Rob Cowen > Quotes

“A hoverfly is held in a sunbeam, an insect in amber.”
― Rob Cowen, Common Ground

“Time spent in one place deepens this interaction, creating a melding and meshing that can feel a bit like love. In the drowsy light of the coming evening I not only see where I've walked before, but who I was when I walked there. What I was feeling; what I was thinking. And isn't this how we navigate this sphere? Creating fusions of human and place, attaching meaning and emotions, drawing cognitive maps that make scenes of the realm beyond our comprehension? Our connection to the world is always two things at once: instinctive and augmented.”
― rob cowen, Common Ground

“A hare's movement seems plagued by the flicks and judders of restrained energy, as if carrying an ache that can only be relieved by running. The rest of the time it's as though they're absorbing the earth's energy, tapped into a ley line, shivering with pent-up static”
― Rob Cowen, Common Ground

“Every year we become more insular and more inward-focused, at once connected to an amazing virtual global multiplicity yet often detached from the world in any physical, emotional and moral sense. Every decision, from buying food to switching on a light, is mediated by so many logistical, institutional and technological layers that we have no sense of what our actions are responsible for. Our profound alienation from the earth continues.”
― Rob Cowen, Common Ground

“Ours [Britain's] is a deeply entrenched culture of exclusive land possession, of privilege and poverty, begun with the Norman land grabs and legitimised by a 500-year system that spread from these shores and would go on to change the physical and psychological landscape of the world.”
― Rob Cowen, Common Ground

“With no foliage to subdue it, light blooms and burns in the wood, sending shadows of trees creeping down the slopes, over me, towards the river. It is as though their spirits have slipped from the trunks to drink.”
― Rob Cowen, Common Ground

“We are landless and listless, so estranged from our planet, so removed from the decision-making that governs it, so isolated from each other and the life we share this world with that we're seemingly unable even to come together and prevent global human and environmental catastrophe. We're still being decided and conquered by [land] enclosure, only now the fences are invisible and internal too.”
― Rob Cowen, Common Ground