“There’s a flavour of happiness that doesn’t photograph well. It’s not excitement or gratitude or triumph. It’s closer to a kind of ease. A person at rest inside their own life, not because everything is perfect, but because they’ve stopped requiring it to be . . . the happiest people I know have mostly subtracted […]
‘Comer o pão que o diabo amasou.’(‘To eat the bread the devil kneaded.’)– A Portuguese Saying that is used referring to periods of intense hardship and suffering There was a time in my life when Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist reinforced my belief in signs and omens. Luckily, I no longer buy into that, as […]
“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. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to […]
“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 […]
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