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All of it… and dinosaur pee

When my daughter was very young, I used to take that malicious paternal delight in suggesting to her that what she was drinking contained what was very likely once dinosaur pee. Bless the resilience of young children, I haven’t disturbed her for life ;-p but it did lead on to the discussions about the hydrologic [...]

Where the sky ends and space begins

Grammatically very rough, this was written in about 20 minutes as a stream of consciousness metaphor… but when I came to work on it, every change destroyed something. So you are left with the poor grammar, paragraphs starting with conjunctions etc.

I once knew a story about a boy called Hugh, who knew all sorts of [...]

The Enemy Within

The Mullah Nasrudin

Nasrudin saw a man sitting at the side of a road looking utterly desolated.

“What’s bothering you?” he asked.

“My brother, there is nothing interesting in my life. I have enough money not to need to work, and I was traveling to see if there was anything curious in the world. But everyone I [...]

On the nature of soul.

A man wanted to know about mind, not in nature, but in his private, large ‘computer’. He asked it: “Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?” The machine then set to work to analyse its own computational habit. Finally, the machine printed its answer on a piece of [...]

The Sanctity of Language

Greg Hill made a really interesting post on his blog today in which he discusses the contention raised by the philosopher Galen Strawson that physicalism entails panpsychism, or the stance that all physical matter is conscious. Now I don’t propose to develop that specific argument, but in comments I have discussed the idea that it [...]

Words of Power, Part I

Words dissemble
words be quick
words resemble
walking sticks

plant them
they will grow
watch them waver so

Jim Morrison, American Prayer

It has been suggested in a forum I contribute too that words only have the power that we give them. This is an idea that I would like to explore on several levels. I’m not proposing a certitude either way, I’m [...]

Bateson on Story

This is a very serious matter… that the way that human beings think, certainly the way that I think, is in terms of stories… Now what is a story? A story, if it so please you, is a metaphor… If you look at these two plants, you will see that they are essentially metaphors, one [...]

taboo, contract and the making of the world

A blogger who’s posts I admire wrote what he called “sketch for a short story” a while back. In this story, a credible construction from an indo-european perspective of the sort of things that may have been practiced and believed by the original druids, although in and of itself wholely a work of fiction, the [...]

I promised you a story.

I promised you a story. Are you sitting comfortably?

A little background colour first. I grew up in social housing in a small market town called Olney during the 70′s. Back then it had a population of about 2 and a half thousand, and was situated in the heart of rural North Bucks, some 11 miles [...]

The Tale of the Sands

This is a slightly experimental post using WordPress’s podcasting plug-in for the first time.

The Tale of the Sands is a Sufi teaching tale which I retold some years ago for submission to an online competition. The voice tone has a trance-voice quality (intended) and the story explores age old themes of identity and impermanence from, [...]