Taking Beauty Seriously with Caroline Ross

As the fifth season of The Great Humbling came to an end, we recognised that what we’ve been doing is letting you listen in on a conversation that we would want to have anyway – and this inspired us to expand the podcast, to bring you overheard conversations with other friends, co-conspirators and people who get us thinking.

We’re calling this Homeward Bound, a title that started off as the name of the first online series that Dougald Hine taught with a school called HOME in 2020. For a few series now, we’ve used homewardbound.org as the home for The Great Humbling. These are two images that gesture in the same direction: they name a need to come down to earth, to be called back from the fantasies of endless growth and technological progress, to face the depth of the trouble around and ahead of us, to find the kinds of agency that make sense now.

We’ll continue to make new episodes of The Great Humbling with Ed and Dougald and you’ll find those here, but alongside them there will also be other conversations that pick up on the themes you’ve heard us speak about. To set this rolling, we’re going to put out the podcast version of the series of “overheard conversations” that Dougald has been hosting this spring over at Writing Home, starting with this conversation with Caroline Ross.

This conversation took place on Zoom in March with a live audience made up of subscribers to Writing Home and Uncivil Savant. You’ll hear the first forty minutes of conversation between Caro and Dougald. If you’d like to watch a recording of the Q&A that followed, then head over here and sign up for a paid subscription.

As mentioned in the intro to this episode, this week also sees the start of Further Adventures in Regrowing a Living Culture, a five-week online series where you can join Dougald and other participants from around the world to explore the work of becoming realists of a larger reality, starting where we find ourselves and finding the courage to act. Full details at aschoolcalledhome.org.

Thanks for listening!

Shownotes

Follow Caroline Ross’s work by subscribing to Uncivil Savant and find details of her book, Found and Ground: A practical guide to making your own foraged paints, on her website.

Theresa Emmerich Kamper is the experimental archaeologist who Caro brought to Östervåla last year for a session in Skolunkan, the old shoe shop at a school called HOME.

Antonio Dias wrote about Viking boats in ‘Notes on Ritual’.

David Fleming’s Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It is online here.

Iain McGilchrist’s work on the divided brain is presented in The Mastery and His Emissary and The Matter With Things. Watch Caro’s conversation with Iain here and the story of Dougald and Caro’s trip to visit him on Skye in February 2023 is here.

Here is a taste of the polyphony of Le Mystére des Voix Bulgares.

Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft was published on this side of the Atlantic as The Case for Working With Your Hands.

The quote Dougald struggles to remember from an early president of the United States is this one from John Adams.

Here’s a taste of Caro’s sojourn in the music world, from the album she made with Rothko.

Credits

The music for this episode is ‘Hope and the Forester’ by Blue Dot Sessions.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org