For over thirty years, my painting studio has been a sanctuary for exploring the interconnectedness of all things – a place where the boundaries between canvas, artist and biosphere regularly dissolve into puddles of intuitively daubed paint. It represents a landscape of sorts, a different perspective, removed from the one I would otherwise inhabit full of daily domestic routine and convention. Hanging out in the studio, occasionally committing to creative activity, allows a distinct, more detached state of mind to emerge. It sometimes approaches a truthfulness: simply me (whatever that is) and some materials being arranged in different ways into temporary outcomes. The landscape unfolds in me, through me and around me – an evolutionary microcosm as creative practice.

But of late, as I look out across the calming evolutionary macrocosm of the woodland beyond the studio windows, I find myself less able to detach myself from the nagging persistence of the current digital and political horizon. Any interconnectedness has felt less like a divine web and more like the tangled thicket of brambles at the end of my garden that my controlling nature can’t abide. Despite the thorns, I return time and again to mercilessly hack back the unruly mess in search of order, but the enemy keeps growing and spreading…welcome to the Libra Full Moon of March 2026.

In the astrological theatre, Libra is the arbiter of balance, the cosmic diplomat holding the scales. Usually, this lunation is an invitation to find harmony in our relationships and, from our peculiarly human perspective, we are unmistakably in relationships with everything: me here and that there; me and you; us and them. But this year, the scales seem out of whack; not just wobbling, they appear to have been repurposed as a catapult for the grotesque, the absurd and fallacious world of alternative facts. Stuff just isn’t making sense. We lurch from one falsehood to the next, barely knowing who or what to trust.

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.

(Stephen King)

Ours is an era where lying in public office has moved from a regrettable scandal to a viable career strategy1. It used to be that if a politician was caught deceiving the public, they’d resign and find themselves in the ensuing years ‘spending more time with their family’ (usually a lie in itself). Now, a blatant deception is simply a narrative pivot around which narcissistic tendencies can blossom.

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

(Albert Einstein)

The hallucinations on social media are even more distorted. Our feeds are governed by algorithms that willingly sacrifice truth on the altar of engagement. We are fed a diet of digital shadows, increasingly fabricated by AI, curated to keep us nodding or fuming and always scrolling, while the platforms themselves perpetuate the ultimate lie: that we are ‘connected’ when we are actually more isolated than ever, staring at glowing glass in darkened rooms.

Lost in the digital shadows

Which brings me neatly to the pertinent philosophical allegory of Plato’s Cave2. For those who skipped that particular philosophy lecture, back in the ancient Greek day, goodtime-charlie Plato3 imagined prisoners since birth, chained in a subterranean cave, watching shadows cast on a wall by objects passing in front of a blazing fire situated behind them. To the prisoners, those shadows are the only perceptible ‘reality’. Despite the bleary image quality, the captive audience derives ‘meaning’ from the shadowy movements in the gloom, highlighting how humans often mistake sensory perceptions and illusions for true reality.

In the analogy a prisoner manages to escape, enduring an arduous ascent to the world outside the cave. Once his eyes adjust to the sunlight, he can see real objects and the true nature of the world. He is astounded by the beauty. He can’t wait to get back to enlighten and liberate his old cellmates, but the remaining prisoners cruelly mock the escapee on his return, believing the outer world to be an apparition, and refuse to leave the confines of the cave.

Could a parallel to the cave analogy be made with our smartphones as the fire and content as the shadow? We argue passionately about the shape of the shadow, oblivious to the fact that the shadow isn’t the thing itself. Most of us seem resigned to chasing shadows of an experience rather than the actual experience. The digital realm has become a rabbit hole of seductive distraction and suggestion down which we can lose connection with the real world that lives and breathes outside its limited artificial lair.

Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is terror-inducing, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth.

(Martin Heidegger)

But let’s go a non-duality4 step further into the Neo-Platonic5 philosophical premise that there is actually no ‘me’ or 'other', merely a singular, flowing expression of unified consciousness that continually unfolds in each entirely new and distinct moment. The ‘human experience', as we’ve constructed it into our very man-made world, starts to look like a magnificent misinterpretation, a multi-faceted peak-time broadcast of fake news.

In the fictitious world of duality we spin the yarn of separation, driven by easily identifiable polarities and the cultural constructs of life ‘success’. We adopt a gender by default, convince ourselves we are man or woman and shapeshift to those conventions, a collection of memories and opinions trapped in a reductionist meat suit. Whereas non-dualism views the 'person', the who we think we are, as just another shadow on the wall, focusing more specifically on the reality of what we are: an integral element in the multiplicity and diversity of existence, itself an indivisible and complete, perfect whole. It transpires that what we are is the light outside the cave.

So, if the world feels broken and out of kilter, with politicians and religious leaders taking the duplicitous, patriarchal lead, and when even our sense of self appears to be a convenient fiction, what remains that is true?

Truth won’t be found in a tweet or a manifesto. It’s located in the unfolding of the moment – the is-ness of each progressive now. It’s in the weight of a brush in my hand, the dripping paint finding its own path down a canvas, the woodland daffodils unfurling to the sun in the cold spring air, and the birdsong; the townsfolk on their way to work beyond the trees as another day dawns within the incontestable living fact of awareness itself. Truth can be found in the silence that endures when we tune out of the white noise of modern living and pause for a deeper breath.

Join art club

Every Easter for the past 9 years, a group of close friends and I gather together to make art in the creative collective we have come to know as Art Club. The studio becomes a hive of positive thought, word and action, a hub of love and imagination. Our long weekend together becomes a forum in which participants can pause for that deeper breath and hopefully find new inspiration.

Each year we set a new theme to work from, our aim being to reconnect with each other and our creative whims, producing an atmosphere of mutual support that will carry us through the 12 months until Art Club convenes again. The artwork produced is a welcome, joyous bi-product, no more than that.

Having previously declared that truth won't be found in a manifesto, a clearly stated signal of personal intent can nonetheless point in the right direction. Here are the rules of engagement for Art Club 26:

In an attempt to evoke an individual and collective life-affirming love transfusion in a haemorrhaging hateful basket case of a world, participants in this year's gathering are encouraged to bring any recently completed creative work (however small) that speaks to last year's theme of 'Resolution'. There will be an initial brief opportunity to show, tell and discuss this work before we swiftly embark on this year's journey of positivity under the new theme of 'Alienation'.

This year's theme may initially appear a negative and contradictory starting point, but the organising committee felt that to dismiss the global rise of the autocratic political right and its warring preoccupation with self-interest during the last 12 months would be tantamount to denial. From the (quite literal) recent ruins of divisive human catastrophe, our collective have the opportunity to transform fear and hate in our own lives to love and trust. Our justifiable anger can be channelled into creative production symbolic of hope. From our position of privilege we can reaffirm our creative commitment to boldly oppose all efforts by those who seek to dehumanise and destroy, building instead increased faith in the power of fraternity, fellowship and community wherever we find ourselves.

As ever, this alchemical process may result in a painting, drawing, photograph, musical composition, script, film or poem, but equal validity might also be given to a considered statement of intent through which subsequent behaviour and activity may be focused for the next 12 months.

Art Club is not just an annual forum for courageous creative endeavour; it is an enduring philosophy that supports participants to be agents of change and love in a man-made world desperately needing both. As we walk the Art Club talk, so we clear the minefields of misdirected human energy, in time enabling others to follow the same creative path to joy unimpeded.

May Art Club 26 herald the joyful reunification of humanity with its divine purpose for the benefit of all.

Bring it on.

This week’s Libra Full Moon might influence attendees of Art Club 26 to rebalance the absolute truth (that everything is one) with the relative truth (that we still have to put the bins out on Monday night). It might help us keep things real. It might even help us align our creativity with Plato’s philosophical triad (often referred to as ‘the transcendentals6’) of “the Good, the True and the Beautiful”.

For practical reasons, Art Club tends to be quite an exclusive affair due to the limited space at our disposal, but if you feel inclined to join the fraternal creative vibe this Easter, why not break out the paintbox or coloured pencils and express yourself with love? Controversially, may I suggest you resist the temptation to post the resulting artworks anywhere in the digital realm? Neither you nor your creativity requires external validation. Instead, let’s ensure our efforts retain their essential goodness, truth and beauty in the here and now by treasuring them purely as moments of creative expression. Such connections with the real world are rare and in desperate short supply.

Despite the illusions of separation we contrive to create, we cannot break our unending union with everything in existence. Ancient spiritual traditions and modern science converge7 and concur. The untruths in this world are analogous ripples on the surface of a very deep, very still, metaphoric ocean. This Libra Full Moon, let the ripples ripple; let them be. Instead, take a deep breath and sink into the reassuring fathomless depths