​ ​ " Let us start our grand tour of the year, my little friend. It will be a voyage of discovery." ​ {A Countryman's Winter Notebook} ​...

" The quiet spaces in which we root our attention become the cadence to the symphony of the story we are forming day by day. ...words...

" I look and look. Looking's a way of being: one becomes sometimes a pair of eyes walking. Walking wherever looking takes one. The eyes...

" Books never really end. They stay with you, good or bad, and can float in your mind without warning. Years later, the faint embers of...

" Flames have always been at the heart of it all. Flames to sit around and read, a place for conversation. A fire is a magical thing. The...

" I like slow mornings & rainy days and thunderstorms. I like empty bookstores & quiet coffee shops. I like oversized sweatshirts & cosy...

" It is a time of richest sensation: the sights and smells, obviously, and the way its daily varying temperatures makes the skin...

" I will cut adrift - I will sit on pavements and drink coffee - I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim -...

" October is the best month when you live in the woods and maybe when you don't, but I wouldn't know. It's when the trees start to shake...

" Damsons are ripe in early September, at a time when the garden paths are festooned with spiderwebs and the leaves start their slow...

" Summer did come at last and, when it did, it was one of those summers of poems and stories and country pictures, a once-upon-a-time...

" He had the indistinct feeling that the priest's forgiveness was the greatest assault and most tremendous attack he had ever...

" If spring is all about looking forward, and autumn about dying back, summer surely is the present moment: a long, hot now that marks...

" It was a brilliant spring day; the day was radiant. Even the air seemed to have a burr in it, as it touched the treetops; it vibrated,...

" I'm craving silence, the chance to feel my way into the moment" {Katherine May} This deep need for expansive silence. To sit in the...

" ...and then just marvel, be astonished, at any object, movement or scent, finally recognizing - realizing - that there is nothing more...

" Mindfulness means moment to moment, nonjudgmental awareness. It is cultivated by refining our capacity to pay attention, intentionally...

" Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone." {Lin Yutang} I've been listening to the...

" Oh the joy of walking! ...the trance like, swimming, flying through the air; the current of sensations & ideas; & the slow, but fresh...

" Inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly, and quietly, and all the...