Life as a reprieve
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...
Our land is a poem
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...
Slow mo long term
I love the slowness of timber growth and durability. Years ago my brother introduced me to the notion of tempering timber to make it more long-lasting and since then I’ve been captivated by accounts of growing and using wood in a cycle amply exceeding a (human)...
Freedom from alarms
One of the joys of leaving a job is the growing awareness that waking becomes a natural process, rather than an aural shock. This doesn’t necessarily mean waking late, just naturally, and I still get up as early as I ever did, about six in the winter and five...
The timelessness of Troy
Golding took thirty years to complete his own odyssey from Troy to Ithaka, with war and other events intervening between his first attempt, in which he passed a few miles shy of Ithaka, and the second successful venture in the early 1950s. Here he captures the...
What are decades to dreams?
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...
We are love, we are
Recently found a scrap of paper with a list of 1960s-1980s progressive rock and similar bands. I believe I may have jotted them down in a conversation with one of my brothers during which we were revisiting songs we listened to at the time. To show you how young I...
While there is still time
Philip Larkin’s simple plea for kindness feels a timely reminder that yes, while there is still time, we should be kind to one another, whether that hint of time’s limits applies to us as individuals, or to humanity more generally.And if it feels as though...
The past is here, now
Ah, now I see why I always see it, it is with me, not behind me. I am lucky enough to have experienced life in such a way that the past constitutes a trove and not a hobble. The past is never behind. It is always to the side. Source: John Berger, Pig Earth, quoted in...
The long sense of possibility
Insights into creativity and innovation in the song of the nightingale – I particularly like how he draws on what he already knows, as we can draw on our past, both personal and collective, to forge the new. And ‘gurgle-beauty’, what a lovely...
Ah yes, so it does
A simple injunction, but timely, always. Be patient. It takes time for ideas to become clear. Source: Adam Nicolson, Sissinghurst: An unfinished history (London: Harper Press, 2009), p. 120Photo credit: Quadronet_Webdesign at...
Time fell away
This describes one of those timeless stretches when you step outside the sturm und drang and step into flow of one kind or another. This is the detachment we find each in our own way, but commonly it seems to involve contact with a natural setting, or being involved...
Of spacious afternoons
We tend to think of time poverty as a feature of modern life. I was curious that George Eliot, writing in the middle of the 19th century, looked back to Henry Fielding’s time, a good hundred years earlier, noting that time, in his time, was more...
Live to be ancient
Long live trees. I love this observation by a dendrologist who has brought to our attention the hidden life and communication of trees. I also love that trees operate on their own timescale and in so doing display an apparent disinterest in a ‘scientfically...
Of memory and vivid moments
I like Esterly’s skillful account of how the vividness of moments scrambles the natural order of past and present in our memories. Vividness can bring the past to the fore and make the present appear like a long-cherished memory even as it happens.This happens...
Skiing to stop time
A marvelous moonlit moment when David Esterly was skiing to keep the moon in a fix spot, creating a parallax effect. He felt he was arresting time for a moment and luxuriated in its apparent suspension or even reverse. ‘Hah! I could make time run backward. If I...
Lightening hours
Isn’t this a signal of perfect companionship, whether as friends, family or lovers? That hours pass like lightening? ‘We started off in the direction of the village. The hours among the rocks had passed as time passes between lovers, like...
Love that moves
These closing lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy, reached after a long upward journey from the pits to Paradise, leave you floating. And what internal harmony and congruity – your wishes and your will rotating in sync with the same universe-turning...
An ageless conversation
This distinction between individual and collective dreams comes from the book that inspired nuannaarpoq.com. Both types can fuse into our future, making or breaking it in terms of whether it is bright, liveable or simply bleak. Arctic Dreams probes many of the issues...
Fat with time
If you are busy, perhaps worth scheduling in your packed agenda an hour, morning, day, month or year, in which to be ‘fat with time’, free of the need to move or do. Or you could propose a regular spot of unscheduled time to your employer, such as Fat With...
Time equals hope
This short statement caught my attention as I haven’t before seen such a tight correlation between time and hope, though I think about both a great deal. Â But it makes sense, if having time allows fortunate things to come into play: relief, coincidence,...
Time and diamonds
On a day when many people will be spending precious time with friends and family, this quotation resonates. But Christmas Day is one day of the year, and diamond-precious hours can happen any time, in joy or pain. Feel free to send me a description of some hours you...
A timeless afternoon
Timelessness seems to me a frequent result of living a nuannaarpoq moment. Losing sense of time, stepping outside its passing and urgencies. Here the author who brought me the word ‘nuannaarpoq’ describes a timeless afternoon he spent in the Arctic.I...Yes, sign me up!
