Day: May 29, 2026

Podcast Episode: Walking The Road Within

~ windinmywheels ~ Leave a comment
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This podcast keeps eyes and ears trained on the British blog windinmywheels.com – dipping into it here and there, rather as one might draw water from a well – actually one of the blog’s recurring themes, come to think of it. And – like all good podcasts – we’re unearthing all kinds of memorable surprises in the wellspring

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Pip: A barn swallow gathering mud, a wren in a Cumbrian hedgerow, and a postscript that somehow contains Simone Weil, Kipling, and Levinas — windinmywheels has been having some mornings.

Mara: This episode moves through two territories: the naming of creation and what it means to belong to it, and then the harder question of who gets told they don’t belong at all.

Pip: Let’s start with the wren, the flute, and the Swedish botanist who named everything — then forgot his names.

The Wren, the Reed, and the Art of Naming

Mara: The opening post – The Universe includes the Wren – in this series asks what it means to pay attention to the particular — a single bird, a Latin binomial — and whether that attention is a distraction from the infinite or the very shape of it.

Pip: The answer arrives early: ‘The Universe doesn’t dwarf the tiny cave-dwelling Wren, or you and me. It includes the Wren, and you and me.’

Mara: That’s the panentheist position laid out plainly — not God above creation, but woven into it. The wren’s outsized song pouring out of hollow places isn’t incidental to the argument; it is the argument.

Pip: And Linnaeus, who spent a lifetime arranging creation, suffered a stroke and forgot his own names. The great namer returned to the earth. Adamah to adamah, dust to dust — which is either tragic or exactly the point, depending on your morning.

Mara: The second post – Thou emptiest again – picks up that image directly. It brings in Tagore’s Gitanjali — the hollowed reed carried over hills and dales, breathed through until it yields something new. The emptied vessel as the condition of music.

Pip: A cave and a flute as the same image. That’s the kind of observation that makes you put your coffee down.

Mara: Kabir arrives here too — the fifteenth-century weaver-mystic from Varanasi who refused to let the divine be housed in any single tradition. He wrote of having been ‘thinking of the difference between water and the waves on it.‘ Eleven words that do the work of an entire theology.

Pip: The motto that quietly accumulates across both posts earns its place: pay attention, name carefully, hold lightly. Which sets up the harder question — what happens when naming is used not to honor, but to exclude?

When Naming Becomes a Weapon

Pip: The third post – Go back to where you came from – in the series asks what it means to name carefully when the names being thrown around are alien, barbarian, illegal, go back to where you came from.

Mara: The post traces those words back to their roots. On the word alien: ‘The strangeness, the menace, the otherness we load upon it came later, and from us.’ Barbarian was onomatopoeic — the sound of a language you hadn’t learned to hear yet.

Pip: So the barbarian is just someone whose music you haven’t learned yet. Which reframes a lot of recent headlines fairly efficiently.

Mara: Arendt appears here — her concept of thoughtlessness, not stupidity but the failure to pause and consider the world from any perspective other than your own. And Toni Morrison: oppressive language, she argued, does not merely represent violence. It is violence.

Mara: Mahmoud Darwish holds the emotional center: ‘I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here.’ Out of perpetual displacement, luminous poetry.

Pip: And the argument circles back to adamah — the Hebrew ground, the earth from which the human is formed. Follow the instruction go back to where you came from with sufficient rigor, the post says, and every line leads to the same address.

Mara: The postscript then maps the road ahead — Simone Weil on rootedness, Levinas on the ethical demand of a face, Etty Hillesum keeping compassion intact inside a contracting world. The series isn’t ending; it’s pausing.

Pip: The cantus firmus – the enduring melody – hums on. The road makes itself by walking.

Pip: What stays is the motto: pay attention, name carefully, hold lightly. Three words that turn out to carry a lot of weight. Roots, mutual regard, compassion — the next mornings are already waiting. We’ll be back when the road offers more.

The continuing road — a postscript

~ windinmywheels ~ 3 Comments
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Postscript to a short series of 3

Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking

Antonio Machado
Proverbios y Cantares

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Adagio – to accompany reading

This series began, as the best things do, without intending to be a series at all. A morning walk. A barn swallow gathering mud. The Latin name of a Wren. And then, one morning leading into the next, something accumulated that felt worth following — until three posts had arrived, not quite planned, not quite finished, and a motto had quietly established itself: pay attention, name carefully, hold lightly.

A postscript, then. Not a conclusion — the cantus firmus doesn’t conclude — but a pause, and a look ahead at some of the views that might be encountered along the road still to be walked.

A dear friend and colleague, now gone from this world but not from memory, once observed — with that particular mixture of rueful amusement and genuine wisdom that was his gift — that ‘the trouble with being retired is that one too often finds the words one couldn’t find or speak when starting out in one’s twenties.’ I’ve been thinking about that remark this morning, on a bright Lakeland day, the lawn freshly mown, three miles already behind me, coffee in hand. This series has been, in its own small way, an act of finding words. The words for what it means to name carefully. To hold lightly. To see the Universe in the Wren, and mean it.

Perhaps that is what the liberal arts, at their best, have always been: not a syllabus, but a vocabulary for being fully human. A set of lenses, each ground differently, each revealing what the others cannot quite reach alone.

And we need those lenses now. Rudyard Kipling — not, perhaps, the first name one expects to encounter in a series that has moved from Linnaeus to Tagore to Kabir to Arendt — wrote a poem whose opening lines have never felt more timely:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too …

The gendered conclusion belongs to its era and hopefully will not detain us. But the wisdom is universal and urgent: the capacity to remain grounded, thoughtful, and generous precisely when the surrounding noise is loudest — to hold one’s head and hold one’s humanity simultaneously — may be among the most important, and most countercultural, acts available to any of us just now.

So: where might the road lead from here? I’m hoping to home in a bit more— one at a time, as the mornings allow, on

Roots: Simone Weil wrote, in 1943, that to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. Her book The Need for Roots has never been more necessary.

Mutual regard: Emmanuel Levinas — less well known than he deserves — built an entire philosophy on a single observation: that the face of another human being constitutes an ethical demand before any word is spoken. The face says ‘do not harm me.’ We might spend a morning with that.

Linguistics and meaning: George Steiner’s After Babel argues that the miracle is not that we so often misunderstand one another across languages and cultures — but that we ever understand each other at all. A humbling and hopeful thought. Will any of my readers want to burrow into some more etymology with me? – not for decoration, not for being ‘precious,’ but because ‘the root and meaning of a word’ is too precious a gift to miss out on. Words can be lighthouses. Life-savers.

Compassion: Etty Hillesum — a young Dutch Jewish woman who died at Auschwitz in 1943 and whose diaries were published only decades later — wrote of finding, and keeping, compassion intact even as the world contracted around her. She is one of the most extraordinary spiritual witnesses of the twentieth century. What can the cries of the suffering teach us about ‘all our yesterdays,’ and our hoped for tomorrows?

Spirituality, cultures, ground, meaning, the liberal arts: all – and so much more – waiting, patient as adamah, for the mornings that will come.

The road, as Machado knew, makes itself by walking. This series arose from a single barn swallow gathering mud at Red Barn. Who knows what future walks will bring – for any of us?

Pay attention. Name carefully. Hold lightly.

The cantus firmus hums her invitation – the road beckons.

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The Universe includes the Wren
Thou emptiest again
Go back to where you came from

The Continuing Road – a Postscript

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archive – a list of all earlier posts

HOME

iii Go back to where you came from

~ windinmywheels ~ 4 Comments
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3 of a short series of 3

I am from there, I am from here,
but I am neither there nor here

Mahmoud Darwish

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Adagio – to accompany reading

Three posts now in what has become, without quite intending it, a small series — arising, as I wrote last time, not from plan but from encounter. First, a walk, some birds, and the great Swedish botanist who spent his lifetime naming creation, only to have his own names taken from him in the end. Then a Bengali poet’s hollowed reed, and a Varanasi weaver who stubbornly refused to let the divine be housed in any one building or adequately named by any one name. Threading through all of it, three words that have become something like this series’ quiet motto: pay attention, name carefully, hold lightly.

This morning I want to sit with a different kind of naming. A harder kind.

The phrase ‘go back to where you came from’ has become one of the defining utterances of our political moment — shouted, tweeted, insinuated, increasingly legitimised — aimed at those deemed not to belong, not to fit, not to be truly ‘of’ whatever place they inhabit. It is meant as an exclusion. But language, examined carefully, has a habit of subverting those who wield it carelessly.

So. Where do we come from?

The word alien comes from the Latin alienus — ‘belonging to another’ — from alius, meaning simply ‘other.’ The strangeness, the menace, the otherness we load upon it came later, and from us. Barbarian — that ancient term of contempt — derives from the Greek barbaros, thought to be onomatopoeic: an imitation of how foreign speech sounded to Greek ears. Bar-bar-bar. Every language, to someone who doesn’t speak it, sounds like babbling. The barbarian is simply the one whose music you haven’t yet learned to hear – the one who unwittingly holds up the mirrored reflection of your own ignorance and parochialism to you. Pagan and heathen were, originally, purely geographic: the paganus was the villager the new faith hadn’t yet reached; the heathen was the one who lived on the heath. Neither began as a moral judgment. Both became weapons.

And then there is treasonous — a word much in circulation just now. It comes from the Latin tradere, ‘to hand over, to pass on.’ And tradere also gives us the word tradition. Treason and tradition share the same root. To betray and to pass on a heritage: linguistically, etymologically twinned. Worth pausing over, I think, in a moment when the word is thrown so freely at those who question inherited arrangements.

Hannah Arendt — herself a stateless refugee, herself someone else’s alien — wrote of what she called thoughtlessness: not stupidity, but the failure to pause, to think, to consider the world from any perspective other than one’s own immediate position. It was thoughtlessness, she argued — not demonic evil, not unique depravity — that enabled ordinary people to participate in extraordinary harm. Those who processed the categories. Applied the labels. People who had simply stopped asking what their words actually meant.

Toni Morrison put it more precisely: oppressive language, she said, does not merely represent violence. It is violence. The naming is not neutral. When we say alien, foreigner, of another faith, go back to where you came from, we are not merely describing. We are doing something to another human being. We are making them less, in the only place it has to happen first: in the mind and the mouth of the one who speaks.

Martin Buber — whose I and Thou has haunted a lifetime of contemplation, and continues to haunt this series — saw this as the fundamental failure, spiritual and ethical at once: the reduction of the Thou to an It. To meet another as a Thou is to encounter them in their irreducible particularity — this person, this life, this story, this adamah-made, stardust-formed creature. To name them ‘alien’ or ‘illegal’ or ‘of another faith’ is to convert them into an It: a category, a problem, a statistic.

The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish — less well known in these islands than he deserves to be — spent his life writing from the experience of perpetual displacement, perpetually named as other, perpetually told he did not belong. He wrote: I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here. Out of that dispossession he made some of the most luminous poetry of the twentieth century. Which is what humans sometimes do with the stones thrown at them: they build something else entirely.

I began this series with adamah — the Hebrew ground, the earth from which the human is formed. We are, every one of us, earthlings. Made of the same dark, generative stuff. The sciences now confirm what the mystics always intuited: trace the human family back far enough, and every line leads to the same small family, on the same continent, beneath the same vast sky. If we were to follow the instruction go back to where you came from with sufficient rigour — with genuine etymological seriousness — we would all arrive at the same address. Dust. The same adamah. The same earth. The same stardust, if you want to go far enough back.

Which I always do.

The Universe doesn’t dwarf the Wren. It includes it. And if it includes Troglodytes troglodytes — the tiny cave-dweller, singing its outsized heart out in a Cumbrian hedgerow — then it includes the one who crosses the sea in a small boat, the one whose prayers sound to unlistening ears like bar-bar-bar, the one who loves differently, the one who has been told, one way or another, their whole life long, that they do not quite belong.

Pay attention. Name carefully. Hold lightly.

The cantus firmus endures. ALL the songs continue.

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The Universe includes the Wren
Thou emptiest again
Go back to where you came from

The Continuing Road – a Postscript

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archive – a list of all earlier posts

HOME

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