Compost for the soul roundup: May 2025

Welcome to this month’s compost for the soul roundup!

It’s no secret that I spend a lot of time consuming all sorts of different media about our relationship with the land and the planet more generally. Quite a lot of this is captured in my monthly CPD roundups, but some is not exactly CPD in the conventional sense (and frankly I already do more than enough to meet the requirements of my professional bodies). And rather than letting these brilliant sources of inspiration go un-noted, I share them here, in a monthly roundup of inspiring and moving blogs, podcasts, films, articles, etc.

The idea is to showcase a few things every month that have either shifted my thinking or that have in some other way inspired, uplifted or motivated me over the month. They represent words and ideas that have taken root in my mind, and I offer them to you now, in the hope that you will find fertile ground in your life too.

And if you don’t want to wait a whole month for the next roundup, you might want to follow me on Instagram, where I share one of these every week. In the meantime, you can find previous summaries here.

The Lost Words Blessing (song), from Spell Songs by an ensemble of artists (see website)

This is one of those songs that I can listen to over and over again and never tire of. As the name suggests, there’s very much a mystical quality to this song. Or perhaps ‘mystical’ is the wrong word, since it sets out to wrap up – as I interpret it – a child with all the protection and power that the wild world is able to offer. Anyway, instead of trying to dissect the song, I offer it up to you and leave you to engage with it in whatever way seems best to you:

Look to the sky with care, my love, and speak the things you see.
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow.
And even as you journey on, past dying stars exploding,
Like the gilded one in flight, leave your little gifts of light.
And in the dead of night my darling, find the gleaming eye of starling
Like the little aviator, sing your heart to all dark matter.

Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg1xFYpXuWA

More information about the project at: https://www.thelostwords.org/spell-songs/

Introduction to Soil, an exhibition at Somerset House

This is a bit of an unusual contribution in that I have not been able to identify the contributor, but it was part of the narrative text that introduced visitors to Somerset House’s exhibition about soil (sadly now ended). I offer it in its entirety:

Dig down through the layers of sand, clay, silt and rock to see the secrets and truths they contain. Soil is the receptacle of our history and witness to all our actions. It is the skin of the planet upon which the scars left by humanity’s misuse are visible.

We are only one part of the planet’s complex and sophisticated systems. Humans are not distinct from the natural world nor is it ours to control. Accepting this may allow us to reconsider our relationship with soil and begin building new, reciprocal connections. For too long we have formed extractive associations with the ecosystems of which we are a part, looking to materials like soil for what we can get and how we can profit. We have abused and depleted this magical substance, rendering it incapable of functioning as it should. As we witness crop failures, droughts, flooding and other man-made disasters we are collectively starting to realise what many growers have known for centuries – that with soil, the quality of care you put in determines how well it is able to play its vital role sustaining growth, nourishing us and acting as the crucial lynchpin in the balance of our planet’s very existence.

If we’re serious about being able to continue living on this planet, soil is the place to start.

Look down.

Start the Week – Advocating for Nature (BBC Radio 4)

Every time I listen to anything on Radio 4, I always thinking back to my first year of uni. Like most students, I lived in student accommodation for the first year, which meant I was essentially thrown together with four other random people to share a flat for a year. That was fine, they were all nice enough, but there was a year-long battle over one particular thing: the tuning of the radio. We had a radio in the flat kitchen (I think I put it there), and whenever I was in there cooking, it used to be turned to Radio 4. But whenever I left the room, the dial would mysteriously be switched to another channel. It got to the point where I would know if anyone had been in the kitchen since I last cooked by whether the stations was set to Radio 4 or not. I still listen to a lot of Radio 4 content, though mainly in podcast form now, and I can’t help but think that my erstwhile flatmates were missing out on gems like this:

You [Monica Feria-Tina] talk about in your book [A Barrister for the Earth] about when people have difficulty thinking that, say, a non-sentient thing can have legal rights, or a non-rational thing can have legal rights. You point out that women were only treated as persons in law relatively recently. Children haven’t been treated as persons in law for a long time. Corporations are treated as persons in law and are clearly not sentient. So we are moving through a real shift in mental attitudes here , are we?

MFT: Well yes, it’s hard sometimes, it appears, for a Western approach to understand. Look, we are at a time when software is about to have rights in our modern life, and it already has happened in the US, in some states. And yet it appears difficult for the same people to understand that perhaps living entities may have the same entitlements. And this is about what society considers is important.

Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002bhj8

Rational or Ridicule? A Journey Towards Subtle Agroecologies, by Julia Wright

I really identify with the sentiment expressed in this piece. which explores the tense relationship (?) between what you might call ‘empirical/rationalist’ approaches to agriculture and those that do not fit within this paradigm (what disparagers might call ‘mystical woo-woo’). Like most people raised in a Western education system, I suppose my instinct is more towards the empirical. And yet, I think we miss something important when we abandon (or supress) some of the more spiritual practices associated in this area, which is why I have begun to seek these sorts of ideas out (and part of the reason that this feature of my blog is called ‘compost for the soul’.

Throughout my career I have found attempts to promote organic farming to be met with ridicule from the mainstream research and development sector, and perhaps the ridicule directed at Subtle Agroecologies is only an exacerbated version of this. It is curious that a minority of people, holding the relatively new paradigmatic belief of objective rationalism, feel qualified to shut down the lived experiences of everyone else on the planet over the history of humanity.

As in the case of Cuba, one could attribute this attitude to being at least in part driven by underlying fears and insecurities, and psychologist Anne Baring traces this to the loss of respect for nature and the feminine that was instilled by the Abrahamic religions over the last four millennia. Baring explains that ‘we no longer have access to other levels or modes of consciousness because our ‘rational’ mind has, over the last four centuries, increasingly ridiculed, disparaged and repressed what it has been unable, so far, to accept, prove or comprehend’.

Available at: https://realfarming.org/news-features/rational-or-ridicule-subtle-agroecologies/