in which you could steer the car and watch the caravan respond.
That seems significant.
I didn’t really want software. I wanted to make an idea manipulable.
There was something in my head — a model of how reversing a caravan works — and through conversation with an AI I was able to externalise that model, turn it into software and then interact with it.
The movement was something like:
imagination → language → computation → experience
And then, because I could experience what I’d imagined, another loop began:
experience → thought → language → modification → new experience
This is where my recurring phrase everything is text starts connecting with Kay’s fantasy amplifier.
By “text” I don’t necessarily mean written words. I mean that more and more of the computational world is becoming addressable through language.
I can type into a box.
Or, increasingly, I can simply speak.
There’s this thing I’m imagining…
And from there I can potentially create an image, a piece of music, a video, an application, a simulation, a website, a database, a game.
I watched a woman create an entire music track by making the sounds of the different instruments with her mouth. Those rough sounds became instruments, arrangement and eventually a finished track over which she sang the vocals.
Something imagined became something encountered.
This seems to me much more interesting than the current obsession with AI productivity.
Yes, give the AI my admin. Sort the diary. Summarise the emails. Format the spreadsheet. Save me twenty minutes.
Useful stuff.
But surely that is the least imaginative version of what we have built.
The more interesting possibility is that AI dramatically reduces the distance between imagining something and encountering it.
And vibe coding might be one of the clearest early examples.
Programming traditionally required me to translate an idea into the symbolic language of the computer:
idea → specification → programming knowledge → code → interface → working thing
Increasingly, that translation becomes:
idea → language → working thing
That doesn’t make programming knowledge irrelevant. There are still enormous questions of reliability, security, architecture, maintenance and scale.
But something else has changed.
I no longer necessarily have to know how to build something before I can begin exploring what it might be like if it existed.
That changes the bottleneck.
The question becomes less:
Can I program this?
and more:
Can I imagine it?
And perhaps this is where AI as a co-thinking technology becomes much more interesting to me.
Because imagination isn’t simply being converted into finished products. The things we make can come back into the conversation and change our thinking.
I imagine something.
We make a rough version.
I encounter it.
Something about it surprises me.
I change my mind. We alter it.
I encounter the new version.
Another possibility appears.
The artefact starts participating in the thinking.
Which means the fantasy amplifier isn’t simply a machine that executes imagination.
It provokes more imagination.
Kay imagined computers as a dynamic medium through which people — particularly children — could explore ideas, construct models, create worlds and discover things through interaction.
Perhaps generative AI adds another layer to that dream.
Natural language becomes an interface to computational possibility.
The little text box becomes strangely powerful.
“There’s something I’m imagining…”
And the machine effectively replies:
“Okay. Let’s see what happens if we make it.”
Maybe that is the more interesting future of AI.
Not artificial intelligence replacing human intelligence.
Not merely artificial intelligence making human beings more productive.
But human imagination coupled with computational intelligence in a recursive creative loop.
A fantasy amplifier.
And perhaps, after all these years, we’re finally beginning to build the thing Alan Kay was pointing toward.
We talk about consuming books, as though reading were a kind of nutritional exercise: pages in, knowledge out. But the best reading has never felt like consumption to me. It feels more like entering into correspondence with another consciousness across space and time. A conversation where one voice has the strange advantage of having thought about what it wants to say for years, sometimes centuries.
The art of reading begins when we stop treating books as containers of information and start treating them as occasions for thought.
A book is not finished when the author writes “The End.” It is finished when the reader has wrestled with it long enough for something inside themselves to rearrange. Every worthwhile book is completed twice: once by the writer, once by the reader.
There is also the question of pace.
The modern world encourages us to read the way we scroll—fast enough to harvest the headline before moving on. But some books refuse this economy of attention. They ask to be lingered over. A single sentence from Montaigne, Woolf, Nietzsche, or Solnit can occupy an afternoon. Not because it is difficult, necessarily, but because it unfolds. Like a landscape seen from different angles, it reveals more each time you return.
Perhaps reading is less like travelling down a road than wandering through a forest. You can rush from one edge to the other and claim you’ve “done” the forest. Or you can stop beside an old oak, notice the fungi on its bark, listen to birds you’ve never heard before, and discover that the forest was never simply a route—it was a relationship.
There is an ethics to reading, too.
A generous reader doesn’t merely ask, Do I agree? They first ask, What is this person trying to show me? Agreement can come later. Understanding comes first. Reading well requires a temporary hospitality of mind, an ability to let another worldview take up residence without immediately redecorating it according to our own tastes.
Of course, books are not always right. Some deserve argument. Some deserve abandonment. Some become more valuable because we resist them. But even disagreement can be a form of intimate reading if it arises from genuine encounter rather than reflex.
The finest readers become collectors of questions rather than answers.
They close a book carrying not a list of quotations but a slightly altered way of seeing. They begin noticing things in the street, in conversations, in their own thoughts that previously passed unnoticed. The book has become less an object than a new lens.
This is why marginalia matters. Underlining. Scribbled notes. Dog-eared pages. Conversations with friends. Journal entries after finishing a chapter. Reading is not passive reception but active participation. Every mark we make in a book is also a mark the book has made in us.
And perhaps this is the deepest art of reading: learning to read not only books, but the world itself.
Eventually the boundary dissolves. A walk becomes a chapter. A stranger becomes a footnote. A dream becomes an appendix. The city becomes a text full of symbols, omissions, revisions, and hidden authors. You realise that books were never teaching you merely how to read pages. They were teaching you how to become more readable to yourself.
The mature reader is therefore not someone who has read thousands of books. It is someone whose reading has become a way of being in the world—curious, attentive, slow enough to notice, humble enough to be changed, and alive to the possibility that every genuine encounter, whether with a paragraph or a person, is another chance to revise the story they are living.
You finish a conversation and realise the other person learned nothing about you. They spoke, you listened, and somewhere along the way your role became clear: hold the space, ask the follow-up question, keep the exchange moving. Later, you replay the conversation and wonder whether they were uninterested or simply unaware.
Claire Lester describes the questions that might have changed the encounter:
How are you, really?
What was that like for you?
Did that land badly?
Are you happy?
Each question asks someone to pause long enough to acknowledge that another person has an interior life. I agree with her that such questions are rare. I also think their absence can become too easy to interpret.
Questions reveal curiosity, but they are not the only form curiosity takes.
Some people ask directly. Others leave a door open and wait for you to walk through it. Some offer practical help. Some sit beside you without knowing how to name what they sense. Some grew up in families where asking personal questions felt intrusive, so they learned to express care through food, errands, lifts to the station, or the quiet repetition of showing up.
None of those gestures replaces a needed conversation. Still, if we treat questions as the primary evidence of love, we may overlook the dialects in which other people learned to care.
Then there is the question the essay left me asking:
Why am I waiting for permission to tell you who I am?
The Secret Test
Many of us conduct a private test inside our relationships.
We mention that work has been difficult. We say we haven’t slept well. We refer to the hospital appointment, the argument, the strange heaviness that has followed us through the week. Then we wait.
Will they ask?
If they do, we feel seen. If they change the subject, something closes.
The other person seldom knows a test is taking place. They may think we have told them everything we want to tell. They may worry that a follow-up question would feel intrusive. They may hear the invitation and lack the courage to accept it. They may simply be distracted.
Meanwhile, we interpret their silence as information about our value to them.
I understand why we do this. An unprompted disclosure feels risky. Being asked gives us cover. We can tell ourselves that we are answering rather than imposing. The question absolves us of the fear that our inner life might be too heavy, too complicated, or too much.
But waiting also hands responsibility for our visibility to someone who cannot read our mind.
Sometimes the honest response to “How are you?” is not “Fine, unless you ask me again with sufficient sincerity.”
Sometimes it is: “I know that’s usually a greeting, but I’m not doing well.”
That sentence carries its own risk. It also gives the relationship a chance to become real.
Curiosity Needs Reciprocity
The final scene in Lester’s essay contains the tension that interests me most.
She calls her friend back. She asks the deeper version of the question and discovers a whole hidden life: a declining father, repeated drives to Hexham, a painful conflict with a brother. Her irritation gives way to compassion.
Her friend still asks her nothing.
Lester notices, but it matters less.
There is generosity in that response. Understanding another person often loosens the stories we have built around their behaviour. Marcus Aurelius returned to this practice because he knew how quickly we turn someone’s limitations into a personal insult. Once we glimpse the fear, grief, habit, or exhaustion behind an action, resentment can lose some of its grip.
Yet understanding can become a trap when one person does all of it.
If I continually explain why you cannot meet me, I may become highly compassionate while disappearing from the relationship. Your history explains your lack of curiosity. Your workload explains your absence. Your wounds explain why every conversation returns to you. All of those explanations may be true. I still have to live inside the relationship they create.
Stoic practice asks us to examine our judgements. It does not require us to pretend that every arrangement is nourishing.
Compassion and discernment belong together.
A friendship can survive seasons of imbalance. Illness, grief, parenthood and crisis rearrange what each person can give. Trouble begins when the season becomes the structure and nobody names it.
The Fifth Question
Perhaps we need a fifth question:
Is there room for me in this relationship?
That question does not ask whether the other person is good or bad. It asks what happens between us.
Can I speak without waiting for an invitation?
When I speak, do you stay with me?
Can I tell you that something landed badly without managing your reaction?
Do we know one another, or have we settled into the roles of speaker and witness?
Can I ask for more without turning the request into an accusation?
These questions move us away from counting conversational turns as though intimacy were an accounting exercise. They also prevent generosity from becoming self-erasure.
A person may love us and lack the ability to ask what we need them to ask. We can teach them something about how to reach us. We can say, “When I mention my father, ask me how I’m coping.” We can say, “I need you to check in after difficult conversations.” We can say, “I’ve realised I know much more about your life than you know about mine.”
That conversation may feel less magical than being understood without explanation. It may also build a stronger relationship because both people can participate in it consciously.
Asking and Telling
Lester is right that we should ask better questions.
Ask the second version of “How are you?” Stay through the pause. Ask what the experience felt like, not only what happened. Check when the atmosphere changes. Risk discovering that someone you love has become unhappy.
Then take the other risk.
Answer the first question honestly. Tell the story beneath the facts. Name the bruise before it hardens into distance. Let someone know that you need their attention rather than waiting to see whether they offer it unaided.
There will still be people who do not turn toward us. A direct answer may expose their limits more clearly than any secret test could. That knowledge can hurt, but at least we will know which relationship we are standing in.
We cannot build intimacy through questions alone. Someone must also decide to answer before the perfect question arrives.
I almost don’t want to say it out loud, as if naming it might hurry things along, but there was a trace of winter under the morning. It wasn’t cold. The air had acquired an edge, just enough to remind me that the year is already leaning towards another season. Where did the summer go?
Thinking often changes like this. I keep circling a question, carrying it from the desk to the path and back again, until one morning I realise I am no longer asking it from the same place.
For the past week the question has been: What is my practice?
The useful version of that question reaches beneath my work, my products and whatever skills I can put on a page. It asks what I am cultivating day after day, whether anybody notices or not.
The internet muddies the answer. I understand the marketplace and its machinery. If I want people to find my work, I have to make it visible. The platforms reward recognisable openings, familiar pacing and proven formats. Success leaves footprints, and the rest of us follow them until even originality begins to look as though it came from a template.
Every time I start thinking too strategically about “content”, I feel my attention detach from the thing that made me want to write. I start positioning rather than wondering. I ask, Will this perform? before I ask, Is this true?
These morning walks have been teaching me another rhythm. Walking, talking aloud, letting a thought find its pace somewhere between footstep and breath. I rarely leave the house with a destination for the thinking. The walk is the thinking. By the time I return, I know something I couldn’t reach by sitting still and pressing harder on the question.
July’s thirty-one days of blogging did something similar. It began as a challenge, became a habit, then asked to be treated as a practice. A challenge has a finish line. A habit can run without much presence. A practice asks me to turn up and meet the day that is here, with whatever quality of attention I can bring to it.
The Textual Underground has been holding versions of this thought for a while. On one walk, i uncovered a useful sequence: walk, notice, record, return, write, publish a trace. Another note asked what particular world becomes available through a person’s attention. Beneath both sits the same suspicion: the work begins before the writing does.
The blog has become the public edge of that practice. It can hold a finished essay, but it can also hold a photograph, a rough connection, a sentence that hasn’t decided what it believes yet. I don’t want it to document a row of conclusions. I want it to show a consciousness moving through time, books, streets, conversations and its own recurring questions, sometimes changing its mind in public.
Attention may be the thing I am cultivating. Attention to the year turning in the air. To old stone under a heavy sky. To the conversations overheard in cafés and the books that keep talking after I have closed them. To the odd thought that arrives halfway up a hill and refuses to leave me alone.
Writing is what attention leaves behind.
The business may grow from those traces. Readers may gather around them. Some notes may become essays, workshops, books or objects I can’t see yet. But those are later forms. If I make them the source, I lose contact with the walk, the question and the part of me that still writes to discover what he thinks.
In photographs, Austin Osman Spare often looks as if he has been caught halfway between worlds. As a young man, he appears pale, beautiful and theatrical, with dark hair swept from his forehead and the wary expression of someone who already suspects that ordinary reality is a confidence trick. In later portraits the beauty has thickened into something more weathered. He sits among cats, books, pictures and the accumulated bric-a-brac of a South London room. The young Edwardian prodigy has become a borough sorcerer.
Both figures belonged to him. So did several others: illustrator, satirist, war artist, mystic, magazine editor, teacher, pub exhibitor, animal lover and prophet of the unconscious. Spare spent his life slipping between identities before the art world or the occult establishment could settle on one. His work carried traces of Symbolism, Art Nouveau, spiritualism, caricature, automatic drawing and the grotesque, yet he never fitted comfortably inside any of them. Even now, he tends to be approached through a side door. Artists find him through magic. Magicians find him through art. Musicians, tattooists and practitioners of chaos magic meet him through the sigil, the strange compressed emblem of desire that has become his most durable invention.
He was born in London on 30 December 1886, the son of Philip Newton Spare, a City of London policeman, and Eliza Osman. The family lived first around Snow Hill and Smithfield, then in Kennington. This was a London of slaughterhouses, churches, railway arches, public houses and crowded streets. Spare grew up close to the city’s physical underworld, where animals, labour and death remained visible. The horned bodies and human-animal hybrids that later gathered in his drawings did not arrive from some bloodless realm of occult symbolism. They had hooves. They carried the stink of the market.
He began evening classes at Lambeth School of Art while still a boy and found work designing for Powell’s glassworks in Whitefriars Street. Visitors to the firm noticed his drawings and helped him secure a scholarship to the Royal College of Art. The college soon discovered that talent and obedience don’t always travel together. Spare disliked its teaching, missed classes and resisted the academic preference for modelling through shade. He trusted the line. Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Ricketts, Edmund Sullivan and George Frederic Watts gave him a visual ancestry, though even in his earliest work Spare’s line seems to know more than the hand guiding it. It coils, sprouts, mocks and mutates. Faces emerge from ornament. Bodies open into other bodies.
In 1904, when Spare was seventeen, his father submitted two drawings to the Royal Academy without telling him. The Academy accepted a bookplate design for its Summer Exhibition. Newspapers seized on the story of the precocious young artist and described him as the exhibition’s youngest entrant. Some inflated the claim and made him the youngest artist ever shown there. The legend began growing almost as soon as the career.
Spare helped the process along. He understood the usefulness of a persona and presented himself as a young visionary in flamboyant clothes, already speaking about mystical ideas that he would spend the rest of his life elaborating. His first self-published book, Earth Inferno, appeared in 1905. It combined pictures, poetry and gnomic declarations in a form halfway between an artist’s book and a private scripture. Its influences included Dante, the Bible, Theosophy and Omar Khayyam, though Spare was beginning to name his own figures: Zos and Kia.
Zos was the embodied self, experienced through flesh, gesture and imagination. Kia was harder to define, an all-pervading field of possibility beyond the divisions imposed by conscious thought. Together they formed the poles of Spare’s personal cosmology. He didn’t inherit this system intact from a lodge or scripture. He drew it out of his own experience, then continued revising it through pictures and prose. His art and magic grew from the same root.
By 1907, Spare had attracted the attention of the London avant-garde. His exhibition at the Bruton Gallery prompted comparisons with Beardsley and produced the sort of disgust that can be useful to a young artist. The Observer called his work “abnormal, unhealthy, wildly fantastic and unintelligible.” Another reviewer admired his “creative flow of impossible horrors.” The phrase catches something essential. Spare’s horrors flow. They aren’t fixed monsters placed in a scene. They leak across the boundary between human and animal, beauty and decay, waking thought and the older life underneath it.
Aleister Crowley saw the work and recognised a fellow traveller, or perhaps a possible recruit. He became a patron, published Spare’s drawings in The Equinox and brought him into the A∴A∴, his magical order. Spare adopted the name Yihovaeum and remained associated with the group for several years, though he never surrendered to its hierarchy. Crowley’s ceremonial system demanded grades, initiations, discipline and a taste for grand ritual. Spare moved in the opposite direction. He wanted a magic stripped of robes, temples and inherited furniture. After the relationship soured, he mocked ceremonial magicians as “the unemployed dandies of the Brothels.”
His alternative appeared most fully in The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy, self-published in 1913. The book resists a clean summary because resistance sits close to its purpose. Spare’s prose moves through paradox, private terminology and sudden attacks on religion, morality and conscious will. Beneath the thorns lies a practical insight: the conscious mind often blocks the desires it claims to pursue. A desire acquires force when it passes below deliberate thought and enters the unconscious.
Sigils offered a method for getting it there. Spare would reduce a written statement of desire into a design, combining and distorting its letters until the original sentence could no longer be read. The practitioner charged the resulting glyph through intense concentration or altered consciousness, then forgot it. The act of forgetting mattered. Conscious craving had to loosen its grip so that the desire could sink into the deeper mind.
The method reveals the trained draughtsman inside the magician. Spare treated language as raw graphic matter. A sentence became a line; the line became a glyph; the glyph became a carrier moving between conscious intention and unconscious action. The sigil was a word taught to travel without its meaning showing.
In 1911 Spare married Eily Gertrude Shaw. The marriage deteriorated, and they later separated without divorcing. His work continued across illustration, publishing and private revelation. He founded the art journal Form with Frederick Carter in 1916, bringing together writing, drawing and discussion of automatic processes. The magazine struggled commercially, but it placed Spare close to a current that would soon become central to twentieth-century art: the attempt to bypass conscious control and give the hidden mind a hand in making the work.
The First World War interrupted these experiments. Conscripted into the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1917, Spare worked as a medical orderly and later produced illustrations connected with the war. He returned to civilian life in 1919 and published The Focus of Life two years later. He revived Form, then co-edited The Golden Hind with Clifford Bax. Both magazines folded. Spare kept producing. In 1924 he assembled The Book of Ugly Ecstasy, a sketchbook full of automatic drawings and grotesque beings. The Anathema of Zos, published in 1927 in an edition of one hundred copies, turned his contempt for respectable society into a private sermon.
The London art world had begun to move away from him. Exhibitions in the late 1920s attracted little notice. His 1930 show of distorted “sidereal” portraits became his last West End exhibition for seventeen years. Surrealism soon arrived in Britain carrying an interest in dreams, automatism and the unconscious that Spare had pursued for decades. Journalists briefly rediscovered him as a possible “father of Surrealism,” though he remained too idiosyncratic to join the movement’s official story.
His retreat from the West End has often been told as a fall from promise into poverty and obscurity. There was poverty, and there was neglect, but the word failure misses the kind of life he made. Spare moved through working-class districts of South London, teaching, drawing local people and holding annual exhibitions in his flats. The domestic room replaced the commercial gallery. According to his obituary in The Times, visitors would ring the bell and inspect pictures hanging in the living room, bedroom and kitchen, sometimes in the company of the working women and elderly neighbours who had modelled for them. He sold drawings for a few guineas because he believed ordinary people wanted art and could afford it when artists and dealers stopped pretending otherwise.
This later Spare deserves more attention. The myth of the solitary magician can obscure the man who drew ageing faces with patience and tenderness, cared for stray animals and welcomed buyers into rooms crowded with pictures. His technical skill remained formidable. He could catch a likeness with a few lines, then let the face warp into dream, ancestry or spirit. His human beings never seem sealed inside their skin.
War reached him again in 1941 when a bomb destroyed his home and much of his work. He was left homeless for a time and suffered injuries that affected his ability to draw. He recovered and taught his hand to work again. In 1947 he staged a successful comeback exhibition at the Archer Gallery, showing more than two hundred works. Celebrity portraits appeared alongside spiritualist subjects, old faces and fantastic creatures. Later critics would detect early Pop Art in these images, just as others had found proto-Surrealism in his automatic drawings. Spare kept arriving before movements that wouldn’t have known what to do with him had he joined them.
During the last years of his life, he became close to Kenneth and Steffi Grant. Kenneth Grant, a younger occultist with connections to Crowley, recognised the importance of Spare’s magical ideas and helped preserve them. Spare returned to occult writing and produced new manuscripts, including the Zoetic Grimoire of Zos. He also held exhibitions in pubs, bringing his work back into the social world of Walworth Road rather than waiting for Bond Street to invite him home.
Spare died in Stockwell on 15 May 1956 after his appendix burst. He was sixty-nine. At the time of his death, he occupied an uncertain place in British art, remembered by a few collectors and friends, dismissed by others as a leftover from the decadent 1890s. His reputation began to revive in the 1960s and 1970s. Kenneth Grant’s writing carried his occult ideas forward, while artists and collectors recovered the drawings. By the late twentieth century, chaos magicians had adopted his sigil method as one of their foundational practices. His influence passed into experimental music, body art, comics, performance and the occult underground.
That afterlife has introduced a new distortion. Spare sometimes disappears behind the sigil, reduced to the inventor of a magical logo-making technique. Yet the sigil makes sense only inside the larger body of his work. He spent a lifetime testing how a mark might move between intention and instinct, how a face might contain its ancestors, how the hand might know what the conscious mind had forgotten. His magic remained the magic of an artist because drawing was his primary instrument of thought.
The city that made him still clings to the work. You can feel Edwardian London, the slaughterhouse district, the Royal Academy, the bedsit, the bombed room and the Walworth pub. Spare went underground without leaving the streets. He found his other world inside this one, in a neighbour’s ageing face, the curve of an animal’s horn, a few letters twisted together on a piece of paper.
Perhaps that explains his continued pull. Spare offers no clean separation between imagination and matter. Desire enters the hand. The hand makes a mark. The mark passes out of sight and begins its obscure work. Somewhere in South London, an old artist sits among his cats and pictures, drawing a line that hasn’t finished moving.
Sources and further reading
Phil Baker, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist (Strange Attractor Press, 2011).
Robert Ansell, Borough Satyr: The Life and Art of Austin Osman Spare (Fulgur, 2005).
Austin Osman Spare, Earth Inferno (1905).
Austin Osman Spare, The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy (1913).
There is a will inside us that is older than thought.
It moves beneath the surface of the personality, beneath preference, fear and habit, carrying an intention we may only dimly perceive. We feel it as a pull, a recurring image, a quiet insistence that returns even after we have ignored it. Something in us remembers a direction the conscious mind has forgotten.
Our choices are the places where this hidden intention enters the world. Each decision opens one path and closes another. Each act becomes a small ritual of alignment or estrangement. We are always moving either nearer to the inner current or further from it.
This does not mean every impulse is sacred. The deeper will is easily confused with appetite, anxiety or the hunger to be seen. It speaks more quietly than these. It does not shout. It gathers. It waits. It reveals itself through patterns, synchronicities, dreams, resistances and the strange aliveness that accompanies certain paths.
Perhaps intention is not something we invent, but something we enter into relationship with. A thread running through the labyrinth. A seed already carrying the image of the tree. A hidden star by which the soul attempts to navigate.
The task, then, is not merely to exert more will, but to become transparent enough to recognise what is willing itself through us.
Every choice becomes a question offered to the unseen:
Does this bring me into deeper alignment with the life seeking to emerge through me?
We are never entirely still. Even in uncertainty, the soul leans somewhere.
There is no universal right way to live, but the platforms keep presenting life as if there were.
Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram turn existence into a hall of mirrors. Someone is travelling more, earning more, healing faster, raising better children, building a cleaner morning routine, finding their purpose, buying the van, leaving the city, moving to the city, lifting heavier, reading more books, becoming more spiritual, becoming less spiritual. Every swipe offers another life you could be failing to live.
After a while, you stop asking, What feels true for me? and start asking, How am I doing compared with the lives I can see?
Life begins to feel like a continuous assessment. You become both the student and the examiner, checking your days against criteria you never consciously chose. The standards change before you can meet them because the feed must keep moving. Yesterday you needed discipline. Today you need softness. Tomorrow someone will tell you that softness is avoidance and what you need is a 5 a.m. ice bath.
The struggle to “get life right” can become the very thing that removes you from your own life. Your attention moves away from the actual texture of your days: the work that absorbs you, the people around whom your body relaxes, the pace at which your mind opens, the small practices that restore you. Instead, you begin organising yourself around borrowed desires.
And borrowed desires are difficult to satisfy. Even when you get what you thought you wanted, the experience can feel strangely hollow because the wanting came from somewhere else.
I don’t know whether the core self is a fixed thing waiting underground to be uncovered. It may be closer to a grain in the wood, a direction in which your life bends when you stop forcing it. You notice it through contact: what gives you energy, what leaves a sour taste, what you keep returning to when nobody is watching, what kind of trouble feels worth having.
Living in accordance with that grain won’t necessarily make life easier. It may make you less legible to the people selling the approved versions. You may want a smaller life than the feed admires, or a stranger one. You may care deeply about something that photographs badly. You may discover that the life which fits you contains long stretches that look like nothing much from the outside.
Perhaps the question isn’t Am I living the right way?
Perhaps it is:
Whose idea of “right” is running through my head?
And beneath that:
What does my life begin to do when nobody else is scoring it?
I picked up an old book this morning: Perceiving Ordinary Magic: Science and Intuitive Wisdomby Jeremy Hayward. The cover is a blue corridor of repeating geometry, the kind of image that used to promise either a difficult physics lecture or a trip through somebody else’s consciousness.
Somewhere in its opening territory, Hayward pointed me back towards Chögyam Trungpa and the Shambhala teachings. I had known the word warrior mostly through its degraded modern forms: the hard man, the self-improver, the person who mistakes tension for strength. Trungpa’s use of it runs in another direction. The warrior is the one who stops arranging life around not feeling what is true.
How often do I reach for the phone because the room has gone quiet? How quickly do I begin rehearsing the future when a task becomes awkward? How much of what passes for planning is just an elaborate way of avoiding the next plain thing?
The Shambhala language calls these little defensive constructions the cocoon. I know the feeling. A bright, upholstered chamber made of scrolling, second-guessing, imagined conversations, old arguments, and the promise that relief is one more click away.
Hayward’s phrase, “ordinary magic”, offers another way into the same space. Not magic as an escape from the real, but the possibility that the real becomes more available when we stop trying to categorise, use, control, or explain it into submission.
I have set up a small fourteen-day experiment for myself: sit for fifteen minutes with my eyes open; walk without headphones; notice one cocoon move; make one small honest return; write a few lines before bed.
No warrior costume. No spiritual badge. Just an attempt to find out what becomes perceptible when I stop defending myself from the ordinary.
I keep seeing headlines about the new rules of attention, usually written by somebody who wants to sell a better way of getting hold of it.
The old rules were blunt enough. Interrupt people. Startle them. Keep them scrolling. Learn which colours, fears, desires and half-conscious wounds make a thumb hesitate for a second longer. Call it engagement. Invoice the result.
Nobody needed to explain this to us. We felt it in the back of the skull after twenty minutes on the phone: the strange mix of stimulation and depletion, like eating a whole packet of crisps for supper. Full of something. Nourished by nothing.
But attention has changed because the internet has changed. The web is filling with language that resembles language without having passed through a life. Clean little answers. Cheerful summaries. Posts that arrive with all the texture of a hotel corridor. They may be useful. They may even be correct. But they have not stood at a bus stop in the rain, forgotten why they walked into the kitchen, or had to sit with a sentence for three days because it would not behave.
So perhaps the first new rule is this: give people evidence that you were here.
Not performative authenticity. I do not need another stranger telling me they are “showing up as their whole self” beside a beige carousel. I mean the signs of actual contact: the grit on the walking boots, the awkward conversation at the café, the book with its spine cracked open on the table, the particular thought that arrived while you were taking the bins out.
A person’s attention still goes where they sense a living presence.
The second rule: do not make your reader pay for your neediness.
A lot of the attention economy runs on an unspoken demand: stay with me, validate me, complete the circuit. But writing can offer a different arrangement. You can give someone a room to think in. You can leave a door open. You can hand them a question worth taking on a walk.
The reader may not remember every word. They may remember that your piece slowed something down inside them. That it returned them to their own life with a little more curiosity.
That seems a fairer trade.
And the third rule may be the most difficult: make things that release attention back into the world.
The feed wants us facing inward, locked in the bright little casino of the screen. The barefoot philosopher wants to close the laptop and notice the birds having some kind of meeting in the hedge. He wants to read a paragraph, then look out of the window for ten minutes. He wants the internet to lead back to the street, the body, the unfinished conversation, the book waiting by the bed.
Maybe that is where blogging comes back into its own.
A blog does not have to chase you through every room of your life. It can sit there like a small public bench. You visit when you feel like it. Someone has left a note. Perhaps it is useful. Perhaps it sends you elsewhere. Perhaps it reminds you that another human being is trying to make sense of being alive under the same strange sky.
The new rules of attention may have less to do with capturing it than deserving it.
And the people worth reading may be the ones who know when to give it back.
Yesterday, on a Wisdom Walk, I realised I had been spending my attention in three directions at once.
Part of me had gone backwards, picking over old choices and wishing I had chosen differently. Part had gone forwards, trying to get ahead of outcomes I cannot know. The rest kept looking for a side door through entertainment, the small and familiar way of leaving the room when the present feels awkward.
I have been thinking about personal power in the old warrior sense: not power over other people, and not the usual self-help business of becoming more assertive. I mean the ability to gather your own attention and use it where you stand. The older writers on the craft of the warrior talk about power leaks. That phrase has stayed with me because it describes the feeling well. Regret drains one pocket. Fear drains another. Avoidance finds a third.
This morning I pulled three tarot cards against that question. The Moon, The Sun, and Death, all upright.
The Moon looked like the mind under partial light. You know the territory. The past starts to feel editable. The future begins to feel dangerous before it has even happened. You follow a worry around the block a few times and call it planning. The card did not ask me to solve every shadow. It asked me to recognise the conditions and keep walking.
The Sun brought the practice back to earth. Ten minutes of meditation. Bare feet in the garden. Looking around the room. A breath. The next thing my hand can actually do. I am learning that the return does not need to be grand. It only needs to be real.
Then Death turned up, which I took as a blunt reminder that some old habit of selfhood has had its time. The version of me that tries to live in the past, secure the whole future, or duck out of the present may have done useful work once. It does not need to run the day.
I am trying a simple field instruction: when I notice myself leaking attention backwards, forwards, or sideways, I come back through the senses. Feet. Breath. Sight. One real task.
The day may still be messy. The question may still be open. But I am here for it.
The shadow is not dark because it is evil. It is dark because it has been pushed out of sight.
Whatever we cannot consciously own tends to run us from behind the curtain. We condemn it in other people. We are secretly fascinated by it. We keep meeting it in the same arguments, the same attractions, the same loops where we sabotage ourselves and cannot say why.
Nineteen pages, eight exercises, designed to be printed and written in by hand. No videos, no course, no login. Questions and enough white space to answer them honestly.
What’s inside
👉 The Projection List. The people who provoke a reaction out of all proportion, and what you are actually reacting to.
👉 Triggers as Doorways. Slowing a charged moment down until the pattern underneath becomes visible.
👉 The “I Am Not That” Inquiry. The qualities you insist are not yours, and what it costs to keep insisting.
👉 Dialogue with a Disowned Part. Letting it speak before you correct it.
👉 Reclaiming the Gift. Separating the life force from the wound wrapped around it.
👉 The Inner Courtroom. Shame, responsibility, and the difference between them.
👉The Golden Shadow. Envy as a crude but reliable compass toward an unlived life.
👉 The Body Knows First. The physical signature that arrives before the story does.
Plus an integration section and a thirty-day practice.
A note on pace
Shadow work can be tender. One page at a time is enough. If an exercise brings up something too large to hold on your own, close the book and talk to someone you trust. Stopping is not failure.
Only a few more days left in my 31-day weblogging challenge. My experience has been when you stop performing and stop conforming, a 31-day blogging challenge turns out to be surprisingly easy. You step out of the paralyzing effect of perfection and focus on staying in conversation with your own experience. A weblog, at its best, isn’t a content machine. It’s more like a mind in motion thinking out loud.
I arrived in Worcester with time to spare before a family lunch. We were all coming from different points on the map. My son, his partner and my granddaughter had travelled from Ludlow. My wife and daughter were on their way from Southam. My in-laws and brother-in-law were coming up from Bristol. I had parked the car and found myself alone in a city I knew mostly as a place one passes through or meets in.
So I wandered.
From the car park I saw a spire above the buildings a short distance away. It had the old, familiar shape of a church tower: stone, height, a narrow point against the sky. My body made the decision before my mind did. I walked towards it.
Churches still do that, even when we no longer belong to them in the old way. A tower says: look up. Something important happened here. This is where the centre is.
Only when I got close did I discover that the church was not there.
Glover’s Needle is all that remains of St Andrew’s Church: the tower, the spire, a great arch opening onto locked gates. The body of the church was demolished in 1949. There is no nave. No rows of pews. No parish gathering beneath a roof of stone and timber. There is a surviving vertical gesture in the middle of a city that has continued to grow around it.
From a distance, the eye supplies the missing church.
That was the little trick the place played on me. From the river later, with trees in the foreground, it looked complete again. Tower, spire, church. The branches kindly concealed the absence. Only up close could you see the open arch and the space where a whole building had once stood.
We do this with more than churches. We see the surviving outline of an institution, a relationship, a self-image, a belief we have inherited, and assume the interior life is still intact. The shape remains persuasive. It still catches the eye. We walk towards it because some part of us recognises the old promise.
Then we arrive and find that the rooms have gone.
I could touch a section of the stone. The rest of the site was gated off. That felt right somehow. You can lay a hand on the remnant, but you cannot enter the vanished body. History offers contact rather than access. A plaque might tell you dates. A tower might tell you, in the blunt grammar of stone, that people once cared enough to organise a part of their lives around this place. But it cannot give you the sound of the congregation, the smell of damp coats, the tensions in the vestry, the ordinary gossip, the private grief, the people trying to believe and the people failing to.
It cannot give you the world that made the church feel necessary.
Standing there, I found myself thinking about power. Not power in the cartoonish sense of secret energy running through a sacred site, although the old science-fiction part of my brain did look at the open arch and think: Stargate. If I could get through those gates and stand beneath that empty frame, where would it take me?
It would not take me to another dimension. It might take me into the Worcester in which St Andrew’s still stood: bells marking the hours, baptisms and funerals passing through its doors, parish boundaries shaping belonging, the church woven into the local operating system.
The tower was once more than a landmark. It was a signal. It said: this is where the centre is.
Church power did not only live in doctrine. It lived in timekeeping, social rank, moral expectation, burial grounds, public ritual, the simple fact that people knew where to come for the passages of life. That world has not disappeared completely, but its authority has changed shape. A tower that once ordered part of the town now stands as heritage, architecture, a thing to photograph, a faint summons that most people can ignore.
That is not quite an indictment of Christianity. It feels more like an exposure of what happens when a worldview loses its monopoly on meaning.
The old sacred structure remains, but the city has learned to centre itself elsewhere.
There was something beside the tower that made this difficult to romanticise. Close to the stone, I saw what looked like someone’s sleeping gear: the rough remains of a bed, somebody’s effort to make shelter in a public place. I did not know whose it was. I did not want to turn it into a picturesque detail in a blog post about ruins. It was somebody’s need, not a prop for my mythology.
Still, it belonged to the scene.
A church once built to gather people beneath a roof stood beside evidence that somebody needed a roof. The institution had gone. The need had not.
That is where the place stopped being merely atmospheric for me. It is easy to enjoy the idea of holy ground when the holy ground is an old tower and an empty arch. It is harder when the same ground asks a more direct question: what does care look like after the institution has become a monument?
I do not have a clean answer. Churches have always been mixed things: places of mercy and exclusion, sanctuary and control, beauty and hierarchy, real care and institutional self-protection. It would be sentimental to imagine that the old parish world was kinder simply because it was more religious. But I could not ignore the contrast. The roof was gone. The tower remained. Somebody’s bedding lay nearby.
A person can make too much of one scene. A person can also walk past one too quickly.
The tower sits among Worcester College buildings. I turned and saw the new precinct around it: classrooms, windows, signs, a building carrying the phrase “The Heart of Worcestershire.” Through a window, or perhaps into a library space, I saw huge multicoloured words: “Love to Learn.” Nearby stood the Arts Centre.
That altered the reading of the place.
The tower had not been left behind by power. It had been absorbed into a different arrangement of power. The church once gathered people around salvation, duty, moral order and a story of the world. The college gathers them around learning, qualifications, skills, the possibility of a different future. The theatre gathers people around imagination, performance and shared feeling.
Faith, knowledge, imagination. A spire, a library, a theatre.
I do not mean that education has replaced religion. Education can become a machine for sorting people into the labour market. The arts can become another kind of consumer offering. Churches can become heritage attractions with expensive cafés. None of these institutions gets to inherit the sacred simply by standing near a tower.
But the language interested me. Heart of Worcestershire.Love to Learn. We still reach for words that once carried a religious charge: heart, love, vocation, transformation, becoming. We still want a life to open beyond its immediate usefulness. We still want to become more than a person who completes tasks, pays bills and waits for the next disruption.
The old religious vocabulary has not vanished. It has migrated.
Glover’s Needle stood among the college buildings like a question nobody had entirely answered. What is learning for? What kind of person is education trying to make? What does a city owe its young people beyond skills and employability? Where does wonder live once it is no longer guaranteed a building of its own?
Then I walked downhill towards the river.
The route became a small descent: steps, benches, trees, open space, the Severn somewhere ahead. I had spent the first part of the walk looking up. A spire invites that. It sets the mind wandering towards power, faith, history, transcendence, the old architecture of meaning.
The stairs offered another instruction.
Come down.
Not as a rebuke to thought. I am not interested in pretending that the metaphysical questions are merely a luxury, or that we should all keep our heads down and stick to the practical. A human life without any sense of depth becomes thin quickly enough.
But I know the temptation of altitude. The grand idea. The lofty project. The next framework that will finally explain the muddle. The notion that life will begin properly once I have found the right plan, become the right version of myself, built the thing that proves I have not wasted my time.
The steps did not ask me to abandon any of that. They asked me to return to the ground beneath it.
At the river, people sat in the sun. Birds gathered at the waterline. The cathedral appeared through the trees, large and intact, its body still present where St Andrew’s had become a single stubborn gesture. I could see people on benches reading actual books. I counted nine before I stopped counting. Paperbacks and hardbacks. Bodies in the sun, minds moving through pages.
I became aware of the irony. I was speaking notes into my phone while noticing people who were not looking at theirs.
Yet I did not feel the phone had taken me away from the place that afternoon. It had become a recorder, map and notebook. It helped me catch the sentences before they vanished. The danger comes when the device turns every encounter into content before the encounter has had time to work on you. The phone can flatten a city into a sequence of images. It can also help you notice that a tower is not a church, that a church without a body still makes promises, that people still sit by a river and read.
The question is whether the tool returns you to the world.
At noon, the bells began.
Their sound travelled across the river, through trees, across the benches where people read and talked and watched the water. The bells did not require anyone to assent to a creed. They did not stop the traffic or summon a congregation. They simply marked the hour.
This hour has arrived.
I liked that. Old language, still travelling.
The bells could not restore the church that had gone. They could not settle the question of what Christianity has become in a city where its old power no longer holds. They could not solve homelessness or make education wise or tell anybody sitting by the river what to believe.
But they crossed the air.
The church’s body had gone. Its gesture remained. Its sound, in other forms and from other towers, still entered the afternoon.
Then my son sent the bat signal.
A shared location appeared on Apple Maps. My granddaughter was with him. His partner too. My wife and daughter were making their way from Southam. My wife’s parents and brother were coming up from Bristol. I plotted a route north along the river and started walking.
The solitary part of the day ended there. The mythogeographic wander gave way to the more ordinary geography of family logistics: people leaving one town, joining a motorway, parking a car, checking a phone, finding a table big enough for several generations.
But it did not feel like the spell had broken.
The old tower had once oriented a parish. Its spire had told people where the centre was. Now, for me, the centre was a blue dot on a screen. My people were gathering from different roads. My granddaughter was waiting somewhere ahead.
The tower still pointed upward. The river kept moving beside the city. Bells marked noon over a world that had changed its mind about many things without losing its hunger for meaning.
I left the church that was not there and walked north towards lunch.
My mother taught me early that I didn’t owe anybody anything. Not even her.
Looking back, I think she meant it as a lesson in self-reliance. Don’t let guilt bind you. Don’t hand other people ownership of your life. Stand on your own feet. Make your own way.
But childhood lessons rarely stay inside the boundaries intended for them.
What I absorbed was not only that I should be independent, but that closeness came with claims. To let someone near was to risk becoming obligated. Better, perhaps, to keep a little distance. Care, but not too much. Love, but retain an escape route.
It took me a long time to work through that.
Then the Army gave me a very different education.
It taught self-reliance too, but not the solitary kind. You had to be competent because other people depended on you. You had to know your role, carry your weight, and remain steady under pressure. At the same time, you learned to trust others with your life—and to understand that they were trusting you with theirs.
That is not independence. It is interdependence at its most concrete.
As an officer, another layer was added: selfless service. The idea that leadership placed obligations upon you. You were responsible not only for yourself, but for the people in your care. Their welfare mattered. Their trust mattered. Your choices carried consequences beyond your own life.
Somewhere between my mother’s lesson and the officer’s code, I began to see that obligation is not a single thing.
It can be a chain placed around you by guilt, expectation, or control.
But it can also be a commitment freely chosen.
I may not owe people access to me simply because they demand it. I may not owe anyone the surrender of my autonomy. But when I choose to stand beside someone—as a friend, partner, parent, colleague, leader, or member of a community—I choose certain responsibilities too.
Perhaps the better question is not simply:
What do I owe other people?
Perhaps it is:
What do I owe the people I have chosen to stand beside?
And what do I owe them not because they own me, but because of the kind of person I have chosen to become?
Self-reliance, then, is not the refusal to need anyone. It is the ability to bring your own strength into relationship. To carry your share. To remain yourself while becoming part of a larger we.
This is where Emerson enters the conversation, though perhaps not quite in the way he is usually summoned. “Trust thyself,” he writes, and the phrase has become almost a slogan for rugged individualism. But Emerson’s self-reliance is not merely the freedom to do whatever one pleases. It is the harder discipline of listening for the voice beneath social expectation, inherited doctrine, and the pressure to conform. “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,” he insists. Project Gutenberg
I can understand the appeal of that. My mother’s lesson carried something of Emerson’s refusal in it: do not let other people decide who you are; do not confuse obedience with goodness; do not surrender your judgement simply because the crowd speaks loudly. There is real strength in being able to stand apart.
Emerson knew that society exerts a gravitational pull on the self. It offers belonging in exchange for compliance. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” he writes—not because opposition is inherently virtuous, but because a person must learn to distinguish genuine conviction from borrowed opinion. Project Gutenberg
Yet self-reliance has a shadow. Taken too far, it can become a fortress. Trusting yourself can quietly turn into trusting only yourself. Independence can harden into emotional distance. The refusal to be owned can become the refusal to belong.
The Army showed me another texture of self-reliance. It was not Emerson’s solitary thinker standing against the crowd, but a person becoming dependable enough to take their place within a collective. I had to trust my own judgement, certainly, but I also had to trust the soldier beside me. My competence mattered because their life might depend upon it. Their competence mattered because mine might depend upon them.
In that world, self-reliance did not abolish obligation. It made obligation possible.
You carried your own kit so that someone else did not have to carry it for you. You maintained your skills because hesitation or incompetence could place others at risk. You learned to act without waiting to be rescued, while also knowing that survival often depended upon the people around you.
Perhaps Emerson gives us only half the equation.
“Trust thyself” remains essential. But so does: become someone others can trust.
The mature self is not dissolved into the group, nor sealed away from it. It is distinct but connected, autonomous but accountable. It knows where it stands, and because it knows where it stands, it can stand beside others without disappearing into them.
Self-reliance, in that sense, is not the end of relationship.
Rheingold’s Tools for Thoughthas me asking an old question again:: what are computers for?
For a long time the answer seemed settled. Computers were calculators, then office machines, then portals into a giant shopping centre with a comment section. We learned to treat them as appliances that happened to demand more and more of our attention.
Rheingold writes from an earlier fork in the road. The people he follows were not trying to put a faster calculator on every desk. They were trying to build tools that could take some of the mechanical burden of thought, so that people might have more room to make connections, work together, remember what mattered and imagine something beyond the present arrangement.
Doug Engelbart called it augmenting human intellect. Alan Kay imagined a fantasy amplifier. Ted Nelson wanted a world-library that could keep changing as we changed. There is an old, generous ambition running through all of this: the computer as a place where thought becomes more associative, more visible to itself, and less lonely.
That ambition has not vanished. It is just harder to spot beneath the feeds, the dashboards, the little red counters and the machines now trained to produce smooth paragraphs before we have worked out what we mean.
I can feel that tension every time I open my vault. The Textual Underground is my small attempt to keep faith with the older promise. Not a second brain built to make me a more efficient employee of my own life. Not a warehouse for digital lint. A place where a phrase from a walk can sit beside a line from a book; where an old note can become useful again because the person reading it has changed; where links make trails that memory alone would not have found.
The question is no longer whether machines can help us think. They plainly can. The harder question is what kind of thinking they leave us with. A frictionless feed can narrow attention. A fluent AI can save time and quietly take over the work through which a thought becomes yours.
So I am trying to keep a little friction in the system. I want the machine to do the filing, the recalling, the connecting, the tedious bits. I still want to make the turn in the sentence myself. I still want the awkward pause, the notebook margin, the walk home, the moment when two things that did not seem related begin to speak to each other.
Maybe the real purpose of a tool for thought isn’t to give us answers faster. Maybe it’s to protect the conditions under which original thought can still happen.
I’ve got the new Masters of the Universe queued up on Prime for viewing tonight. I suspect I’ll be viewing it through two lenses. The kid, waiting to hear “I have the power!” and the storyteller who’s curious to know if they can make the mythology of Eternia something more than a marketing reboot. One thing I hope they preserve is what made the original strangely compelling beneath the Saturday morning animation: it wasn’t just muscles and monsters. It was a mythic story of identity. Adam isn’t powerful because he’s He-Man; he’s powerful because he chooses to become He-Man. That’s a classic hero’s journey dressed up in neon armor.
I went out for a short wisdom walk this afternoon.
Nothing grand. No pilgrimage. No mountain path. Just enough movement to loosen the mind and let a little air into the machinery.
Walking does that for me. It opens a space in which thoughts can arrive without being summoned. They come sideways, through the body, through rhythm, through the simple fact of moving forward while not necessarily trying to get anywhere.
The day was so good that it felt almost rude not to stop for a pint.
So I did.
At The Old Mint.
An Alpacalypse IPA. A ridiculous name for a perfectly sensible decision.
The building has stood at the heart of Southam for centuries. Long before it became a pub, it was a place where value was made tangible. Local tradition holds that small coins were struck here for everyday trade, and during the English Civil War, silver from the Crown is said to have been minted here to pay King Charles I’s troops before the Battle of Edgehill. Whether every detail survives the scrutiny of historians hardly matters. The building carries the weight of those stories in its stones.
I found myself wondering if The Old Mint has always been in the business of exchange.
Once it exchanged silver.
Now it exchanges stories.
The walk had opened space to think. The pub opened space to listen.
The two people sitting in front of me were talking about health.
The man had been to the doctor for a check-up about an aneurysm. He spoke about it in that familiar way people sometimes speak about frightening things: casually, almost administratively, as though keeping the tone light might somehow keep the danger at a manageable distance.
The woman was talking about her split.
Her former partner had their daughter this week. Then she would have her the next. A week-on, week-off arrangement for the summer holidays. She said she was bored. She wanted to be at a beach or beside a pool or somewhere else entirely.
On the surface, it was a conversation about schedules, childcare and holiday plans.
But I found myself wondering what was happening underneath.
Was boredom really boredom? Or loneliness? Or grief? Or the strange emptiness that follows when a shared life becomes divided into alternating weeks?
Perhaps I want to be by a pool really meant, I want to be somewhere my current life cannot reach me for a while.
Then the bartender wandered into the beer garden and joined another conversation.
Guy problems.
There were nude photographs of another woman. An old girlfriend. Suspicion. Betrayal. Her friend told her this might be the out she’d been looking for. Whatever she decided, she’d have her support.
Again, the facts were easy enough to hear.
The inner life was not.
What does betrayal feel like inside the person living it? Is it anger first, or humiliation? Relief, perhaps, if the relationship had already been quietly dying? Fear of leaving? Fear of staying? The sudden collapse of the future you thought you were walking towards?
Conversation gives us the visible surface of a life.
The rest remains submerged.
We hear aneurysm, custody, boredom, photographs, ex-partner, holiday arrangements. But behind each word is a whole private weather system: fear, longing, memory, shame, hope, resentment, tenderness, uncertainty.
People rarely speak directly from the deepest layer. We translate our inner lives into practical language.
Appointments.
Schedules.
Plans.
Problems.
The socially acceptable vocabulary of the day-to-day.
Perhaps that’s why people fascinate me so much.
We are all so different in detail and so similar in structure.
Each person carries a world no one else can fully enter, yet that world is built from materials we all recognise. Fear of loss. The need to be loved. The wish to escape. The hope that someone will stay. The quiet search for a life that feels like our own.
Perhaps that’s what places like this are really for.
Buildings survive by changing their trade.
The Old Mint no longer stamps coins, but it still circulates a kind of currency.
Not silver.
Stories.
Worries about aneurysms.
The logistics of shared custody.
Dreams of beaches and swimming pools.
The first careful words after trust has been broken.
People arrive carrying experiences that have value only because they are shared. They spend them across a table over a pint, hoping to leave a little lighter than when they arrived.
Centuries ago, this building minted coins that passed from hand to hand.
Today, it mints conversations that pass from mouth to ear.
Different currency.
The same human impulse.
As I sat there with my pint, it struck me that perhaps The Old Mint has always been doing the same work.
Helping people make sense of life together.
The wisdom walk had cleared the inner room.
The pub opened the windows.
And for a little while, Southam thought out loud around me.
“Same shit, different day” is one of those phrases I hate because it usually arrives wearing a smirk. It reduces a life to a conveyor belt: wake up, coffee, work, scroll, eat, sleep, repeat. A little verbal shrug before another day gets fed into the machine.
And yet, some mornings, it’s mostly true.
Routine isn’t the villain. I like the small anchors of a day: making coffee before I look at a screen, walking the familiar stretch of road, opening the notebook, sitting down to work before I’ve had time to invent too many reasons not to. A few repeated acts hold the shape of a life together. They save you from having to negotiate every tiny decision from scratch.
But routines have a dark side. They can turn into grooves so deep you stop noticing you’re in them. You take the same route because it’s efficient. You eat the same lunch because it’s easy. You keep putting off the phone call, the email, the invitation, the strange little idea that keeps knocking because it doesn’t fit the version of you who has got things under control.
Nothing dramatic happens. That’s part of the problem.
You don’t wake up one day and find a guard standing at the edge of your life saying, You may not leave the pattern. You just keep choosing the familiar option until it starts choosing for you.
When I feel that happening, I borrow a trick from Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man. Not the whole project — I’m not handing my moral agency over to a cube of plastic — but the basic interruption.
I make a list of six possible actions.
They can be small: take a different route into town; work from a café rather than the desk; send the message I’ve been rehearsing in my head for three weeks; spend an hour reading something outside my current obsessions; go somewhere I’ve never bothered to enter; make the phone call.
One option has to be something I would not normally choose. Not reckless. Not self-sabotaging. Just inconvenient, unfamiliar, or slightly embarrassing. Something the routine-self would dismiss before it had a chance to become real.
Then I roll a d6.
The only rule is that I honour the roll. No best-of-three. No quiet reinterpretation. No “well, technically I have done the thing by thinking about doing it.” The dice don’t care what I wanted.
That’s the point.
Most of the time, I know what I want before the die stops moving. I roll a three and feel a small lift of disappointment. Or relief. That feeling tells me more than another hour of analysis would. The die has not revealed a cosmic instruction. It has made my preference visible by putting something else in front of it.
Other times, the roll sends me somewhere I wouldn’t have gone: down a road I’ve ignored, into a shop that has sat in my peripheral vision for years, towards a conversation that breaks the stale internal monologue. The day doesn’t become a cinematic adventure. Usually, it becomes a day with one less automatic movement in it.
That can be enough.
I don’t think the dice are wise. They are indifferent little objects with numbered faces. But indifference has its uses when your own habits have become too persuasive. The roll cuts through the committee meeting in your head. It interrupts the little boss who thinks safety and repetition are the same thing.
Sometimes the right response to “same shit, different day” isn’t a grand reinvention. It’s a different walk home. A meal you haven’t made before. A message sent without polishing it into dust. One small act of disobedience against the machinery of your own predictability.
The forest does not offer answers in the way a book, a screen, or a clever conversation does. It gives you texture. Uneven ground. The sound of your own feet. Branches moving against one another. The minor negotiations of a body making its way through the world. In that setting, the mind’s usual bureaucracy begins to lose authority. The lists, rehearsed conversations, inherited measures of success, old complaints, small self-defences: they do not disappear, but they stop being the only voices in the room.
To “lose my mind” is not to become irrational. It is to step outside the cramped administrative office of the self. The mind that Muir wants to lose may be the one that keeps score, keeps pace, keeps the gates shut. In the forest, attention gets redistributed. A bird call cuts through the internal monologue. A patch of light on moss asks nothing of you. A path bends out of sight, and for a few minutes the future is not a project but a turn in the trail.
Then the soul, if we use that old word without embarrassment, has a chance to speak in its quieter register.
Perhaps the soul is not a hidden object we discover, like a coin in the leaf mould. Perhaps it is the part of us that reappears when we stop forcing experience to justify itself. It knows something about proportion. It remembers that we belong to a world that was not made to fit inside our plans. It brings us back to appetite, grief, wonder, fatigue, gratitude, and the strange relief of being one animal among many.
The forest does not cure us of thought. It gives thought a wider habitat. We return with the same problems, perhaps, but their edges have changed. The mind has been loosened from its familiar grooves. The soul has had some air. And the path home, though it may be the same path, no longer feels entirely owned by the person who set out.
