On Tuesday, Dolly Parton died, and I felt genuinely bereft. For years I had loved her voice, her songs, her wit and her faith. I admired her appearance, and the intelligence with which she carried it off. Dolly ensured that we saw the joke without ever allowing us to imagine that she was one. Friday brought news of the death of King Harald V of Norway.

For several years I have tried not to write about the culture war. This has not been because I regard it as unimportant. Quite the opposite. I have avoided it because almost everything drawn into it becomes smaller, harsher and less truthful. Words are taken from us and made to serve as passwords. People are sorted into camps. Every disagreement must end with a victor and a defeated party.

The Thorn and the Oak Are Friends I was reading the summer edition of The Irish Garden recently when I came across a feature written by Colin Stafford-Johnson. Many people will know him from The Wild Gardener, in which he returned to his childhood garden and began creating a place for native plants and wildlife. In the feature, he mentioned an old Irish saying: the thorn and the oak are friends.

Circular retail is not just about what we buy, but how and where we buy it.

For years I misunderstood Gerard Manley Hopkins's Pied Beauty. I thought it was a poem celebrating diversity. I don't have permission to publish it here, but you can find it easily on the internet. It delighted in "dappled things": skies mottled with cloud, trout whose skins were speckled, finches with piebald wings, fields "plotted and pieced". It seemed to be saying that the world is beautiful because it contains such astonishing variety.

I remember certain tables long after the meals served upon them have been forgotten. Almost thirty-five years have passed since I found myself sitting at one in Darjeeling, in the foothills of the Himalayas. I had travelled there for a few days' respite from the heat and humidity of the monsoon in Calcutta, where I was working at the time.

There are certain houses I remember long after I have forgotten the conversations that took place within them. I left them with the curious feeling that life somehow became more spacious while I was there. It is difficult to explain why. Atmosphere is an elusive thing. It cannot be designed in quite the way a room can be designed, nor bought in the way furniture can be bought.

Every so often, a bird of prey circles above the fields beyond my house. Whenever I see it, Gerard Manley Hopkins quietly enters the scene. I have not read The Windhover for many years, yet the opening lines return almost without invitation. They seem to have been waiting patiently for the bird. What strikes me is not that I remember the poem.

A row erupted in Irish media this week after a former politician made comments about the economic imbalance between urban and rural Ireland. He pointed to taxation, output and measurable contributions from urban centres. Perhaps unwisely, he then pointed to subsidies and productivity levels in rural districts. The response was immediate. Arguments about inadequate infrastructure and structural disadvantage were made with force.

In a presidential term characterised by jaw-dropping moments, last night’s attack by Donald Trump on Pope Leo XIV made my jaw drop even lower than what has become usual. The pope was described as weak and unfit, as though the measure of his office were the same as that of a political leader. Leo has not, of course, responded in kind.

Sometimes language fails in plain sight, and folk carry on as if it has not. This year’s Good Friday gathering at the White House offered one such moment. A number of Christian leaders stood alongside political power and spoke with certainty about what they believed they were witnessing. One voice, with great seriousness, drew a parallel between Donald Trump and Jesus Christ.

Each year on St Patrick’s Day, Ireland performs a curious ritual. The country celebrates a saint belonging to a religious tradition that much of the population now keeps at arm’s length. Churches that once structured everyday life are quieter than they were a generation ago. Scandals involving abuse and cruelty within church institutions have left wounds that are still raw. Many people understandably approach the subject of Christianity in Ireland with caution, or with anger.

In the first year of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians gathered to bury their dead. According to the historian Thucydides, it was the custom that a prominent citizen speak over those who had fallen in battle. That year the task fell to the statesman Pericles. The speech he delivered was less a eulogy than a portrait of the city itself. Athens, he told the mourners, was unlike any other polis in Greece.

My teacher asked me to rewrite a paragraph. The first draft was hurried and vague and the teacher knew I could do better. The request was simple. Try again. Be more precise. Cut the excess. Support the claim. I sighed, probably even rolled my eyes, but I returned to the page. Nothing dramatic had happened, yet something important had taken place.

Imbolg is arriving quietly here. There is no drama to it, no obvious turning of the year that announces itself with surprise. The fields are still bare. The air still bites. Winter has not loosened its grip. Yet something has shifted. The days lengthen almost imperceptibly. Ewes begin to lactate. When I send my shovel into the ground, though hard on the surface, it is no longer inert.

It’s easy to imagine John somewhere in the west of Ireland still. I can picture him walking the hills and gathering the vocabulary of his next book. His death in 2008 was a rupture, but his voice still resonates. John knew our culture moves too fast for its own interior life. His response was to insist, quietly but with great fidelity, that the soul is real and that it needs room to breathe.

It’s easy to imagine John somewhere in the west of Ireland still. I can picture him walking the hills and gathering the vocabulary of his next book. His death in 2008 was a rupture, but his voice still resonates. John knew our culture moves too fast for its own interior life. His response was to insist, quietly but with great fidelity, that the soul is real and that it needs room to breathe.

On winter nights my fields become a kind of open chapel. Darkness gathers without resistance. The hedgerows fall silent. The faintest movement of the Atlantic air some 40 miles away seems to pass through the grass and into the lungs. There is no interference from streetlamps. The sky arrives unfiltered. First a few tentative points of light. Then the full sweep of stars that seem to have waited all year for the privilege of being seen.

I have been spending these weeks with Rilke, Weil, and Kierkegaard as part of the preparation for the next Hedge School. Their writing doesn't stay politely on the page. It gets into you and asks questions you thought you had already settled. Almost without noticing, you find yourself reconsidering the shape of your life. You question the why of a decision.

Leadership is often spoken of in terms of action, influence, and performance. We imagine leaders as people who stand at the front, who speak with clarity and carry a group from one place to another. Yet those who have led for any length of time know that the real work begins elsewhere. It begins in the quiet part of a life, in the part that is not on display.

Every organisation has two lives. One is visible and busy. It deals with plans, meetings, deadlines, and reports. The other is quieter. It is carried in the way people greet one another, in what th…

When Elon Musk appeared on screen at a far-right protest in London and told his audience that violence was coming, he spoke with the air of a man delivering prophecy rather than making a speech. He…

Outside Trinity College Dublin stands the statue of Edmund Burke, the parliamentarian and writer who lived from 1729 to 1797. Students hurry past. Tourists pause briefly. Traffic flows on. Most wil…

I had been working on this piece all week and it was missing something. Notes about the season turning, scraps about the constellations, half-thoughts about the weight of winter. But none of it hel…

The Irish presidency holds almost no formal authority, yet it has carried extraordinary weight. When under threat in the 1970s, its strength was restraint. Today, its danger is theatre. When de Val…

This essay follows an earlier visit to Skjolden in Norway, where Wittgenstein built his hut. Weeks later I travelled to Rosroe in Ireland, where he lived for a time in a cottage on the Atlantic edg…

The pursuit of happiness is one of the most famous promises in political history. When Thomas Jefferson wrote those words into the American Declaration of Independence, he was borrowing from the cu…

A reader got in touch after yesterday’s piece on William Blake and the Paolozzi statue of Newton outside the British Library. They ask how I explain Blake’s apparent madness. My first response is t…

For years, I worked just a short walk from the British Library. My job in higher education often brought me there for meetings and between sessions I’d sometimes step outside for air (actually, I w…

Last Saturday I visited Wittgenstein’s hut, high above a fjord in Norway, near the village of Skjolden. I travelled there with two Scandinavian friends, Åke and Helge. We were pilgrims of sorts, dr…

Chesterton for a Stoic I think like a Stoic now, most of the time. I find comfort in restraint, in steadiness, in the daily work of aligning life with reason. It helps.   It wasn’t always this…

The Sycamore Gap tree stood alone in a dip along Hadrian’s Wall. For over a century, it shaped the landscape around it. It was a solitary presence known not just for its beauty. It seemed to belong…

This reflection began, unexpectedly, with a reference to Moby-Dick among the John Moriarty community on Facebook. In that space, something stirred. The image of Jesus arose not simply as a figure o…

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Stoic practice & Spirituality