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The 52:52:52 project, launching on this site and on social media in 2025, will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.

This site addresses what's changing, at the personal, organisational and societal levels. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 elements of life, from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and much more besides, which will help you better prepare for related change in your own life.

Halcyon In Kaleidoscope features irregular and fragmentary writings - on ideas and values, places and people - which evolve over time into mini essais, paying humble homage to the peerless founder of the genre. The kaleidoscope is Halcyon's prime metaphor, viewing the world through ever-moving lenses.

A Mundane Comedy is Dom Kelleher's new book, which will be published in 2025. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

Inner

On Aubagne

Aubagne

 

Four decades ago I left Aubagne, without any photos - which I sometimes regret, but I was young and stubborn and romantic and weird - but with images imprinted on my mind, and maybe my heart, forever.

Indeed, over the intervening years, these images have grown much stronger in relative terms, and moved closer and closer to the front and centre of the painting of my life, even as other, once seemingly permanent formative experiences have gradually faded....probably the reminiscence bump in action.

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On Poetry
Poetry
Halcyon In Kal… 5 September 2024

 

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

 

On Legacy
Christopher Hitchens
Halcyon Inspired 2 September 2024

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Those who study the stories and myths we tell point out that they often share remarkable similarities. They very often involve a separation from home, a test of character, and then a return home with new wisdom or strength. One of these transformative trials comes when we lose someone we truly and deeply love. Those who have known grief understand something more about life. When we suffer the loss of someone we love, we know what it means to be left alone and behind.

On George Orwell

blog image

 

According to Open Culture, Orwell's Animal Farm was almost never published.  The manuscript barely survived the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, and then initially T.S. Eliot (an important editor at Faber & Faber) and other publishers rejected the book.  It eventually came to see the light of day but, reportedly, Animal Farm still can’t be legally read in China, Burma and North Korea, or across large parts of the Islamic world. However, the Internet Archive offers free access to audio versions of Animal Farm and 1984.

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