February was the month we were walking the West Island Way, a 40km way marked trail around Bute. The bags were packed, ferry taken, campsite checked in to. Unfortunately, the weather had other ideas. We trudged through massively boggy ground for the first 8km, the Kilchattan Bay circular, before deciding to spend the rest of the weekend drinking coffee and reading books.
The danger goes beyond authority figures silencing female voices. Young women internalize societal cues about what defines “appropriate” behaviour and, in turn, silence themselves.
It wasn’t until I heard the Phi Beta Kappa speech about self-doubt that it struck me: the real issue was not that I felt like a fraud, but that I could feel something deeply and profoundly and be completely wrong.
I realised that searching for a mentor has become the professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming.
Lean In
– Sheryl Sandberg
The very meaning of food is being transformed: food cultures that once treated cooking and eating as central elements in maintaining social stricter and tradition are slowly being usurped by a global food culture, where cost and convenience are dominant, the social meal is obsolete, and the art of cooking fetishised in coffee-table cookbooks and on television shows.
Just as we long ago broke farming into its constituent pieces and are now suffering the consequences, our solutions have tended to follow a pattern that is no less reductionist, in which each problem (for example, synthetic farm chemicals) is met with its own discreet solution (organics). Yet just as most of our food challenges are now understood to be interrelated and evolving, our solutions, too, must be both comprehensive and capable of constantly adapting.
The End of Food
– Paul Roberts
The French writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet recalls his friend the literary theorist Roland Barthes musing, ‘In a restaurant it is the menu that people enjoy consuming – not the dishes, but their description.’ The words, the bright names of ingredients, the voluptuous-sounding dishes are all part of the experience of the food.
“We don’t sit around a table as a distraction from the travails of daily life. We do everything else in order to sit around the table. What you share when you eat in the Caribbean isn’t just food, it’s stories. Words become a condiment to the food.” Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Edible Atlas
– Mina Holland
About a month ago, I listened to a podcast interview with Alastair Humphreys, adventurer extraordinaire. In the closing moments, he uttered a phrase that has held me absolutely captivated:
“I’m obsessed with the idea of trying to make myself brave enough to begin things.”
I cannot tell you how often I’ve been turning that over (and over, and over) in my mind this last month or so.
There are dreams that have lain silent in my heart for some time. Dreams I thought long dead are making rumblings again, like a dormant volcano reminding the environment not to get too settled.
Eight years ago, I did a gap year that changed my life. I got to spend twelve months telling stories about the devastation poverty causes, and walking alongside people to show them how they could bring change into those situations. One of the great privileges of that year was the friendships I made.
One of those women, Jen, has played the role of confidant, encourager and mischief-maker in my life since then. Over the last few years her job has taken her to places well off the beaten track, and she’s discovered that her unique gifts line up perfectly with a job we could never have imagined of as kids – the kind that seems so tailor made you’d think we dreamt it up.
It has brought me great joy to see her discover that what she has to offer is not only enough, it is essential.
She was brave enough to begin, and she makes me braver by her inspiration.
Bravery is a strange word. Just the mention of it conjures up images of warriors and windswept landscapes. I am more interested, though, in the silent, unseen kind of bravery. The kind that of bravery that notices a change in a friend and points it out in love. The kind that sees an opportunity and doesn’t shrink back from it, even if it might unbalance the scales. I want to be more like that kind of person; to have the kind of bravery Jen exhibits. I want to be brave enough to begin.
I finally realised that my fear was boring.
I made a decision a long time ago that if I want creativity in my life – and I do – then I will have to make space for fear, too. Plenty of space.
It has taken me years to learn this, but it does seem to be the case that if I am not actively creating something, then I am probably actively destroying something (myself, a relationship, or my own peace of mind).
What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant? What do you love even more than you love your own ego?
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
– Elizabeth Gilbert
“A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.” John Maynard Keynes
The title of Ward’s blog is borrowed from a saying of Andy Warhol’s: ‘I like boring things’. Warhol took he most boring and ubiquitous object he could think of – a tin of soup – and made millions of people see it anew. Ward says that when he refers to boring things he is thinking of things that only seem boring, because we’re not paying attention to them… “The transformative power of attention”.
Curiosity is a life force. If depression involves a turning inwards, a feeling that there’s nothing in the world that is worthy of our attention (or that nothing we pay attention to is worthy) then it is curiosity which takes us the other way, that reminds us that the world is an inexhaustibly diverting, inspiring, fascinating place.
Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It
– Ian Leslie
The climax of God’s creative work is not the creation of humanity (or the satisfaction of human desires exclusively defined) but the experience of Sabbath. Sabbath is not an optional reprieve in the midst of an otherwise frantic or obsessive life. It is the goal of all existence because it is in Sabbath, creation becomes what it fully ought to be.
God the gardener is a striking image. It helps us understand that the divine creative activity is fundamentally about ‘making room’ for others to be and to flourish.
All along the way decisions have to be made about how people relate to the land (agriculture) and each other (culture). These decisions reflect more or less appropriate forms of abiding: bread can be consumed in ways that respect and honour fields, farm workers, and bakers, but it can also be consumed as a produce in which relations to land and others have been degraded. Food production and consumption, in other words, embody a logos. What we eat and how we eat it reflect whether or not we think we need to abide with others at all.
Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating
– Norman Wirzba
A weekend in Aviemore isn’t complete with a trip to Loch Morlich and up to Cairn Gorm.
Abundance may make us feel more productive, but perhaps emptiness has greater power to strengthen our souls.
We are accountable before God for our imaginations as much as for our deeds.
As Jesus stepped out of the Judean wilderness and into the public eye, he did not avoid such lonely spaces. On the contrary, he pursued them for the rest of his days. The same word that is translated desert in the temptation appears throughout Jesus’ visible years as solitary or lonely places.
Anonymous: Jesus’ Hidden Years… and Yours
– Alicia Britt Chloe
Really, prayer and worry are of the same essence. They are both a rehearsing of circumstances, a mulling over, and a kind of mental and emotional chewing. But in worry, there’s no connection, no traction, no relational receiver.
To Live Is Christ to Die Is Gain
– Matt Chandler
That is the essence of encouragement—treating the people in your life as the best possible versions of themselves, whether they are currently living up to that standard or not.
Tongue Pierced: How the Words You Speak Transform the Life You Live
– Nelson Searcy
Efficiency is a dangerous mind-set to bring to our faith. We do not want to be efficient worshipers, driven by a desire to get more of God in a shorter amount of time.
The Next Story
– Tim Challies
It’s not that I hold that belief so much as that belief holds me.
All Is Grace
– Brennan Manning
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past thirteen years, it’s this: Just because someone isn’t willing or able to love us, it doesn’t mean that we are unlovable.
“Grace will take you places hustling can’t.” Liz Gilbert
Regret is a tough but fair teacher. To live without regret is to believe you have nothing to learn, no amends to make, and no opportunity to be braver with your life.
Rising Strong
– Brene Brown
“We live in peace, but we live apart”
This 6 minute film brought tears to my eyes and broke my heart all over again for the land I was born and raised in, making me long afresh for the courage to imagine a better future.
I have a deep love for the land I grew up in. It is full-to-bursting with hope. There is redemption breaking out on macro and micro levels all over the country – stories of communities changed, perceptions challenged, fears overcome.
I have not always felt this way. For a long period of time I struggled with my identity as a Northern Irish citizen, wishing that I hadn’t started from there.
It seems that the more I have found my place in Scotland, made my home in Glasgow, the more I have grown to love and hope for my first home, for Northern Ireland.
The last two years saw a lot of political posturing in my second home, and brought that first home to mind often.
The stories we tell ourselves matter.
On the whole, I found myself deeply excited and encourage by the discussions surrounding the Scottish independence vote in Sept 2014. What started as a mud-slinging campaign became, for many of us, a real conversation about the kind of nation we wanted to live in (regardless of how we intended to vote).
The similarities between Northern Ireland and Scotland are many.
Is it possible for us to hold intelligent conversations – to imagine a better future – regardless of our political system, religion, school, village…?
Walter Brueggemann reflects on this need for imagination.
We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.
The Prophetic Imagination – Walter Brueggemann
I dream of this for Northern Ireland, in the same ways I dream of it for Scotland. In the post-referendum haze, it was easy to find ourselves sidetracked and lazy in the language we used. It was tempting to take the easy way out and stigmatise ‘the other side’.
This, I think, is our greatest challenge: a failure of imagination.
Having already spent a long time in a deeply divided nation, I have no desire to see Scotland become (more of) one too. Can we be brave enough, have courage enough, to not settle for polarisation but to push and prod our nations onwards? Can we commit together to walk slowly towards a better life?
There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater.
But sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life.
That is the sort of bravery I must have now.
Allegiant – Veronica Roth
The speakers are turned up loud,
the song is on repeat,
and I’m on my back on the floor.
I have no words, so there is this:
a prayer in music, just for me, from my friend.
It’s a scratch track,
recorded on a laptop;
original music long since lost.
But I don’t care.
This is the song that unravels me,
then puts me back together again.
The song that tells me it’s ok not to be ok.
To not even know why you’re not ok.
This is the song that prays for me when my words are gone.
“It is harder to decide what you want to say than it is to figure out how to say it.”
“Reading is another necessary luxury. William Safire once told a budding writer, “Never feel guilty about reading, it’s what you do to do your job.” Reading is the collecting of intellectual income; writing is the spending of it.”
On Speaking Well
– Peggy Noonan
“The taproot of cookery is not the desperation of the belly any more than it is the gastrointestinal tracts vulnerability to the imagined dangers of raw food; rather it is the mind’s thirst for delight – it’s lifelong and obsessive quest to discover, in everything it takes a shine to, unnecessary goodness, superfluous beauties and gratuitous truths.”
“The most serious thing I have to say about God – after fifty-some years of living in a world full of aardvarks and artichokes, garlic and girls’ knees, mushrooms and men’s noses, zebras and zucchini – is that whoever was responsible certainly spent a lot of eternity simply playing around. Creation looks like nothing so much as the original wild party.”
“But beware. Civilization is a fragile thing. You could get everything else right and destroy the whole picnic with Styrofoam cups. It’s taken us 5000 years to get this far. Let’s have honest-to-goodness stemware only, please.”
“The world we live in exists not because it is an old inventory item once made and long since shelved, but because each scrap of its marvellous being is an intimate and immediate response to the Creator who, at every moment, romances it out of nothing into existence by loving regard.”
Capon on Cooking
– Robert Farrar Capon
“Isaiah calls us to an intimate activism and an active intimacy.”
“God deliberately chose an elderly barren couple to launch Israel the nation, and he sustained that nation by sending them patriarchs and prophets who were supernaturally born. The very birth and existence of the nation of Israel was a miracle both physically and spiritually.”
Home for Good
– Krish Kandiah
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