Compost for the soul roundup: February 2025
Welcome to this month’s compost for the soul roundup!
It’s no secret that I spend a lot of time consuming all sorts of different media about our relationship with the land and the planet more generally. Quite a lot of this is captured in my monthly CPD roundups, but some is not exactly CPD in the conventional sense (and frankly I already do more than enough to meet the requirements of my professional bodies). And rather than letting these brilliant sources of inspiration go un-noted, I share them here, in a monthly roundup of inspiring and moving blogs, podcasts, films, articles, etc.
The idea is to showcase a few things every month that have either shifted my thinking or that have in some other way inspired, uplifted or motivated me over the month. They represent words and ideas that have taken root in my mind, and I offer them to you now, in the hope that you will find fertile ground in your life too.
And if you don’t want to wait a whole month for the next roundup, you might want to follow me on Instagram, where I share one of these every week. In the meantime, you can find previous summaries here.
After Dark (ep 36): Alaskan Stories: Sedna the Sea-Goddess & Myth of Last Frontier (podcast episode), by Anthony Delaney, Maddy Pelling and Tia Tidwell
I love After Dark anyway, but I especially enjoyed this conversation about the relationship between landscape and story – particularly the points made by Tia Tidwell about how the idea of wilderness is a construct – and one bound up with the settler/colonial project:
It’s not really that wilderness is there waiting to be shaped or conquered by settlers, but wilderness is really a construct of the settler imagination. And as a construct of settler imagination, it’s there waiting to share settlers into “true Americans”. And in that way, the settlers become the arbiters of what a “true American” is. And also, wilderness, the way that they’ve configured it in their imagination, becomes of utmost importance, and so that has real consequences on land and the people who live there.
Wild Clocks (article), by David Farrier
We are somehow already part-way into the second month of the year, and I’ve definitely been feeling slightly out-of-time. This article explores which this might be the case, and why our human ways of measuring time are, in many contexts, inadequate:
In forests, time is shared; we, on the other hand, tend to hoard it. Industrial agriculture strips soils of their nutrients, robbing future harvests; the drive to pull as many minerals and as much oil as we can from the earth is a kind of temporal stockpiling. But our days could be told instead by forest-time and bird-time; by the hastening of the Arctic spring and the loosening of the bonds by which species make time together. We might even redesign political time. Imagine what could be achieved with a political calendar that was set by the wobble in the jet stream or the faltering migration of butterflies rather than election cycles.
Available at: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/wild-clocks/
The Essay (The Meaning of Flowers series): Bluebells, by Fiona Stafford
Bluebell season might be a few weeks off yet (or maybe not, if time is really slipping as David Farrier describes above), but can you blame me for looking forward to the Spring? Warning: there’s a later section about how bluebells are associated with mourning and grief, particularly amongst writings. It’s very sensitively handled, but just to flag.
There is nothing quite like the shimmering blue that transforms a Spring wood into an inland sea, where slim trunks stand, as if in safe mooring. If you haven’t gone specifically in search of bluebells and just stumble on them unawares, it feels like the entrance to a different world, where a few steps might make you sink, or fly, into another element. They remind us of the very origins of Spring, a gush of water, bubbling up and spreading everywhere as April turns to May.
Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b09c0gfw
Drink from the Well (song), by Stöj Snak
A bit of a gear shift from this month’s other slightly more meditative pieces, but just as valuable as the others – and a fun one too. It’s always amazing when you stumble across a song that so perfectly captures how you’re thinking or feeling about something important to you. So enjoy - but make sure you’ve got your headphones in if you’re in a public space!
With happiness always just out of reach,
We follow the trails that run into the ground,
To become kings of the ashes, we will
Burn the whole world down
But once we could drink the well…
Available at: https://youtu.be/vLv4B6JgLxQ