“Do we have the strength within ourselves to slow down, to make the necessary changes personally, structurally, and institutionally…so the life around us can flourish?” – Terry Tempest Williams Michael and I, over the last couple of months, have had various discussions about what I’ve always termed as my quest for a simpler way of […]
“It is not speed that matters, it’s persistence.”– Abhijit Naskar The past week was an exceptionally busy week on the quinta, and both Michael and I were exhausted yesterday. We told a friend on Saturday that no tool will be lifted on Sunday, as we were planning to make it a rest day, but nothing […]
“Remember to look up at the stars, and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exists. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.”– […]
“To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these […]
“You can’t have the light without the shade.”– Stephen Fabes After a long, cold winter here in Portugal, I was quite excited when the days started to warm up and the landscape around me was transformed in froth of white flowers breaking over the slope of the neighbour’s land like a giant wave. Spanish broom […]
“. . . how we eat is a reflection of how we live.”– from: Bread, Wine, Chocolate – The slow loss of foods we love by Simran Sethi One of the things I’ve dreamed of since we’ve bought the land was a vegetable garden. I’ve dabbled with growing vegetables before, but there was either not […]
“Food is a very conservative aspect of culture but the erosion on the use and knowledge about wild food plants is higher than that of allotment food plants. The decline in wild food gathering appears to be due to negative connotations, i.e., association with times of scarcity, especially during and after the Civil War (1936–1939).” – […]
“Thinking will not overcome fear but action will.” – W. Clement Stone Two years ago Frank the Digger did some land clearing for us, burning some of the brambles and broom he cleared, but a couple of piles were left. With my recent spree of clearing patches of brambles along our access road, we had […]
“A silence where you interact with your thoughts is also a sacred act, a way of owning your interior being. Sometimes you need to wade through your thoughts in order to let them settle.” – Heather McRae-Woolf Brambles, producing delicate flowers in spring and juicy fruit in summer, are mostly a web of thorns growing […]
“All that came before us and all that surrounds us is continually leaving its imprint on what we are and how we are, on what we do and how we do it.” – Miguel Moore Monday morning dawned cold, which promted Michael to send an email to the company that installed the heating system. “Unfortunately […]
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