Uncivil Savant Podcast Caroline Ross

Pax Corporis
Your body is not an enemy to be subdued, it is not evil and does not need transcending.1
You do not need to mortify the flesh, neither is it advisable to indulge it.2 3
It is not a peripheral matter that the intelligence beaming out of you at this moment, meeting my words in that ancient embrace of sense-making together, (like strangers clasping hands and forearms to make a new peace), is embodied.4
Embodiment is not an accident, a trap, a curse, a trick, an inconvenience. The Great Mystery is not mistaken, and neither is everyone who loves you.
Do not worry that you are a body for no reason. Your ability to reason depends upon your body, as everything you can conceive of is measured by a proportion you learned before you could speak, when you were quickest making sense.
You are not trapped in a body, you were not born in the wrong body. There are no wrong bodies.
If your body is in pain, even in chronic pain, is injured, exhausted, ill or dying, is damaged, is unwieldy, unwilling, unwanted, then remember you remain in good, ordinary company at the endlessly long feasting table of life. All of us will one day be most of these things, or already have been.5 Indeed, it is why we can have any compassion for anyone else.6
This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, footnotes, images and links on 10th June 2024.


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Mind sneaks glances from behind the door of the room where heart and hope lay sleeping in a tangle. Lists accrue in layers on the desk as chestnut pollen tints the bay window yellow and further warms the (already golden) evening sunlight to a tone not seen since Proserpina’s last return. I have three more days of the very best company before I must make my third Lenten month of the year and work and only work. So, poems, pilgrimage and images are how I can be here with you this week, in one of those occasional interludes. Discursive brain cells rest, knowing they will be needed soon, and so are currently lounging in long grass, chewing stalks. The nettles in the abandoned churchyard are growing longer and shortly will be picked for cordage, as the Schumacher College course is full and I cannot scrimp on twist away, pull towards, twist away, pull towards materials.
The phenomenal world is ever present. We are not lost in thoughts and words do not steal energy from events. What is said is what is already being done. We bow to the day and to each other, to the sun, the Great Mystery and to Providence. In west Dorset, the Milky Way roared above us at 3am. Outdoors for a pee, my old glasses permitted only a blurry Plough and Cassiopeia, but we could still orient ourselves well enough and laughed southwards, sky-clad, ridiculous.
This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, footnotes, links and images on June 3rd 2024.


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Aspirant
I have long been in search of a way to write about the real1 without lapsing lazily into superlatives nor anatomising a now-lifeless corpse of the beloved. I have a duty to speak for wisdom only accessible by the body and to somehow say-into-being the unspeakable, and to not just allow, but speak up for, the flawed, the exiled, the tiny, the marginal.
The untethered word is to the real what the virtual world is to lived reality: merely a representation. When words are true, they remain nestled into the fabric of being, connected by an umbilicus to the matrix of real life. When they have finished being useful they can and should return to the nourishing silence that surrounds all speech and action.
The Great Mystery is in all things.4 Matter matters. Sacrifice involves physical loss, even death. The container of insight is material, even though the insight is immaterial. This is the great paradox of embodiment, the heart of all wisdom traditions worth their salt, the current lack of which makes empty husks of men, women and children.
This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, images, notes and links on 20th May 2024.


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Loose Ends
I am accustomed to being away from home, but it is a new and tricky thing travelling so far away when one’s love is 3600 miles and 5 hours east. Conversations between hosts, friends and strangers are woven together, the beloved is included. How do we stay in communion with what and whom are not physically present? How do we do this without drifting away from the present moment, from what is close at hand? Maintaining a thread between myself and family, friends or partner has been an ongoing conundrum over the many years where touring with bands or teaching T’ai Chi took me to Poland, Canada, USA, Scotland, Sweden or elsewhere. Now, older, though perhaps only marginally wiser, I realise the importance of puncturing the mystique of that perfect distance achieved by international travel. It can attenuate connection to a point at which it breaks. I have seen friends and myself swept up in that seemingly inviolable self-contained bubble which can accompany anything other than very low-budget travel. Marriages have faltered. Bands have broken up. What starts as a semi-mystical experience soon becomes an excuse for not bringing ourselves fully back home even as we dump our dusty bags by the front door.
In the recent past I have sat on one end of a string and felt nothing but emptiness greet my hopeful pulls. At other times I have let my own loose end dangle, ignoring the tension in the line, refusing to be in connexion, and yet expecting to be able to pick it up on my return.
But these are not those times, thank goodness. So I will write of host-guesting and then of a shawl the size of an ocean.
This podcast was published first here on Substack, with full transcript, notes and links on 6t May 2024.


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I am in America, and inexplicably have no phone signal or data here despite paying for it, right after a couple of weeks in Italy.
Here at last are deep green thoughts beneath the Georgia trees, where it is hot and humid and the shade of early evening is welcome. Good conversation and wonderful birdsong fill the air. There is due to be a ‘Biblical storm’ tonight, so people are leaving the camp, but we are trusting in our new tent and the fact that in Britain’s south west, we’ve just had the wettest winter on record. So we don’t feel fazed. My belly is full of the quesadilla and refried beans I cooked on the little camping stove. I have hard seltzer beside me and my travelling friend in front of me. My beloved is 3600 miles away, and so I console myself with the real beauty that is present and the deep conviviality of the people around me.
May you feel it too.
This was first published here on Substack with full transcript, more photos and footnotes on 23rd April 2024.


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On the seventh, and final, celebration of the anniversary of the initiatory circle of the Incorporation of Muse. Below are some extracts of the many meetings of the participatory Beings and the Mistress of the gathering basket. Losses are recouped. A new door opens. We draw a crooked line under everything with charcoal made from our brothers’ vines, and heave a glad sigh.
This week, an unknowable horizon beckons, we go to pack old hurts away and find them turned to thick black ink.
This post was first published here on Substack with full transcript, photos and footnotes on 8th April 2024.


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