How climate strikers are borrowing words and images from 1960s counterculture to influence the hippies of yesterday that stand in the way of climate action today. A little over a year ago, an image took the world by storm. It was of a girl outside an old building, beside her a white board with hand-painted black capital letters on it: ‘SKOLSTREJK… Read more →
A bit of a Japanophile, I’d been looking for the kimono shop listed in my Melbourne guidebook when I came across something even better. Up a dingy stairwell and down a dimly-lit corridor in an old building that could have been the setting for the detective agency in a black-and-white film, a cheerful sign caught my eye: “Haberdashery”. I poked… Read more →
The thick pine forest that lines the sides of southern Maine’s curving costal road is interrupted by a sloping green field, where four barn-red buildings are clustered together. Inside, table saws hum as they slice through planks of oak and lathes swiftly spin as they curve blocks of walnut. “There’s a tremendous amount of creative problem solving in carpentry,” says… Read more →
Wabi-sabi is a Japanese philosophy that embraces impermanence, imperfection and emptiness. Its origins are in Zen Buddhism and it was popularised by tea master Sen no Rikyu, who integrated wabi-sabi ideas into the Japanese tea ceremony in the 16th century. Few people can articulate a concrete definition of wabi-sabi: ambiguity is integral to the philosophy. Rather than denoting a strict… Read more →
The dish in my kitchen had been upsetting me. Its heyday as part of my teatime ritual was long gone, but I hadn’t parted with it. In three pieces, it lurked moodily behind my mugs, wondering whether it would ever be invited to the table again. I’d been uncertain how to fix it until one day, wandering the internet, I… Read more →
