beauty, enchantment
After an extended Indian summer, the last few days we’ve seen early morning mists and a delicious freshness to dawn and dusk. I always feel sorry when summer fades and then have a surprise at the recurring mellow beauty of its successor. This year, as the...
beauty, enchantment, innocence
A lovely preparation for the bride of a god, including cowslip-ruby bejewelled acorn cups. Some stole the light from glow-worms’ tails, and wove it into a necklace, and others pulled the ruby spots from cowslip leaves, to set with jewels the acorn cups that...
beauty, colour, discovery, enchantment
What a teacher, this god who exhales perfumes and offers to impart his knowledge of nature’s flourishing. And what a syllabus: “I am the genius of clouds and sunshine,” answered Frey; and as he spoke, the essences of a hundred perfumes were exhaled...
inspiration, resilience
It’s years since I noted this quote and it has recently made its way to the front of the nuannaarpoq pipeline. But only reading it again now do I see how much it resonates with the urgencies of rebalancing our relationship with the natural world around us, and...
beauty, resilience
This is from a collection of interviews with Russian people by the Nobel-prize winning journalist Svetlana Alexievich. Here, one of them explains why there is one sight she has never tired of, and not only due to its beauty. The one thing I haven’t got sick of...
beauty, colour
A lovely summer image of blueness infusing the landscape. The hills Lullingford way were blue as a summer sky, a deep promising blue, and there was a richness on the world. Wishing you richness on the world, wherever you are. Source: Mary Webb, Precious Bane...
beauty, colour, discovery, enchantment, inspiration
Next time your mind is roiling, look outside and see if you can spot any birds, and then watch them. Their capacity to survive, their resilience and resourcefulness, and their sheer uncomplaining chirpiness can often air-lift us out of anxiety. Or at least provide a...
beauty, colour, resilience
Isn’t that exhilarating, the land shouting with grass? And due to successive years of dousing rain, it feels lush and burstingly, verdantly abundant.   There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of...
beauty, colour, enchantment, moments
A searching definition for the precise shade of California poppies, as recalled in Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Not orange, you understand, but golden cream.And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color – not...
beauty, colour, discovery, enchantment, happiness, innocence, memory, nuannaarpoq
A powerful recall of childhood memories regarding the names of plants, the homes of toads, the awakening of birds and the smell of both seasons and trees. A surprisingly gentle recollection in a book which has plenty of violence. I started learning the names of...
authenticity, discovery, resilience
James Rebanks had a childhood awakening when accompanying his grandfather on a tractor, making the connection between his family, their farm, and the gulls and the plough. It’s a fitting start to a heartfelt journey from that ‘ancient farming world’...
authenticity, enchantment, freedom, happiness
Beware the gilded cage, although I don’t believe that living a life on the land need contradict individualism. In the sense that you may develop a stronger sense of self and purpose, and a feeling of contributing to something bigger than yourself, it might...
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...
authenticity, discovery, enchantment, happiness, innocence, moments, nuannaarpoq, sharing
James Rebanks describes a touching element during a class visit to his farm, where one little boy finds solace in simply gathering some eggs or watching the dogs work with the sheep. One day a class came from a distant town, and we were told that one little boy was...
beauty, discovery, enchantment, happiness, memory, moments, nuannaarpoq, sharing
James Rebanks describes a nuannaarpoq moment with his daughter, watching a white owl hunt. And he wishes her all a loving parent could wish a child along with the hope that this magical moment will live on in her memory.    I hope Bea lives for a hundred more years. ...
authenticity, resilience, time
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)...
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...
beauty, colour, discovery, enchantment, innocence, sharing
A moment when the two main characters of Bronte’s less well known novel get to know each other. Shirley, newly arrived, proposes a day in the woods to Caroline, who knows the land and the calendar of its changes in minute detail, a mental map she is happy to...
beauty, colour, moments
What a dazzling description of watching a sunrise from a ship, contrasted perfectly with a preceding sunset. The miracle of both, eternal and always new.  But there was no getting back into the berth again, in Chios harbour, and the sun just rising. And exquisite...
happiness, imagination, moments
The capacity of otters to play and to turn anything they find into a game, is breath-taking. Here is one, having worked out the ludic possibilities inherent in the physics of ping-pong balls, setting off to entertain himself for an hour or two at a stretch.  You can...
enchantment, happiness, moments
An astonishing account of a newborn seal pup responding to a passing cuddle from a human. I liked too that in the end his mother’s love, even in a telling off, proved the stronger attraction. Once … I picked up a brown seal pup no more than a day or so...
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,...
