Chris Parish

Practicing Animism: Back to the Future

How might we begin to experience ourselves as being inherently part of Nature? Not as some disembodied observer taking a stroll through the woods or along the riverbank, but rather as being within nature, fully embodied and interwoven. There is enormous value and benefit if we can come to feel this to even a marginal degree. An important part of

Read More

Walking the Path to Nowhere & Everywhere

I went for a walk in the woods recently; along easy paths through the rolling miles of Epping Forest, an ancient forest miraculously still surviving on the outskirts of London, saved by campaigners. It’s not a difficult walk, and many germs of ideas sprouted by themselves on that walk, though I hadn’t intended to think about anything in particular at

Read More

A Nightingale Pilgrimage

So it was that after almost three weeks of recovering from the fatigue and coughing of a mild, but nevertheless very unpleasant covid infection, following right on the heels of being involved in some intense nonviolent civil disobedience, I longed to be out of the city and into the healing balm of the Spring flowering.  Taking a dawn train out

Read More

Requiem for Nature in Britain – Devastation in our Green and Pleasant Land

Our hearts go out when we see one of those awful pictures of a disoriented, lost orangutan in the debris of clear-cut rainforest somewhere in Indonesia, which up to a few hours ago, had been the orangutan’s ancestral home for millennia. And now utterly destroyed, so we can have cheap multipurpose palm oil. In contrast, when we look at a

Read More

From Seniors to Elders

Senior citizens, OAPs, retirees. Doesn’t sound so inspiring, in the way this vast and growing segment of our population is sometimes referred to, does it? Now of course I know many older people have a very hard time, coping with chronic illness, poverty, disabilities and loneliness, all compounded by years of governmental austerity in Britain. Many need special care and

Read More

Practicing Animism: Back to the Future

How might we begin to experience ourselves as being inherently part of Nature? Not as some disembodied observer taking a stroll through the woods or along the riverbank, but rather as being within nature, fully embodied and interwoven. There is enormous value and benefit if we can come to feel this to even a marginal degree. An important part of

Read More

Walking the Path to Nowhere & Everywhere

I went for a walk in the woods recently; along easy paths through the rolling miles of Epping Forest, an ancient forest miraculously still surviving on the outskirts of London, saved by campaigners. It’s not a difficult walk, and many germs of ideas sprouted by themselves on that walk, though I hadn’t intended to think about anything in particular at

Read More

A Nightingale Pilgrimage

So it was that after almost three weeks of recovering from the fatigue and coughing of a mild, but nevertheless very unpleasant covid infection, following right on the heels of being involved in some intense nonviolent civil disobedience, I longed to be out of the city and into the healing balm of the Spring flowering.  Taking a dawn train out

Read More

Requiem for Nature in Britain – Devastation in our Green and Pleasant Land

Our hearts go out when we see one of those awful pictures of a disoriented, lost orangutan in the debris of clear-cut rainforest somewhere in Indonesia, which up to a few hours ago, had been the orangutan’s ancestral home for millennia. And now utterly destroyed, so we can have cheap multipurpose palm oil. In contrast, when we look at a

Read More

From Seniors to Elders

Senior citizens, OAPs, retirees. Doesn’t sound so inspiring, in the way this vast and growing segment of our population is sometimes referred to, does it? Now of course I know many older people have a very hard time, coping with chronic illness, poverty, disabilities and loneliness, all compounded by years of governmental austerity in Britain. Many need special care and

Read More