“No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.”– Nassim Nicholas Taleb The first two weeks of February continued the drab, grey, rainy weather that set the tone for winter this year. Water oozed out the soil, first turning our little access road into […]
“Most of us are moving through such an undergrowth of excess that we cannot sense the shape of ourselves anymore.” – John O’Donohue October has been an exceptionally busy month, as a lot had to get done before I handed the quinta over to our house sitter on the 16th, and join Michael in South Africa […]
“Change is slow and gradual. It requires hard work, a bit of luck, a fair amount of self-sacrifice, a lot of patience.” – Robert Greene April has been a whirl of activity and colour. The landscape is lush and vibrant with the iridescent green of spring, interspersed with an array of colourful flowers and grass […]
“Every food has an inspiring birthplace and holds flavors directly connected to the places and people that make them.”– Simran Sethi Spring on the quinta is a tumultuous explosion of colour – white, yellow, and purple vie for attention, while the calls of the cuckoo bird punctuate a collective increase in the birdsong that fills […]
“Every human person is inevitably involved with two worlds: the world they carry within them and the world that is out there. All thinking, all writing, all action, all creation and all destruction is about that bridge between the two worlds. All thought is about putting a face on experience.” – John O’Donohue My writing […]
“Others can stop you temporarily – you are the only one who can do it permanently.”– Zig Ziglar During the last couple of months Michael and I have seriously questioned the sanity of the choices we´ve made in recent years. Our struggles with the bureaucratic system, and finding people who work to our standards in […]
“Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience.” – Rebecca Solnit (from: A Field Guide to Getting Lost) When one is focused on realising dreams […]
“. . . it’s the human-made landscape, not the natural one, that will shape our actions – including the ways that we’ve remade the physical environment. Geography isn’t ‘unchanging’, as Kaplan writes, but volatile. And where we’re going, the old maps won’t help.”– Daniel Immerwahr After having lived on the quinta fulltime for two years, […]
“We must strive to become intellectual nomads, keep moving, keep learning, resist confining ourselves in any cultural or mental ghetto, and spend more time not in select centres but at the margins, which is where real change always comes from.” – Elif Shafak July’s heat has weighed heavily on my soul. Chores were centred around the […]
“Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks […]
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