By Robin Boardman, co-founder of the global Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement; originally published on April 7 2026 on Robin’s website here. Republished with his permission.
This week, I let go of the last small thread of work I’d been holding onto with Revolution in the 21st Century. A few hours here and there — just enough to feel like I was still the person I used to be. Still contributing. Still part of something I’d spent years building.
But my brain has shut down to that kind of work now. So I wrote a gentle goodbye email to the team, and a farewell on social media. I’m hoping that by shrinking my world — and my worries — I might give my body the space it needs to recover.
Now I’m lying down with a migraine, dictating these thoughts into my phone. Speaking, in a strange way, both into the void and into the world’s largest language machine.
Chronic illness takes things from you slowly, and then sometimes all at once. Work — that identity of doing and producing — was one of the last things I was still quietly clutching. Letting it go feels significant. Not just practical, but existential.
Who am I, if not someone who does? What do I do when I see climate collapse unfolding across our gorgeous blue-green earth, yet live bound by these four walls?
I’m still working that out. My values are the same. My love and motivation undimmed. Yet physically, I can give a lot less. So meaning has gotten smaller. More specific.
I’ve started sewing again — patches, small art projects, techniques I haven’t touched since school. I bake for my housemates and neighbours. I keep the common spaces clean because I’ve noticed how much it changes the feeling of coming home to something cared for.
It’s not the life I imagined for my twenties. It looks, in some ways, closer to that of a retiree. But there’s an honest craft in it. A kind of housebound purposefulness — stripped of the stereotype associations of age or gender. Just a person who happens to be home a lot, trying to make that mean something for the people around them.
I hold it lightly. Some days it feels like a silver lining. Other days, it just feels like what’s left.
The hardest part, most days, isn’t the physical limitation. It’s the relational cost.
Illness makes you unpredictable. Unavailable. Hard to reach.
People you love have their own rhythms — their own crises, their own windows of openness. And when your body doesn’t run on a schedule, you miss each other. You fall out of sync.
So you find other ways.
Letters. Voice notes. Small things made with care. Slower, more asynchronous forms of love.
It’s an adjustment. And it’s ongoing.
Not everyone understands. Some are drifting away. That’s okay. I’m taking it one day at a time.
I’m still doing EMDR therapy. Still trying to bring my nervous system somewhere closer to rest — films, audiobooks, sitting in the garden, whatever works on a given day. Still watching for those small windows of recovery, and trying not to measure my life only by their absence.
Six years in, I’m not the person I was before.
But I’m still here. Still finding small ways to nourish the life I actually have. Still trying to keep despair at a distance with purpose, however quiet.
Featured image: ‘Lunchtime Concerts’ 1979; Pencil and collage on paper (College project)
When I left college in 1981, I was offered a council flat on the eighth floor of a tower block in Wood Green, London, so I took it. I had to go through seven doors and a lift to get out, but I didn’t think about it then, I was living in a totally ungrounded, drug-filled fantasy world, and so being in the air suited me. I imagined it as my high-rise apartment in New York. The famous artist. This is who I believed I wanted to become. But I was extremely self-critical, not even knowing I was being so hard on myself. It had been a normal part of my childhood. This and my lack of confidence kept me in a cycle of wanting to block this harshness out.
After 3 years at college, I had had enough of Graphics and began doing freelance illustration. I did commissions for The Magic Circle, BBC, Channel 4, The Fiction Magazine, Spare Rib, World Wildlife Fund, Live Aid and various publishers. My work was small, black and white in ink or pencil, and it was detailed.
Gemini. A commission for ‘The Complete Astrologer’ by Derek and Julia Parker. 1981
I also explored my own realistic and abstract artwork and crafts, sculpture, clothes design, generally with a nature or recycling theme. Artwork was my healing journey from a childhood bereft of emotional comfort.
Embroidery eagles for a shirt collar. 1981
My work got bigger and bigger in size as my confidence grew.
‘Blue Grass’ 1981 pencil and watercolour on paper.
In 1982, when I was 23 I had a motorbike accident and broke my leg in three places. The woman I was living with, Yvette was on the back and thankfully only bruised her knee. It was a complex fracture and they couldn’t operate immediately as I had friction burns on my leg. I found myself in traction, (they put a pin through the ankle and dangle a weight from it to pull apart the bones so they can realign them. Sounds like torture and it was!). Obviously some nurses and doctors were considerate but my experience of doctors standing at the end of my bed with their white coats on and clipboards talking about my condition without including me, stuck with me. Also asking a nurse for a bedpan and being told it wasn’t time for the bedpan round and I must wait. These were just two examples of emotionally unsafe behaviours that stayed with me for a long time. It was frightening.
‘The Resting Biker’ 1982 oil on paper
Yvette came to visit me every day and when I came out of hospital I vowed I would never see a doctor again as I had felt so out of control. It was another pivotal moment where I began unconsciously building my need for complete autonomy and to find a healing space. The accident completely woke me up. I wanted a more spiritual life and I started to explore complementary medicine, diet and fasting to improve my physical health.
I met Simo and Checca, the Italian twins at the women’s bathing pond at Hampstead Heath. Yvette moved out and they came to live with me. They had been brought up in rural Italy and moved to London when they were 11. They had gone to school at the famous Summerhill and were very open minded. They were outgoing sannyasins, disciples of Osho, an Indian Guru and I loved living with them. Through Osho, I learned about meditation, mysticism and spirituality. It was comforting and life affirming. Seeing life through the perspective of spirituality created a positive outlook. I also found a book called “You can heal your life” by Louise Hay and read it over and over. Its basic principle is “you are in control of your mind; it is not in control of you” and she provides exercises to let go of past painful conditioning and find that empowering place of being in control. She is also the queen of positive affirmations.
Simo, Checca and I visited Italy for months and I loved it there. They both also knew about wholefoods and introduced me to cooking brown rice.
In 1987, when I was 28, I was having a conversation with my friend Roger and someone I had just met. This person asked me what I did for a living. I avoided the question and mumbled something about crafts. Roger said ‘she’s an artist!’ That was the first time I began to give myself that title.
That same year, Checca and I went to live in Italy. This created the real foundation for my connection with nature. My first activity was to collect figs from a tree and eat them, I loved it and it made complete sense to me. We collected and cracked pine nuts on a stone and made pesto with fresh basil. We stayed with Checca’s dad for a while. He was an accomplished artist. He foraged, including mushrooms.
‘Antonio’s Garden’ 1990 ink on paper.(Checca’s dad’s house)
After almost a year with Checca’s dad and also staying at our friend Roberto’s house, we found a house to live in at the edge of a quiet village in the countryside. I meditated, (working on my inner demons of depression) and got a job working for Walt Disney drawing cartoons of Donald Duck for ‘Paperino Mese’. I would work at home during the week and go to Milan on Saturdays to the Walt Disney Studio to have my work assessed.
My drawings for ‘Paperino Mese’ 1991
In 1990, when I was 31, I came back to the flat in London which had been kept on by Simo. Checca stayed in Italy, Simo moved out of the flat and I lived there on my own.
As I was healing, the eighth floor of a noisy tower block next to a main road with noisy neighbours all round me and no sound insulation, became a place of deep suffering. I could even hear my neighbour Tracey downstairs sweeping the floor. The sound of Tracey’s bass-heavy music in the night for two years and environmental health being unable to catch her brought me to a nervous breakdown, a catharsis, in 1998 and I was sent to a psychiatric hospital for a week. I then spent further spells in crisis centres and took anti-depressants until one day during a massage at the crisis centre, I broke down and exclaimed to the masseuse, “I’ve lost my soul”. I stopped the anti-depressants immediately.
The outer issue was always noise. The noise that humans create which, to me, made the sounds of nature harder and harder to hear. I longed for silence and the only sounds being the sounds of nature, I was obsessed with it. I felt breathless without it. I told a carer in the crisis centre that I longed to hear the sound of the birds and she said “well, we’ve got a birdsong tape!” I could have screamed; she didn’t get it. I wanted to be so immersed in nature that there was no separation. Birdsong on a tape was just another human invention and all part of my disconnected environmental crisis. I wanted the real thing, but I was on the dole, DHSS (Department of Health and Social Security) feeling ashamed and guilty. My friend Prabhu helped when he said, ‘Don’t feel guilty, it’s DHSS—Divine Help for Spiritual Seekers!`. I was living on £50 a week, no money in the bank and living, ‘existing’ in a noisy tower block in London. Sometimes I sat on my balcony at the flat with my hands over my ears, rocking from the insanity of the noise; traffic, household noises from uninsulated flats, police sirens, fire engines…and nature seemingly so far away out of my reach. My solace was to walk through Alexandra Palace park to Crouch End to buy my shopping from the health food store. Alexandra Palace was a walk across a little park next to my allotment and over the railway bridge. I also started to see counsellors and this gave me a feeling of strength and security. However, I couldn’t get out of the flat. No-one wanted to home swap to a tower block, I was trapped.
‘A Fine Line’ 1998 oil on canvas
I was continuously burdened with the thoughts of how to raise enough money as an artist to get a mortgage and buy my own place. It was a crazy idea, I was an Artist! Money was an alien concept, and consistently making money without feeling utterly stressed was even more alien. I had been on and off the dole for years, coming off to do a few months of freelance work and then signing back on again. I couldn’t cope with the pressure of relentless work; it sucked the joy and the purpose out of making art. Thinking only of the conventional route clearly wasn’t for me, but what was the solution?
I spent the next few years going in and out of the crisis centre, figuring out in my mind, what I wanted. On one visit, I met a man who did photography. He showed me one of his pictures. It was a barge going through a tunnel and there was a small bright light at the end. It made me ask, “What is my light at the end of the tunnel?” and my first thought was “America”! So I made that a goal. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my trip to America was to be another foundation for my deep inner craving for a more natural life.
A temporary but urgent call to action! Centre of the Web partner Versy Talks is kindly running a free public online debate about the publishing industry from 21st to 31st May 2026. It does not take long to take part in the debate and state your opinion, and everyone is welcome! Sharing your voice will help boost both COTW and Versy Talks. Please help us grow, so that we can platform diverse and underrepresented voices from around the world. More information can be found here.
There is a certain “myth” about Korean geography and climate, passed down among those born and raised in Korea, though one senses its meaning gradually fading with age. “A peninsula surrounded by seas on three sides.” “A climate with four distinct seasons.” These are deeply familiar notions of the homeland’s nature and landscape for those born and educated in the south of the Korean Peninsula in the latter half of the twentieth century and after. From early childhood, Koreans were taught to recognize the Korean Peninsula and its surrounding islands—the constitutional territory of the Republic of Korea— as “our country,” likened to the shape of a rising tiger. We believed that the 365 days of this fierce tiger-shaped land, roaring toward northeastern China with the Taebaek Mountains as its spine, were painted in the ever-shifting colors of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. The “distinct four seasons of the complete Korean nation-state,” stretching from Mount Paektu to Mount Halla, formed one of the foundational images of nation and landscape in the minds of Korean children.
To a certain extent, this was grounded in reality. For more than eighty years, the two governments on the Korean Peninsula have regarded each other with hostility while each claims the tiger-shaped peninsula facing the continent as its homeland. The climate, too, is severe and mercurial. In the central region of the peninsula where I was born and have lived for nearly forty years, every year brings heavy snow and bitter cold during the year’s end and beginning, followed by summer heat soaring well above 30 degrees Celsius from June through August. Such cycles have long shaped the rhythms and lifeworlds of ordinary Koreans like myself. Spring and autumn—the transitional periods between winter and summer—were relatively mild seasons, moments of temporary recovery for bodies and minds exhausted by the brutality of the extremes.
Yet Koreans, myself included, also know that this “myth” is slowly collapsing. Our actual lived experience as Koreans educated and raised in Korea increasingly compels us to doubt it. As is well known, the practical territory of Korea for most Koreans is limited to the land south of the Military Demarcation Line, which stretches in a wavering curve from Baengnyeong Island in the west to Goseong County in Gangwon Province in the east. We were taught to regard Mount Paektu, rising 2,744 meters along the Yalu River bordering China, as “the sacred mountain of our people” and “the highest mountain in our country.” Yet from South Korea there is no way to visit “our territory” on Mount Paektu directly. The only possible route is through China, and even then one may only stand on the land outside the territory effectively controlled by North Korea. For this reason, many South Koreans, myself included, tend in practice to think of Mount Halla on Jeju Island, standing 1,947 meters above sea level, as the nation’s highest peak. The collective imaginary geography of a fierce tiger peninsula divided by the Military Demarcation Line often diverges from the actual geographical sensibilities of Koreans like myself. For South Koreans, whose human and material exchanges with North Korea are completely severed, the Republic of Korea is effectively an island.
There is equally much to say about the climate. “Four distinct seasons”? Controversial though it may sound, I increasingly feel that spring and autumn are disappearing from Korea. The 365 days of the year seem to be collapsing into the two brutal extremes of summer and winter. This is not merely a personal impression. According to the Korea Meteorological Administration, the average annual temperature of the Korean Peninsula rose by 1.6 degrees Celsius over roughly a century, from 1912 to 2020. The rate of warming, moreover, continues to accelerate. Over the past thirty years (1991–2020), summer has lengthened by an average of twenty days, and the trend is expected to intensify further. Rising temperatures have caused spring and autumn to converge into summer. As a result, unlike in the past, we now experience the year as though we pass abruptly from summer into winter, having lost the buffer zones once provided by spring and autumn.
What was it like in the past? Consider Monsoon (1935), a work by the celebrated modernist writer Yi Tae-jun (1904–1978) from colonial-era Korea. The story unfolds at the threshold of summer after spring has passed, during the humid and sweltering season Koreans call the ‘Jangma,’ the East Asian monsoon rains. Traditionally, the monsoon season has been difficult for Koreans to endure. Premodern living spaces on the peninsula, designed primarily to survive the harshest period of the year—the winter—were ill-suited to withstand a hot, humid climate that brought nearly thirty percent of the annual rainfall. The narrator, “I” (effectively Yi Tae-jun himself), feels the same. For a man drifting through colonial Korea under Japanese rule without any real occupation, passing his days idly, the monsoon season is unbearable in every sense. Each morning he must wake to the damp smell of mold clinging to the bedroom, bedding, and bookshelves. His wife suffers as well. The oppressive humidity filling the house aggravates her already frayed nerves over their meager household finances. It is hardly surprising that arguments erupt between them. Irritated by his wife’s nagging, “I” has little choice but to leave the house and wander the streets.
Yet he has nowhere in particular to go. He merely drifts endlessly through the humid, sweltering boulevards of colonial Seoul. Thus “I,” as an anonymous urban subject, surrenders himself to the fluid dynamism of metropolitan space, wandering aimlessly in thought. He hopes to run into friends such as Yi Sang and Gubo—modernist writers of colonial Korea, much like Yi Tae-jun himself—men who share his circumstances. But the city does not permit such encounters. There is no special reason for it. His small gamble of going out that day simply fails. Nothing changes. It is only an ordinary afternoon during the monsoon season, much like all our urban walks.
The reality of Korea in the mid-1930s was deeply complex. The Great Depression had made ordinary life even more difficult. Meaningful employment for Korean intellectuals—second-class citizens within the imperial order—was extremely scarce. The narrator’s wandering through the city captures the unremarkable everydayness of that era. His groundless optimism that he might accidentally meet fellow Korean writers in similar circumstances forms the other side of the same coin as his powerlessness before reality. In Gyeongseong, the colonial capital of Korea and a forward base for the Japanese military’s invasion of China, Koreans endured each day under intensifying ideological repression and growing intellectual humiliation. And yet, the worst had not yet arrived. The people of colonial Korea were unknowingly waiting for the total-war era of the 1940s that would soon descend upon them. Of course, neither the narrator nor anyone else knew the fate awaiting them. But while strolling through a colonial Seoul outwardly more glamorous and bustling than ever before, “I” suddenly voices a reflection that seems almost prophetic of the catastrophe to come:
“I transferred to the streetcar at Anguk-dong. It may be Anguk-machi now, but it still feels right to call it Anguk-dong. I cannot help but resent how every dong and ri has been entirely transformed into machi. To regulate culture solely according to the efficiency of business is a misguided importation of Nazism. (…) At this rate, in a few years they may even decide that names like Lee, Kim, Park, and Jeong are too disorderly, and find some way to control citizens’ personal names as well.”
Remarkably, this did in fact come to pass only a few years later. Under the military regime’s radical expansionist policies and in the name of Pan-Asianism, the people of colonial Korea were mobilized into the total-war system and forced to adopt Japanese names in place of their Korean ones. Seen in this light, the narrator’s insight is astonishing. Yet he did not seriously predict the future. It was merely a passing thought during an idle urban stroll.
Now, nearly a century later, in the year 2026, I often walk through the old downtown districts of Seoul where Monsoon was set whenever I feel restless. A brutal winter during which I suffered badly from influenza has finally passed, and I am writing this essay at the threshold of a summer that seems to grow shorter every year. Korea will soon enter the monsoon season again. The monsoon is not the harshest season for Koreans. It is unpleasant and melancholy, but it is not the worst. The worst is yet to come. That is what I feel now. Nor is it merely a premonition about the climate. Like Yi Tae-jun before me, I stand at the threshold of the monsoon and sense keenly that the world’s worst days have not yet arrived. What will become of the world ahead? I pray for everyone’s well-being.
A temporary but urgent call to action! Centre of the Web partner Versy Talks is kindly running a free public online debate about the publishing industry from 21st to 31st May 2026. It does not take long to take part in the debate and state your opinion, and everyone is welcome! Sharing your voice will help boost both COTW and Versy Talks. Please help us grow, so that we can platform diverse and underrepresented voices from around the world. More information can be found here.
she will be ready lying at the sunlight level. she listens with one eye open suspended on her floating seabed. her massive brain is so foggy her huge bulk feels empty. there is no calf in her no urgency to seek out an already absent father.
she looks for her sons brawling, bullying, biting their fins. she must be their keeper now.
she surfaces makes blow hole fountains so explosive that tourist boats head out only as far as they dare.
she follows with her boys foaming the waves into a V. pushes upwards looming over the boats. her aqua jet releases decades of birthing stress showcases her new supremacy.
she zooms back to her pod like a black and white torpedo her youngsters in her wake flying through the sea like it is wet air.
her menopause is past, is post freed from lust she is submerged into her oceanic queendom. Orca Matriarch Granny.
Dedicated to David & Sue & all the present & past staff of Two Whales Coffee Shop
1. Ghosts
The riddle of our living is the genius beneath the suffering. I uncovered this in Newfoundland. I was told a colonial story of which I am the extension.
A fishing vessel was wrecked but for one survivor, brought back to Petty Harbour. Distressed, boatless, for days he paced the coast with a telescope, hoping to spy his shipmates. In the Newfoundland fog I was mistaken for his ghost. I was looking for whales.
I yearned to witness them from craggy cliffs, from where wind-stunted conifers pour lichen over blueberry carpets; nature’s sensuousness expunged old wraith-like memories. A whale-watching ride crafted into a slick but gutsy production in an other-worldly light, gave me finally, an encounter.
Yael, my wife, tortured healer and spy for the unnameable, had flown us to meet these beasts. Yael and I had met at far-flung extremities of ecology, relationship and self.
2. The girls
Among these wilds, in meditation I was drowned. At times a new self surfaced, not owned; a brilliant awareness. It saw entangled bundles of threads I had taken to be me. Futures flashed in prophecy. Yael was calmly cognisant.
Day-to-day perception re-oriented to metaphor. A local woman by her stoop would rather count dead crows than go to the capital. A young boy by his wary glint was planning a life on Mars.
‘There’ll be ways to get there, we don’t know yet’ he proclaimed one day, in passing. Not likely after the mess Musk made.
***
Now it is afterwards. I volunteer in the veg patch of Two Whales Coffee Shop at Port Rexton. It sprung up three decades back after the cod dried up. The grounded faith the owners instil in the teenage girls they employ, will one day save this province. Selfless courage will invigorate a latent networked creativity…will birth heroic genius — recognisable by the drowned. The old C02-farting patriarchy will be defeated by these girls and their loyal partners.
One of Two Whales’ founders is David, also the voluntary ex-chief of the local fire service. Often uncannily in the right place at the right time: perhaps an extension of his tai chi. Catastrophes are common now. He says ‘nothing is black and white’ so some of the locals call him ‘Tai Chi Panda’.
The other of Two Whales’ founders, Sue, works for Decentralised AI (DAI) and bakes excellent cakes, although she’s not sweet-toothed. Her lemon drizzle is a killer. When she married David, she didn’t tell him about her work in bringing down the global capitalist patriarchy and weakening the CIA’s Centralised AI. Before he knew the truth, he thought she spent hours playing patience on the computer. Metaphorically, it was true. Sue had directed Yael to Newfoundland for discussion and operations, of which I am only beginning to learn; us men blindly follow their script.
3. Little starfish, 2029
More climate tipping points were reached this autumn, including the first ice-free summer Arctic. Bewilderedness escalates.
Breaks from former selves are quickened by ecological trauma. An original Beothuk lineage — self-revealed survivors of European genocide — is returning to the islands. Communities are slowly fracturing into those who have guns and those who don’t, with Indigenous folk on both sides. For now, the combined ingenuity of the unarmed prevails, with DAI on their side. I am sure that all will eventually rally round to fight the greater enemy. Weapons may be needed.
Two Whales is now the first Good War Room on Newfoundland. More are emerging. The beauty of bleak boarded-up properties is giving way to practical use. Sunsets burn more bloody than ever and the bears and lynxes become more bold.
On Newfoundland beaches, amidst global ecological and economic collapse, as superpowers battle with each other and try to retain control over decentralised communities like ours, little pink starfish are washing up in numbers. I know that in some species, new starfish can grow from portions of their severed limbs.
It is not just starfish that can regrow from small parts of themselves; from a few thoughts connected across a few individuals, a whole new universe can grow.
Centre of the Web 