In autumn last year, I decided to stop paying lip service to nature. Modern life grabs our cheeks and forces our sight to other, shiny, things. Loud adverts, products. More money to keep our bigger houses. More things to fill our lives with a meaning created by somebody else. My whole journey with minimalism started… Read More A Year Walking Slowly
Did you ever get a lightning bolt realisation from reading something small and simple? A little innocuous sentence, but suddenly, a situation becomes clear, all at once? It happened to me this week. Reading the latest Permaculture magazine, Simon Lacey’s article on horticultural therapy really interested me, especially the incorporation of Permaculture principles into therapeutic… Read More Lightning
One from a bit back – the endless frustration of cfs… I don’t know who I am and I just want to scream. I want to scream at stillness, shatter through this grey existence like breaking walls of glass into a million glinting shards. I search and wail and am lost in the years of… Read More Scream
Next week, I’m starting a Pilates class at my physio. Spending a few years sat down doesn’t do much for your posture, and apparently, hardly any of my core muscles are working any more, with my neck/shoulders and lumbar region working double hard to keep me upright, rather than the muscles that actually should be… Read More Movement and fear
I’d like to say thank you for the thoughtful, heartfelt comments on Caring Enough. To hear that other people feel like this as well helped enormously. I needed to hear the things that people enjoy doing, to see that despite this feeling, it’s possible to begin to get involved in life once more. And, of… Read More I am for
This is a weird thing to try and write about. I think I’ve deleted this sentence about 8 times, trying to put into words this odd feeling that’s niggling at me recently. It’s getting to that time in my ‘time off real work’ where I’m starting to get itchy feet. I feel, if not that… Read More Caring Enough
6 years ago, I decided to stop buying things for a year. I supposed it was easy to stop consuming stuff. After all, I didn’t want to be part of that machine any more – I wanted to break free, to get rid of the knee-jerk twitch that made it so easy to mindlessly keep… Read More What does buying give me?
It’s Tuesday. I’ve caffeinated my way through my piano lesson and am now munching my way through a pile of vegetable sticks and houmous. Somehow this has randomly become my favourite lunch. I feel like after the yuletide period my body was crying out for vegetables, vitamins, anything green… so I’m well into the crunchy… Read More One foot in front of the other
2018 was a huge, crashing, explosion of a year. When I look back, the overwhelming feeling is that I’m so glad it’s over – one or two huge things sticking out, obscuring anything else from view. We’re well into 2019 now and I’ve spent a few days mulling over the last year in my head.… Read More Things that I’m proud I did in 2018
A few years ago, I bought nothing for a year. It seemed so simple on paper. Inspired by the OG Minimalism blogs – Zen Habits, The Minimalists, Becoming Minimalist, Slow Your Home – I loved the idea of a streamlined life, free from clutter and distraction. And so, in the January of 2012, I just… Read More The other side of buying nothing