Micro Blog

We talk about consuming books, as though reading …

August 8, 2026 No Comments

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,

Life is an orderly collection of uncertainties. The …

August 7, 2026 No Comments

Life is an orderly collection of uncertainties. The order is not in what happens to us. It is in the fact that uncertainty keeps arriving. There is a rhythm to it. Birth, love, work, loss, chance encounters, illnesses, opportunities, endings. None of them arrive on schedule, yet somehow uncertainty itself is one of the few constants we can reliably expect. We spend much of our lives trying to exchange uncertainty for certainty. We make plans, buy insurance, write five-year strategies, create identities, collect opinions. We call this getting our life together. But perhaps what we’re really doing is arranging our uncertainties into patterns we can live with. A calendar is an orderly collection of unknown tomorrows. A marriage is an orderly commitment to an unknowable future. A career is an orderly wager that your skills will continue to matter. Parenthood is an orderly surrender to permanent unpredictability. Every meaningful human undertaking is built on this paradox: we create structures not because the world is certain, but because it isn’t. Maybe wisdom isn’t learning how to eliminate uncertainty. Maybe it’s learning which uncertainties are worth embracing. Every choice closes some possibilities while opening others. To choose one path is to enter

The air has changed. I almost don’t want …

August 6, 2026 No Comments

The air has changed. 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

There is a will inside us that is …

August 4, 2026 No Comments

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

There is no universal right way to live, …

August 3, 2026 No Comments

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:

I picked up an old book this morning: …

August 2, 2026 No Comments

I picked up an old book this morning: Perceiving Ordinary Magic: Science and Intuitive Wisdom by 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

I keep seeing headlines about the new rules …

July 31, 2026 No Comments

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

Yesterday, on a Wisdom Walk, I realised I …

July 31, 2026 No Comments

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

The shadow is not dark because it is …

July 29, 2026 No Comments

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. This is a workbook for facing your shadow self. 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

Only a few more days left in my …

July 28, 2026 No Comments

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.

Rheingold’s Tools for Thought has me asking an …

July 27, 2026 No Comments

Rheingold’s Tools for Thought has 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

I’ve got the new Masters of the Universe …

July 25, 2026 No Comments

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.

This morning I picked up How to Practice …

July 24, 2026 No Comments

This morning I picked up How to Practice Self-Inquiry by Ramana Maharshi. I expected a quick survey read, a reconnaissance mission into the territory of the question Who am I? Instead, before I had travelled very far into the book, another question appeared: Is this your game? Is this your true mission? I could almost locate the voice physically. I raised my left hand as though it were speaking from that side of my brain. It wasn’t dismissing the book. Intellectually, I find the whole thing fascinating: the idea of following the sense of “I” backwards, beyond name, history, personality and role, towards whatever remains when all the usual answers have fallen away. But fascination is not necessarily vocation. As I sat there thinking about consciousness, another whisper began pointing elsewhere—back towards The Feminist Art of Walking, towards psychogeography and mythogeography, towards the work I have been doing around movement, place and the conversation between the inner and outer worlds. That is where the energy seems to be. As I understood it this morning, Ramana’s method moves inward by subtraction. Sit still. Withdraw attention from the world. Follow each thought back to the one who is thinking it. Ask who

colorful dice in focus with blurred background

“Same shit, different day” is one of those …

July 22, 2026 No Comments

“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

The forest does not offer answers in the …

July 21, 2026 No Comments

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

I’ve been carrying a small psychogeographic instruction around …

July 19, 2026 No Comments

I’ve been carrying a small psychogeographic instruction around with me: unfold a map, put a glass down anywhere, draw round its rim, then go out and walk the circle as closely as the streets allow. This is a low tech version of the deríve app I made last week. It’s a lovely bit of mischief because it gives the walk a rule without getting to complicated. The line is arbitrary, yet the body has to negotiate it: the cul-de-sac, the dual carriageway, the bit of private land, the pub garden, the place where the tidy circle becomes a long awkward detour. The map makes a proposition, and the street answers back. Robert Macfarlane’s version says to record the “textual run-off” as you go: graffiti, branded litter, snatches of conversation, visual rhymes, whatever keeps catching on the mind. A walk doesn’t need a grand revelation to become material. It only needs attention and a way of catching what sticks to it. I like that the instruction ends with the circle and the record ending together. There’s a discipline in it. You don’t have to turn every walk into a project, a lesson, or a little performance for the screen. You walk

Rebecca Solnit’s sentences are archipelagos of thought. You …

July 18, 2026 No Comments

Rebecca Solnit’s sentences are archipelagos of thought. You step onto one clause and find another small island appearing just beyond it: a memory, a road, an old map, a story someone told her, a political fact that refuses to stay merely political. The sentence does not hurry you to its conclusion. It gives you somewhere to stand, then asks whether you might look sideways. This can feel dreamy at first. Then you realise the dreaminess has a method. Solnit slows the reader down long enough for the usual boundaries to become less convincing. Inner life and public life. Geography and memory. A walk taken alone and the larger histories written into the land beneath the feet. She lets them mingle until you can no longer quite separate one from the other. For a mind that likes to move laterally, this is a relief. So much writing now arrives already ashamed of taking up time. It declares its point, breaks it into obedient little units, and offers a summary in case you have a more important tab waiting. Solnit’s prose makes another wager. It trusts that a digression can be part of the thing itself. It trusts that the route towards

It feels to me as though this is …

July 17, 2026 No Comments

It feels to me as though this is the only true choice we have. You did not ask to be born. You did not choose your parents. You did not choose the circumstances into which you arrived. The only real choice, I think, lies in deciding how we will play the hand we have been dealt. Not to mix metaphors, but I am reminded of Thomas Henry Huxley’s description of life as a game of chess. He was searching for a metaphor for the silent player seated opposite us from the moment we are born: “The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.” It is important to remember that the hidden player is not malicious. It simply follows rules that do not bend for our comfort. Its only demand is that we learn the board or accept the consequences of failing

I’ve been thinking about the difference between critical …

July 14, 2026 No Comments

I’ve been thinking about the difference between critical thinking and the kind of intelligence that has to sit beside it. Critical thinking gets a lot of the limelight. Fair enough. It is the part of the mind that asks for evidence, spots the loose plank in an argument, and refuses to be charmed by every shiny claim that comes down the road. In a culture thick with sales pitches, outrage machines, and synthetic certainty, we need it. It is the Yang move: active, discriminating, separating what holds up from what does not. But I keep wondering what its Yin counterpart is. My best name for it, today, is receptive thinking. It is not the same as switching your brain off. It is not believing everything you feel, or treating a hunch as a court ruling. It is the capacity to sit with something before you pull it apart. To listen before you judge. To notice tone, context, relationship, body language, the strange image that arrives while you are making coffee, and the fact that an idea may still be half-grown. Critical thought asks: is this true? Receptive thought asks: what is this showing me? One works by distinction. The other

Dusting off the old street photography and field …

July 13, 2026 No Comments

Dusting off the old street photography and field note cameras this morning. The first one out of the drawer is my old Olympus Tough: compact, waterproof, shockproof, and made for being carried rather than protected. I’m about to head into Leamington Spa to give the Deríve app I made over the weekend its first proper outing. The plan is simple: follow its prompts, pay attention to where they take me, and let the camera collect a few traces along the way I don’t know what I’m looking for yet. That’s part of the point. A camera like this feels less like equipment and more like permission to wander with my eyes open. Sometimes the old tools don’t need replacing. They need a walk.

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