I called out from the East Sussex library system store their copy of Aristotle’s The Nichomachean Ethics. Had tears come when I opened it and found its first readers took it out during the Second World War, when this area was often bombed. And yet people went out to get this text on how to live…

‘Understand how much time it takes for a work, or a path, or a life to take shape’ A sculptor’s advice for art & life: David Nash is perhaps best known for his living art piece the Ash Dome - planted in the 70s for the next millennium. He has literally grown a meaningful life. Here is his advice

Well-worn: Husband & Wife Was going about my quiet day alone at home, thirty years married, when the sight of our clothes without us had me stop and fill with feeling. Always-there but never-noticed: his habitual outfit, mine, hanging together on the basement door.

Well-worn: Husband & Wife Was going about my quiet day alone at home, thirty years married, when the sight of our clothes without us had me stop and fill with feeling. Always-there but never-noticed: his habitual outfit, mine, hanging together on the basement door.

“Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” In memoriam #VirginiaWoolf #DOTD 28 March 1941 📷 Starlings over the River Ouse at Southease, near Woolf’s last home - Monks House, Rodmell, Sussex

“Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” In memoriam #VirginiaWoolf #DOTD 28 March 1941 📷 Starlings over the River Ouse at Southease, near Woolf’s last home - Monks House, Rodmell, Sussex

‘She worked on the Harrier, the Concorde. She had a love of speed and freedom. Sports cars. Like the one in which she fled. Flew. From marriage and family. From us.’ Stunning piece by @npitchford.bsky.social for the decade-long collective #BirdsOfFirle project… selkiepress.com/2025/03/18/b...

‘I once had a winter that was wordless’ In 2020 @littletollerbooks.bsky.social published my #BirdsOfFirle: origin story of a decade-long collective project on hope & grief as the things with feathers. I used Twitter to reach people; hope to relaunch here soon www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing...

Deeply moving, beautifully drifting writing from @npitchford.bsky.social for the wonderful, occasional body of threaded stories that is @tanyashadrick.bsky.social’s #BirdsofFirle .. “as if belonging could be as multiple in its objects as love is.”

Honoured to be part of the beautiful, fragile collective work #BirdsOfFirle, created & curated by Tanya. An ongoing project of 100 writers responding with objects & online to a single physical manuscript, circulated by post over the course of a decade. On grief & hope as the things with feathers...

‘She worked on the Harrier, the Concorde. She had a love of speed and freedom. Sports cars. Like the one in which she fled. Flew. From marriage and family. From us.’ Stunning piece by @npitchford.bsky.social for the decade-long collective #BirdsOfFirle project… selkiepress.com/2025/03/18/b...

This silver birch tree is in my back garden & is probably 50+ years old. I aimed to capture it with the remaining few golden leaves clinging on last autumn. Neighbours have always wanted it cut down, but I turn a deaf ear. ‘Heartwood’ Monotype and Drawing 23x29cm

Multiple oaks perhaps from a long-forgotten jay’s cache.

Looking Eastwards is my ongoing artwork where I document the view down the lane from my house. #LandscapePhotograhy www.dirtmeetsthewater.co.uk/looking-east...

“The first bird surprised me… Engraved in memory: black leather legs, rictal bristles on the beak, an aluminium eye, and every wing-feather filigreed by white light so I could feel the hooks and barbules holding each one together, a chain mail” #NatureWriting www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing...

I’ve just created a Slow Art starter pack. Alongside that, sharing this link to a @bbcsounds.bsky.social show I took part in alongside my mentor #DavidNash. Also includes work of sculptor #JamesTurrell & musician #JemFiner… www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Receding, up on the wilds of Teesdale 2011, Canon EOS 60D #photography #BlackAndWhite #Landscape

A #SlowArt starter pack… go.bsky.app/V6j8hdS A meeting place for all interested in artists of any discipline - photography, fine art, sound, writing, illustration, more - who make work with a long-running, repetitive, ongoing, cumulative or time-defined nature. Glad of shares & suggestions

"The days are getting shorter and colder, but I ask you to remember: even as the Winter comes in, there is Hope and there is Light." ~ Seamus Heaney Towards Another Summer.

I’ve just created a Slow Art starter pack. Alongside that, sharing this link to a @bbcsounds.bsky.social show I took part in alongside my mentor #DavidNash. Also includes work of sculptor #JamesTurrell & musician #JemFiner… www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Like my mentor #DavidNash, I make work with long timespans: It’s also the art I’m most drawn to… If that speaks to you too, here’s a starter pack of others engaged in serious noticing - through repetition, return, time series & other forms of slow art… go.bsky.app/V6j8hdS

“The ability to start out upon your own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own terms. . . . Getting started, keeping going, getting started again in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm." - Seamus Heaney

This Rook reminded me of the Mountain Gorilla that David Attenborough famously encountered in Rwanda. They both share the same intelligence in the eye. @tanyashadrick.bsky.social #ukbirding

The Corvid flypast at the cottage just now, on their way to the roost in the nearby copse. This contingent was pretty much pure Jackdaw - the Rooks had sorted themselves out separately, choosing not to have a 'joint enterprise' display. #ukbirding #wildlife #naturalhistory

This is what I get up to sometimes: nicktankard.co.uk Pondering some ideas of my own at the mo but also very much open to book illustration commissions. Cheers 😊👍🏻

Colours and textures collected on the path from #VirginiaWoolf house at Rodmell to the river at Southease Part of the durational #ConcentratesOfPlace project by @tanyashadrick.bsky.social - which invites others to make and share them using the hashtag www.ernestjournal.co.uk/blog/2022/1/...

‘This was just a crow. / That never fit in anywhere in its life, / or did anything worth mentioning. / It sat there on the branch for a few minutes. / Then picked up and flew beautifully / out of my life.’ - #RayCarver 📷 from #BirdsOfFirle series by @tanyashadrick.bsky.social

Storm-shook rook #BirdsOfFirle

The older I get, the more I find value in the gaps, the negative space (known as ma in Japanese) that makes sense of the things around it. With this week's cold weather and now strong winds on the way, the trees will soon be bare and there will lots more gaps to absorb and balance us.

One of the most generous online souls I’ve ever encountered… @theunhurriedreader.bsky.social’s book reviews - which began on her exquisite instagram - are now in beautiful new long form on Substack. Love this one of @annelouiseavery.bsky.social’s Reynard the Fox open.substack.com/pub/theunhur...

“…the gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound…Go up into the gaps.” — #AnnieDillard Image from #BirdsOfFirle by Tanya Shadrick

‘I only know that a rook / Ordering its black feathers can so shine / As to seize my senses, haul /My eyelids up, and grant /A brief respite from fear’ — Black Rook in Rainy Weather, #SylviaPlath 📷 from #BirdsOfFirle series by @tanyashadrick.bsky.social

a winter's tale

'Field Ploughed Through' Charcoal & Varnish Private Collection

Hello + welcome to another flurry of new followers! Radio Lento is a podcast of quiet places. Subscribe for weekly episodes. Or listen to the ones we prescribe each day. Everything is recorded by us. Listen ad-free, plus no talking or music. Here's one of our most popular episodes > bit.ly/LenSkY

“As a child in farming country, I’d learnt long ago the parts of animals ­­but only as things dead or diagrammed… I’d been incurious to them as living creatures in relation to one another… Now I couldn’t stop looking.” #BirdsOfFirle www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing...

Le brouillard breton. Novembre.

“I recorded the rooks for hours, months. At first light and last. In sun and storm. Following them on days when my chronic pain lifted just enough for me to track them from Beacon to Bottom; most days using the car as hide.” #BirdsOfFirle www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing...

"The days are getting shorter and colder, but I ask you to remember: even as the Winter comes in, there is Hope and there is Light." ~ Seamus Heaney Towards Another Summer.

& november light smokes in cold burnless dwindling anticyclonic greysky weight informs aching in & out each end of day corvids are soot caught in it commuter traffic on the main drag dots out ellipsis at throb of dark

‘Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.’ — #SylviaPlath

“…the gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound…Go up into the gaps.” — #AnnieDillard Image from #BirdsOfFirle by Tanya Shadrick

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“I recorded the rooks for hours, months. At first light and last. In sun and storm. Following them on days when my chronic pain lifted just enough for me to track them from Beacon to Bottom; most days using the car as hide.” #BirdsOfFirle www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing...

For those I’ve just met here, an intro After a sudden near-death at 33, I determined to live with more risk & generosity. I became a hospice scribe…then a performance artist writing a mile in public…& a publisher of others’ words…now author of The Cure for Sleep, which holds these stories, more

We made a Starter Pack for anyone new to this place so we can find our people. Let us know if you want to be added to it go.bsky.app/73irajm

I wrote a piece of Tanya about my Jackdaw series - she was so encouraging and I will always be so grateful to her. I would highly recommend following Tanya and reading her Birds of Firle project too - you will be inspired.💙

Still miss this jackdaw, my friend for two years. Would sit beside me and bite my thumb when I only fed it, wanting instead to turn pages in my book and have me read to it. Must verbal bird I’ve ever encountered - its own fluency, and appetite for sound, both