Stake your life, again, in what you dream
Isn’t this as good a moment as any to stake your life again in what you dream? The start of a new year, a new decade and a once-every-101-years double-digit (101 years since the last one, in 1919, and 101 years until the next, 2121).And if you don’t have...
Happiness and exhilaration
A simple response to what could be taken as a complex question. Send me your own definitions. From the magnificent book which inspired this website – enjoy our quote studded mosaic review. ‘Knud Rasmussen, an arctic traveler, once asked an Eskimo man about...
Still as a stone
Try it, next time you have a quiet moment. Sit, if you will, maybe on a stone, and hold a smaller one in your hand, as a talisman for the history of man. Sense its weight and form. ‘You can sit for a long time with the history of man like a stone in your hand....
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...
Introducing the Isumataq School of Leadership
Barry Lopez’ masterful Arctic Dreams gave me an inkling of a richly philosophical seam in Eskimo language. If you watch, read or listen to the news, you may despair at the apparent absence of anything resembling an isumataq in the upper echelons of government,...
On Arctic trees
An underlying condition of being able to live in the spirit of nuannaarpoq is resilience in the face of setbacks. It’s a quality I particularly admire in people who manage to keep enjoying life and its finer moments even after suffering severe shocks and...
A lexicon of happiness – quviannikumut
A glorious Eskimo word for feeling deeply happy. Wishing you many moments of quviannikumut.Sitting high on a sea cliff in sunny, blustery weather in late June – the familiar sense of expansiveness, of deep exhilaration such weather brings over one, combined with the...
Good thoughts about the universe
Perhaps this could be a Key Performance Indicator for nuannaarpoq.com – that it might become a compendium of good thoughts about the universe from different cultures. Or at least good thoughts about living life fully and sharing its joys.Each culture, it seemed...
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...
How to slow down
Great tip for stepping out of the – or your – rat race, and slowing down. Sometimes when I’m anxious, I suddenly discover my attention has wandered to the birds in the garden, or the ambling hedgehog on his evening walkabout, and by the time I...
Here and now
This enigmatic assertion seems to pour the sum total of our past into the present moment. It reminds me of Henry Miller’s description of the past not as being dead and buried ‘history’ but as something alive and ever fructifying the present. For me...
Listening to landscape
We tend to think of our engagement with landscapes in visual terms – you ‘look’ at a view or a landscape. I like this shift from looking to listening. Ideally both at the same time. Some time in the next week or month, feel free to spend a few...Yes, sign me up!
