Kangaroo Island
Vying with the Gal á pagos for Charles Darwin's destination, Kangaroo Island in South Australia is one of ours too. And yes, our family visited the island this winter.
Kangaroo Island, in essence, is four times the size of Hong Kong, minus all the people. All sugar-gum trees go well with everywhere-you-look wildlife. Flinders Chase National Park, located at the western edge of Kangaroo Island, is God's gift, or magical exhibition of whimsical stalactite arch (or architecture
Untamed
Shortly after the worldwide demolition tour of the coronavirus, a growing panic became palpable everywhere. The resulting repercussion appeared in tweets, hashtags, news feed, and various platforms. And then the pent-up frustration are written in novels: Lucy by the Sea , Tom Lake , Wish You Were Here , and now Dream Count .
The last one was written by a Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. As the book opens, a family Zoom call tells the story of how the long lines of people waiting to buy toilet
Calendar
The British countryside is known for its sweeping expanses and ever-changing seasons. Intrigued by the micro-seasonal changes, an ecologist, a book coach, a lecturer in human environmental geography, and a historian came together to write a book on their journey through a year, divided into 72 seasons.
Their book, Nature's Calendar , is like a series of commas along a long road. The comma works like a speed bump to slow down our pace, to help us develop habits of observing the mind
Camera
A sentence is more than its meaning; there can be both logic and lyric within the sentence. For that matter, a memory can be neither false nor true; our memory isn't fixed like a carbon copy inside our hippocampus.
As I learned from the neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath, a memory is constructed from the past (when a story is being compressed in our archives) and the present (when we reboot our brain to pull up what we think had happened, or assemble those bits and pieces into
Money
Grief
Burnt
A lot of things happened to us this week. I guess nobody lives an entire life without a crisis. And yet, in a matter of few hours, we had to face the most harrowing and disheartening nightmare we believe we have ever heard.
In the morning, I was riding bike with my wife near Tai Po, from Ma Liu Shui Waterfront to Tai Mei Tuk. That traffic-free bike path is a favourite route of my daughter. And our family, too. The Tolo Harbour Cycling Track is mostly
Listening
It's so easy – too easy, perhaps – to lose the art of listening.
A pause, I suggest, for all of us. A step back, and think about the all-too-common mistake of not listening. To help me become more aware of my listening habits, I picked up a book The Lost Art of Listening , written by an experienced therapist Michael P. Nichols.
One good lesson for me is the mistake of "Me Too." Think about your friend telling a story
Nature
Cemetery
"The cemetery is a place of gentle quiet. At night, I can hear the whistle of distant trains. It's a lovely place." This is what Jarod Anderson mentioned in his memoir.
Many famous poets and writers, as what Jarod Anderson did, lived close to cemetery. Examples include Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Maybe the cemeteries are unwelcome four-letter word or taboo in our society, but I'd suggest it's time we rethink how unique and peaceful the cemetery can be