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This page will contain regular updates about A Mundane Comedy, Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published in 2025. Please see below an introductory extract.

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To be a catalyst is the ambition most appropriate for those who see the world as being in constant change, and who, without thinking that they control it, wish to influence its direction - Theodore Zeldin, Intimate History of Humanity

This book is about what goes wrong in our lives, and about how we can try to make things better, even if temporarily and contingently. It’s not about imaginary progress, which John Gray in Straw Dogs punctured definitively.

See Pan the Piper dancing in the greenwood dawn...Earth, Water, Fire, Air, dancing round the Maypole...at Beltane, light a Beltane fire, high on the skyline - from Ancient Dream, by Aeolian Songspell

The "Maienschein" - literally, "May-light" or "May-shine" in the above photo epitomises the green glow of sunlight through spring leaves.

I share below (without comment...which is a personal act that belongs in the real, not the virtual world), an evolving, far from exhaustive, but from an emotional point-of-view, highly illustrative and authentic selection of my favourite poetry and lyrics...

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And it's a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace
And a wound that will never heal

- from Tom Traubert's Blues, by Tom Waits

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(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift

- The Uses of Sorrow, by Mary Oliver

This evolving paper starts to imagine and sketch out Personal Development Goals (PDGs) that could complement the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

We will also draw ideas and inspirations from the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) not for profit and open source initiative. (See also Can the Inner Development Goals help us create a more sustainable future? and Start working on your Inner Development Goals now.)

Introduction