YOUR CABIN IN THE WOODS

So you are another lover of the out-of-doors who desires a cabin or shelter in the woods!  I salute you.  I understand you.  I know your kind.  You carry the spirit of our ancestors.  The spirit of the Great Out Doors.

Our cabin in the woods should be built where there is quiet, where housework can be reduced to a minimum, where our time may be given over to the perusal of a few chosen books, where reflection may have its full sway, where one may be carefree in the great outdoors.

This idea may provide a means of escape from the reality and tension of city life.  It may prove a step forward and upward in the fulfillment of your life's ambitions. 

You may be crowded with work in town, but this should be your rest-cure, your re-creating.  Don't spoil it by city-driving standards.  Set your own standards.

CONRAD MEINECKE

FFOREST FARM

IDENTIFICATION OF SPECIES

THIS WEEK

Hanging loose at Fforest Farm

CHARCOAL BURNER

THE DHARMA BUMS

NEWS. HAPPY.

Adam has nailed philosophy and life.  Whata great guy!  Congrats Dr Adam Ferner!

In other news, I now teach a two-colour RISO workshop every fortnight at Ditto Press.  You will have fun, and you might learn something - you can book future classes HERE.

The workshop this week was great, we had so much fun with coloured paper and grey ink.  What a sophisticated bunch!

Next week I'm travelling into the wilderness for a week of drawing and mapping.  I'm going to Wales, I'm going to a forest, I'm going to be completely intolerable and enthusiastic when I return.  Apologies in advance.

HOPS AND DREAMS

THIS WEEK

Adam's masterwork:

If we cannot recognise our own given natures and the natural world as setting any limit at all upon the desires that we contemplate taking seriously; if we will not listen to the anticipations and suspicions of the artefactual conception of human beings that sound in half-forgotten moral denunciations of the impulse to see people or human beings as things, as tools, as bearers of military numerals, as cannon-fodder or as fungibles...then what will befall us?  Will a new disquiet assail our desires themselves, in a world no less denuded of meaning by our sense of our own omnipotence than ravaged by our self-righteous insatiability? 
DAVID WIGGINS

Also this week:

Whereas sight situations the observer outside what he views, sound pours into the hearer... When I hear, I gather sound simultaneously from every direction at once; I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelops me, establishing me at the core of sensation and experience. 

Eating, resting, moving, experiencing the weather, are primary experiences of being embodied; to view them as negative is to condemn biology and the life of the senses - severing human perception, expectation and action from the organic world in which our bodies exist.   Alienation from nature is usually depicted as estrangement from natural spaces.  But the sensing, breathing, living, moving body can be a primary experience of nature too: new technologies and spaces can bring about alienation from both body and space.

UNASSAILABLE WALL

Deus, in adiutorium meum intende.
Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina.

An unassailable wall, an impenetrable breastplate, a very strong shield for those who labour under the attack of demons.

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This last week I've drawn some pictures for an interesting MA Service Design project, exploring future opportunities to deliver ecotherapy as a widespread intervention to boost mental wellbeing.  Working with Mind, Kate Wakely is monitoring how projects like food growing, conservation and gardening can help participants, with their combination of physical activity, social interaction and education.

I have also printed many many pages of 4-colour riso...it has been a week of big riso.  Anyone interested in this marvelous technique can read more HERE in this interesting article that I contributed to on Creative Bloq.