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The 52:52:52 project, launching both on this site and on social media in early 2024 will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.

A Mundane Comedy is Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published in mid 2024. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

This site addresses what's changing, in our own lives, in our organisations, and in wider society. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 areas, ranging from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and very much else inbetween.

Halcyon's aim is to help you reflect on how you can better deal with related change in your own life.

Animals

On Gardening

Angus in Genval

 

“This is happiness,” Willa Cather’s fictional narrator gasps as he sinks into his grandmother’s garden, “to be dissolved into something complete and great.” A generation later, in a real-life counterpart, Virginia Woolf arrived at the greatest epiphany of her life  - and to this day perhaps the finest definition of what it takes to be an artist - while contemplating the completeness and greatness abloom in the garden.

Talking Change - Animals

Animals

 

As long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other - Pythagoras

Animal rights will end up with votes for oysters - Bertrand Russell

As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out - Alice Walker

I am conscious that meat eating is not in accordance with the finer feelings, and I abstain from it whenever I can - Dr. Albert Schweitzer -1952 Nobel Peace Prize recipient

I don't eat anything with a face - Linda McCartney

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals - Henry David Thoreau

On Yule

Shortest Day

 

Since the cave we have tried to make the old gods smile. Each year we fail and winter comes. #CLNolan

 

"Wings are for flying, not frying" ...nice quote, nicer sentiment.  Animal-friendly consumerism could be a major future trend. Until 16 years ago I too gorged myself on turkey every Christmas Day, Boxing Day, 27th...and my mouth watered long after at the remembered taste of turkey soup on the 28th or 29th, a meal which constituted one of the culinary highlights of my year.

On Jane Goodall

"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then do it" - Robert Heinlein

Jane Goodall's Chimp Greeting from The Jane Goodall Institute on Vimeo.

As one of reportedly fewer than 10 people ever to be invited to study for a PhD at Cambridge without a prior undergraduate degree, Jane Goodall was promptly told by "experts" there that all her field work on chimpanzee behaviour was wrong, and that she should not anthropomorphise them with names, still less assign them thoughts, personalities and emotions.

Today, we know that she was right and they were wrong.

On Humanity

The Royal Society of Arts gathered a high-profile panel of speakers to explore the hidden agendas behind our values and attitudes toward the place of ‘the human’ in today’s societies, and debate what must now be a key issue for the 21st century.