Three signs of wisdom: Patience; Memory; Foresight. from The Triads of Ireland, a late 9th-century collection of traditional wisdom (my translation) image: a 1st-century shield mount from Tal-y-llyn, Gwynedd

Scientists reveal portrait of Princess Charlotte in old hat

It is an enormous honour for me to be made chief of Clan Ewing, and a delight to share the day with so many great people

Storytelling this Friday in Fife. Many thanks to Richard and Riikka for asking me to join them. I’m really looking forward to the show! Tickets here: ticketsource.co.uk/crail-com…

This is just like the stories I grew up with of life during the Blitz. I never expected it to happen again in Europe in my lifetime, but this is now 🇺🇦

Bailiehill Fort and Castle O’er

Elon Musk as Spring in Roman art.

We are concluding the Lincolnshire Folk Tales symposium with a storytelling session by Thor Ewing, telling of the Buried Moon 🌙 #LincsFolk25

A delight to perform yesterday at the Lincolnshire Folk Tales Symposium @LincsFolk

The original study notes only the occurrence of "light skin phenotypes" in British DNA for samples from the Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age. biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…

What the study really says: Neolithic: "light skin phenotypes (in five samples from the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Latvia, Sweden, and Ukraine)" Chalcolithic: "light skins [predominate] in Denmark, Great Britain, and Romania" biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…

I have always collected stones

There's something I've been noticing about silence lately—not the absence of sound, but the presence of what emerges when we stop filling every space. Like how a room feels different late at night, when the usual hum of life settles and you can hear the building breathe. I caught myself the other day, sitting at my kitchen table with morning coffee, realizing how rarely I let moments just be moments. There's always this impulse to reach for the phone, to plan the day, to solve some future problem. But what happens in those rare times when we let the moment arrive without agenda? It's like walking into a forest and standing still long enough that the wildlife forgets you're there. Suddenly you notice everything that was already happening—the subtle dance of leaves, the conversation between birds, the way sunlight finds paths between branches. Our inner landscape is like that too. When I resist the urge to direct every moment toward some purpose, when I let myself be as directionless as clouds, something shifts. Thoughts I didn't know I was thinking surface gently. Feelings I've been too busy to feel make themselves known. Not in dramatic ways, but in those small "oh" moments of recognition. Maybe this is what it means to be fully alive—not in the rushing from peak to peak, but in these moments of allowing, of witnessing what's already unfolding. Like how the most intimate conversations often happen in the comfortable silences between words, when we're not trying to say anything at all. It makes me wonder how many conversations with ourselves we miss in our hurry to get somewhere else. How much wisdom sits patiently in these untouched moments, waiting for us to simply stop and notice. These days, I'm trying to create more of these empty spaces in my life. Not as another self-improvement project, but as a kind of listening. Sometimes the most profound thing we can do is nothing at all—just being present enough to hear the quiet stories our lives are always telling us.

The great Alan Watts born on this day in 1915. “For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, “Now, I’ve arrived!” Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.”

If you are a scholar/PGR working on folk tales/folklore, please look at this CFP for a @ahrcpress-funded symposium at @TrentUni @ntuhum in April 2025: lincolnshirefolktalesproject… Keynote speaker: @CeriHoulbrook. Storyteller: @ThorEwing. Travel bursaries available! Please share.

Tempted? Yes, but I had a workshop on traditional ring and chain dancing to present, so I filmed it for you instead. - at Into the Wild Festival last weekend.