“. . . it’s the human-made landscape, not the natural one, that will shape our actions – including the ways that we’ve remade the physical environment. Geography isn’t ‘unchanging’, as Kaplan writes, but volatile. And where we’re going, the old maps won’t help.”– Daniel Immerwahr After having lived on the quinta fulltime for two years, […]
Category Archives: Our Journey
October – Shades of Green
“I think landscape is an incredible, mystical teacher, and when you begin to tune into its sacred presence, something shifts inside you.” – John O’Donohue October flew by in a succession of gorgeous days. It felt good to be outside strimming away all the dead grass of summer, getting ready for the winter rains, and […]
September – A Reprieve
“If you’re a farmer and you are not an optimist, you are not a farmer.” – Glenn Roberts When my father, who has been a farmer his whole life, asked me what I was going to do in Portugal I told him that I was going to farm. A bit ironic really coming from someone […]
August – Where there is Smoke, there is Fire
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” – John Muir As I stepped outside into the cool of the early morning on the 16th of August, the strong smell of smoke made my heart skip a beat. I stopped to stare at the […]
July – Heat
“We must strive to become intellectual nomads, keep moving, keep learning, resist confining ourselves in any cultural or mental ghetto, and spend more time not in select centres but at the margins, which is where real change always comes from.” – Elif Shafak July’s heat has weighed heavily on my soul. Chores were centred around the […]
June – Experimentation
“Nature isn’t ‘out there’ – someplace to go on a weekend. As food, nature is coursing through us. Our guts and the soils are intertwined, both alive with microorganisms doing the work of transforming organic matter into strong plants, trees, and bodies.”– Vicki Robin With the sun gathering strength and the daylight hours stretching out […]
May – Visitors
“Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks […]
April – Unsettled Weather
“Multiple belongings are nurtured by cultural encounters but they are not only the preserve of people who travel. It is an attitude, a way of thinking, rather than the number of stamps on your passport. It is about thinking of yourself, and your fellow human beings, in more fluid terms than solid categories.” – Elif […]
March – A Shimmer of Yellow
“Over the past eight years, as part of a global storytelling project called the Out of Eden Walk, I have been hiking continents emptied of their wildlife by human beings. The Gaoligong represent a chance for solace. They are one of the planet’s last remaining vaults of biodiversity: a glimpse into a teeming Earth that once […]
February – The Other Side of Silence
“We’ve reached a time in human history when our global environmental crisis requires that we make permanent life-style changes. More than ever before, we need to fall back in love with the land. Silence is our meeting place.” – Gordon Hempton Gordon Hempton, and acoustic ecologist warns that silence, true silence, where man-made noise does […]
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