Ailsa Ross

I hate chairs.

“How surprised I was by my tears. I had not cried in so long. But when I got up, my body was completely free of pain.”

aka notes from my last time meditating at a ten-day Vipassana silent retreat

I recommend Vipassana meditation (on Substack and also just to anyone who will listen).

I wrote something new on Substack

Tehching Hsieh has said that human time had no meaning when considered against the time of the universe.

The ways of ancient Greece are running through the modern day like veins in marble.

Time is an accordion, the past folding in to meet the present.

A new little Substack post for your perusal

By the 1980s, there were many more women working in the field of anthropology. They were better able to integrate with women in foraging societies, to join in the rhythms of their days. They found that women were picking berries and catching lizards and, yes, hunting.

It is for me

“Impossible to believe that just a few weeks ago I’d been excited to see where girls once dressed in saffron suits and charged around like bears” – aka this week I posted notes from a trip to Greece on Substack.

I wrote a Substack about getting my author photo taken, and what happened just before (bee stings, botched dye jobs etc.

I recommend reading The Sand County Almanac, in which Aldo Leopold writes about some old boards being washed up in the beat-up meadow of his Wisconsin farm. He writes of these boards having value, history, stories, personality. As having a kind of literature not taught on university campuses.

I recommend reading the paper The Adjustment Process of Ex-Buddhist Monks to Life, written by Tim Mapel, an ex-Buddhist monk (free to read on JSTOR)

To wander blindly into a solitudinous situation is like skipping into an untamed forest without a hatchet.

Monks through history have been warned to fear solitude – have been told that if they saw no danger in solitude they were done for.

I'm just saying I just wrote about solitude on my Substack (ailsawrites dot substack dot com)

I recommend no longer using the words sunrise and sunset.

The polymath R. Buckminster Fuller disliked the words "sunrise" and "sunset" because they connote an Earth-centric universe in which the Sun is moving around us.

He preferred the terms "sunsight" and "sunclipse."

Just published the 'very exciting' story of what happened when I lost my sunglasses (nothing good) on Ailsa Ross Dot Substack Dot Com

I mean I have been saying it is the Year of the Cabbage every year since 2017, Vogue.

Thank you from someone with a case of viral pink eye.

Can anyone help me freeze an ARC of my novel HOVEL properly?

Air bubbles are getting the better of me, and my book.

HOVEL is on this list!

The physicist Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau in 1829 happily gazed directly at the sun for 25 seconds, for he was fascinated by the luminous impressions looking made on his retina.

Of course many years later he did, in fact, lose his eyesight.

“In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.” – Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” – Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)

“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.” – Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)

I remember reading Susan Sontag’s essay collection On Photography a few years ago while commissioning travel influencers to go off and take pictures with a ‘beautiful person looking out at a beautiful landscape’ aesthetic. Partly as a result of doing this work while reading Sontag, I became jaded.

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

– Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)

Often I am having dreams about what I would serve in my dream cafe (dark bread, almond cream apple tarts, oatcakes), but really, Patti Smith already created my dream cafe in M Train.

"No music no menus. Just silence black coffee olive oil fresh mint brown bread."

There is a tree that ‘moves’ up to 186,540 miles a year if you count the dancing of its branches.