We feel a little uncomfortable, don’t we? Unknown surroundings make us feel a little out of sorts, and the pressures of life make even very familiar things like the first sip of a fresh steaming coffee hard to enjoy. At times like this, our everyday surroundings can seem unfamiliar and we can even start to …
Category Archives: Creative Writing
Life-Love 63: A Snow Day
Unexpected pleasures are the best ones, aren’t they? Our lives are so incredibly busy, steaming forward devouring the days from dawn until dusk – filling them with reports, family commitments, meetings and new friends. The pace can be overwhelming and it’s easy to start feeling as though you’re chasing your shadow, a little out of …
Life-Love 62: Birthday Wishes
We all like to be remembered on our birthday, don’t we? Especially those among us who live alone and for whom a birthday may seem a lonely milestone. In fact there are many who live alone within families, for reasons of personal history and struggle. When we were children, birthdays were special and easy times …
Life-Love 61: Mark Helprin’s Writing (Reconstruction)
I love this passage. Enough said. The nostalgia and longing that accompany life’s loves and life’s losses… “At the dinner party, because of my silence, they thought I was thinking about them. And so I did begin to think about them, which broke the spell and brought me back. Also, my wife kicked me. I …
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Life-Love 60: Taking a good photo
Taking photographs is a real joy. It’s a way to freeze a time and space, capturing a moment in a very personal way and preserving what your eye has seen. Our memories are so fleeting, and we spend an amazing portion of our lives trying to reconstruct them – we re-tell ourselves the stories of …
Life-Love 59: Breaking through ideology and into humanity
Sadly, ideology can often drive a wedge between peoples. I choose the word ideology and don’t extend it to faith, because one often finds that profound faith – in God or in others – tends to soften and humanise people. Any person whose faith is driven by love and caring outside of politics and ideology …
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Life-Love 58: Feeling kinship with someone different
It is so easy to dismiss others who surprise or disconcert us. They may look different, eat foods we’ve never tried, listen to music whose rhythms and melodies surprise us, speak a language we don’t understand or wear clothes that we find strange or immodest. They may have a different skin colour, or perhaps practice …
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Life-Love 57: Winterlight
There is a softness to winterlight that is both soothing and serene. A muted whiteness with tinges of grey and blue. It takes the hard edges off buildings and makes them seem almost translucent, shimmering reflections rather than rough impositions of stone and glass. Driving through a sunrise in winter is particularly beautiful – the …
Life-Love 56: Restoring someone’s dignity
Life can be a real trial for many people. It all feels so transient – people have part-time contracts at work, they live together in precarious relationships that always feel as though they could crumble at any moment. Friendships can be fleeting and illusory – based on shared experiences in places that really don’t have …
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Life-Love 55: Driving a sports car
As a race, we humans have always liked to move. To make progress. To feel our bodies as we dance, walk, hike, run and climb. We like to feel the earth beneath us, its changing terrain of hills and valleys, rocks and clumps of grass. As we move over ground, our bodies adapt to the …