“It’s pretty easy to feel gloomy about the world at the moment. There are 8 billion of us and yet somehow it feels like we’re an endangered species.
Surely there’s never been a more urgent time to remind ourselves what an imaginative, brave, generous, thoughtful, utterly bonkers species we can be when we put our hearts and minds to it?
Because surely we humans are worth saving?!”
CELEBRATE THE HUMAN BLOGs
Celebrate the Human
Years ago, I crouched around a campfire in a field bum-cresting the Atlantic, while a gale that hadn’t let up for forty-eight hours whipped around us. We were two days into a week of camping. There were plenty of reasons to feel gloomy. Not least because it was the annual family holiday and I wasn’t allowed to go home.
And it was in these circumstances that my physicist brother-in-law, with his hood up, wearing sunglasses to protect his eyes from the relentless onslaught of wood smoke and burning spits, unfolded to us his vision of the looming apocalypse... (read more…)
Rowena Cade- Build it and they will come
So, once upon a time, they made a film about a man who built a baseball diamond in a field of corn. Yes, that’s right - a man turned a field into a baseball pitch and they made a film about it. And not only that, but it went on to become one of the biggest films of the year.
There were a lot of important life lessons to take away from this film, you see, and chief among them was that following your dreams is the most important thing you can do with your life. It might mean you have to put up with people shouting ‘You’re an idiot!’ all the time, but as long as you have sexy eyes, an understanding wife and James Earl Jones for a mentor, you can do it! Come on, people – follow your dreams! (Read more. I do get to the point eventually…)
Kurt Vonnegut - God damn it, you've got to be kind
“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
Kurt Vonnegut... seriously, what a man. (Hear me out - read more…)
Isabella Rosselini - What the duck…!
Okay, I feel like we know each other well enough now so I’m going to be hands-on-heart honest with you. It wasn’t Maya Angelou who inspired this blog theme. It wasn’t Nelson Mandela or Malala Yousafzai who made me think that actually the human race is worth saving after all. It wasn’t Nina Simone or Freda Kahlo who made me worried that computers, when they finally take over, aren’t going to properly appreciate the human species in all its full dizzying variety. No. It was Isabella Rossellini. And what’s more, it was Isabella Rossellini pretending to be a duck.
I think it must have been a dull day that day when I was casually surfing the bulrushes of the internet and stumbled on Isabella Rossellini dressed up as a duck flirting with a horny papier-mâché drake. (Read more…)
“Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!”
I would love to credit the image at the top of this page, but I'm unable to find the artist responsible. If you recognise it please let me know so I can include a link and credit them accordingly xx