Uncivil Savant Podcast

I have often remarked to friends that the River Thames is a hidden, long, thin county of England, with its own customs, rules and celebrations which only boat dwellers, river users, lock keepers and island dwellers know. But there is a longer, thinner complete country, more vast and yet less visible even than the stretched shire that is the Isis. Tidelandia. Today I know that it is the rock of this liminal country that I feel in my bones, the stone that gives me a sense of belonging, strength to carry on, and provides for me the ballast of my joy. It is those myriad innumerable pebbles that make up the fractally endless shores of the tidal riverbanks and coastline of the British Isles that are my home rock. At last, it makes complete sense to me, as someone occasionally irritatingly multifarious, that my heart-stone would be any small stone that can be found in the intertidal zone and is cyclically covered and revealed by water, according to the interaction of time of tide, rainfall and season. If it can fit in the palm of my hand. If it contrasts with its mate that lies beside it. If it only hints at its true colours, being covered with the modesty of silt, requiring dousing and scraping to reveal itself. Or equally, if it shouts its vibrancy in hue and cry. If it sits among five hundred of its fellows. If it is the only one of its kind for miles around. I cannot adequately describe the humming power and immediately raised spirits which come from squatting on my haunches in half an inch of water - sweet or salty - where pebbles jostle for my attention, all of them somehow bursting with stories without a word spoken. Uncivil Savant which available to all with no financial barrier to access thanks to my paid subscribers. Thanks for listening.This podcast was first published here on Substack on 27th November 2025 with full transcript, footnotes, links and images. If you’d like to make a one-time donation towards my work, feel free to use this button!I don’t use AI to search, research, edit, alter or create my writing or images at all. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

It is Wednesday, named for Woden, Odin, he of the one baleful eye. With it, even without the parallax view, he would see that today is a golden coin, unearthed from the ploughed field of autumn. Bright, chill to the touch, marvellous. I reach down to pick it up.Whose face glints on it? Minerva, goddess of wisdom, justice, law, trade, victory, crafts, sponsor of the arts, patron of trade and of strategy. On its reverse, the day-coin sports a basket, miniature ridged and woven weavers form the bas-relief image of ancient-yet-still-current containment in fingertip-tempting texture. I run my right index finger over it and sigh through a smile. It is easier to describe the muse-currency of my mind’s eye than it is to gather all today’s thoughts into its basket, but I must try.We will need craft, strategy and wisdom if we are to attain victory against dehumanising forces, both over us, in the mad rush towards transhumanism and the technological panopticon our states all seem to crave. But we will also need these qualities against the dehumanising forces inside ourselves, the ones that scapegoat others, insist on ‘us’ and ‘them’, or conversely, inwardly berate ourselves as worthless and unworthy. Beauty, belonging and beloved-ness (giving and receiving love) are our birth rights. Connexion is the natural state of affairs. How has this been so comprehensively foiled, so quickly? How can we cultivate, grow and share our remedies?By now, you will have noticed how the net has tightened. Once seemingly everyday tasks, simply performed, now require the kind of digital form-filling fitting, perhaps, for someone who has witnessed a crime, and must recount to the authorities every inconsequential detail, and yet, even after doing so, feels somehow complicit despite not personally being party to any wrongdoing. Posting a book to a friend abroad yesterday became a two hour project in the tolerance of fastidious yet strangely inexact classifications. Drop down menus opened little trap doors in my mind: which mood is the machine trying to conjure? You may choose from annoyance, irritation, ennui, rage, confusion, doubt, exhaustion or exasperation. You may not uncheck the box which reads ‘you will experience the sensation of being watched and measured at all times’. Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.This week I finally put down my copy of Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth after an interrupted month which meant a slow reading pace was all that life and health allowed. It was no bad thing to be forced to read and ponder, rather than devour a book in my usual manner. In the front of my copy, Paul has inscribed ‘for Caro, fellow warrior!’ But I have not felt like much of a warrior of late. Today the low golden slanting rays and the boldness of my friends’ and co-conspirators’ words and actions, in writing, art and community building, give me the inspiration to get back to my practice.What is that practice? Perhaps I will never have the definitive words1 to describe the what of ‘the work that is mine to do in the world’ but I know where the work is situated, at the crossroads of embodied work, hand craft, writing and the way of nature2. An important part of this crossroads is that it is a public place, where others pass through. The paths I am interested in are not just for me.This week my new-old path became clear again and I stepped back onto it. If you’d like to walk along some of it with me, you’ll be most welcome. This podcast was first published here on Substack on October 30th 2025, with full transcript, images, links and footnotes. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

Oak comes to the rescue, yet again. This laptop sits on a cork mat which prevents the cold hard aluminium edge of the camping table, which provisionally serves as my writing desk, from digging into my my wrists. I send heartfelt thanks to the cork oaks of Spain, Portugal and southern France, where the raw materials for this mass-produced natural cork-fragment mat were likely harvested. Years ago, visiting the chalet in Provence belonging to a family friend, I was struck by the cork oaks on the hillsides. Pale, stripped of their precious bark up to the height of the pollard, they looked like strange arboreal lambs after first shearing, likewise suffering no harm, perhaps only a sensation of sudden bareness to the elements no human could ever know. Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To receive weekly posts and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber.I am experiencing the period of adjustment of a newly transplanted shrubby herb. Great care has been taken over the siting, aspect and soil. Water, air and light are provided gratis by the Great Mystery, via the condensation of the angel’s share of the Tyne, the action of gravity on bodies possessing mass, and the electromagnetic emanations of our nearest star. I thank Physics for its pared-back beatitudes, rarely bettered by a poet. Although I feel I certainly will, whether or not I root and sprout well again is truly out of my hands. And so I turn to silent, spoken and embodied prayer. This podcast was first published with full transcript, footnotes, links and photos here on Substack on October 8th 2025. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

I pack a box, clean a table, write more. The day is all mixed up. I cut my toenails then cry into my phone at the beauty of a message. The world is mixed up. The aspect ratio of verity and simile is not even. Joy is still joy. Hate is still hate. They were so before, during, and after, I wrote this post, which likely changes nothing except for the itching in my two typing fingers and the density of knots in the wild yarn ball of my 2am mind.Acorns sustain life, whether eaten as the common of mast by pigs in the New Forest, or gathered, shelled, soaked and ground by people. This year, we have one small bowl of leached acorn pieces which will become flour and then food once we are firmly settled again. Life-death-life - life is fulfilled in death, it is death which allows life to be renewed, as all myths worth their salt will tell you. Whether Pagan or Christian, Taoist or Sufi, stories unfold with the sense of a space set at the table for the final guest we will ever meet. Not so in tales of the Machine which abolishes death (and thereby bans acorns), which seeks only an infinite plantation of sterile trees, each of which they hope will live forever. I shiver. To seek to hoard life itself, as well as all the money, housing, natural resources and land, what a truly mad mindset. You might as well try to only breathe in.Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To receive weekly posts and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber.This podcast was first published with full transcript, footnotes, links and pictures here on Substack on 22nd September 2025. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

Welcome to the 100th podcast episode! There’s an off the cuff intro plus the full audio from my recent Zoom conversation with Paul Kingsnorth from his Machine Sessions1 for the launch of his upcoming book Against the Machine. As soon as I have read it, I’ll write about it here. But for now, enjoy our conversation. If you’d like to watch the video of it, and all Paul’s other conversations in this series, you can go straight to The Machine Sessions, on YouTube. Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts each Monday morning and support my work become a free or paid subscriber.This podcast was first published here on Substack on Monday 8th September 2025, with links and extras. Thanks for listening to Uncivil Savant. I don’t use AI to research, write or edit my writing, nor to make my art or music. If you’ve enjoyed the first 100 podcasts, feel free to This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

Ships of differing flags have come to moor inside myself, anchoring in the part of me which welcomes-in mystery. Here come the big ships - Goodness, Truth and Beauty. Are they from one fleet or from opposing navies? I do not recognise their flags and pennants nor do I understand the movements of the crews. But I have a deep interest in their cargoes.My two beloved wisdom traditions have such contrasting approaches to some of the deepest conundrums and predicaments of my life, with sometimes just a slim band of connective tissue linking them…Polarity affords a voltage gap. Sparks leap across this void: it is not fair. Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, and come to subscriber meet ups online, consider becoming a paid subscriber.This podcast was published here on Substack on 1st September 2025 with full transcript, links, footnotes and photos. To enjoy 3 years’ worth of Uncivil Savant podcasts, essays and articles for free, click here. If you have enjoyed my work, feel free to… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

It’s coming up for three years since I started this Uncivil Savant, and for the first time in many months, I have been taking a look through some of the pieces from the years before I opened this particular writing space. The space before this one was letters and emails to my dear friends and trusted colleagues. Thinking in conversation. It’s still a joy, but with so many of my gang of friends now writing, both here and in our books, I find I miss the daily and weekly typed missives, punctuated with the occasional phone call.At least fifty such fragments, filed away on my laptop, have found their way into the pieces here over the years. Each month I share one of my favourite archive pieces, and there’ll be one later this month. For now, you can investigate my whole archive here and all my recorded voiceovers in my podcast here. This week’s podcast contains writing from the last few years, I hope you enjoy it. This podcast was first published with full transcript, footnotes, images and links here on Substack on 11th August 2025. I don’t use AI to make my writing or art. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

The function of the Machine is onslaughtThe oil that allows its gears to turn is provided by your mind.The mill which expresses the oil from your mind is precisely calibrated to extract the maximum levels of anxiety from your thoughts, as, like the industrially mined and finely micronized graphite additive in engine oil, your raised cortisol and adrenaline levels greatly aid the smooth functioning of the Machine.The large and small gaps in the onrushing overwhelm of information, provided by family, community, happenstance, weather, geography, responsibility, religion and work have been abolished by the One Device.Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.This podcast was first published here on Substack on 4th August 2025 with full transcript, footnotes, links and images. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

The oaks bear it. The brunt of the sun. Turn their bitterness to acorn and gall. Buddleia is wilting, the weight of the butterflies barely registers. Whispering - ‘Remember how to be gentle before the burning time’.The forest always goes past at 80 miles an hour. My eyes are impatient lovers, the purple bruise of heather spreading under my proprietorial gaze. Yet the shimmering heath renders beauty, even unto seizure.I walked here two weeks ago, deliberately stamping so that the adders could make their excuses and go elsewhere to bask in peace. Some diamonds should not be seen; reptiles spurn the recognition gemstones seek.(This week’s recording has the ambient sounds of the pigeons and other birds of dusk in balmy south London, as it was too hot to close the windows at my brother’s house, before the storm broke.) All the writing, audio, video and art at Uncivil Savant is available to all with no financial barrier to access. Please support me if you can by becoming a subscriber whether for a month or a year. Thanks so much. This podcast was originally published here on Substack July 28th 2025, with full transcript, photos, links and footnotes. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

In a time of the unsayable not only being said, but being enacted, I have withdrawn into speaking less. I haven’t been calling people, (my generation still phone each other), only leaving occasional short voice messages, like my younger friends. I love to talk with people, but I feel a time of silence is needed, so by the time you read this, I will have had three days quiet time with the sea and the horizon. There is something about opening my heart up to that impossible line which slows down the jumpiness, the teetering verticality, of head-first thinking. There are many other ways of working with words.One of the ways of working I love best is to be asked to find words for music, for art, for a moment, as in improvisation, or for something more long lasting. Collaboration is a discipline I missed hugely after pausing my music life. For a while I poured that desire for connection into my books and teaching, finding a great editor and colleagues. But still…Last month, it was good to be asked to spend some time finding the words to respond to contemporary artist Nicky Hirst’s sculptures in the current show PLAYTIME also featuring Giulia Ricci and Ian Dawson, at Ubicua Gallery, 85 Charlotte Street, London W1T 4PS.Ubiqua says, ‘This exhibition of three artists blurs the boundary between image and instruction within a performative language, working with sculptures and drawings that have the possibility of being visually ‘played’. The works can all be viewed as musical scores and will be interpreted by various musicians. A space for collaboration, translation, and play.’ It is on until 22nd August and I will be performing these spoken word pieces live on the 17th from 6pm. You are welcome to join us if you are in London. Musicians have improvised live in the space but sadly I was not able to attend, as I was in the woods.You will hear my two audio pieces for the show which include sound settings for spoken word. The text of the pieces is also below. The process of finding these words was more like drawing than writing an essay. I made sketches of phrases, scribbled on paper, while staring intently at photographs of the art in progress. Speaking out the syllables, skirting meaning, allowing words1 to tumble, feeling for the spaces between things, the rhythm of the pauses, until something coalesced that had the right relation to the artworks; a sort of oblique symmetry. Drawing from a moving life model and improvising lyrics for music or art have some fundamental similarities. There’s a line you are stalking. You must finish before it’s over-worked. If you try to pin everything down and ‘make it make sense’2, it will almost certainly fail.There needs to be gaps for the reader / listener / observer to leap across. Given the chance, wouldn’t you rather risk hopping the rocks than clomping over the wide bridge, with the crowd? The salmon spotted from atop slippery granite is a gift not seen from behind railings. So close to the water, one is still kin. This podcast was first published here on Substack on July 14th 2025 with full transcript, footnotes and images. Uncivil Savant is available to all with no financial barrier to access thanks to my paid subscribers. Please join them for a month or a year if you enjoy my work here. Thanks! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

I spent most of last week on an art residency. For those of you from other walks of life, this is where you are invited and sometimes paid, to go away from home and make your art, often in response or relation to some aspect of the venue, people or institution that invite you. Perhaps it's easier to sit a 7-day Zen retreat. My mind, stripped of all stimuli but my body and a blank wall, quickly quits struggling and at least attempts to settle to the task at hand; counting breaths, say. I am in a field, constantly stimulated, yet rebuffed, a whole day here and I am only at the surface, on the grass, looking down from human height. I'm using my late friend Mark Watson's beautiful book The Plant Pamphlets as a guide and method for being here. Starting last night and finishing this morning I reread his book cover to cover and reminded myself of the simple but effective ‘hanging out with plants’ practice which is found within it. This morning after breakfast, I headed out into the field and walked around until I felt a particular plant calling to me to pay it my undivided attention. If you've never walked around anywhere noticing whether a plant, landform or rock is asking you to communicate, then you'd be forgiven for assuming that it's an outlandish practice and that I am officially woo. But I know you will have stopped to notice a pavement dandelion at some point in your life, the craggy beauty of a winter oak, or the sheer spiky effrontery of a bramble shoot thick as your thumb making its way through a fence, up into the elder tree and back down again, laden with pink flowers of blackberry-promises. You will at least have stopped for a rose.This week’s podcast was first published here on Substack on Monday 23rd June 2025, with full footnotes, photos, links and extra sections. All the audio, video, writing, art and tuition at Uncivil Savant is available with no financial barrier to access thanks to my paying subscribers. Many thanks!If you appreciate my work please take out a paid or free subscription, or you can make a one-time donation here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

Every six months or so, inspired by thoughtful writing by Ruth Gaskovski , I end up writing a tactile / haptic response or addendum to something rich from School of the Unconformed. In this case Architecture for the Free Mind was the prompt and my desire is to add a little detail to a possible materiality for a free life. I contributed some snaps of my studio areas, full of unmade objects and hand-worked natural materials. For me, these are a source of something almost akin to a vitamin; I receive something lifegiving and nourishing when I work with or use these things.Much is being written4 about Ultra Processed Foods (UPFs) being a feature of the modern urban diet almost worldwide, causing illness and disease. While I am not here to argue that spending up to 18 hours a day swiping almost frictionless screens or pressing plastic buttons is going to give you heart disease or directly cause obesity, I am suggesting that it is unhealthy, and related to the narrowing of simple, natural dietary and behavioural choices available around here lately.5 Paid and founding subscribers to Uncivil Savant mean I can keep it available to all with no financial barrier to access. Thank you!This podcast was first published here on Substack on June 2nd 2025, with full transcript, footnotes, links and images. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

This week, glimpses from a week wrestling with good.The Great Mystery, as I experience it, is in all things and makes itself known hour by hour. We have never had a pugilistic relationship. Instead, I struggle with good, that is, how people, including myself, behave to one another, especially online. Online is where I must sadly spend a large amount of time at the moment to make certain projects that I care about take place. Screen-life can have the effect of hollowing me out. Here are sundry recent Notes and notes from the bone marrow of my soul as I attempt to fill back up after what feels like a puncturing and the sense of having briefly become an uncanny drink to a malign and greedy being. Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber.This podcast was originally published here on Substack on 12th May 2025 with full transcript, footnotes, links and images.Thanks to my paid subscribers, I can keep all my writing and this podcast available to all with no financial barrier to access. You can also… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

This week, I’d like to share a film of a recent conversation with Iain. As so often happens with friends, one wishes it were possible to capture the deep, spontaneous conversations that arise around meals or while relaxing. That not being possible, here’s us discussing a little of what we’ve been talking about over the last couple of years since my last visit to Skye in 2023 with Dougald Hine. (You can watch the conversation he had with Iain here).It’s not possible for me to fully delineate the influence of Iain’s work on both my own thought and practice, as well as that of many people in the T’ai Chi schools of which I have been a part. I go into some details about it in the film we made two years ago, which you can watch here.I have added links regarding some of the things we mention in conversation. Mostly these relate to points Iain makes. So many of the things I talk about pertain to creaturely knowledge gained over years in an oral tradition, taught week-in, week-out, in a physical environment and understood in an embodied way before any words coalesced around the knowing. They mostly remain ‘unsearchable’ online, but they are nonetheless real. These understandings are possibly the thing I discuss most with my trusted friends; it is rewarding to compare insights gleaned from their particular realms of study and expertise. We see where shafts of light that have percolated through our own unique vessels refract and finally, together, illuminate a tiny portion of the beloved shared table that is our too-brief time on earth together.I hope that my gestures, analogies and stories go some way to giving you a little insight into my particular area of study and begin to explain why encountering The Master and His Emissary and more recently, The Matter with Things, was so important.Of course, the real joy is simply knowing Iain, to whom I am profoundly grateful for his time in making this film, for his encouragement, and for his ongoing friendship.Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. Your generous subscriptions mean I can keep everything available to all with no financial barrier to access, thank you!I would like to thank my partner Jonny Randall for beautifully shooting and editing the film. We currently have a very good and equitable skill-swap going on (I mend and sew things and he films and photographs things) but if you’d like to show him some extra appreciation, please feel free to:All tips from the appropriately transformed ‘buy me a coffee’ button will go to Jonny this week! Thank you.This podcast was first published as a video here on Substack on 5th May 2025 with full show notes, links, footnotes, images and extras.Selected notes: (h:m:s)5:00 Newgrange Spiral carvings5:35 Heartwork, T’ai Chi lineage9:40 Dōgen finger pointing at the moon11:20 Ultramarine extraction from lapis lazuli11:40 ‘The fining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold: but the Lord trieth the hearts.’ Proverbs 17:v3, Old Testament, KJV Bible14:44 Keats’ Doctrine of Negative Capability16:34 Niels Bohr deep and shallow truths24:25 Dreyfus brothers’ model of acquisition of skill26:51 Sincerity, Jonathan Monks32:53 D H Lawrence we are transmitters of life33:30 Goethe uniting the divided38:46 Matter and consciousness41:36 Rabbinical saying ‘you are not tasked with completing the work…’44:08 Dougald Hine the question that is yours to carry48:13 Necessary distance49:38 Henri Bergson time, duration, paradox50:08 Dōgen If there were no time there would be no mountain51:28 Zeno’s paradoxes52:05 Heraclitus Panta rhei / everything flows53:19 Marcelo Gleiser the same situation cannot occur twice55:45 The third heart, connexion, longing56:49 Max Scheler1:01:15 Paul Kingsnorth Past, People, Place, Prayer from ‘Against The Machine’1:04:05 Jan Zwicky (also of interest - The Experience of Meaning)1:05:59 Love Story ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’1:06:46 Orangutan rofl1:07:35 Marcel Theroux ( of interest - In Search of Wabi Sabi)1:08:24 Commedia dell’Arte1:09:10 John Cleese1:13:00 Stewart Lee1:14:00 Life of Brian, new stage show This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

This week, four poems. Some take years to find a shape, others arrive fully formed. Their promptness or tardiness to the party, their languishing in my laptop or notebooks in various states of déshabillé - none of these correlates to whether they will be good mixers, or that they’ll skulk in a corner, eyeing the host’s impressive bookshelves morosely.Also this week, my, what interesting times to be a woman.Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe now so you need never miss an episode. This podcast was first published here on Substack on April 28th 2025 with full transcript, footnotes, links and art. If you enjoy my work but can’t afford a paid subscription, feel free to buy me a coffee! My paid subscribers allow me to offer everything at Uncivil Savant with no financial barrier to access. Thankyou. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

This week, a story gathered fresh from the wild last week about how we unwittingly get caught in serfdom, and how we might walk away free. Some things that seem to be dead can haunt an unwitting culture or even possess it. A way of life as old and long-lived as feudalism, which persisted in diverse forms for centuries in Europe and Japan, and millennia in China, amongst other places, rears its head this week. Before you listen to this piece, first listen to Ursula K LeGuin’s masterful short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. This podcast was first published here on Substack on 14th April 2025 with full transcript, footnotes and links. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

‘That which circles moves from its centre’1Perhaps you too have something like this: a conundrum from which you can never turn away, which you do not feel as a curse, but a generative, endlessly revealing, probably insoluble, puzzle. In Ancient Greece and Norse myth it is part of your Fate. In Old English, it’s part of your Wyrd. It’s a now-smooth pebble you can endlessly turn over in your hand, replete with crooked hole through which you can peer, to see the horizon transformed through the-nothing-that-is.In writing this piece, I wanted to name it, this perennial circling of the heart-mind, as I know it’s not just me who experiences it. I went downstairs and I knocked at my partner’s door, requesting a moment of his insight into the language he has been enjoying in Old English Word Hord and Beowulf.2 I said that I was searching for a traditional two-word phrase to name the centripetal dance around my life’s great koan, (like the famous ‘whale-road’ for the sea). ‘Ah, you mean a kenning,’ he said. We talked of wyrd and fate, questions and purpose, interior places to which, no matter where you wander, you always end up returning: is it like a tor? A well? A magnet?No, it’s the hearth, we realised. That bright place to which we will always be drawn.3So, I will from now on call it my hearth-riddle (heorþ-rǣdels)4Tangled lifeNo matter where I turn and how far I wander, the challenge and practice of yielding are always present. This is my hearth-riddle: how not to resist life, yet keep my centreline. How to balance softness and firmness, adaptability without flimsiness, stay in touch with things, yet not become enmeshed. In short, how do I stand my ground using softness, when all around the laws of iron5 and silicon6 are followed ten thousand times more widely than the rules of any wise well-tried path or the natural process itself?It can seem that we are in a particularly terrible time right now with domination being a popular policy instead of dialogue, in so many contexts, whether at home or abroad. The great paradox of yielding in relation to this is how do we resist ‘evil’ (such as rule by force) without getting tangled up in it, or perpetuating it ourselves? If we constantly dwell on everything awful, do we not internalise it? If we ignore it and seek a safe hermitage somewhere, metaphorically or physically, aren’t we just abandoning our fellows to its ill effects?Thanks for listening. To receive my podcasts regularly you can subscribe here.This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, footnotes, illustrations and links on 3rd March 2025. If you’ve particularly enjoyed an episode, please feel free to… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

With the sound of courting herring gulls hark hark harking on the roof opposite my desk, I just sat down to complete the next longer essay and briefly looked through my ‘drafts’ folder in the Substack editor. Words jumped up and said ‘hear me now!’ So, this week, while I continue writing the longer essay, perhaps completing my current delve in ‘not resisting evil’ and yielding, here are some fragments - shorter thoughts and thinking points - which wanted to be shared with you. Also, you might appreciate a break from long-form essays from me.Wet, windy, not-yet-spring-but-something-has-changed greetings from me.Thanks for listening. You can help me keep my podcasts and writing free to all by becoming a paid or founding subscriber. This podcast was first published with footnotes, links and photos here on Substack on Monday 24th February 2025. If you have particularly enjoyed an episode of Uncivil Savant but don’t want to take out a paid subscription to my Substack, you can buy me a coffee. Thanks! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

This week’s podcast is an expansion on a voice letter I sent to Dougald Hine this week, which is part of our years-long ongoing conversation about how people can show up for one another in the strange times in which we find ourselves. My tone might sound different compared to other pieces but I have decided to leave it unsweetened. Forgive my rant, or perhaps just rant along.Leaving aside the slew of land-expropriation news from elsewhere, in my country right now, rich landowners are seeking to turf-off everyone from even being able to walk freely on ancient paths on ‘their’ land. Meanwhile the guardians of national parks in America were laid-off this week, and soon we will watch as every last piece of Earth that can be parcelled and sold is grabbed by the richest and most powerful. It is a travesty.Without access to land, ordinary people begin to doubt that they are part of nature, and cease to be able to care about it, thus a vicious cycle ensues. This has been the shadow side of ‘progress’ for many hundreds of years here in the UK, as we were the first country to industrialise.1 Without consideration for the public good, an environment of individual kleptomania has been normalised. If Earth is the creation of The Great Mystery, we are beholden to the Creator to care for it. If Earth is ‘just’ a wonderful planet, we are still beholden to each other and to our descendants to care for it.It should not be seen as radical to say ‘slow down’ to all this carving up. My long-term small ‘A’ anarchism and my intermittent small ‘C’ conservatism2 go hand in hand in saying, ‘Let us keep what is good for those who come after us. Let us consider needs other than just our own in our decision-making.’ Too hard to swallow? How about, ‘Consider the future needs of your own children, grandchildren and those of the people you love!’When I am at my lowest ebb with what goes on in the world, I wonder, do those who hoard all the wealth, land, power and goods not love anything but money, ownership, power and goods? It is not my mission to depress myself or others, so follow me on a line of thought today that leads to practical resistance to both instrumentalist machine-thinking and the idea that success in acquisition is the best measure of human flourishing.This podcast was first published here on Substack on 17th February 2025 with full transcript, footnotes, links and images. You can subscribe here for free to access all previous articles and podcasts from Uncivil Savant. I greatly appreciate all tips, paid and founding subscriptions which help me keep my writing and research freely available to all. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com

Caught as we are in the seasonal gales of bawling and chest-beating of barely literate tyrants, there is much we cannot hear. Where I live, this last week of storms has left the low tide strand scoured and giant boulders half the size of cars are strewn about the upper shore, going nowhere. Meanwhile, and for some months, I have been considering the three seemingly unpopular qualities after which I named this piece.On these Isles, both the pagan religions that arrived by foot over Doggerland or by boat across the North Sea, or via the newly formed English Channel, and the religions of One God that came here by curragh from Ireland, then by ship and plane, have a deep current in common: the communal telling of stories of great lives. At differing times, or at overlapping nights around the fire, tales of heroes, goddesses, gods, kings, saints and villains were told, and the way in which these tales could inspire or instruct were at each time largely held in common. The ground water of these tales were the one great aquifer common to our thousand islands. Springs sprung up differently here and there; a variant, a telling detail, a differing parentage, a new tale seeping in. But it was clear that self-sacrifice for family, friends, kin, village, or for your principles, to give hospitality to ordinary people, giving away what was precious to the down-trodden or the hungry, were seen as good and noble things. This is as common in ancient myths I have read and heard as it is in words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. Until very recently, these qualities were seen as universally good amongst all but followers of Machiavelli…This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, footnotes, links and photos on Monday 3rd February 2025. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carolineross.substack.com