“You are not guaranteed a long life, so make it a good life.” I slow down to a crawl behind a little old lady in black walking with her donkey, where the little village peters out into a patchwork of small parcels of land. On a previous occasion she had a dog with her too, […]
There is a reason many Portuguese people build houses and other buildings without permission from their local municipality on their land. We’ve heard various stories, but it seems that the general consensus is that it is a simpler process to be fined and then to legalise it than to attempt the legal process like we […]
“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 […]
“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”– Vincent Van Gogh A constant throughout the month have been the sound of rain on the roof, running, gushing, or trickling water elsewhere on the quinta, and gusts of strong cold wind sweeping through with names like Ingrid, Joseph […]
“I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.” – Diane Ackerman As I write these words on the last day of 2025, Lily and I are sitting on a bench outside, enjoying […]
“It takes solitude, under the stars, for us to be reminded of our eternal origin and our far destiny.”– Archibald Rutledge After two flights, and too many hours spent at airports, I had another three hours in Lisbon airport, before I could catch the bus taking me close to home. I bought a coffee, and […]
“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 […]
“The fact of things passing was not a cause for grief so much as a summons to attention. All the light or beauty we could find, we had to find right now. The fact that nothing lasts is the reason why everything matters.”– Pico Iyer September marked the arrival of autumn on the quinta, and […]
“To paraphrase John Muir: when one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it hitched to the rest of the world. Tug hard enough, and we risk the whole beautiful tapestry coming undone.” – Cal Flyn from Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape As I write these words, a cool breeze […]
“We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”― Richard Rohr Although a lot has happened, July felt like a slower month, and although it started out extremely hot there has been enough cooler days to make it feel milder and more pleasant than June. Each […]
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