Would your situation make more sense if you know you’d chosen it? If you share my belief that there’s an upside to most problems, where’s the gift in the way life is getting ever more confusing, and reliable information is harder to find? Maybe it’s prodding us to see life from a quite different perspective: […]
The London Underground as a guide to happiness
It was in a lull in a long meeting recently that I realised that I was musing on the symbolic significance of the Northern Line. This is where, after twenty-one miles of tunnel, the Tube emerges into daylight: much as a travailing soul find illumination after the long darkness… This blog is intended to appeal […]
Why steam trains matter, and Dampfloks are AOK
Many men are searching for meaning, a sense that the events of their life matter and have a shape to them. I have hatched a belief that steam trains can help in this. If you’re aged late fifties or older, you’ll have grown up with steam trains in your childhood. I can recall many maturing […]
Testimony of Light by Helen Greaves
Is there an afterlife beyond this human one? What is it like? If we knew more about the afterlife, could that guide our human life here and now? This book offers some of the most convincing answers to these questions that I have found. There are two voices in this book: the writer is Helen […]
Building Wellbeing Together: debrief
In September 2017, I was part of the delivery team for a major gathering on this theme, hosted by the Network of Wellbeing and Hawkwood College. This quasi-conference aimed to provide an overview of the wellbeing sector in the UK, and it’s a vibrant and encouraging picture. Among daily bad news, it’s great to hear […]
The World’s most magical forest – and what we can learn from it
I’ve loved forests all my life, and have been in many fine ones on five continents. My vote for most magical is the forests of Bale Mountains National Park, in south-east Ethiopia. Why so special? Beautiful, vibrant, atmospheric, with life of all kinds, and very rare: many unique species, and there are few other habitats […]
Earth Wisdom by Glennie Kindred
Glennie Kindred has walked her talk for decades in exploring deeper connections with nature, and helping others to do so. Honouring the Celtic seasonal festivals is part of her approach, and her earlier book, Earth Cycles of Celebration, is my favourite guide to them. This book is in two parts. The first offers various ways […]
WHAT MAKES A WILD BOAR WILD?
This true tale of animal passion comes from a showpiece of sustainable forestry in the Scottish Highlands, a project which I visited on a trip last year. Boar and pigs were part of many traditional forestry systems all over Britain. Alan feeding the so-called wild boar In this case, the […]
Want fresh insights? Change your view!
Celtic New Year and the dark months ahead are a good time for rest, reflection, opening to new perspectives. You can help this by changing your point of view, and I’d like to share some examples. A fairly easy change is place. This is one reason I go to the Yorkshire Dales most years. The […]
Digging for Maturity: Cultivating Yourself in Riper Years
My fourth planned book explores how gardening analogies can help people’s wellbeing, and I’ve started to ponder what insights they offer for creative ageing. This was groundwork for a weekend I co-lead at Hazel Hill Wood, in June, called Fruits of Maturity. In a garden, it’s clear that you can’t simply leave nature to do […]