Welcome to the 129th edition of Conscious Humanity — it’s so good to see you here!
If you’re new here, my name is Emily and I’m a writer, photographer, teacher in higher education, home gardener, single parent, and all-round creative soul. I am in the midst of figuring out how to extract myself from the capitalist-driven, digitally saturated, artificially “busy” life we’re told we must live in order to survive and “succeed.” And I’m helping you do the same.
Below are seven positive things that have entered my orbit in the last two weeks, all chosen as inspiration to slow down and unearth a more creative, nature-connected life. They’re formatted so you can scan through and dive deeper into those that resonate most with you. I offer these things not as noise, but as nourishment. May at least one thing brighten your day, inspire you to take action, or help you return to what matters most.
I was sad to hear that actor, Sam Neill died earlier this week and many tributes have listed his big roles, especially in Jurassic Park, but others have remembered his quiet manner and this article caught my attention because it says so much about Sam’s character, including as an ally to Indigenous Australians. On the set of Event Horizon, a 1997 Australian Horror movie set in 2047, Sam put an Aboriginal Flag over the Union Jack on the Australian flag that was on his sleeve (see the photo at the top of this article). As Gadigal man, Uncle Robert Merrick, explained:
“He imagined a fairer Australia in a movie literally about hell. And here we are in 2026, closer to his 2047 than to his 1997 and the flag hasn’t budged. The film was fiction. Sadly, so’s the flag.”
Uncle Robert said Sam “got it and never made a fuss about getting it.” “Asked about it years later, he said he wouldn’t do it any different today…” he said. “That’s an ally. Not a speech, not a press release — a quiet little patch on a sleeve, saying ‘this is how it should be.’ Vale, mate. You saw us.”
This reminds me of our conversation about anarchy in the last edition of Conscious Humanity.
Sam Neill leaves such a beautiful legacy.
To a quiet act of a different kind now, and I watched The Earthing Movie (also called Down to Earth on Amazon, but not to be confused with the 2001 Chris Rock movie of the same name) last weekend.
I wasn’t expecting to learn much because telling me that it’s important to walk barefoot in nature is preaching to the converted. I also think it’s crazy that us humans are only just figuring out that extracting ourselves from nature, insulating ourselves from Earth via synthetic soles and barely (or never) touching grass is bad for our health! As Medical Doctor, Laura Koniver said,
“…it’s the most common sense thing that we are organisms that live and grow and are dependent entirely on earth while we’re alive and yet we have completely isolated ourselves from it. We’re so disconnected that it becomes this weird thing if we actually slip our shoes off.”
Well, it’s not weird to me.
But, it was fascinating to learn more of the science behind the practice of “grounding” or “earthing” and the man who started researching it in 1994, Clint Ober.
According to Clint, the positive effects of grounding are based on the fact that there is electrical conductivity between ourselves and the Earth while we’re standing barefooted.
I consider myself someone who walks barefoot a lot, and I go out in nature every day, but after watching the movie I realised that I haven’t actually put my bare feet on a natural surface for months!! Walking barefoot on concrete, or timber, or insulated via shoe soles doesn’t count. Since this epiphany, I’ve been taking 15-minutes every day to stand barefoot in my yard and literally touch grass. I feel like the positive effect of being outside and in natural light could account for people feeling better after “grounding” or “earthing” and I’m still sceptical about the science, considering that Clint Ober sells expensive products that claim to earth those who connect to them. Having said that, I do feel more calm and focused after consciously standing on natural surfaces, so I take that as a positive (and it doesn’t cost a cent to stand outside).
What do you think?
Staying with a similar theme, Rob Walker at The Art of Noticing (TAoN) shared some wisdom from Alastair Humphreys’ new book called Unwilded, designed to help us find our way back to nature.
“Connecting with nature” doesn’t come naturally to everyone; in fact, it can feel super awkward. I’ve had conversations with friends who have said that connecting with nature is a pretty abstract, and even unnatural concept to them. To that point, Alastair suggests that connecting with nature doesn’t require grand gestures (or to be “out there” somewhere far removed from our urban lives), and simple exercises in noticing nature for a few minutes each day can be the perfect antidote to our digital lives. He says,
“My bold claim is that spending just fifteen minutes outdoors each day, paying attention and beginning to care, can be the first stepping stone towards repairing both ourselves and the living world. It might involve climbing a tree once a month, taking your coffee outside, making pinhole cameras from beer cans collected on litter picks, rewilding your garden, joining parkrun, or simply moving your next Zoom meeting outdoors. This is accessible outdoors time for anyone and everyone.”
If standing outdoors with your bare feet on the grass for 15 minutes/day is too unstructured for you, Alastair suggests a shorter weekly exercise in noticing an aspect of nature can be a good way to get started. For example, taking a photo of a tree close to your house, every week for a year (the same tree every week). As Alastair explains, when he did this exercise, it had a surprising effect on his outlook:
“After just a few weeks, this tiny action became something I looked forward to. By the end of the year, it had shown me clearly what a wild gallop our little planet makes around the sun over the course of a year. The miracle of the universe was revealed to me through the changes you notice when you do something as small as snap a photo on your phone once a week.”
I think this is a great idea and it will be especially easy to do (and remember) if you choose a tree that you already pass as part of your regular routine. You can also put a reminder in your phone to take the photo at a specific day and time each week!
Once you have spent some time observing nature, you might find, like me, you’re suddenly more inspired to do creative work. Right now, I’m on a mission to improve my drawing skills to help with my watercolour painting and other creative projects. In a happy accident, I was scrolling through comments on a YouTube painting tutorial and one person had commented, “I can’t draw” to which another one replied, “Anyone can draw. Read Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” So, off I went to find that book (first published in 1979 and now in its Fourth Edition)!
As soon as I started reading, I realised that I had heard and practiced fragments of Betty’s advice about how to draw (or more accurately, how to perceive) in other courses and videos etc., but had never come across the whole, original theory.
In a nutshell, Betty explains the five basic skills of drawing, which are:
the perception of edges,
the perception of spaces,
the perception of relationships,
the perception of lights and shadows, and
the perception of the whole, or gestalt.
Once mastered, these five skills translate into a global skill, just like reading, or riding a bike, that you never forget. From that point, it’s a matter of honing your finer skills and personal expression, but the fundamentals are there for all time.
Betty’s method is grounded in neuropsychology and teaches students to truly see, rather than allowing our brains to interpret visual information according to what we expect to see, or decide that we’re seeing (which is what our brains normally do). And as Betty explains, the benefits of learning perception extend far beyond the drawing itself:
“The brain’s editing is somehow put on hold, thereby permitting one to see more fully and perhaps more realistically. This experience is often moving and deeply affecting. My students’ most frequent comments after learning to draw are “Life seems so much richer now” and “I didn’t realize how much there is to see and how beautiful things are.” This new way of seeing may alone be reason enough to learn to draw.”
Betty hasn’t only taught this system to aspiring artists either. She teaches drawing skills in corporate environments as a method for problem solving. “In drawing, you will delve deeply into a part of your mind too often obscured by endless details of daily life. From this experience you will develop your ability to perceive things freshly in their totality, to see underlying patterns and possibilities for new combinations.”
I have done three exercises from the book so far and my skills in perception and drawing have already improved, so I’m really excited to keep going. If this has piqued your interest, I highly recommend Betty’s book. You might surprise yourself with newfound confidence that emerges through understanding your own mind and its workings more deeply!
To creativity of a different kind now, and I have mentioned Abi Awomosu’s book called How Not to Use AI here before and I’m still doing a lot of reading and reflecting and experimenting with generative Artificial Intelligence to see where it may fit in my life; not by optimising or augmenting current systems or processes, but in achieving what couldn’t be achieved before. Opening new possibilities in thought and expression. And I am the first to admit there are contradictions galore in this space! I am using AI tools, and I also made a submission to the Australian senate inquiry into Artificial intelligence and data centres last weekend, urging our government to mandate enforceable standards in renewable electricity generation and water use/recycling by data centre companies. Anyway, this Substack post by Abi is long (very long!) and explains her philosophy on The Soul Curriculum (yes, use discretion; she’s selling a product here), which promises a different way of using AI that doesn’t purely rely on running old systems faster.
Even if you’re not using AI, Abi’s point that our lives were already automated before generative AI arrived on the scene is an interesting one to reflect upon:
“Everyone is afraid AI will automate their job. But the biggest automation was never going to be your job.
It was your life.
School, job, money, marriage, mortgage, children, promotion, retirement, respectability, optimisation, performance, productivity – a whole course laid out before you were old enough to ask whether you wanted to run it. The industrial world did not only automate factories. It automated people. It automated desire, adulthood, success, time. It automated the imagination so thoroughly that a great many people now experience freedom itself as confusion. And that fixed sequence, sold to you as the natural order of a life, is the same enclosure this whole piece has been tracing – a course narrowed into a track, exactly the way universitas was narrowed into rooms. We were not taught to author ourselves. We were taught to comply with an inherited script and call it maturity.”
And, Abi says, we can use AI to copy this model, or ask it for something very different by starting with what speaks to our soul (I know this may sound “woo woo” but it’s truly worth considering):
“AI can be a copying machine for the industrial default – or it can be an archaeological tool for recovering the forms of intelligence the default buried.
But this is only if you know what to ask it for.
And you cannot ask for what you have not yet let yourself remember. Skip the recovery, and the machine simply regenerates the translation.”
Abi suggests five practices to adopt when prompting AI tools and one in particular resonated with me: soul searching. Even if you’re not using AI tools, you could consider these questions more generally:
“What is mine to do – not what is impressive, not what is strategic, not what the market rewards this quarter, not what the algorithm can understand. What work has my life been preparing me for before I had the confidence to call it work. What question keeps returning. What wound keeps becoming a method. What grief keeps becoming a map. Without it, you produce work that is technically accomplished and privately meaningless – competent, and never yours.”
Ha, “technically accomplished and privately meaningless” - I think there are a lot of people in the workforce who might identify with this statement in some way!?
I’d love to hear where your thinking is on this - whether you’re using AI tools, or not.
To something more simple now and while Conscious Humanity is all about positive thought and action, I decided this little piece of gentle wisdom deserved some space here because in its own way, it is positive.
I saw a quote from poet and presenter of the Poetry Unbound podcast, Padraig O’Tuoma this week and it struck me as such a lovely way to describe sadness as a passing emotion:
“In Irish when you talk about an emotion, you don’t say, ‘I am sad.’ You’d say, ‘Sadness is on me – Ta’ Bron Orm.’ I love that because there’s an implication of not identifying yourself with the emotion fully. I am not sad, it’s just that sadness is on me for a while. Something else will be on me another time, and that’s a good thing to recognise.”
Wow, how lovely.
Neil the Seal visits Lutruwita/Tasmania twice a year to rest and moult. He got up to some mischief while he was on land this time (see below), but has now safely returned to sea. He’s likely on his way to Southern feeding grounds before his next visit to Tassie.
Bon voyage, Neil!
And that’s the end of this edition! I hope at least one thing brightened your day, inspired you to take action, or helped you return to what matters most.
🙏🏻
P.S. If you like a quick game/challenge (and no need to sign-in or register an account), Dialed.gg tests your ability to remember and recreate five colours, found via NYT ‘Good List’ newsletter.
Thanks for reading Conscious Humanity by Emily Wade - you are amazing! If this post brought a smile to your face, please share it with a friend or two (you can forward this email).
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