Rubbly pieces

a few things to share this end of month that you might be interested in.

May 31, 2025

Just a quick Saturday morning post from me today - the closest thing I get to a newsletter - because there are a couple of things coming up that you might be interested in, in person and online. There is one link for each below so as not to bombard you.

If you want to catch up with some of my other essay and journal pieces this weekend here are a couple of recents: Opening the Ground (an intro to my new therapy and mentoring space!), Pink (a non-fiction vignette from my prose sketchbook that is a slow read for a slow start) and Bird Box ( a short story also from my sketchbook).

Have a lovely weekend, friends xo

Stone Club, London - Monday 2nd June

For any London readers, I’m going to be at the Stone Club London event this coming Monday sharing my film Everything Happens for a Season, that I made with friend and collaborator Rob St John. You can still get tickets here if you want to come along! It would be lovely to see some friendly faces especially as I don’t get to London that often. I’ve done a few things with Stone Club and love to be involved with their work whenever possible. Here’s a podcast we recorded last year. Hooray for the New Stone Age! I can’t wait to share our film with fellow stone lovers, and I’ll also be taking some zines with me too, perhaps also a signed book or two.

National Landscapes Nature Calling Conversation - Online, free - Wednesday 4th June

If you’re around on Wednesday lunchtime Rob St John and I are in conversation about our nature-based art practices for the first in a series of conversations being hosted by National Landscapes, the new name for our beautiful Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB)’s as you may still know them! Rob has undertaken a huge and brilliant project in the Trough of Bowland working with young people, called Are You Lost? (Which even featured on BBC Countryfile last month!) I’ll be asking him questions all about this project, and we’ll be talking about sound work, deep listening, outdoor access, and plenty more! It’s free but you need to make a quick booking so why not tune in with your lunch?

NEW DATE for Narrative Journeys and Natural Forms Workshop

I’ve finally got round to booking a new date for my popular online workshop looking at narrative journeys and natural story forms for non-fiction writers and memoirists. Thinking and planning the structure and form of my work is one of my favourite aspects of book writing, and in this workshop I hope to inspire you to love it too! For more information on what this practical workshop is about take a look at its homepage and get booking before it fills. The next run is Friday 25th July, online, 10am-1pm and will be recorded for watching on catch up if you can’t make it live.

Are you a therapist in Higher Ed?

Next month I’ll be back up in Aviemore to facilitate a couple of workshops as part of a Recharge event for counsellors and allied professionals in education (Higher and Further). I’ll be doing an Introduction to Geosomatics, introducing embodied and sensory ways to connect with inner and outer stability and substance for these trying times, and getting under the skin of what a natural versus synthetic definition of ‘resilience’ really means. All of this, out in the beautiful Cairngorm mountains. If you’re interested in attending through your institution there are still a couple of spots for the event running 12-13th June. I imagine this won’t be relevant for most readers, but you never know who is reading :) And if you read this and think, hey! I would like to offer this workshop to my own staff or colleagues in any other sector then do get in touch with me.

POP-UP (TENT) EVENTS: Your input is desired!

As you will know from my recent post on changing my therapy space for the next chapter of my work, I am now offering therapy, mentoring and dreamwork from my tent in Derbyshire. In addition, I would love to start offering some small group (6-8) half and one-day pop-up events. I have hundreds of ideas of course, but I would really welcome your input too. I do lots of stuff that involves a lot of planning, but I really like the idea of looking ahead to the long-range weather forecast and with just a couple of weeks or a month’s notice host some really nourishing and soulful pop-ups that can be run outdoors in the field, and under shelter. I’m thinking of animal movement, deep listening, and some writing and creating. My usual stuff. But if you have anything specific where you think ‘that is something I would come along to!’ then do let me know. The tent feels like a deeply collaborative space and I would like to honour that as I make my working home on this regenerative farm. If I don’t hear from you, then watch this space anyway. The land is already speaking its own invitations…

Practice books I have been enjoying this month:

Groundswell is a brilliant exhibition hardback on women in land art, and as well as covering many great artists that are often left out of the history of sited, environmental installations, it includes four great essays. I am taking a lot of inspiration and joy from this on tea breaks.

As a long term project I have been working through A Year of Deep Listening 365 Text scores for Pauline Oliveros edited by Stephanie Loveless. One score a day is really helping me deepen my own listening practices, and with the book split into sections such as imaginative listening, listening to ourselves, listening to other species and so forth, it is a really rich way into deeper listening if this is of interest to you. I had meant to write a longer post on this - about a search for spiritual practice that has brought me back to this foundational discipline in my life - but perhaps that’s enough to say. For now at least.