life, sharing
Saint-Exupery highlights the essentials of life revealed at the moment of death. A reminder to be conscious of the mesh of relationships binding us to life, while we live. And I would expand the notion to include our relationships to places and other species. When...
enchantment, life, time
In the day to day whoosh of things to do and deal with, we may be conscious of our time being limited on a daily or hourly basis, but often forget the bigger time limit, life itself.  The grandmother of the French artist Françoise Gilot reminds us that life is a...
authenticity, life
A succinct testimony to a life aligned with its owner. Rebanks has also spent decades trying to align farming in an industrialised, globalised context with his values and the demands of sustainability. Despite the pressures, he easily concludes he wouldn’t...
authenticity, beauty, colour, inspiration, life
This poem, ‘Into Battle’, was written in 1915 by an officer serving in the First World War, Julian Grenfell. It was published in The Times the day after his death from war wounds. The poems draws on different threads of life as providing strength to the...
beauty, life, time
A lovely description of a landscape as poetry in motion, slow sedimentary layers added by successive generations. Maybe recent layers showing devastation of rich old forests and all round biodiversity will give way to more trees, plants and a wide range of species of...
happiness, kindness, life
Some wise words from Aaron Copland to a young Leonard Bernstein. They maintained a close friendship and correspondence for decades, and I like the advice. It reminds me of a word from a father to a daughter in an American novel: ‘Slow down, Ivy, slow...
happiness, life
An interesting character in Goncharov’s 1859 novel Oblomov is Andrey, close friend of the eponymous hero. He starts out as an exuberant, feisty boy and grows into a disarmingly and ebulliently self-assured, balanced and capable man who tries to rouse his...
authenticity, awards, beauty, colour, enchantment, freedom, happiness, imagination, innocence, inspiration, kindness, life, resilience
Our third nominee for a Nuannaarpoq Award is: Mary Delany (1700-1788) Parameters:Â 18th century, British, real, human, female, now living elsewhere Nuannaarpoq qualities: authenticity, enchantment, imagination, innocence, kindness, resilience References:Â Molly...
authenticity, inspiration, life
This recently discovered gem accompanied us twice as we drove down, and two weeks later, up, the Italian side of the Grand St Bernard Pass between Italy and Switzerland. It’s one of the most beautiful passes we’ve ever been through, and the road is...
beauty, discovery, enchantment, freedom, happiness, life
Yes, sometimes I’m late to the game. Such as ‘discovering’ the Moody Blues in 2021, a mere half century after they were discoverable. We were driving over the Grand St Bernard Pass and had picked up a second hand CD (remember those?) which we...
life, moments, sharing
The cool and collected Narziss finally tells his lifelong friend Goldmund how much he means to him. Goldmund wanders the world for years, the wilder of the two, and perhaps in some senses the less wise, eventually returning to his childhood home, and friend-mentor...
discovery, life
A wonderful comment on life – you can come up with as many fine formulae as you like, it will sooner or later defy our clever definitions. Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. Part of me says, ‘Thank goodness’. For other comments on this...
discovery, freedom, happiness, life, memory, resilience
Ivan is a character, apparently based on Vasily Grossman’s brother-in-law, who survived 30 years in a gulag before being released into ‘normal’ life. He is resilient enough to be able to rediscover the existence of love and kindness, as well as...
discovery, life, time
Golding, sailing past the island of Ithaka, thought he would return and land within a few months. Then war and life intervened, and it took him more than a quarter of a century. Which goes to show, hang on to your dreams long enough and they can come true. Or, more...
authenticity, inspiration, life
Isn’t this all we’re trying to do when we talk about ‘sustainability’, ‘circular economy’, or climate change? When it’s put so simply, it sounds easy, but we have a long way to go before we can see our stifling ignorance fall...
beauty, colour, enchantment, life
A soughing sense of spring surging in the dense-leaved trees.  You can hear the branches, brushing against each other in the dancing breeze, whispering like a wish in your ear, enticing you to begin afresh, afresh, afresh. Yet still the unresting castles threshIn...
beauty, life
A step in the process of creation, where the Creator takes a moment to teach the tree its leaf. They learned well, and this is the season we see them unfurl their lessons, each perfectly mastered. Everywhere he taughtThe tree its leaf.  Source: Ted Hughes,...
discovery, freedom, life, resilience
This man is one who returns from the dead, from decades in a gulag in Siberia, released during one or another political thaw. He returns to ‘normal’ life, and it is interesting to see the signs of it which make him realise it had continued even as he was...
life, sharing
One day I decided not to rely solely on Charlton Heston’s interpretation of El Cid but to go to the original (with the aid of a parallel translation). The epic Song of the Cid dates from around the second half of the 12th century and in places has a touching...
beauty, enchantment, life, sharing
I’m always touched by people connecting to us from the past, throwing their light into an unknown future in addressing, in a human and friendly way, people not even born. George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte do this by addressing readers directly, and you, reading...
discovery, life
The candour of this statement struck me, and also reassured me that my own paltry attempts at living a ‘moral and compassionate existence’ are no worse than can be expected of an average human in a human world. I accepted very young that questioning is...
authenticity, innocence, life
This current and timeless phrase – with that curious ‘inmate’ alongside the energetic ‘active’ – comes from Wordsworth’s image of himself as an infant, tapping into some greater connectivity than mere wifi systems and smart...
inspiration, life
On this day, which many of us celebrate as being connected in some way to light and at very least to peace on earth and goodwill to all, let’s enjoy the little known fact that in the Divine Comedy:Â Dante ends each book with the word “stars”.And so he...
life, resilience
This year has seen a surfeit of old people whose hold on life has slipped. Hoyle is an ornery character but one who nevertheless has the spirit of nuannaarpoq, partly by turning a health problem to good use: easily out of breath when he walks, he just walks more...
