Pietro's 'Moment of Crystallisation' - and - My Playlist, Your Radio Show.

Cover Photograph from Thomas Berry's 'The Dream of the Earth' (1988)

Writing is like any other skill, you’re bad at it without practice. And like any other skill, I do not practice enough. The banjo stands in its dusty case, the sewing machine sits idly in the loft and the thoughts running in my head rarely make it to the page. Or, when they do, they do an alarmingly underwhelming job at articulating whatever the magic was when it was an idea being conceived on the cold bathroom floor of my head. It’s safe to say, I am a bad writer. Many hours of writing are sat in my drafts, where I fumble over and over with a few ideas like a child trying not to drop a ball. Like any other skill, failure is essential for improvement. And like with any other skill, I do not want to fail.

This post was supposed to be about poetry and radio shows. That’s at least what I thought I wanted to write about when a few different ideas were cohabiting yesterday, in my brain. I was thinking about my interest in poetry and literature, and in nature and humankind’s relationship to it, and I thought oh blamo-whamo, here we go baby, there’s something here worth writing about. Now that I start trying to write, these tired, stiff writing muscles do not want to perform how I want them to. Thoughts become sentences, one after another. That’s me doing my best in order to articulate what was happening yesterday, behind the curtain. Against my own instinct, and likely yours too, I am going to try and stick this one out in pursuit of doing something instead of nothing. When it comes to my blog, when it comes to my day, when it comes to my life. So, bare with me if you can.

Click to get to the juice.

Pietro once used the expression ‘the moment of crystallisation’ when referring to how an idea can form in one’s mind. Often it’s the right combination of thoughts, like ingredients, that can create something magical. And it’s that moment when you realise the end potential of what you have, where you see the relationship between the parts, and where something now brand new is formed from their sum. The moment when an idea crystallises, when it becomes a tangible idea. When you can see something you could not see a moment earlier. 

I wrote that down when Pietro said it, and whenever I have the moment of crystallisation I am inspired to write, to make and create and to bring the idea to life. To share it with people.

One thing I don’t do is act on that feeling often enough. This blog was supposed to be a place to respond to that feeling, every time. My disappointment in my own writing ability meant so many of these crystallisations have been written up only to wither away in the drafts bin. The dark, decaying area in the backend of themainstem. What good is that to me and more importantly what good is that to anyone else? It’s negligent to say that writing anything on a blog is not intended for reading. This is and always has been equally for you as it is for me. The great feeling of an idea crystallising is really nothing when nothing is done with it. And so I will try and write a little about what was in my head yesterday.

I have thought many times about keeping a record of poetry and literature segments that I find meaningful. Mostly about human nature, and humankind’s relationship to nature. I've also thought many times about creating a Substack or something to share those with the world. Building up a resource of quotes from poems, stories, songs that feel increasingly relevant in today’s world and maybe writing a bit about them for context. Much of the literature I am interested in, is either concerned with the results of industrialisation on the human condition, or was written pre-industrialisation. Something looking at the old times, the old ways. Not a modern day ‘return-to-the-land’ plea, but maybe a look at what we are as a species, outside of technology, an attempt at reframing the way to see ourselves as lucky and The shared experience that ties us together, no matter of class, race, sex and so on. 

You know the drill by now, we have climate change, wars, increasing societal divide and the rapid advancement of technology to grapple with. The news is bad for you, so is PFAS, so is pretty much everything. Your phone is trying to kill you, the government is trying to control you and we’re all strapped into a car that is heading straight for a cliff. These days, we are all-consumed by the problems of the world, to the point that we are now unable to see ourselves and these problems as distinguishable from one another.

As the world has developed so quickly, we have lost something primary to our being, in the process. We are dislocated from one another and a large portion of this, is in my opinion, our increased dislocation with nature. Urbanisation. Globalisation. industrialisation. A relationship with nature that once permeated all civilisations is becoming less and less a part of ours in the modern day. How hard is it to take a weekend away, to see the mountains, to sleep under the stars, to hear the birds, to feel the moss on the rocks of a stream, to watch the plants and animals move through their cycles, to be reminded first-handedly, that everything is finite. That every single moment is precious, just because you are experiencing it. The people you love and take for granted. Your health. The ability to think a thought. Maybe I idealise ‘the times of old’ as having this greater sense of ‘connectivity’ and it is not to be mistaken that I do not hope for us to live without technology, without globalisation and without all of the luxuries that exist because of these processes. I just think it is time to stop for a second, and think about what we have lost in the midst of gaining so much. I think what we have lost is something fundamentally important. It’s the sense of meaning that connectivity to one another, to nature, to the planet; gives to all of us.

I live in a city in Europe at the time of writing, and outside of exercise, travel and human connection, it is music, song and poetry that helps me to feel this connectivity in my day to day life, and so my ambition was to share this with people. To see if it could help anyone else that also feels like they are misaligned with meaning in today’s world. Like so many before me, I find wisdom in the writings and culture of peoples from all over our planet. From Taoism in ancient China, to Buddhism, to the mythical frameworks and lore of the ancient peoples of the Americas, Australia and across the globe. There are many contemporary western disciples of Eastern philosophy, from Gary Snyder to Robbie Basho, who have let this wisdom and connectivity permeate their own writing, their own work, their whole lives, and it’s through these contemporaries that ancient ideas are brought forward into modernised language and culture. Poetry. Story. Song. This is where we can find them and through them start to feel a little bit more aligned with the miraculous reality of life. If I do make a Substack and start to send these little bites out into the world maybe something will grab you, like it does to me. Like any feed; not all of it will tickle your toes, but something here or there might. My biggest obstacle is overcoming the demand of copyright rules for starting a digital collection of these materials. Likely, this is an obstacle that will stop me from starting a feed like that.

In the meantime; I have put together a ‘radio-show’, in the form of a playlist on Spotify. I don’t know how to mix or to combine the tracks into one mp3 file, and I have no experience with the kind of software that can help with those things. added bonus is that there is no copyright infringement from making and sharing a playlist on Spotify’s platform. The downsides are; you are limited to materials that exist on the Spotify server and you have no control in terms of editing. I have been increasingly enjoying radio as a format for curation. From Utah Phillips, to  the many NTS shows I have been shown at work. Each piece of material exists on its own but it's the total sum of all pieces of material that has meaning and that becomes a ‘show’, much like a single work of art in an exhibition or a single item on display in a museum, and that is where a ‘host’ comes in, to guide, present and give context to the materials. Sourcing and curating is something that I have always been attracted to in my creative practices… few (but some) may know! So I treat this playlist like a radio show, where the elements of spoken-word aim to fill in the absence of a host to guide the show. 

Spanning folk sub-genres with poetry and spoken word as a backbone; the show focuses on material from across North-America, and of the Anglo-North-American experience and relationship to the land. The show aims to maintain some joviality whilst also encompassing great issues like biodiversity loss, and to take a wide perspective on humankind’s relationship to nature. From those influenced by the first peoples of the American landmass, their oneness to the land, the plants, the animals and whose creation stories articulate how the vast wonder of nature came to be; through to the European migratory-labourer, humbled and moved by the greatness of the land, stories shared from those those who have travelled the land, worked upon it, and have taken great meaning from it. An ode to nature and an ode to humankind. 

The experiences of women, in song and poem, are not represented in this show, in the same way that they are not greatly represented in all of the North-American story after European colonisation. It is undoubtable that during the industrialisation of America, as gender roles stood pronounced, it was men whose stories and experiences were recorded, from labouring, from exploring, from conflict and travel. It is, however, families that traveled across the seas to arrive in America, and these experiences were also within the women and children of an industrialising America, albeit rarely appreciated at the time. The women of this time have contributed a rich body of folk music to the North American story in a way that their male ‘counterparts’ did not; carrying stories down through the generations by passing these stories and their songs on to their children. Woody Guthrie’s mother would sing old-english ballads in the kitchen in Okemah when he was a boy, many of these, versions of folk classics, ones you would recognise having been recorded by artists over and over throughout the twentieth century. It is through this domestic closeness that much literary material managed to live through the ages of North America’s colonial history. It was families that travelled the seas, sold their houses and moved across the country, and it was mothers that planted the seeds of folk music, deep in the mind-soil of many young Americans in the twentieth century. The ‘voice’ of this show is created by male narration and harnesses the perspective of the migratory labourers that built the railroads, felled the woodlands, and laboured the farmland of industrial America and sadly it was much harder to put together a collection of materials that speak to this period in American history from the perspective of women. Maybe an interesting concept for a future ‘radio show’, if anyone listens to this one.

1. Coyote, My Little Brother - God Bless The Grass (1966) - Pete Seeger


2. My Flowers - Equilibrium, Songs of Nature and Humanity (1980) - David Laing

3. The Young Man Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn - Early American Folk Music & Songs (1982) - Clark Jones 4. Magic Mountain - Equilibrium, Songs of Nature and Humanity (1980) - David Laing & Robin Laing

5. Chinese Flute - Songs with Guy Carawan (1952) - Guy Carawan

6. The Wild Geese, Read by Wendell Berry (1934) - Wendell Berry 7. Across the Blue Mountains - Across the Blue Mountains (1976) -  Harry Tuft

8. Boll Weevil - I’ll Sing You a Story: Folk Ballads For The Young (1972) - Sam Hinton


9. Mourning Dove - Northern Wilderness (2019, Recorded 1960’s) - John D. Curnow 10. I Wonder Why - Magic Mountain: A Collection of Songs (1978) - David Laing

11. Yase: September - Gary Snyder Reads (2019) - Gary Snyder 12. Silver Bell - Equilibrium, Songs of Nature and Humanity (1980) - David Laing & Robin Laing

13. The Little Black Flies - Songs with Guy Carawan (1958) - Guy Carawan

14. Arch Leaves - The Hired Hand (1971) - Bruce Langhorne 15. An Apple Place in Annapolis - Hooray for Another Day (2008) - Max Ochs 16. Aiken Drum - Early American Folk Music & Songs (1982) - Clark Jones 17. Under The Magnolia - Early American Folk Music & Songs (1982) - Clark Jones 18. Pastures of Plenty (1941) - Woody Guthrie 19. White-Breasted Nuthatch - Northern Wilderness (2019, Recorded 1960’s) - John D. Curnow 20. Three Little Pigs - Songs with Guy Carawan (1958) - Guy Carawan

21. Garden Song - Circles & Seasons (1979) - Pete Seeger 22. Love Song - Music of the Sioux and the Navajo (1949) - John Coloff 23. Sleep Song - A Cry From the Earth: Music of the North American Indians (1979) - Clarence Taptuka 24. Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout - Gary Snyder Reads (2019) - Gary Snyder 25. It's a Wonder - Songmaker of the Catskills (1965) - Grant Rogers 26. Gold In The Morning Sun / Roving Mind - Equilibrium, Songs of Nature and Humanity (1980) - David Laing 27. No Further Need - The Hired Hand (1971) - Bruce Langhorne 28. Sowing on the Mountain - Lonesome Valley (1951) - Cisco Houston & Woody Guthrie 29. House of Green - Equilibrium, Songs of Nature and Humanity (1980) - David Laing

Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, ca. 1943. Courtesy of the Woody Guthrie Archives.
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