Movement, Thresholds and the Phenomenological Topography of Place Over the course of the New Landscape Holistic Project, a different understanding of landscape has gradually begun to take shape. What first presented itself as a study of unusual places has become something more precise: an inquiry into the way landscape is lived through the body, memory, … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 10: Reading the Landscape with the Body
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New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 9: Being-in-the-Landscape: Body, Place and the Art of Dwelling
From Looking at Landscape to Being in Landscape There is a point in landscape experience at which looking is no longer enough. A place may first present itself through sight, through the slope of the land, the arrangement of stones, the form of a tree, the opening of a path or the quality of light, … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 9: Being-in-the-Landscape: Body, Place and the Art of Dwelling
New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 8: Phenomenology and Entering the Landscape: Memory, Imagination and the Participatory Field
A Phenomenological Approach to Natural Landscape Cognition A landscape is never encountered as a neutral arrangement of forms. The moment we step into a place, perception is already entangled with memory, expectation, bodily state and imagination, so that a forest which feels protective to one visitor can feel oppressive to another, a mountain can evoke … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 8: Phenomenology and Entering the Landscape: Memory, Imagination and the Participatory Field
New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 7: The Soul of the Tree: Breath, Reciprocity and the Living Landscape
A landscape begins to change when we stop experiencing it as scenery. Hereunder is a segment of our landscape at the Quinta Quixote, where the elemental of the tree can be seen with our imaginative eye... The stones, trees, paths, springs and contours of a place are ordinarily arranged by perception into a world of … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 7: The Soul of the Tree: Breath, Reciprocity and the Living Landscape
New Landscape Holistic Project Part 6: The Place Calls First – The Magick Megalithic Circle at Pocilgais
Elemental Encounter, Bardon’s Soul Mirror, and the Ethics of Landscape Magick From Stone Phenomenology to Elemental Encounter This series (now with 6 parts) began with a simple but difficult decision: not to decide too quickly what the stone formation at Monte Pocilgais is. It may be a natural accumulation, an agricultural clearance cairn, a collapsed … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project Part 6: The Place Calls First – The Magick Megalithic Circle at Pocilgais
New Landscape Holistic Project: The Magick Megalithic Circle Phenomenology
A Complete Series Index On the south-facing slope of Monte Pocilgais, in the eastern Algarve hills between the parishes of São Brás de Alportel and Moncarapacho, there is a grey stone oval approximately fifty metres long and twenty metres wide. The stones are materially foreign to the local geology. Old carob trees and stone oaks … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project: The Magick Megalithic Circle Phenomenology
New Landscape Holistic Project: The Magick Megalithic Circle Phenomenology, part 5: A Practical Guide to Entering the Stone – Six Phases of Deepening Attention at a Charged Landscape Site
Preliminary Note This guide is written for the stone oval at Monte Pocilgais, but its principles apply to any site where a charged landscape presence has been recognised and prepared through repeated attentive visits. It is not a ritual in the theatrical sense. It is a protocol of attention, a sequence of practices that progressively … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project: The Magick Megalithic Circle Phenomenology, part 5: A Practical Guide to Entering the Stone – Six Phases of Deepening Attention at a Charged Landscape Site
New Landscape Holistic Project: The Magick Megalithic Circle Phenomenology, part 4: The Anima of the Stone – From Chthonic Presence to Enchanted Moura, A Three-Stage Journey Across Six Thousand Years
When visitors sit inside the grey stone oval at Monte Pocilgais, what they encounter is rarely a single, clean experience. It is layered. Something is felt before anything is seen. A weight gathers before any image forms. An atmosphere precedes any thought. Only later, if at all, does the presence begin to acquire a face. … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project: The Magick Megalithic Circle Phenomenology, part 4: The Anima of the Stone – From Chthonic Presence to Enchanted Moura, A Three-Stage Journey Across Six Thousand Years
New Landscape Holistic Project: The Magick Megalithic Circle Phenomenology, part 3: The Beings Between Two Hills – Alportel, Moncarapacho, and the Stone Oval at Monte Pocilgais
Monte Pocilgais sits almost exactly between two parishes with old names and long memories. To the north lies São Brás de Alportel. To the south lies Moncarapacho. Both appear in the field notebooks of Ataíde d'Oliveira (1842–1915), the Algarve scholar who spent the final decades of the nineteenth century walking village to village, sitting with … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project: The Magick Megalithic Circle Phenomenology, part 3: The Beings Between Two Hills – Alportel, Moncarapacho, and the Stone Oval at Monte Pocilgais
New Landscape Holistic Project: The Magick Megalithic Circle Phenomenology, part 2:The Moura at the Bottom of the Spring: A Story from São Brás de Alportel and the Living Landscape of the Eastern Algarve
There is a spring in the parish of São Brás de Alportel that has a name older than the town itself. It is called the Fonte do Mouro, the Spring of the Mouro. The name has survived centuries of conquest, conversion, and forgetting. The water still rises from the same place it always did. And … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project: The Magick Megalithic Circle Phenomenology, part 2:The Moura at the Bottom of the Spring: A Story from São Brás de Alportel and the Living Landscape of the Eastern Algarve
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