“In a very cold night, even houses want to have houses of their own to enter inside them and feel warm!” – Mehmet Murat Ildan My wife , many years ago when we first moved to the UAE, wrote a blog post titled “I love winter”, and in that article she says she never thought […]
“Filthy water cannot be washed.” – An African Proverb The importance of fresh drinking water cannot be overstated, and as we get our small piece of paradise ready for our eventual habitation, we realized that we need more than an open well for a source of clean drinking water. After a long deliberation, and […]
“We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do. “– Barbara Ward – We learned in April that land clearing is not the same as gardening, and that we will have to approach it in a more efficient way. Our visits are short, and […]
“It all comes with the cold water.” – An Islandic saying to remind someone that if you are patient, things will fall into place. As the temperatures in Portugal are plummeting, and Michael is heading there tonight, it may seem rather ironic and perhaps a tad cruel that I would reflect on the warmth of […]
“The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.” – Simone de Beauvoir – “I’d like to go home now.” […]
“. . . it is our dreams that tell us who we really are and what is important to us . . .” – Paula Constant – As our eventual plan is to combine the barn and ruin into one house, and with Michael always looking at the “bigger picture”, often to my chagrin, he […]
“The world is divided into two categories of people: those who shit in their drinking water supplies and those who don’t.” – Joseph Jenkins, from: The Humanure Handbook I completely agree, when people make statements like: “We do not have a symbiotic relationship with the earth anymore; or, we live wasteful lifestyles.” And when people […]
“The weight of a dream is not in proportion to its size. Some dreams are made of fog, some of lace, some of lead.” – Rebecca Solnit – We fell in love with the land, the first time we saw photographs of it, and when we first set foot on it in July last year, […]
“The immensity of nature gives us a new perspective on life, washes away or minimizes our worries. How can we feel sad with all the beauty there to see? And how can we feel poor when all this beauty belongs to us?” – Ferenc Máté – July brought long sun-drenched days, followed by lingering light, […]
❝Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.❞ – Rita Mae Brown – Learning Portuguese is not optional for us. In rural Portugal hardly anyone speaks English, unlike Lisbon, where most people can speak a couple of languages. And so, I thought, […]
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