In praise of dubious eggs
A wonderful voice of hope, wryly recognising, however, that potential can be fragile, as eggs can break. But then again, they can hatch…In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities. May your dubious eggs of...
Life surprises
An impressively positive assertion coming from someone who both witnessed and directly suffered from the ‘seething layer of bestial refuse’ of which humans are capable. Gorky’s childhood memoir is a testimony to emotional and physical resilience in...
Begin with breakfast
Wondering how best to get this bright new year off to a good start? Follow this sound advice from the Swallows & Amazons family.  I got up early to make what I thought were muffins until, having liberally adapted the recipe, I realized it was meant to be for...
Choosing hope
A few years ago a friend commented that I was an optimistic person. My response was that optimism isn’t necessarily a question of personality, but can sometimes be a matter of choice. If I dwell on the things that concern me about the world, I can feel as...
A hopeful song
How is it that birdsong can give us such a sense of hope? Today I was walking up into the woods and heard a bird I haven’t heard for years. Hearing it, with instant recognition, transported me to repeated moments earlier in my life when that same song imbued...
Not now, but soon
One of the sweetest sounds of spring is a blossom-bursting tree humming with a hundred bees. And after the blossoms fall and the bees move to the next awakening, you just wait for the fruit to grow and fall. Not now, but soon, with that ‘somehow, some...
New, new, new
Something wonderfully simple in these closing lines of Dante’s Purgatory, which open up a new and dazzling vista. You know he will next embark on his journey up and into Paradise. The cadence is also of someone confidently stepping out into a new phase of life,...
Lent lilies and swallows’ time
A delicious description of the days of mid-April, when the wild narcissus, known as ‘lent lilies’, bloom. We’ve had daffodils and tiny narcissi sunnying the garden for weeks, visited by early-buzzing bees.Williamson’s account includes the...
A spell of peace
An intricate description of the effect an ancient temple can work on the spirit – a falling away of complication and anxiety and a spilling over of clarity and hope. I had such a feeling when a handful of us were allowed to roam untrammelled through ruins and...
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,...
To make hope possible
One aim of nuannaarpoq.com is to reinforce joyful people, even when they feel assailed by humdrum issues or simply by the apparent state of the world. I liked this definition of being radical – making hope possible – and if I manage to do a bit of it here,...Yes, sign me up!
