Category: Writing
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The shortest day: mental health in a time of change
We’ve reached the shortest day — at least here in the Northern hemisphere. Maximum darkness. Minimum light. As I look at the storm outside my study window, though it’s daytime, it’s gloomy. Barely above half-light. The clouds are low and dense. Everything, sky, earth, trees, the very air itself, sucks light in and gives out…
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Perfect moments: Finding beauty in the present
I sat last night in my kitchen. Wooden table and white wooden chairs. Outside the wind was, for a while, stilled. No stars. I live in a very quiet place. A few white houses. Fields. Some trees. Peat bog. Behind the house, beyond the hill, ocean. I hear the waves some days. A lighthouse up…
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Marketing Alchemy: Turning Gold into Crap.
Apparently ‘authentic’ is word of the year. Dec 26, 2023 The Merriam-Webster Dictionary just announced that ‘authentic’ is their ‘word of the year’. Back in 2021 I wrote a piece about ‘Authenticity’. I thought I’d reconsider what I wrote back then. Does it still stand up, in a marketing world obsessed with selling ‘the real’…
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Feeling like I belong: recovering from boarding school.
Christmas used to be a time of isolation. Slowly, that’s changing. Christmas has always been a difficult time for me. There’s a tension between what we’re told it is — togetherness, family, community, peace, joy, generosity — and how I experienced it. I’ve always experienced it as a time of heightened anxiety and uncertainty. The…
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How to interact online
…and not make things worse while you’re trying to make them better In bitter times, Social Media is a cesspool. I’m talking about how we choose to interact — with friends, colleagues, strangers. I’m talking about how the desire many of us have to do good, to be healthy and contribute to creating a better…
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A path through the mountains
Embracing contradiction and developing adaptability There’s an old story I sometimes tell. It’s from one of the many Buddhist traditions. It goes like this: Some students go to their Master, and say: ‘You’re a fraud! We don’t want to study with you anymore!’ The Master smiled softly and stroked his beard (for this story comes…
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Self is a fiction
You’re not a thing, you’re a relationship How can we live authentically, when we’re each such a tiny part of a vast universe? How do we combine self-care and individual fulfillment, with social engagement and ethical, altruistic life-choices? How can we align our needs, desires and obligations without exploiting others or the earth? We start,…
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Snow
How to build community Where I live, community still matters. People wave when they drive pass. If I’m out walking, often drivers stop to say hello, or ask if I want a lift somewhere. Often enough I don’t lock the house when I go out. If I ask a neighbour for help, I know it’ll…
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We can do this. It takes guts though
To make the world better, we must imagine better. The future is made when we all become artists. ‘Why can’t things be how they used to be?” ‘I remember the good old days…’ ‘Everything was better when we were kids…….’ A brief glance at literature from the last thousand years suggests people have been lamenting…
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Take Action
However inconsequential it seems, an action achieves more than words. The slaughter continues. As you and I go about our day, a population deprived of fundamental rights for decades shelter from carpet bombing. Women, children, men, desperately hunt for food and water to survive the day. Children without parents howl in bombed-out buildings they once…