“Ask her what she craved, and she’d get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music. Plants and the seasons. Also freedom. Not being bought and sold by some idiot employer, not having the moments of her days valued in fractions of a dollar by somebody other than herself.”
– Charles Frazier
EXPLORE ART & WRITING

On brushing blankets and the value of anti-productivity in the new normal
Amid the new normal and still in the throws of long covid, blanket brushing taught me the validity of anti-productivity. That is, doing things not on your list but just because you’re called to, and being present enough to listen to what they reveal.

The Dark Arts of DIY: A bathroom to want to get naked in
This isn’t a renovation post. I’m not going to tell you how to get these effects and which colours we used.
Its sole purpose is to show you, that sometimes the extreme darkness of life can bring to the fore the most subtle, brilliant light.

Painting with feathers
The wild feather call gets stronger
“Don’t just paint us. Paint with us”, I hear them calling.

How a wooden bristle brush cured a bad case of my dishwashing blues
The dishwasher had been broken for weeks. Unable to switch over from one cycle to the next, it required constant babysitting and manual intervention. A gear was broken. Me? I was broke. The dishes still came out only half washed, bits of food and undissolved oil smears taunting my bull-headed efforts. The grim reality of hand washing the dishes...

Can you think yourself well?
We use our grey matter every day – to solve problems, analyse, and often, to plain old’ overthink stuff. It’s this overthinking that brings about so much stress and anxiety – the comparisons, the second-guessing, the self-doubt. And yet, why when we use this powerful organ to think ourselves out of the myriad puzzles of complicated scenarios and...

Herb wreaths: the festive equivalent of a zen garden and why you should make one this season
DIY content for Faithful to Nature’s festive season. Instead of just listing the ‘how to’ steps for a wreath I made, this type of content also offers a path to mindfulness by paralleling it to a holistic Eastern practice.

A friendly reminder in mindfulness from you dinner time aubergine
It was a strange and rare occurrence — a night on which I wasn’t particularly hungry. I clicked on the gas and heated three slices of bread in the pan. No, I don’t own a toaster. It’s part of my ‘living with less’ lifestyle philosophy. Once golden brown, each slice first got a sliver of butter. As I watched it melt into the rye I contemplated my...

Overcoming your personal brand of eye gook
My poor dog, Shumba, always gets this gook in his eyes. Most mornings, he blinks his still handsome hello at me through a thick, goopy slime. My vet attributes it to dry tear ducts. Basically, he’s crying snot (my dog — not the vet). Every morning, while I undertake my much-loved coffee ritual, I also clean the gook from his eyes. He knows what’s...

Why I stepped it up and switched to the cup
An honest and vulnerable content piece written for Faithful to Nature on my personal journey and experience in using a Moon Cup.

Why you should join the #stopthe100billion movement
It’s safe to say we live in a pretty fast moving world. And in our best efforts to succeed in this world, we’ve become rather dependent on the caffeinated fuel that keeps us going – coffee. But for all the many cups we buy, surely there is a displacement somewhere? This is is the very question designer David McKlagan was addressing when he came...

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