Happenings

Horizon scanning, slow media and things with hooves

As 2026 brightens into this third month, I realise that my writing is still in hibernation. Whilst working on a longer piece to send you (about neurodivergence, language and blossoming), here are a few snippets of upcoming joy and things I am thinking about right now.

Getting back to PhD and freelance life full-time has surprised me with several lovely invitations to be involved in projects. On Saturday 21st March you can join Mari Ellis Dunning and I on a walking, writing and drawing workshop in Aberystwyth as part of the Spineless Wonders project and Dinas Llên: City of Literature. Within the same set of events, there is also Reading the Landscape, a mini symposium at Aberystwyth School of Art. This event features special guests and pecha kucha talks from some of us PhD researchers, who will very much appreciate the chance to get out about with real humans after a long winter.

If you are local to North Wales, save the dates of 25-26 April for Under the Aqueduct, and arts and poetry weekend organised by ETA (Empathy Through Art CIC). This event is part of the Afonydd series and linked to a poetry book about Welsh rivers which came out last year. Co-organising this event with collaborator friends Suzanne Iuppa, Emma-Jayne Holmes and Natasha Borton is another opportunity to open into Spring. There will be a rivers themed poetry event 1-4pm at Froncysyllte Community Centre on Sunday 26th, in aid of the Welsh Dee Trust. join us!

Words have been fewer this year, as I have been working on my PhD projects, making more media and listening to the landscape. You can now check out the latest walking interlude Castle Walls / Ancient Oak and a new episode of Desire Lines podcast, in which I speak with Jo Hazell Watkins about women’s strength as desire line. This is a slight sidestep from my usual landscape-based topics, but still an important aspect of ecofeminism and walking arts.

As the year of the horse starts to run a little faster, I am trying to go about a lot of projects and being mid-way through a PhD without feeling like life is a production line. It is very easy in this world to be seduced by busy-ness, and submit to there being no extra space around things. I was interested this week to learn that ‘horizon scanning’ is a thing; a term used a lot in business to think about long-term plans and projects. What I am thinking, is that we divergent wanderers could steal this term back from the realms of board-rooms and pop it in it’s rightful place; that restful moving moment of oversight along an actual horizon. or a pause in time to hover at the edges of our doings.

Recovery from bereavement, traumatic events, PTSD and life changes apparently can’t happen when we are in the sympathetic and autonomic nervous system states. We have to be in prolonged states of the parasympathetic nervous system being active, not just twenty minutes after a hot bath. This is my aim for the year, consistent, mindful doing, alongside stopping for a good horizon scan or nap when the tension and speed racks up. A concept that is helping me is the idea of Slow Media. This movement grew out of other ‘slow’ campaigns such as Slow Food and Slow Travel.

The slow movement is not about doing everything at a snail's pace. Nor is it a Luddite attempt to drag the whole planet back to some pre-industrial utopia. The movement is made up of people who want to live better in a fast-paced, modern world. The slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word: balance. Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and be slow when slowness is called for. Seek to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto - the right speed.

Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

With roots in journalism fields, Slow Media (as I am asserting in my PhD) can be claimed as an art form, both in creation and consumption. I look forward to reading a few books on this theme in the upcoming weeks.

Slow Media by Jennifer Rauch (www.slowmedia.org)

Farewell for now folks, I will be back later this month with some longer writings.