"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."
Friedrich Nietzsche
17 Jan 2017
Browsing tag: Essence
25 May 2016
"The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety." W. Somerset Maugham
05 Apr 2016
"We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”
John Fowles
16 Mar 2016
“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”
Rumi
15 Nov 2015
One of the characteristics of having an uncommon name like Callan is that it can cause you to become self-conscious when you are young. I have mentioned this before in relation to the choice of my children’s names. Growing up I never encountered another soul called Callan. The first time I met another Callan I was in my 20’s. I asked him, “Do you like your name?” He shrugged, smiled and said, “Yeah, I actually do.” Up until then, for me, the name had been burdensome - always having to repeat it, spell it, correct people who
09 Apr 2015
I remember when my wife was pregnant with our daughter and we were in that exciting phase of guessing the gender of our baby and then choosing a name. We were super keen to know what we were having, but the baby was not sharing anything during any of the scans we had. We presumed we were having a boy and decided the baby would be called Matthew following an ancient (and somewhat purposeless) tradition in my family of alternating first born males with the name Callan Mathew and then Matthew Callan. With Rosh Hashanah fast
02 Mar 2015
One of my two amazing nieces is a very talented artist. She finishes high school this year and has been accepted into a very prestigious design school in the United States. She is working on a series of portraits where she places people in a context that captures their state of mind – or their essence. This is a portrait she did of me and it’s called Memories of Africa. The leaves are cut out of a copy of the novel, The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. If you haven’t read this book it tells stories about