Beginnings and Awakenings
Parts of a Whole In the morning, the great looming bulk of the Vercors Massif is lit pink with the dawn, a line sliding down the cliff face to meet the trees below, the tenacious patches of snow a constant…
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Whispers of Summer
From a Window The bedroom — my office — window is open, despite the downpour. At this side of the building it mostly flies beyond the eaves, lashing into the orange grove and obscuring all but the nearest hill. Such…
Islands of Hope
Waters of Warmth Specks of seedlings are strewn across the empty plant pots on the balcony. The flowers or salad they held are now mostly long gone, with the exception of a single nasturtium and a sprawling and exceedingly hardy…
Sunset, On Quite A Year
But the sun also rises. The air grips the lungs from the inside, mountain-cold and surprisingly dry, despite the thick fog weaving tendrils down streets and throwing a blanket over the valley. There are snow-covered peaks in all directions, but…
Invisible Roads
or, The Thumb of Self-Compassion The world is full of tracks and paths and routes, many invisible to our eyes, currents brushing the face of things, whispers, yesterday’s wind across the earth below. As I write, I am beneath one…
The Owl and the Pussycat
And other nonsense I, like so many others, have done the vast amount of my recent nature observation from the windows of our home. Here, in the west of Alentejo, even on the fourth floor, sometimes nature also tries to…
Summer Reading
Running out of ‘Free Book’ titles here… This morning, as I draft this, it is raining, for the first time in weeks.* Everything is cool and crisp, the air fresh and clear. It is a joy to feel rain like…
Join me on Reddit (and Free Books, Still!)
Which is a long and unwieldy title, sorry. Hello It is Sunday. A glorious Sunday, where all I want to do is go and play outside, but instead I’m stuck inside doing homework. Namely writing this, building a couple of…
Free Books!
And a note on my birthday Hello, I did say there would be more newsletters this month, didn’t I? This newsletter is primarily for two things, a bit of personal news, and a bit of marketing — a shiny, all-free,…
Light and Dark
But mostly light My local world is bounded by windmills. Round hilltop towers, now shorn of their sails, some falling back to nature, others repurposed into circular homes. Many of the taller hilltops near this village are capped with a…