I have not written here for a few weeks. Sometimes, those personal insecurities become a block. I’m OK now.

I love to write, because I love life. Today, I am compelled to write, because I love life, compulsively.

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Have you watched the documentary, The Great Hack? It’s on Netflix right now. 

I urge you to see it, listen and think deeply about what is being said. The human angles are clear. The story is of the dismantling of Western democracy as we understand it. It is one of electoral manipulation and an erosion of free choice. 

A group of clever but immoral individuals clubbed together to swing votes using social media data and the targeting of vulnerable demographic groups. … Read more

Ornicophony ~ inspired by the deafening birdsong to be heard on Llanbradach Hill, above one of the biggest coal mines that once belched out black dust in South Wales. #HopeOnAStick https://t.co/EOVI6WxH4t

— Ginny (@ginbat) May 27, 2019

Video Clip … Read more

Photos by me.

A rubble road crests a ridge above the old coal pit village of Llanbradach. Breeze blocks and plastics are decaying to dust, beginning to press themselves shallow into the chorography of this place. I stand on a jumble of human fall-out, taking in the views, and think of my father; and his father.

Llanbradach Hill is one of many swells in the geodrama known unsentimentally as the South Wales Upper Coal Measures Formation. Down deep, where it is warm, labarynthine tunnels have been blasted out by men long dead, and the spaces left uncollapsed now leak with water, gas and ghosts. … Read more

Since my article published in Earthlines, Technofossils and Radionuclides, welcome to the Anthropocene,  I have been referencing the significant work of Australian philosopher, Professor Glenn Albrecht.

Glenn is renowned for his term Solastalgia, as reported before in the New York Times, now embeded in popular culture, for example, featured as the title of the fifth studio album by Australian singer-songwriter Missy Higgins.

In this podcast by Cornell University Press, Glenn talks to Jonathan Hall about his powerful new book, a lifetime of work on words and emotions, culminating in the most profound and hopeful message there is – The Symbiocene. … Read more

“Flowers are the beautiful hieroglyphics of nature with which she indicates how much she loves us.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Wood Anemones, photo by me.

Let in the light.

Deep in a wooded glade on the northern fringes of Cardiff, bright sunlight filters down through an unfolding verdant canopy to an array of snow-white starlets gleaming along the woodland floor. 

The wood anemones have bloomed and this makes me very happy. I must be honest with you, there were moments during cancer treatment when I considered never seeing Spring 2019. Today, these ‘wind flowers’ shimmer to a breeze in waves, whilst little clouds cast shadow moments and honey bees and bee flies trace their invisible paths from one flower to another. … Read more

Rockle ~ the sound of beach rocks drawn seaward by the backrush of waves. An energy released from a key process of beach erosion, the making of shingle and sand habitats.

Trasilian Bay, South Wales. Photo by me.

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  … Read more

Wren, by me.

“Wren; small, migratory singing bird, Old English wrenna, metathesis variation of earlier werna, a Germanic word of uncertain origin. Compare Icelandic rindill, Old High German wrendo, wrendilo “wren.” (etymonline.com)

The suffix like is a model for Spring Theory, an evolution from the root gelic, lic, like, and to ly.  

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Wren perched in a little thicket of dogwood. I heard her first, of course, even above a whoosh of Taff water spilling the Blackweir. Then her roundness appeared so tiny, so seemingly defenseless in the face of human derogation (in this case, river-borne litter caught up in tweavelets). … Read more