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1000 results for “less_beauty”
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Hello Fediverse. Here's my #introduction and welcome to it.
I'm a late #boomer and #eldergay living in the #PNW with my lovely and talented husband, Eric. We are both musicians and singers, though he makes a living at it while I have become a happy amateur, choosing instead to make my living tapping and cursoring about screens, mostly building signage to sell products I don't actually care much about. Still I love collaborating with creatives, making things and being good at what I do.
I'm a longtime #Mac fanboy, #InDesign and #Photoshop expert and #writer - mostly on the subject of sex, particularly between men. I often wish I'd pursued a career in sex research. Since I chose the arts, I instead created a podcast in which I could spout a few opinions and ask a ton of questions of people who understand sexuality in ways I don't, which is enormously fun.
Though it's been dormant a while, I produce The Heart of Jacks Podcast, and listening to it will tell you way more about me than any introduction. For example, I'm what's commonly considered an ethical slut, and I pursue a sort of mission to encourage people to find their way to authentic and joyful sexual expression that does what sex is fundamentally meant to do for humans: connect us meaningfully to ourselves and each other.
I operate a Mastodon instance that I will not name here and will not link to, because it is explicitly for the purpose of shamelessly sharing sensitive media. I intend to share thoughts, ideas and less-sensitive media here, and mainly find interesting interactions that require fewer CWs.
Things I believe:
Life is like most good games: a compelling combination of luck and skills.
"What seems to be coming at you is coming from you" —Jack Flanders
If you want it to be delicious, try adding butter.
Adult relationships require consistent, persistent effort.
"Every human being has a basic nature of goodness, which is undiluted and unconfused. That goodness contains tremendous gentleness and appreciation. As human beings we can make love. We can stroke someone with a gentle touch; we can kiss someone with gentle understanding. We can appreciate beauty. We can appreciate the best of this world. We can appreciate the yellowness of yellow, the redness of red, the greenness of green, the purpleness of purple. Our experience is real. And when we appreciate reality, it can actually work on us. We may have to get up in the morning after only a few hours’ sleep, but if we look out the window and see the sun shining, it can cheer us up. We can actually cure ourselves of depression if we recognize that the world we have is good." — Chögyam Trungpa -
Hello Fediverse. Here's my #introduction and welcome to it.
I'm a late #boomer and #eldergay living in the #PNW with my lovely and talented husband, Eric. We are both musicians and singers, though he makes a living at it while I have become a happy amateur, choosing instead to make my living tapping and cursoring about screens, mostly building signage to sell products I don't actually care much about. Still I love collaborating with creatives, making things and being good at what I do.
I'm a longtime #Mac fanboy, #InDesign and #Photoshop expert and #writer - mostly on the subject of sex, particularly between men. I often wish I'd pursued a career in sex research. Since I chose the arts, I instead created a podcast in which I could spout a few opinions and ask a ton of questions of people who understand sexuality in ways I don't, which is enormously fun.
Though it's been dormant a while, I produce The Heart of Jacks Podcast, and listening to it will tell you way more about me than any introduction. For example, I'm what's commonly considered an ethical slut, and I pursue a sort of mission to encourage people to find their way to authentic and joyful sexual expression that does what sex is fundamentally meant to do for humans: connect us meaningfully to ourselves and each other.
I operate a Mastodon instance that I will not name here and will not link to, because it is explicitly for the purpose of shamelessly sharing sensitive media. I intend to share thoughts, ideas and less-sensitive media here, and mainly find interesting interactions that require fewer CWs.
Things I believe:
Life is like most good games: a compelling combination of luck and skills.
"What seems to be coming at you is coming from you" —Jack Flanders
If you want it to be delicious, try adding butter.
Adult relationships require consistent, persistent effort.
"Every human being has a basic nature of goodness, which is undiluted and unconfused. That goodness contains tremendous gentleness and appreciation. As human beings we can make love. We can stroke someone with a gentle touch; we can kiss someone with gentle understanding. We can appreciate beauty. We can appreciate the best of this world. We can appreciate the yellowness of yellow, the redness of red, the greenness of green, the purpleness of purple. Our experience is real. And when we appreciate reality, it can actually work on us. We may have to get up in the morning after only a few hours’ sleep, but if we look out the window and see the sun shining, it can cheer us up. We can actually cure ourselves of depression if we recognize that the world we have is good." — Chögyam Trungpa -
Hello Fediverse. Here's my #introduction and welcome to it.
I'm a late #boomer and #eldergay living in the #PNW with my lovely and talented husband, Eric. We are both musicians and singers, though he makes a living at it while I have become a happy amateur, choosing instead to make my living tapping and cursoring about screens, mostly building signage to sell products I don't actually care much about. Still I love collaborating with creatives, making things and being good at what I do.
I'm a longtime #Mac fanboy, #InDesign and #Photoshop expert and #writer - mostly on the subject of sex, particularly between men. I often wish I'd pursued a career in sex research. Since I chose the arts, I instead created a podcast in which I could spout a few opinions and ask a ton of questions of people who understand sexuality in ways I don't, which is enormously fun.
Though it's been dormant a while, I produce The Heart of Jacks Podcast, and listening to it will tell you way more about me than any introduction. For example, I'm what's commonly considered an ethical slut, and I pursue a sort of mission to encourage people to find their way to authentic and joyful sexual expression that does what sex is fundamentally meant to do for humans: connect us meaningfully to ourselves and each other.
I operate a Mastodon instance that I will not name here and will not link to, because it is explicitly for the purpose of shamelessly sharing sensitive media. I intend to share thoughts, ideas and less-sensitive media here, and mainly find interesting interactions that require fewer CWs.
Things I believe:
Life is like most good games: a compelling combination of luck and skills.
"What seems to be coming at you is coming from you" —Jack Flanders
If you want it to be delicious, try adding butter.
Adult relationships require consistent, persistent effort.
"Every human being has a basic nature of goodness, which is undiluted and unconfused. That goodness contains tremendous gentleness and appreciation. As human beings we can make love. We can stroke someone with a gentle touch; we can kiss someone with gentle understanding. We can appreciate beauty. We can appreciate the best of this world. We can appreciate the yellowness of yellow, the redness of red, the greenness of green, the purpleness of purple. Our experience is real. And when we appreciate reality, it can actually work on us. We may have to get up in the morning after only a few hours’ sleep, but if we look out the window and see the sun shining, it can cheer us up. We can actually cure ourselves of depression if we recognize that the world we have is good." — Chögyam Trungpa -
Hello Fediverse. Here's my #introduction and welcome to it.
I'm a late #boomer and #eldergay living in the #PNW with my lovely and talented husband, Eric. We are both musicians and singers, though he makes a living at it while I have become a happy amateur, choosing instead to make my living tapping and cursoring about screens, mostly building signage to sell products I don't actually care much about. Still I love collaborating with creatives, making things and being good at what I do.
I'm a longtime #Mac fanboy, #InDesign and #Photoshop expert and #writer - mostly on the subject of sex, particularly between men. I often wish I'd pursued a career in sex research. Since I chose the arts, I instead created a podcast in which I could spout a few opinions and ask a ton of questions of people who understand sexuality in ways I don't, which is enormously fun.
Though it's been dormant a while, I produce The Heart of Jacks Podcast, and listening to it will tell you way more about me than any introduction. For example, I'm what's commonly considered an ethical slut, and I pursue a sort of mission to encourage people to find their way to authentic and joyful sexual expression that does what sex is fundamentally meant to do for humans: connect us meaningfully to ourselves and each other.
I operate a Mastodon instance that I will not name here and will not link to, because it is explicitly for the purpose of shamelessly sharing sensitive media. I intend to share thoughts, ideas and less-sensitive media here, and mainly find interesting interactions that require fewer CWs.
Things I believe:
Life is like most good games: a compelling combination of luck and skills.
"What seems to be coming at you is coming from you" —Jack Flanders
If you want it to be delicious, try adding butter.
Adult relationships require consistent, persistent effort.
"Every human being has a basic nature of goodness, which is undiluted and unconfused. That goodness contains tremendous gentleness and appreciation. As human beings we can make love. We can stroke someone with a gentle touch; we can kiss someone with gentle understanding. We can appreciate beauty. We can appreciate the best of this world. We can appreciate the yellowness of yellow, the redness of red, the greenness of green, the purpleness of purple. Our experience is real. And when we appreciate reality, it can actually work on us. We may have to get up in the morning after only a few hours’ sleep, but if we look out the window and see the sun shining, it can cheer us up. We can actually cure ourselves of depression if we recognize that the world we have is good." — Chögyam Trungpa -
Hello Fediverse. Here's my #introduction and welcome to it.
I'm a late #boomer and #eldergay living in the #PNW with my lovely and talented husband, Eric. We are both musicians and singers, though he makes a living at it while I have become a happy amateur, choosing instead to make my living tapping and cursoring about screens, mostly building signage to sell products I don't actually care much about. Still I love collaborating with creatives, making things and being good at what I do.
I'm a longtime #Mac fanboy, #InDesign and #Photoshop expert and #writer - mostly on the subject of sex, particularly between men. I often wish I'd pursued a career in sex research. Since I chose the arts, I instead created a podcast in which I could spout a few opinions and ask a ton of questions of people who understand sexuality in ways I don't, which is enormously fun.
Though it's been dormant a while, I produce The Heart of Jacks Podcast, and listening to it will tell you way more about me than any introduction. For example, I'm what's commonly considered an ethical slut, and I pursue a sort of mission to encourage people to find their way to authentic and joyful sexual expression that does what sex is fundamentally meant to do for humans: connect us meaningfully to ourselves and each other.
I operate a Mastodon instance that I will not name here and will not link to, because it is explicitly for the purpose of shamelessly sharing sensitive media. I intend to share thoughts, ideas and less-sensitive media here, and mainly find interesting interactions that require fewer CWs.
Things I believe:
Life is like most good games: a compelling combination of luck and skills.
"What seems to be coming at you is coming from you" —Jack Flanders
If you want it to be delicious, try adding butter.
Adult relationships require consistent, persistent effort.
"Every human being has a basic nature of goodness, which is undiluted and unconfused. That goodness contains tremendous gentleness and appreciation. As human beings we can make love. We can stroke someone with a gentle touch; we can kiss someone with gentle understanding. We can appreciate beauty. We can appreciate the best of this world. We can appreciate the yellowness of yellow, the redness of red, the greenness of green, the purpleness of purple. Our experience is real. And when we appreciate reality, it can actually work on us. We may have to get up in the morning after only a few hours’ sleep, but if we look out the window and see the sun shining, it can cheer us up. We can actually cure ourselves of depression if we recognize that the world we have is good." — Chögyam Trungpa -
The real enemy of a Realist isn’t Big Tech… It’s Indifference https://therealists.org/?p=7755I recently had a powerful epiphany: all the research and the work I had been doing for The Realists had the framing all wrong.
For years, I had been thinking that my “enemy”, my nemesis, adversary – however you want to call it – was Big Tech… the companies that have built systems of surveillance capitalism and are profiting from it. The platforms promoting unattainable beauty and life ideals. The popular apps that are addictive by design.
But no, I now realize I had it all wrong.
The real “enemy” is indifference – people’s indifference to the monumental changes brought on by Big Tech. What they are doing to our humanity. How they are changing what we value. How we see ourselves. Our dreams and aspirations. How we socialize. How we raise our kids.
Big Tech will continue to keep a powerful hold on our lives if we think that “the toothpaste is already out of the tube”, that the changes are inevitable, and that it’s a good thing to jump on all the latest trends, use the most popular apps, under the belief that they will make our lives better.
Media Consumption
I find it astonishing that nowadays people worldwide spend an average of 455 minutes per day consuming media – that’s 7.58 hours a day. And yet, most people have a vague understanding of the effects of media on their lives, self-esteem and worldview.
My interest in the subject? I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Mass Communication and I still vividly remember concepts from my college classes about “Persuasion and Public Opinion” and “Media Effects.”
For example, are you familiar with any of these media theories? “Agenda setting” and “Gatekeeping”? “Cultivation Theory”? The “Magic Bullet Theory”?
I learned about these theories many years ago and today the media landscape is completely different. There are now powerful communication devices in everyone’s pocket… and they are being used extensively, for most of people’s waking lives, without much thought about it.
I notice indifference… and I also notice – and experience – resistance to tech resistance. What do I mean by that? I have the perfect example from my personal life.
Resistance to (Tech) Resistance
I’m the mom of a two-year-old daughter.
I have been called a “Taliban” “Putin” and an “extremist” for wanting to raise her screen-free, without any visual media except for interactive FaceTime videos with her grandparents who live far away. (Incidentally, that’s what the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends, but to some people, it appears to be extreme).
It’s ironic that I’m a filmmaker – but my child has never watched a video in her life. To her, a phone is something that stays in the back pocket; an iPad is a magical portal for video calls with her grandparents. I don’t own a TV and aside from iPad video calls her screen time is exactly 0 minutes a day. She’s 26 months old. And I wouldn’t do things any other way.
Thankfully the colorful nicknames/insults came from one person and they have been toned down since that person watched a documentary on the effects of screen time on young children’s brain development.
These nicknames may sound a bit harsh, but in several situations, with other adults around me and my child, I have noticed similar attitudes. Resistance to my resistance.
I’ve been told that it would be impossible to handle my child on the plane without a tablet or smartphone… and yet she aced her first flights, entertained by her parents, her favorite books and a teddy bear.
I’ve been called “excessive” for voicing my concerns about screen time and reading “too many books” to my child. I was warned I would ruin her eyes with books.
I’ve been advised not to talk about how I raise my child screen-free lest I offend other parents and grandparents who do things differently.
But I think it’s important to share my experiences, to show that there is another way.
Thankfully my husband is on the same page as me, wanting to raise her like we were raised. Think: a childhood like we had in the 1980s – minus television, plus an iPad only for FaceTime calls.
Who’s Raising the Kids?
I have been closely following the work of Dr. Susan Linn for years – a psychologist who founded the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. I have interviewed her for my documentary The Illusionists and I recently read her powerful new book Who’s Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Media, and the Lives of Children.
Dr. Linn writes:
You’re dealing with a culture dominated by multinational corporations spending billions of dollars and using seductive technologies to bypass parents and target children directly with messages designed — sometimes ingeniously — to capture their hearts and minds. And their primary purpose is not to help kids lead healthy lives or to promote positive values or even to make their lives better. It’s to generate profit.
Later in the book, she adds:
Traditionally, for kids having what Winnicott might call “good enough” childhoods, the adults with whom they mostly interacted, and who had the most influence over them, were parents, other caregivers, and teachers. They were all familiar family or community members who were at least supposed to have children’s interests at heart. For better or worse, it’s common to raise children to be wary of strangers. Yet in a digitized, commercialized culture, we blithely turn vast portions of a child’s day over to strangers. We don’t see these people. Our kids never meet them. But these strangers know an enormous amount about our children. They know how to capture their attention, to exploit their vulnerabilities, and to trigger their longings. These are the strangers who own, manufacture, and advertise the apps, toys, and games that occupy children’s time and whose jobs demand that they develop and market products that generate big bucks regardless of their impact on the kids who use them.
Instant Gratification and Continuous Distraction
What worries me the most about the shifts brought on by this brave new technological world is this: the internet, smartphones and apps have created a frictionless world of instant gratification and constant distraction.
Are you bored? Fish your phone out of your pocket and you can scroll social media, listen to any song you may think of courtesy of Spotify or watch a video on YouTube.
Do you feel lonely? A couple of taps on the phone and you could communicate with a friend or see what they have posted on social media. Turn on the TV, keep it on in the background, and feel like you are not home alone.
Hungry? A meal can be delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less, courtesy of an app.
Everyday activities that take actual effort are starting to be frowned upon.
Silence and time away from a screen may make certain people uncomfortable.
Technology sweeps in, allowing people to never feel bored and giving them the illusion of connection… and handing them any object they may desire, delivered straight to their doors.
When it comes to spending time with a small child, many adults default to entertaining children with screens… not really thinking about the consequences of screen time and the content they will consume. These devices take away all the effort – but they also take away human connection and the opportunity for a child to develop their curiosity.
I can understand why people do this. Smartphones and tablets have been around for less than 20 years and to hundreds of millions of people they still have a magical aura around them. That’s why it’s so hard for adults to see them in a critical light. Dissenting voices are a minority. Tech giants spend a fortune in marketing their shiny devices and platforms. And – this is key – most people equate technology with progress and modernity – positive things. But media consumption and screen time carry consequences.
Dr. Linn writes in her book:
Today, children’s opportunities for silence — to experience wonder but also to play, dream, and explore — are rare. […] It was a long – ago conversation with Fred Rogers that first got me thinking about the importance of silence in children’s lives. Silence was so important to him that he once used an egg timer to tick off a whole minute of it on his television show. And after listening to cellist Yo-Yo Ma play his cello, Fred commented, “After you’ve heard someone play beautiful music, sometimes you just like to have a quiet time to remember it. Let’s just sit and think about what we’ve heard.”
The Universal Need for Media and Digital Literacy
I think media literacy AND digital literacy classes should be mandatory… not just for young people but also for all educators, parents, grandparents and caretakers. For all humans, really.
Because if you are a parent or grandparent and you read this sentence by Dr. Linn, wouldn’t you start to care?
It became clear to me that the problem with the tech-driven, omnipresent marketing that kids experience today isn’t just that they’re being sold stuff. It’s that the values, conventions, and behaviors embraced and engendered by gargantuan, minimally regulated, for-profit conglomerates permeate all aspects of society, including the lives of children.
I think they would. And they may think twice before handing their toddler a tablet or putting them in front of a TV.
The Lumineers’ song “Stubborn Love” goes: “The opposite of love’s indifference. So pay attention now…”
The ways in which technology has invaded the lives of small children – with most people accepting this uncritically – is just an example of indifference to Big Tech. I think it’s a particularly salient example because it powerfully affects a new generation.
How do we counteract indifference to Big Tech?
Through education. Media literacy AND digital literacy.
If you haven’t already, I would highly encourage you to read the late Neil Postman’s book Technopoly and Dr. Linn’s Who’s Raising the Kids? Listen to podcasts such as The Ezra Klein Show or Offline with Jon Favreau. And don’t be afraid to be different. To resist.
At the end of Technopoly Neil Postman writes:
A resistance fighter understands that technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things, that every technology—from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer—is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny, criticism, and control. In short, a technological resistance fighter maintains an epistemological and psychic distance from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural.
I encourage you to re-read Postman’s powerful words slowly, carefully.
And then spend a minute thinking about them – à la Fred Rogers.
“Let’s just sit and think about what we’ve heard.”
#BigTech #children #digitalLiteracy #DrSusanLinn #FredRogers #indifference #mediaConsumption #mediaLiteracy #mediaTheory #NeilPostman #parenting #screenTime #Technopoly #WhoSRaisingTheKids
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On our route towards #AGI in this #TechnologicalSingularity trajectory we are accelerating on the most burning question is what the tomorrow looks like.
It is becoming more and more difficult to forecast shorter and shorter futures, but now we still have some visibility. What I believe will happen:
- We will experience a huge growth in appetite for #compute, specifically #chips, #data and conveniently encoded #knowledge.
- While we can introduce #AI to our existing industries, businesses and militaries, we will experience the bottleneck where we cannot quite do what we'd like to do as we have too few robots everywhere. We'll probably start building robots like there's no tomorrow, and renting them to be controlled by AIs to construct new factories, logistical centers, military bases and all sorts of things more streamlined for an AI-based society.
- Many people will cede control of their lives and any decisions within their power to AIs. Those who do might do well or less well, but definitely better and better over time as the systems become more powerful. Delegating day-to-day control to machines means that there is less reason for humans to even be informed of the day-to-day operational details.
- Some companies will get boosted by not having to hire so much labor in the first place. I think this will be a stronger dynamic than layoffs, and it will eventually causally drive layoffs as companies with more traditional structures will lose in competition to these new challengers.
- Prices of lots of things will fall, but at least initially, everything that bottlenecks further AI adoption will become scarce. Digital design becomes practically free which means our world will fill up with beauty and purpose. -
Wildlife Photojournalist and Animal Advocate Dalida Innes
Dalida Innes
Wildlife Photographer and Portrait Photographer
“If I could tell animal activists and conservationists something, I would say: Never give up! Once a species is gone that is a terrible loss to us all! #Boycott4Wildlife #Boycottpalmoil” #Wildlife Photographer @dainnes67
TweetDalida Innes @dainnes67 specialises in #wildlifephotography and #portrait #photography. She captures rare intimate moments with animals in all of their emotional complexity. Read more about her and her incredible photos
Tweet“I am against all supermarket brands that have deforestation in their supply chain. I am a vegan for the animals and I #boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife” Wildlife Photographer Dalida Innes @dainnes67
TweetMy name is Dalida Innes, I am from France originally and I live in Sydney, Australia. I love wildlife, landscape, travel photography and everything between. I travel as often as I can and try to make the most of it. Encounters with nature have taken me to incredible places and I have met fantastic people.
I am self-taught with a sincere passion for all things photographic
Adventurous spirit with camera in hand, I try to capture moments of wonder and serenity. For me, capturing images is like freezing the time and I can go back to it whenever I want. Trying to get that precise moment that your eye doesn’t have time to memorise or to remember.
I love witnessing special moments between animals
You never know what’s going to happen. Everyday is a new adventure when you’re photographing wildlife. No two days are exactly the same.
We can learn so much just from watching animals
I have always worked with animals. I just love watching them, observing their behaviour is something I am fascinated by. I have learnt so much from them and I want to share all of the beauty that I have witnessed with the world.
Buy Dalida’s photographic printsWhen I was a child, I used to play with a broken camera
I dreamt that as an adult I would become a filmmaker and make animal documentaries, as I loved watching these shows as a child. Later when I started to work, initially I bought my first video camera but I quickly realised that this wasn’t for me. So instead I started doing photography and it all accelerated from there.
Never give up the fight to save wild animals!
If I could tell animal activists and conservationists something, I would say: Never give up! Once a species is gone that is a terrible loss to us all!
Always respect a wild animal’s personal space
To wildlife photographers just starting out, I would say that it’s important to respect the animals’ personal space. Don’t try and encroach on the animals too much, as they will feel uncomfortable and won’t behave naturally. Always be prepared for the unexpected, it may not happen, but if it does, be ready for it.
Morning Glory by Dalida Innes Wildlife PhotographyI am against all supermarket brands that have deforestation in their supply chain
Less trees means less habitat for wild animals. Not only this, today with so much advanced research and technology there should be other ways, other methods of producing palm oil and other commodities. They have the technology to make anything they want. So I still don’t understand why they don’t just do that instead of destroying forests!
I welcome you to connect with me on social media and visit my shop to buy prints
Visit my website #Africa #ArtistProfile #Artivism #Boycott4wildlife #BoycottPalmOil #conservation #CreativesForCoolCreatures #MountainGorilla #Photographer #photography #portrait #Primate #TigerPantheraTigris #wildlife #wildlifeActivism #wildlifePhotography #wildlifephotography -
Wildlife Photojournalist and Animal Advocate Dalida Innes
Dalida Innes
Wildlife Photographer and Portrait Photographer
“If I could tell animal activists and conservationists something, I would say: Never give up! Once a species is gone that is a terrible loss to us all! #Boycott4Wildlife #Boycottpalmoil” #Wildlife Photographer @dainnes67
TweetDalida Innes @dainnes67 specialises in #wildlifephotography and #portrait #photography. She captures rare intimate moments with animals in all of their emotional complexity. Read more about her and her incredible photos
Tweet“I am against all supermarket brands that have deforestation in their supply chain. I am a vegan for the animals and I #boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife” Wildlife Photographer Dalida Innes @dainnes67
TweetMy name is Dalida Innes, I am from France originally and I live in Sydney, Australia. I love wildlife, landscape, travel photography and everything between. I travel as often as I can and try to make the most of it. Encounters with nature have taken me to incredible places and I have met fantastic people.
I am self-taught with a sincere passion for all things photographic
Adventurous spirit with camera in hand, I try to capture moments of wonder and serenity. For me, capturing images is like freezing the time and I can go back to it whenever I want. Trying to get that precise moment that your eye doesn’t have time to memorise or to remember.
I love witnessing special moments between animals
You never know what’s going to happen. Everyday is a new adventure when you’re photographing wildlife. No two days are exactly the same.
We can learn so much just from watching animals
I have always worked with animals. I just love watching them, observing their behaviour is something I am fascinated by. I have learnt so much from them and I want to share all of the beauty that I have witnessed with the world.
Buy Dalida’s photographic printsWhen I was a child, I used to play with a broken camera
I dreamt that as an adult I would become a filmmaker and make animal documentaries, as I loved watching these shows as a child. Later when I started to work, initially I bought my first video camera but I quickly realised that this wasn’t for me. So instead I started doing photography and it all accelerated from there.
Never give up the fight to save wild animals!
If I could tell animal activists and conservationists something, I would say: Never give up! Once a species is gone that is a terrible loss to us all!
Always respect a wild animal’s personal space
To wildlife photographers just starting out, I would say that it’s important to respect the animals’ personal space. Don’t try and encroach on the animals too much, as they will feel uncomfortable and won’t behave naturally. Always be prepared for the unexpected, it may not happen, but if it does, be ready for it.
Morning Glory by Dalida Innes Wildlife PhotographyI am against all supermarket brands that have deforestation in their supply chain
Less trees means less habitat for wild animals. Not only this, today with so much advanced research and technology there should be other ways, other methods of producing palm oil and other commodities. They have the technology to make anything they want. So I still don’t understand why they don’t just do that instead of destroying forests!
I welcome you to connect with me on social media and visit my shop to buy prints
Visit my website #Africa #ArtistProfile #Artivism #Boycott4wildlife #BoycottPalmOil #conservation #CreativesForCoolCreatures #MountainGorilla #Photographer #photography #portrait #Primate #TigerPantheraTigris #wildlife #wildlifeActivism #wildlifePhotography #wildlifephotography -
Wildlife Photojournalist and Animal Advocate Dalida Innes
Dalida Innes
Wildlife Photographer and Portrait Photographer
“If I could tell animal activists and conservationists something, I would say: Never give up! Once a species is gone that is a terrible loss to us all! #Boycott4Wildlife #Boycottpalmoil” #Wildlife Photographer @dainnes67
TweetDalida Innes @dainnes67 specialises in #wildlifephotography and #portrait #photography. She captures rare intimate moments with animals in all of their emotional complexity. Read more about her and her incredible photos
Tweet“I am against all supermarket brands that have deforestation in their supply chain. I am a vegan for the animals and I #boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife” Wildlife Photographer Dalida Innes @dainnes67
TweetMy name is Dalida Innes, I am from France originally and I live in Sydney, Australia. I love wildlife, landscape, travel photography and everything between. I travel as often as I can and try to make the most of it. Encounters with nature have taken me to incredible places and I have met fantastic people.
I am self-taught with a sincere passion for all things photographic
Adventurous spirit with camera in hand, I try to capture moments of wonder and serenity. For me, capturing images is like freezing the time and I can go back to it whenever I want. Trying to get that precise moment that your eye doesn’t have time to memorise or to remember.
I love witnessing special moments between animals
You never know what’s going to happen. Everyday is a new adventure when you’re photographing wildlife. No two days are exactly the same.
We can learn so much just from watching animals
I have always worked with animals. I just love watching them, observing their behaviour is something I am fascinated by. I have learnt so much from them and I want to share all of the beauty that I have witnessed with the world.
Buy Dalida’s photographic printsWhen I was a child, I used to play with a broken camera
I dreamt that as an adult I would become a filmmaker and make animal documentaries, as I loved watching these shows as a child. Later when I started to work, initially I bought my first video camera but I quickly realised that this wasn’t for me. So instead I started doing photography and it all accelerated from there.
Never give up the fight to save wild animals!
If I could tell animal activists and conservationists something, I would say: Never give up! Once a species is gone that is a terrible loss to us all!
Always respect a wild animal’s personal space
To wildlife photographers just starting out, I would say that it’s important to respect the animals’ personal space. Don’t try and encroach on the animals too much, as they will feel uncomfortable and won’t behave naturally. Always be prepared for the unexpected, it may not happen, but if it does, be ready for it.
Morning Glory by Dalida Innes Wildlife PhotographyI am against all supermarket brands that have deforestation in their supply chain
Less trees means less habitat for wild animals. Not only this, today with so much advanced research and technology there should be other ways, other methods of producing palm oil and other commodities. They have the technology to make anything they want. So I still don’t understand why they don’t just do that instead of destroying forests!
I welcome you to connect with me on social media and visit my shop to buy prints
Visit my website #Africa #ArtistProfile #Artivism #Boycott4wildlife #BoycottPalmOil #conservation #CreativesForCoolCreatures #MountainGorilla #Photographer #photography #portrait #Primate #TigerPantheraTigris #wildlife #wildlifeActivism #wildlifePhotography #wildlifephotography -
Wildlife Photojournalist and Animal Advocate Dalida Innes
Dalida Innes
Wildlife Photographer and Portrait Photographer
“If I could tell animal activists and conservationists something, I would say: Never give up! Once a species is gone that is a terrible loss to us all! #Boycott4Wildlife #Boycottpalmoil” #Wildlife Photographer @dainnes67
TweetDalida Innes @dainnes67 specialises in #wildlifephotography and #portrait #photography. She captures rare intimate moments with animals in all of their emotional complexity. Read more about her and her incredible photos
Tweet“I am against all supermarket brands that have deforestation in their supply chain. I am a vegan for the animals and I #boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife” Wildlife Photographer Dalida Innes @dainnes67
TweetMy name is Dalida Innes, I am from France originally and I live in Sydney, Australia. I love wildlife, landscape, travel photography and everything between. I travel as often as I can and try to make the most of it. Encounters with nature have taken me to incredible places and I have met fantastic people.
I am self-taught with a sincere passion for all things photographic
Adventurous spirit with camera in hand, I try to capture moments of wonder and serenity. For me, capturing images is like freezing the time and I can go back to it whenever I want. Trying to get that precise moment that your eye doesn’t have time to memorise or to remember.
I love witnessing special moments between animals
You never know what’s going to happen. Everyday is a new adventure when you’re photographing wildlife. No two days are exactly the same.
We can learn so much just from watching animals
I have always worked with animals. I just love watching them, observing their behaviour is something I am fascinated by. I have learnt so much from them and I want to share all of the beauty that I have witnessed with the world.
Buy Dalida’s photographic printsWhen I was a child, I used to play with a broken camera
I dreamt that as an adult I would become a filmmaker and make animal documentaries, as I loved watching these shows as a child. Later when I started to work, initially I bought my first video camera but I quickly realised that this wasn’t for me. So instead I started doing photography and it all accelerated from there.
Never give up the fight to save wild animals!
If I could tell animal activists and conservationists something, I would say: Never give up! Once a species is gone that is a terrible loss to us all!
Always respect a wild animal’s personal space
To wildlife photographers just starting out, I would say that it’s important to respect the animals’ personal space. Don’t try and encroach on the animals too much, as they will feel uncomfortable and won’t behave naturally. Always be prepared for the unexpected, it may not happen, but if it does, be ready for it.
Morning Glory by Dalida Innes Wildlife PhotographyI am against all supermarket brands that have deforestation in their supply chain
Less trees means less habitat for wild animals. Not only this, today with so much advanced research and technology there should be other ways, other methods of producing palm oil and other commodities. They have the technology to make anything they want. So I still don’t understand why they don’t just do that instead of destroying forests!
I welcome you to connect with me on social media and visit my shop to buy prints
Visit my website #Africa #ArtistProfile #Artivism #Boycott4wildlife #BoycottPalmOil #conservation #CreativesForCoolCreatures #MountainGorilla #Photographer #photography #portrait #Primate #TigerPantheraTigris #wildlife #wildlifeActivism #wildlifePhotography #wildlifephotography -
Wildlife Photojournalist and Animal Advocate Dalida Innes
Dalida Innes
Wildlife Photographer and Portrait Photographer
“If I could tell animal activists and conservationists something, I would say: Never give up! Once a species is gone that is a terrible loss to us all! #Boycott4Wildlife #Boycottpalmoil” #Wildlife Photographer @dainnes67
TweetDalida Innes @dainnes67 specialises in #wildlifephotography and #portrait #photography. She captures rare intimate moments with animals in all of their emotional complexity. Read more about her and her incredible photos
Tweet“I am against all supermarket brands that have deforestation in their supply chain. I am a vegan for the animals and I #boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife” Wildlife Photographer Dalida Innes @dainnes67
TweetMy name is Dalida Innes, I am from France originally and I live in Sydney, Australia. I love wildlife, landscape, travel photography and everything between. I travel as often as I can and try to make the most of it. Encounters with nature have taken me to incredible places and I have met fantastic people.
I am self-taught with a sincere passion for all things photographic
Adventurous spirit with camera in hand, I try to capture moments of wonder and serenity. For me, capturing images is like freezing the time and I can go back to it whenever I want. Trying to get that precise moment that your eye doesn’t have time to memorise or to remember.
I love witnessing special moments between animals
You never know what’s going to happen. Everyday is a new adventure when you’re photographing wildlife. No two days are exactly the same.
We can learn so much just from watching animals
I have always worked with animals. I just love watching them, observing their behaviour is something I am fascinated by. I have learnt so much from them and I want to share all of the beauty that I have witnessed with the world.
Buy Dalida’s photographic printsWhen I was a child, I used to play with a broken camera
I dreamt that as an adult I would become a filmmaker and make animal documentaries, as I loved watching these shows as a child. Later when I started to work, initially I bought my first video camera but I quickly realised that this wasn’t for me. So instead I started doing photography and it all accelerated from there.
Never give up the fight to save wild animals!
If I could tell animal activists and conservationists something, I would say: Never give up! Once a species is gone that is a terrible loss to us all!
Always respect a wild animal’s personal space
To wildlife photographers just starting out, I would say that it’s important to respect the animals’ personal space. Don’t try and encroach on the animals too much, as they will feel uncomfortable and won’t behave naturally. Always be prepared for the unexpected, it may not happen, but if it does, be ready for it.
Morning Glory by Dalida Innes Wildlife PhotographyI am against all supermarket brands that have deforestation in their supply chain
Less trees means less habitat for wild animals. Not only this, today with so much advanced research and technology there should be other ways, other methods of producing palm oil and other commodities. They have the technology to make anything they want. So I still don’t understand why they don’t just do that instead of destroying forests!
I welcome you to connect with me on social media and visit my shop to buy prints
Visit my website #Africa #ArtistProfile #Artivism #Boycott4wildlife #BoycottPalmOil #conservation #CreativesForCoolCreatures #MountainGorilla #Photographer #photography #portrait #Primate #TigerPantheraTigris #wildlife #wildlifeActivism #wildlifePhotography #wildlifephotography -
Timneh Parrot Psittacus timneh
Timneh Parrot Psittacus timneh
IUCN Red List Status: Endangered
Location: Timneh Parrots inhabit the lowland forests, mangroves, and savannahs of West Africa, from Guinea-Bissau to western Côte d’Ivoire.
The Timneh Parrot, a smaller and darker cousin of the African Grey Parrot, captivates with their intelligence, vibrant personalities, and ability to mimic speech. However, their beauty and charm have contributed to their decline. The illegal pet trade is depleting wild populations, with poachers raiding nests to meet global demand. Meanwhile, habitat destruction driven by out-of-control palm oil plantations, meat agriculture, and crops like cocoa, coffee, and tobacco is eroding their forest homes.
Research shows that the parrot trade, facilitated by social media, has expanded into new regions like Algeria, where demand for exotic pets continues to fuel poaching. The population declines are staggering—studies in Cameroon show local reductions of up to 99% over 14 years due to trapping and habitat loss. Protecting these parrots requires ending the demand for wild-caught birds and halting deforestation in West Africa. Take action today: #BoycottPalmOil, boycott the pet trade #BoycottMeat #Boycott4Wildlife.
Smart and beautiful Timneh #Parrots 🦜💚live in #CoteDIvoire 🇨🇮 #SierraLeone 🇸🇱 they’re endangered from the illegal #pet trade #palmoil and #mining #deforestation. They deserve better! Fight for them #BoycottPalmOil #Boycott4Wildlife @palmoildetect https://palmoildetectives.com/2021/02/15/timneh-parrot-psittacus-timneh/
Share to BlueSky Share to TwitterTimneh #Parrots 🦜💚 are endangered due to people’s selfishness, wanting them as #pets driving illegal trade. Boycott the #PetTrade for them! #PalmOil is another threat to their forest in #WestAfrica. #BoycottPalmOil 🌴🚫 #Boycott4Wildlife @palmoildetect https://palmoildetectives.com/2021/02/15/timneh-parrot-psittacus-timneh/
Share to BlueSky Share to TwitterThis species has been uplisted to Endangered because it is subject to heavy trapping pressure across much of its range. In combination with the high rate of ongoing habitat loss, the species is therefore suspected to be declining rapidly over three generations (47 years).
IUCN Red List
Appearance and Behaviour
Timneh Parrots are smaller than African Greys, measuring 28–33 cm in length and weighing 275–375 grams. Their smoky grey plumage is complemented by maroon tail feathers and an ivory-coloured upper mandible, giving them a subtle but elegant appearance.
Highly intelligent and social, Timneh Parrots thrive in flocks, using a range of vocalisations to communicate. Known for their exceptional ability to mimic human speech, they are sought after as pets, which is contributing massively to their population decline in the wild. In their forest home where they belong, their vocal talents serve a vital role in maintaining flock cohesion and avoiding predators.
Threats
Capture for the Illegal Pet Trade:
The global demand for Timneh Parrots as exotic pets is the primary driver of their decline. Social media platforms have exacerbated this issue by making it easier for poachers and traders to connect with buyers. Research published in the European Journal of Wildlife Research highlights the growing role of online platforms in the parrot trade in Algeria, a region where this market is expanding rapidly. Poachers often destroy nests to capture chicks, causing irreparable harm to wild populations.
Palm oil, cocoa, meat and coffee deforestation:
Expansion of palm oil plantations, meat agriculture, and crops like cocoa, coffee, and tobacco are devastating the forests of West Africa. These activities fragment and degrade the lowland forests and mangroves that Timneh Parrots rely on for nesting and feeding.
Trapping for the Pet Trade Leading to Massive Population Loss:
Research published in the African Journal of Ecology confirms catastrophic population losses in regions like Cameroon’s Korup National Park, where grey parrot populations (including Timneh Parrots) have declined by 99% between 2002 and 2016. These declines are attributed to both trapping for the pet trade and extensive habitat loss.
Hunting for Bush Meat:
In addition to the pet trade, Timneh Parrots are hunted for bushmeat or kept as pets in local communities. This practice, while small-scale, compounds the pressures on their dwindling populations.
Extreme Weather from Climate Change:
Shifting rainfall patterns and rising temperatures from climate change disrupt the ecosystems these parrots depend on, further limiting their already fragmented habitats.
Diet
Timneh Parrots are frugivores and granivores, feeding on a diet of seeds, nuts, fruits, and berries. Their role as seed dispersers is critical to forest health. By consuming fruit and scattering seeds over wide areas, they help regenerate forests and maintain biodiversity. The loss of these parrots would have cascading effects on the ecosystems they support.
Reproduction and Mating
Timneh Parrots nest in tree cavities, laying 2–4 eggs that are incubated for approximately 28–30 days. Both parents participate in raising the chicks, which fledge around 10–12 weeks after hatching.
Suitable nesting sites are increasingly scarce due to deforestation and logging, leaving parrots to compete for the few remaining mature trees. This scarcity directly impacts their reproductive success, pushing them closer to extinction.
Geographic Range
Timneh Parrots are endemic to West Africa, with a range spanning Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and western Côte d’Ivoire. They inhabit lowland rainforests, mangroves, and savannahs but are increasingly restricted to isolated forest patches due to deforestation.
Efforts to conserve these parrots require protecting their remaining habitats and restoring degraded forests to expand their range.
FAQ
Are Timneh Parrots good pets?
Timneh Parrots are intelligent and bond strongly. However a strong warning and reminder – keeping Timneh Parrots as pets is an incredibly selfish act, as it is contributing to their extinction. Many parrots sold in the pet trade are illegally caught from the wild, causing immense suffering, the destruction of family units of birds and decimating populations. If you care about these parrots, you must advocate against the demand for exotic pets instead.
What is the lifespan of a Timneh?
In captivity, Timneh Parrots can live up to 50–60 years or more. In the wild, their lifespan is shorter due to the challenges posed by predation, disease, and habitat destruction. Timneh Parrots are not suitable pets because their species is going extinct due to the pet trade.
What is the difference between African Grey and Timneh?
Timneh Parrots are smaller and darker than African Greys. They have maroon tails and ivory-coloured upper mandibles, compared to the African Grey’s bright red tails and black bills. Timnehs are also considered less nervous and more adaptable.
What are the threats to Timneh Parrots?
The main threats include the illegal pet trade, deforestation for palm oil, cocoa, and coffee plantations, hunting for bushmeat, and climate change. Social media platforms have worsened the pet trade by facilitating connections between poachers and buyers.
Take Action!
The Timneh Parrot is on the brink of extinction due to habitat loss and the illegal pet trade. Refuse to support the exotic pet market, boycott products linked to deforestation, and demand conservation efforts to protect their habitats. Every choice you make can help save them: #BoycottPalmOil #BoycottMeat #Boycott4Wildlife.
Timneh Parrot Psittacus timneh
Support the conservation of this species
This animal has no protections in place. Read about other forgotten species here. Create art to support this forgotten animal or raise awareness about them by sharing this post and using the #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife hashtags on social media. Also you can boycott palm oil in the supermarket.
Further Information
Ameziane, I. N., Razkallah, I., Zebsa, R., Bensakhri, Z., Bensouilah, S., Bouslama, Z., Nijman, V., Houhamdi, M., & Atoussi, S. (2024). Disentangling the role of social media in the online parrot trade in Algeria. European Journal of Wildlife Research, 70(68). Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10344-024-01821-3
BirdLife International. 2019. Psittacus timneh (amended version of 2018 assessment). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2019: e.T22736498A155462561. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2019-3.RLTS.T22736498A155462561.en. Downloaded on 15 February 2021.
BirdLife International. (n.d.). Species factsheet: Timneh Parrot. Retrieved from: https://datazone.birdlife.org/species/factsheet/timneh-parrot-psittacus-timneh/text
Birds of the World. (n.d.). Timneh Parrot. Retrieved from https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/grypar10/cur/introduction
Reinhold, N., Wobker, J., Schröder, T., Kemnade, C., Bobo, K. S., & Waltert, M. (2020). Confirmation of strong declines of grey parrots in the Korup region, Cameroon, between 2002 and 2016. African Journal of Ecology. DOI: 10.1111/aje.12837
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Timneh Parrot. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timneh_parrot
How can I help the #Boycott4Wildlife?
Take Action in Five Ways
1. Join the #Boycott4Wildlife on social media and subscribe to stay in the loop: Share posts from this website to your own network on Twitter, Mastadon, Instagram, Facebook and Youtube using the hashtags #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife.
Enter your email address
Sign Up
Join 1,391 other subscribers2. Contribute stories: Academics, conservationists, scientists, indigenous rights advocates and animal rights advocates working to expose the corruption of the palm oil industry or to save animals can contribute stories to the website.
Mel Lumby: Dedicated Devotee to Borneo’s Living Beings
Anthropologist and Author Dr Sophie Chao
Health Physician Dr Evan Allen
The World’s Most Loved Cup: A Social, Ethical & Environmental History of Coffee by Aviary Doert
How do we stop the world’s ecosystems from going into a death spiral? A #SteadyState Economy
3. Supermarket sleuthing: Next time you’re in the supermarket, take photos of products containing palm oil. Share these to social media along with the hashtags to call out the greenwashing and ecocide of the brands who use palm oil. You can also take photos of palm oil free products and congratulate brands when they go palm oil free.
https://twitter.com/CuriousApe4/status/1526136783557529600?s=20
https://twitter.com/PhillDixon1/status/1749010345555788144?s=20
https://twitter.com/mugabe139/status/1678027567977078784?s=20
4. Take to the streets: Get in touch with Palm Oil Detectives to find out more.
5. Donate: Make a one-off or monthly donation to Palm Oil Detectives as a way of saying thank you and to help pay for ongoing running costs of the website and social media campaigns. Donate here
Pledge your support#Bird #birds #Boycott4wildlife #BoycottMeat #BoycottPalmOil #CoteDIvoire #deforestation #EndangeredSpecies #ForgottenAnimals #Guinea #GuineaBissau #IvoryCoast #Liberia #mining #palmoil #Parrot #Parrots #pet #pets #pettrade #SierraLeone #SierraLeone #TimnehParrotPsittacusTimneh #WestAfrica
-
Timneh Parrot Psittacus timneh
Timneh Parrot Psittacus timneh
IUCN Red List Status: Endangered
Location: Timneh Parrots inhabit the lowland forests, mangroves, and savannahs of West Africa, from Guinea-Bissau to western Côte d’Ivoire.
The Timneh Parrot, a smaller and darker cousin of the African Grey Parrot, captivates with their intelligence, vibrant personalities, and ability to mimic speech. However, their beauty and charm have contributed to their decline. The illegal pet trade is depleting wild populations, with poachers raiding nests to meet global demand. Meanwhile, habitat destruction driven by out-of-control palm oil plantations, meat agriculture, and crops like cocoa, coffee, and tobacco is eroding their forest homes.
Research shows that the parrot trade, facilitated by social media, has expanded into new regions like Algeria, where demand for exotic pets continues to fuel poaching. The population declines are staggering—studies in Cameroon show local reductions of up to 99% over 14 years due to trapping and habitat loss. Protecting these parrots requires ending the demand for wild-caught birds and halting deforestation in West Africa. Take action today: #BoycottPalmOil, boycott the pet trade #BoycottMeat #Boycott4Wildlife.
Smart and beautiful Timneh #Parrots 🦜💚live in #CoteDIvoire 🇨🇮 #SierraLeone 🇸🇱 they’re endangered from the illegal #pet trade #palmoil and #mining #deforestation. They deserve better! Fight for them #BoycottPalmOil #Boycott4Wildlife @palmoildetect https://palmoildetectives.com/2021/02/15/timneh-parrot-psittacus-timneh/
Share to BlueSky Share to TwitterTimneh #Parrots 🦜💚 are endangered due to people’s selfishness, wanting them as #pets driving illegal trade. Boycott the #PetTrade for them! #PalmOil is another threat to their forest in #WestAfrica. #BoycottPalmOil 🌴🚫 #Boycott4Wildlife @palmoildetect https://palmoildetectives.com/2021/02/15/timneh-parrot-psittacus-timneh/
Share to BlueSky Share to TwitterThis species has been uplisted to Endangered because it is subject to heavy trapping pressure across much of its range. In combination with the high rate of ongoing habitat loss, the species is therefore suspected to be declining rapidly over three generations (47 years).
IUCN Red List
Appearance and Behaviour
Timneh Parrots are smaller than African Greys, measuring 28–33 cm in length and weighing 275–375 grams. Their smoky grey plumage is complemented by maroon tail feathers and an ivory-coloured upper mandible, giving them a subtle but elegant appearance.
Highly intelligent and social, Timneh Parrots thrive in flocks, using a range of vocalisations to communicate. Known for their exceptional ability to mimic human speech, they are sought after as pets, which is contributing massively to their population decline in the wild. In their forest home where they belong, their vocal talents serve a vital role in maintaining flock cohesion and avoiding predators.
Threats
Capture for the Illegal Pet Trade:
The global demand for Timneh Parrots as exotic pets is the primary driver of their decline. Social media platforms have exacerbated this issue by making it easier for poachers and traders to connect with buyers. Research published in the European Journal of Wildlife Research highlights the growing role of online platforms in the parrot trade in Algeria, a region where this market is expanding rapidly. Poachers often destroy nests to capture chicks, causing irreparable harm to wild populations.
Palm oil, cocoa, meat and coffee deforestation:
Expansion of palm oil plantations, meat agriculture, and crops like cocoa, coffee, and tobacco are devastating the forests of West Africa. These activities fragment and degrade the lowland forests and mangroves that Timneh Parrots rely on for nesting and feeding.
Trapping for the Pet Trade Leading to Massive Population Loss:
Research published in the African Journal of Ecology confirms catastrophic population losses in regions like Cameroon’s Korup National Park, where grey parrot populations (including Timneh Parrots) have declined by 99% between 2002 and 2016. These declines are attributed to both trapping for the pet trade and extensive habitat loss.
Hunting for Bush Meat:
In addition to the pet trade, Timneh Parrots are hunted for bushmeat or kept as pets in local communities. This practice, while small-scale, compounds the pressures on their dwindling populations.
Extreme Weather from Climate Change:
Shifting rainfall patterns and rising temperatures from climate change disrupt the ecosystems these parrots depend on, further limiting their already fragmented habitats.
Diet
Timneh Parrots are frugivores and granivores, feeding on a diet of seeds, nuts, fruits, and berries. Their role as seed dispersers is critical to forest health. By consuming fruit and scattering seeds over wide areas, they help regenerate forests and maintain biodiversity. The loss of these parrots would have cascading effects on the ecosystems they support.
Reproduction and Mating
Timneh Parrots nest in tree cavities, laying 2–4 eggs that are incubated for approximately 28–30 days. Both parents participate in raising the chicks, which fledge around 10–12 weeks after hatching.
Suitable nesting sites are increasingly scarce due to deforestation and logging, leaving parrots to compete for the few remaining mature trees. This scarcity directly impacts their reproductive success, pushing them closer to extinction.
Geographic Range
Timneh Parrots are endemic to West Africa, with a range spanning Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and western Côte d’Ivoire. They inhabit lowland rainforests, mangroves, and savannahs but are increasingly restricted to isolated forest patches due to deforestation.
Efforts to conserve these parrots require protecting their remaining habitats and restoring degraded forests to expand their range.
FAQ
Are Timneh Parrots good pets?
Timneh Parrots are intelligent and bond strongly. However a strong warning and reminder – keeping Timneh Parrots as pets is an incredibly selfish act, as it is contributing to their extinction. Many parrots sold in the pet trade are illegally caught from the wild, causing immense suffering, the destruction of family units of birds and decimating populations. If you care about these parrots, you must advocate against the demand for exotic pets instead.
What is the lifespan of a Timneh?
In captivity, Timneh Parrots can live up to 50–60 years or more. In the wild, their lifespan is shorter due to the challenges posed by predation, disease, and habitat destruction. Timneh Parrots are not suitable pets because their species is going extinct due to the pet trade.
What is the difference between African Grey and Timneh?
Timneh Parrots are smaller and darker than African Greys. They have maroon tails and ivory-coloured upper mandibles, compared to the African Grey’s bright red tails and black bills. Timnehs are also considered less nervous and more adaptable.
What are the threats to Timneh Parrots?
The main threats include the illegal pet trade, deforestation for palm oil, cocoa, and coffee plantations, hunting for bushmeat, and climate change. Social media platforms have worsened the pet trade by facilitating connections between poachers and buyers.
Take Action!
The Timneh Parrot is on the brink of extinction due to habitat loss and the illegal pet trade. Refuse to support the exotic pet market, boycott products linked to deforestation, and demand conservation efforts to protect their habitats. Every choice you make can help save them: #BoycottPalmOil #BoycottMeat #Boycott4Wildlife.
Timneh Parrot Psittacus timneh
Support the conservation of this species
This animal has no protections in place. Read about other forgotten species here. Create art to support this forgotten animal or raise awareness about them by sharing this post and using the #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife hashtags on social media. Also you can boycott palm oil in the supermarket.
Further Information
Ameziane, I. N., Razkallah, I., Zebsa, R., Bensakhri, Z., Bensouilah, S., Bouslama, Z., Nijman, V., Houhamdi, M., & Atoussi, S. (2024). Disentangling the role of social media in the online parrot trade in Algeria. European Journal of Wildlife Research, 70(68). Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10344-024-01821-3
BirdLife International. 2019. Psittacus timneh (amended version of 2018 assessment). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2019: e.T22736498A155462561. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2019-3.RLTS.T22736498A155462561.en. Downloaded on 15 February 2021.
BirdLife International. (n.d.). Species factsheet: Timneh Parrot. Retrieved from: https://datazone.birdlife.org/species/factsheet/timneh-parrot-psittacus-timneh/text
Birds of the World. (n.d.). Timneh Parrot. Retrieved from https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/grypar10/cur/introduction
Reinhold, N., Wobker, J., Schröder, T., Kemnade, C., Bobo, K. S., & Waltert, M. (2020). Confirmation of strong declines of grey parrots in the Korup region, Cameroon, between 2002 and 2016. African Journal of Ecology. DOI: 10.1111/aje.12837
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Timneh Parrot. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timneh_parrot
How can I help the #Boycott4Wildlife?
Take Action in Five Ways
1. Join the #Boycott4Wildlife on social media and subscribe to stay in the loop: Share posts from this website to your own network on Twitter, Mastadon, Instagram, Facebook and Youtube using the hashtags #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife.
Enter your email address
Sign Up
Join 1,391 other subscribers2. Contribute stories: Academics, conservationists, scientists, indigenous rights advocates and animal rights advocates working to expose the corruption of the palm oil industry or to save animals can contribute stories to the website.
Mel Lumby: Dedicated Devotee to Borneo’s Living Beings
Anthropologist and Author Dr Sophie Chao
Health Physician Dr Evan Allen
The World’s Most Loved Cup: A Social, Ethical & Environmental History of Coffee by Aviary Doert
How do we stop the world’s ecosystems from going into a death spiral? A #SteadyState Economy
3. Supermarket sleuthing: Next time you’re in the supermarket, take photos of products containing palm oil. Share these to social media along with the hashtags to call out the greenwashing and ecocide of the brands who use palm oil. You can also take photos of palm oil free products and congratulate brands when they go palm oil free.
https://twitter.com/CuriousApe4/status/1526136783557529600?s=20
https://twitter.com/PhillDixon1/status/1749010345555788144?s=20
https://twitter.com/mugabe139/status/1678027567977078784?s=20
4. Take to the streets: Get in touch with Palm Oil Detectives to find out more.
5. Donate: Make a one-off or monthly donation to Palm Oil Detectives as a way of saying thank you and to help pay for ongoing running costs of the website and social media campaigns. Donate here
Pledge your support#Bird #birds #Boycott4wildlife #BoycottMeat #BoycottPalmOil #CoteDIvoire #deforestation #EndangeredSpecies #ForgottenAnimals #Guinea #GuineaBissau #IvoryCoast #Liberia #mining #palmoil #Parrot #Parrots #pet #pets #pettrade #SierraLeone #SierraLeone #TimnehParrotPsittacusTimneh #WestAfrica
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Piano Quintet Amy Beach streamed with a view of Scheveningen beach
Amy Beach (c) George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress)
Hooray, since the beginning of this month we can finally visit the theatre, the movies or a concert again! – Oops, I cheered too early. No hall can make a living from a maximum of 30 visitors, so a lot of events are still only offered online.
The young Dutch Ensemble de Formule will give a concert in Zuiderstrandtheater in The Hague on 10 June. Since they’re playing in the Harbour foyer, the live stream will offer a view of Scheveningen beach.
According to their website, the five musicians will dive ‘into the magic of surrealism’. To this end they play piano quintets by César Franck and Amy Beach. – And here they’ve got me: Beach is a great composer, whose work is far too rarely performed. However I would contest that her music is ‘surrealistic’ and expresses both ‘raw beauty and madness’. But since the quintet are young and eager, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt: I’m tuning in on June 10th!
Child prodigy
Amy Beach (1867-1944) was born on September 5, 1876 as Amy Cheney in the state of New Hampshire. Her father was a manufacturer and importer of paper, her mother had a modest concert career as a singer and pianist. Amy turned out to be the proverbial child prodigy. Already as a one year old she sang forty songs by heart, at two she made up counter-melodies to her mother’s singing, at three she taught herself to read and at four she could play any piece of music by ear.
She took piano lessons from her mother and gave her first recital at the age of seven. Here she played some of her own works along compositions by Handel, Chopin and Beethoven. Contrary to what was customary at the time, her parents did not send her to a European conservatory but to a private school in Boston. Her talent did not go unnoticed and at the age of sixteen she made her debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with an acclaimed performance of the Piano Concerto in F by Frederic Chopin.
This boosted her career enormously and that same year she published the song The Rainy Day, her first composition to appear in print. She knew very well how to promote her music and managed to publicize all her consecutive pieces as well. This eventually led to an oeuvre comprising over 300 works. It was performed by renowned singers such as Emma Eames and ensembles such as the Boston Handel & Haydn Society. Her progress was closely monitored by a group of passionate fans. – Among them the surgeon Henry Beach, whom Amy married in 1885.
Concert practice curbed
Amy was only 18 years old at the time, Beach was twenty-four years her senior. And, it sounds familiar: he immediately curbed the stormy career of his brand-new wife. Luckily he was somewhat less rigorous than Gustav Mahler, who forbade Alma to continue composing once they would have entered in wedlock. Henry ‘merely’ demanded Amy to drastically restrict her concert practice and donate her income to charity. Nor was she allowed to take on piano students, for it was considered uncouth for a woman to earn an independent income.
However, Henry did encourage her to continue composing. After all, his infatuation originated in his admiration for her talent. When he came home from work in the evening he asked what she had composed that day. If this was a song, he would sing it out loud while she accompanied him at the piano, and then voice his opinion.
Giving public performances only once or twice a year, Amy was able to dedicate most of her time to her creative work. Her husband helped her publish her scores and collect royalties. – Since this didn’t involve public appearances this was apparently ok.
Moreover, Henry stimulated his wife to broaden her horizon and venture beyond chamber music into large-scale compositions. In 1892 she broke through with her Mass in E flat for choir, soloists and orchestra. Four years later she composed her Symphony in e minor opus 32, which is still occasionally performed today.
Classical and Irish inspiration
With her symphony Amy Beach responded to Antonín Dvorák, who had been director of the New York Conservatory from 1892-1895. Dvorák had encouraged American composers to seek inspiration in the music of the black community and the Indians, the original inhabitants of their country.
Beach, however, disagreed with him. ‘It is much more likely that we of the North are influenced by old English, Scottish and Irish melodies’, she declared self-assured. She put her money where her mouth was and based her Symphony on themes from a collection of Irish folk music. The subtitle ‘Gaelic’ refers to this Irish inspiration.
Gradually she became one of America’s leading composers, and thus functioned as a role model for budding female composers. Together with renowned masters such as Arthur Foote and Horatio Parker, she belonged to the so-called ‘New England School of Composers’. They pursued a classical sound ideal and in her early music we can hear echoes of Brahms.
In the last movement of her 1908 Piano Quintet, Beach even quotes a theme from Brahms’s Piano Quintet. On 10 June, Ensemble de Formule will play the second movement of her own quintet. This is a gripping lament full of languorous lines of the strings, supported by dreamy runs of the piano. As the argument becomes more intense and poignant, the dynamics increase and the piano plays stronger and brighter counterparts. Shame that De Formule will only perform this one movement.
I look forward to hearing Amy Beach performed against the backdrop of Scheveningen beach. Furthermore I am really curious as to how ‘surrealistic’, ‘raw’ and ‘crazy’ the five young musicians will make her wonderful music sound!
Watch the livestream of Ensemble de Formule from Zuiderstrandtheater on Vimeo.
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Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice re-interpreted
Just out: Een os op het dak: moderne muziek na 1900 in vogelvlucht.
The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra joined forces with International Theatre Amsterdam (ITA) and director Ivo van Hove for a re-interpretation of the famous novella Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann. David Robertson conducts, Nico Muhly composed new music. The production will premiere on 4 April in Theater Carré in Amsterdam and will get seven runs. Conductor and composer shared their views in a double interview I wrote for the monthly magazine of the RCO.
‘I accepted within a split second when I was asked to write music for Death in Venice’, says Nicol Muhly by phone.’ I am a big fan of Mann and read the novella when I was eighteen, a fantastic book!’ David Robertson turns out to be a great admirer of the German author, too: ‘I have read almost everything from Mann, and I find it fascinating how librettist Ramsey Nasr and Ivo van Hove combine the novella with his life. They do not only tell the story, but also portray Mann in the period when he wrote his story, as a young father, living in Munich. This makes the content less abstract and gives it more personal depth. In this way art becomes a beautiful mirror of life.’
The eternal value of beauty
Robertson praises Van Hove’s approach: ‘Ivo makes it clear that Mann did not just invent something but wrote from a deep inner source, drawing on his own experience. Death in Venice was a way to ward off his own demons.’
This is not to say he thinks Mann may have been latently homosexual. ‘That’s too simple. I think more in terms of the adage of Nietzsche “Alle Lust will Ewigkeit”. – It’s hard to translate, because it is not about lust, but about the desire that something beautiful has eternal value. This lies at the heart of Von Aschenbach’s fascination for the beautiful boy Tadzio.’.
Muhly admires Van Hove, too: ‘I’ve been following him for years, seen almost all of his Broadway productions. His method is very poetic. In this new production the music forms a kind of parallel counterpoint to the story. Music can express things you cannot grasp in text, it can place something in a different context.’
Familiar and new
‘Compare it to lighting: if you present the same action on stage in a different light, it takes on a different meaning. This role is now fulfilled by music, which can express underlying emotions.’ Robertson fully agrees with Muhly: ‘And it is precisely someone like Nico who perfectly manages to express emotions that remain vague and elusive when you try to convey them in words.’
The production does not only present newly composed music, but also work by contemporaries of Thomas Mann such as Richard Strauss, Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Arnold Schönberg. Muhly: ‘I think this is a fine combination of the familiar and the new. My music functions as a bridge between the somewhat surrealistic world of memories from the novella and the historical time in which Mann lived.’
No Mahler, no Britten…?
Anyone who says Death in Venice immediately thinks of the film adaptation by Luchino Visconti and the opera by Benjamin Britten. Robertson: ‘I know the opera well, but unfortunately I have never conducted it, and Ivo wants to stay far from associations with Britten. Neither does he refer to the film version with Mahler’s music. I fully support both choices, because either you do Britten’s opera and then you enter that world, or you do something completely different. And if you add Mahler like Visconti did, I think you’re going to play too much on sentiment.’
For Muhly it is a bit more nuanced. In 2018 he and Thomas Bartlett released the CD Peter Pears: Balinese Gamelan Music. The title simultaneously refers to the tenor Peter Pears – Britten’s lover – and his interest in Indonesian gamelan music. When I mention this, Muhly bursts loose in an enthusiastic argument.
‘I feel very involved with Britten’s music and am currently fascinated by the period in which he started using Balinese and Javanese harmonies. Brilliant how he characterizes Tadzio with this completely different sound world and makes him vanish in the ether as it were. The last five minutes of the opera are both time harmonically stable and unstable, masterly!’
Asian scales
‘In essence, all my music is a dialogue with Britten’, Muhly says. But he stresses he will use no direct quotes: ‘The idiom is naturally in the DNA of this piece. If you link up with music from Thomas Mann’s time, you simply cannot escape that, Claude Debussy was also inspired by Asian scales’.
The influence of the Frenchman can be heard in Death in Venice: Saint-Sébastien, which Muhly places about halfway through the piece. ‘I use similar chords as Debussy in his stage music for Le martyre de St. Sébastien by Gabriele D’Annunzio. These are built on the pentatonic scale, consisting of the five black keys of the piano. That fits in well with the period in which Mann lived, when there was a lot of fear in Europe of infectious diseases from the colonies. By distorting the simple chords of Debussy I have tried to capture the atmosphere of decay in Venice at the time when this city suffered from the plague.’
Endlessly falling
The orchestra is seated on the stage. Robertson: ‘The action takes place in two different spaces. One represents Mann’s residence in Munich, the other the place where Von Aschenbach has his adventures in Venice. The orchestra is a little smaller than usual. This is both a practical solution – a large symphony orchestra takes up too much room – and suits the situation well. The current line-up resembles the salon orchestras that played in Spas and in the Lido in Venice.’
The various compositions are linked to different scenes. Robertson: ‘Sometimes the music illustrates a state of mental torment, at other times it represents the bourgeois background against which the drama takes place.’ A recurring element is Death in Venice: Charon, which runs like a thread through the performance.
Muhly: ‘Charon stands for death and the descent into ever deeper darkness. It is a cycle of 44 chords, each of which returns in a different variation. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes played by wind instruments, sometimes by strings. It is as if you endlessly fall down, which creates a feeling of inevitability.’
Monteverdi and Strauss
Muhly also made an adaptation of the duet ‘Pur ti miro’ from the opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea by Claudio Monteverdi. Robertson: ‘Monteverdi evokes a feeling of nostalgia and desire. But how do you arrange a duet if you only have one singer at your disposal, a countertenor? ‘That’s typically a puzzle Nico likes to get his teeth into’, chuckles Robertson.
‘I made the most obvious choice and gave the second voice to a cor anglais’, Muhly responds. That instrument is closest to the human voice in terms of size and timbre. I have left Monteverdi’s notes intact, but have orchestrated them in such a way that they fit in with the harmonic language of Charon and Debussy. For example, one of the variations lacks a bass line, as if a kind of halo of sounds is created around the voice.
Towards the end, the countertenor sings an arrangement Theo Verbey made of two of Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder. Robertson: ‘Again a great choice. This androgynous voice gives these songs a completely different meaning. Just as Ivo van Hove’s direction will make you experience the original story of Death in Venice differently.’
RCO & ITA: Death in Venice
Theater Carré 4-13 April#BenjaminBritten #DeathInVenice #IvoVanHove #NicoMuhly #RoyalConcertgebouwOrchestra #ThomasMann
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The Sacred Arithmetic of My Years
A Reflection on Turning Fifty-Nine on May 24, 2026
I do not believe that numbers control my life or determine my future. I do not look to numerology as prophecy or as a replacement for faith in God. Still, I find myself drawn to the symbolic possibilities hidden within dates, names, anniversaries, and coincidences. I have always been one to look beneath the surface of things, to wonder whether something ordinary might contain a whisper of something deeper.
#Aging #artAndSpirituality #birthdayReflection #ChristianReflection #Contemplation #CosmicImagery #creativeCalling #Creativity #faithAndImagination #Healing #Hope #landOfTheLiving #lifePathSeven #May24 #numerology #personalReflection #portraitArt #Prayer #sacredArithmetic #SeekingGod #SpiritualJourney #SpiritualSymbolism #stillBecoming #turningFiftyNine
And so, on this birthday, I find myself looking at the numbers of my own life: 5 / 24 / 1967.
Today, I turn fifty-nine. I enter another year grateful for life, even while longing to feel more fully alive within my own body. I have not been feeling well physically, and that has weighed on me. There is so much I want to do, so much I want to create, so much ministry and imagination still stirring within me. It is a strange and sometimes painful thing to feel my spirit reaching outward while my body asks me to slow down.
Perhaps that is why I find myself lingering over these numbers. Not because they can tell me what will happen, but because they give me another language with which to consider who I have been, who I am becoming, and what I still hope to offer.
My full birth date reduces to the number 7:
5 + 2 + 4 + 1 + 9 + 6 + 7 = 34; 3 + 4 = 7.
Seven is often understood as the number of the seeker, the contemplative, the mystic, the one who is drawn toward the deeper questions. I recognize myself in that description. I have never been especially satisfied with what lies only on the surface. I want to know what things mean. I want to know what suffering means, what beauty means, what history means, what faith means, what it means to walk faithfully through a world so broken and yet so astonishingly alive.
I have spent my life seeking God in scripture, in ministry, in music, in stories, in strange fragments of history, in imagined worlds, in the wounds of people, in the possibility of peace, and even in my own unanswered questions. I have often felt that I live somewhere along the border between contemplation and creation, between the desire to understand the world and the desire to reimagine it.
Seven also carries sacred meaning in scripture. It is the rhythm of creation moving toward Sabbath. It is fullness, completion, holy rest. Perhaps there is a word for me in that. I have spent much of my life asking what more I should do, what more I should make, what more I should accomplish. Perhaps the question of this birthday is gentler: What within me is asking to become whole? What in my life needs not more striving, but Sabbath?
I was born on the twenty-fourth day of the month:
2 + 4 = 6.
Six is associated with love, care, responsibility, home, beauty, healing, and service. Here, too, I recognize something of my life. I have given much of myself to ministry, to caring for others, to the church, to my family, to the hope that something I say or create might encourage someone, heal something, reconcile something, or simply remind someone that they are not alone.
The number twenty-four seems especially fitting: the tenderness and relationship of two joined with the grounding and craftsmanship of four, becoming six—a number of care and beauty. Much of what I love involves bringing things together: faith and imagination, peace and play, history and story, pain and hope, scraps of wood arranged into inlay, scattered ideas gathered into poems, songs, sermons, games, or worlds.
Yet care has its shadow. I can so easily feel that I ought to be stronger than I am, more productive than I am, more helpful than I am. I can feel guilty when my body interrupts my hopes or when weariness makes me less able to give. But perhaps this number does not only remind me of my call to care for others. Perhaps it also reminds me that I am a creature worthy of care. I do not have to earn rest. I do not have to apologize for needing healing. I am not valuable only when I am producing, preaching, creating, or carrying someone else.
May, the fifth month, brings another number into my birthday: 5. And the year of my birth also reduces to five:
1 + 9 + 6 + 7 = 23; 2 + 3 = 5.
There is, then, a double current of five woven into my birthday. Five is associated with movement, change, freedom, curiosity, experience, creativity, and new possibilities. Again, I recognize myself. My mind rarely stays in one place for long. A passing historical note can become a story. A phrase can become a song. A forgotten disaster can become a gothic meditation on memory. A theological idea can become a game, a world, an image, a spoken word piece, or an invitation to peace.
This past year has been filled with creative stirring. Stories, images, reflections, PeaceGrooves, imagined kingdoms, spiritual meditations, music, ministry, and new possibilities have continued to rise within me. Sometimes I hardly know what to do with all of it. My imagination feels crowded with doors, and behind each one is another room I want to enter.
And yet five also carries a restlessness. It wants to move. It wants freedom. It wants to run down every road and follow every spark. When my body does not feel well, that restlessness becomes painful. There are days when I feel as though my spirit is already racing ahead while my flesh is standing at the roadside, trying to catch its breath.
I do not want simply to exist. I want to be well enough to live. I want strength to minister, strength to love, strength to create, strength to bring into the world at least some portion of what continues to be born within me.
The month and day of my birth together yield the number 11:
5 + 2 + 4 = 11.
Eleven is often associated with heightened sensitivity, spiritual intuition, imagination, vision, and an unusual awareness of meaning. Reduced, it becomes 2, the number of relationship, compassion, receptivity, and peacemaking.
Perhaps this is part of why I feel things as deeply as I do. Beauty can overwhelm me. Failure can wound me. A story from the past can haunt me. A work of art can awaken something in me. The suffering of the world can feel almost unbearable. I find myself unable simply to accept violence, ugliness, cruelty, or indifference as the normal order of things. Something in me continues to insist that another world is possible, that peace is not foolishness, that imagination matters, that reconciliation is not weakness, that grace is still stronger than fear.
This sensitivity has not always been easy to carry. It means I can become discouraged. It means I can long deeply to be seen, heard, understood, or affirmed. It means I sometimes experience disappointment with an intensity that others may not recognize. But it is also part of the gift I have been given. It is part of what allows me to preach, to write, to create, to listen, to notice, to care.
Perhaps I should not spend so much energy wishing I were less sensitive. Perhaps I should ask God to help me carry that sensitivity with wisdom, humility, and courage.
The numerological pattern for the year beginning with this birthday gives me the number 3:
5 + 2 + 4 + 2 + 0 + 2 + 6 = 21; 2 + 1 = 3.
Three is the number of expression, creativity, voice, imagination, communication, music, storytelling, and joy. I cannot help but smile at that. At a time when I am so aware of physical limitation, the number for the year ahead is not silence or retreat, but expression. It is voice.
Write the stories. Sing the songs. Make the images. Build the worlds. Speak of peace. Preach the goodness of God. Let the things that have long lived inside me take form.
Perhaps I do not need to wait until everything is ideal. Perhaps I do not need to wait until I feel completely strong, completely confident, completely certain that anyone will notice or understand. Perhaps creativity itself is one of the ways I bear witness to life. Perhaps every story, every song, every reflection, every act of beauty is my small refusal to let suffering or discouragement have the final word.
And then there is the number of my age itself: 59.
5 + 9 = 14; 1 + 4 = 5.
Once again, I arrive at five: movement, change, possibility, new roads.
Fifty-nine is a threshold. It is not yet sixty, though I can see sixty from here. There is a temptation at this stage of life to look backward with regret, measuring what has not happened, what recognition has not come, what dreams remain unfinished, what strength seems less certain than it once did. I know that temptation well. I have wondered whether I have done enough with what I have been given. I have feared that some of my deepest gifts might remain unheard or unseen.
But perhaps fifty-nine is not a year for mourning what has not been. Perhaps it is a year for gathering what is still alive. Perhaps it is a year for listening closely to the call that has never quite left me alone. Perhaps it is a year for opening the doors that remain before me rather than staring only at the ones that seemed to close.
When I gather these numbers together, they seem to form a kind of portrait:
7 — I am a seeker, drawn toward mystery, contemplation, and the deep questions of God and life.
6 — I am a caregiver, a pastor, a lover of beauty, home, healing, and reconciliation.
11/2 — I am sensitive to meaning, to suffering, to vision, and to the fragile possibility of peace.
5 — I am restless with creativity, longing for freedom, movement, renewal, and life.
3 — I am entering a year of voice, expression, story, music, and joy.
These numbers do not define me. God does. But perhaps they name something true about the way grace has moved through my years.
I am fifty-nine years old today. I am grateful, though I am tired. I am hopeful, though I am not entirely well. I am surrounded by unfinished ideas, unanswered questions, creative longings, ministry responsibilities, and the quiet awareness that life is precious precisely because it is not endless.
I want to be well. I want to feel strength returning to my body. I want more years with my wife, more years of ministry, more years of creating, more years of discovering the hidden beauty of this world and offering whatever beauty I can in return. I want to continue seeking the goodness of God in the land of the living.
And perhaps that is enough for this birthday: not certainty, not achievement, not proof that everything I have hoped for will come to pass, but the grace to stand at this threshold and say:
I am still here.
I am still seeking.
I am still loving.
I am still imagining.
I am still creating.
I am still hoping.
And by the mercy of God, I am still becoming.
Prayer at Fifty-Nine
God of all my years,
gather the seeker in me.
Strengthen the caregiver in me.
Steady the restless creator in me.
Heal what is weary in me.
Comfort what is afraid in me.
Awaken what is still waiting to be born.
Teach me to receive rest without guilt,
care without embarrassment,
and life itself as grace.
Let this year not be measured only
by what I accomplish,
but by how faithfully I love,
how courageously I create,
how deeply I listen,
and how fully I trust Your goodness.
Give me strength for the road ahead,
joy in the work still before me,
and peace in the knowledge
that I have never walked alone.
May I see Your goodness,
again and again,
in the land of the living.
Amen. -
Fifty-Nine on Pentecost: Fire, Bridges, and a Heart Still Being Warmed
A Birthday Reflection — May 24, 2026
Today, I turn fifty-nine.
#Aging #AldersgateDay #birthdayReflection #BobDylan #bridges #BrooklynBridge #ChristianSpirituality #creativeCalling #Creativity #Faith #fireAndBreath #Grace #Healing #HolySpirit #Hope #illness #JohnWesley #lifeJourney #Ministry #Music #Peacebuilding #PeaceGrooves #Pentecost #PentecostSunday #personalReflection #Prayer #Reconciliation #SamuelMorse #SpiritualReflection #storytelling #strangelyWarmed #turningFiftyNine #WhatHathGodWrought
There is something strange about writing that number. Fifty-nine is not yet sixty, but it stands close enough to feel the gravity of that approaching threshold. It is a year poised at the edge of another decade, a number that invites a certain kind of honesty. Not the dramatic honesty that pretends everything has suddenly come into focus, but the quieter honesty of looking back over the terrain I have actually traveled: the things that have blossomed, the things that have hurt, the things still unfinished, and the signs of grace that keep appearing in the undergrowth.
I would like to say that I arrive at this birthday strong and full of energy, ready to gather every creative seed scattered through my life and bring it all into harvest. But that is not entirely true.
I have not been feeling well physically. My body has been reminding me that I am not simply a mind imagining world, a spirit dreaming visions, a pastor speaking words, or an artist shaping beauty. I am a body too—a body that tires, aches, worries, and longs to be well.
There is a particular sorrow in having so much one still wants to do while feeling uncertain about one’s strength to do it. There are stories pressing at the edges of my mind. There are songs waiting for breath. There are images, games, reflections, ministries, strange and beautiful worlds, and ideas of reconciliation and peace that I still want to offer. So much creative life has been stirring. So many sparks have appeared.
And alongside those sparks has been the quiet prayer:
Please, God, let me be well enough to tend the fire.
Perhaps that is why the date of this birthday feels especially meaningful.
Today, my birthday falls on Pentecost Sunday.
Pentecost is the day when frightened and uncertain disciples, people who had already known grief, bewilderment, failure, and hope beyond explanation, were gathered in one place. They were not standing at the height of their strength. They were waiting. They were living between what had been promised and what they could not yet see.
And into that waiting came breath and flame.
The Spirit descended. Words awakened. The scattered were gathered. The fearful found their voices.
I have often thought of creativity as something like that: a rushing wind through a room that has gone still; a flame resting upon an ordinary head; a language arriving that I did not fully know I knew. A story comes. A song arrives. An image forms. An idea for peacebuilding, a game, a sermon, a strange new country of the imagination appears as though someone has opened a window in a room that had grown close and airless.
Over this past year, windows have opened.
PeaceGrooves has continued to become more than an idea. It has become a gathering place for the things I most deeply care about: peace, creativity, imagination, justice, story, music, and the hope that human beings can learn to live differently with one another. I have imagined games that refuse the old assumption that conflict must end in domination. I have thought about creative peacebuilding not merely as an interesting phrase but as a calling: the possibility that art and story and play may become instruments of reconciliation.
I have continued to write strange, shadowed, luminous stories—stories emerging from history, disaster, forgotten figures, mystical places, wounded worlds, and the possibility that even within darkness there may yet be a voice calling toward mercy. I have made images and songs. I have watched one idea open into another and then another, like doors in an old house I did not know was so large.
And all the while I have continued to minister: to preach, to walk with people, to seek the goodness of God in the land of the living. I have continued to believe that reconciliation is not a decorative word for the church, but part of the very shape of the gospel: enemies becoming neighbors, strangers becoming companions, wounds becoming places where healing may begin.
Yet I can not pretend that this year has been only creative exhilaration.
There has also been weariness. There has been discouragement. There has been the familiar ache of wondering whether what I create will ever find the audience I hope for, whether the songs and stories and visions will reach beyond the small circle in which they first come to life. There has been the weight of inhabiting a body that does not always feel cooperative. There has been the fear that perhaps my energy will diminish before the fullest flowering of my gifts.
But Pentecost does not come only to the vigorous.
The Spirit does not descend only upon those who are untroubled, healthy, young, successful, or certain. The wind blows through closed rooms. The fire rests upon waiting people. The gift is not that the disciples suddenly become invulnerable; it is that they become alive with a life greater than their fear.
Today also carries another spiritual memory. On May 24, 1738, John Wesley went reluctantly to a meeting on Aldersgate Street. Reluctantly—that word matters to me. He was not triumphantly marching toward a spiritual experience. He went while troubled, still searching, still uncertain. And there, while hearing words about grace, he wrote that he felt his heart “strangely warmed.”
I find myself less interested now in a faith that demands I always appear strong and more drawn to the quiet mystery of a heart that can still be warmed.
At fifty-nine, I do not need to have everything solved. I do not need to prove that every dream has succeeded. I do not need to deny that I am tired or that I long for healing. Perhaps the deeper prayer is that my heart would remain warm: warm toward God, warm toward my wife, warm toward the people I serve, warm toward beauty, warm toward the wounds of the world, warm even toward my own imperfect and unfinished self.
It is possible for a person to grow cold over the years. Disappointment can do that. Illness can do that. Rejection can do that. The constant awareness of limits can make the spirit draw inward and protect itself.
But I do not want to live cold.
I would rather remain tender, even when tenderness hurts. I would rather keep imagining peace in a violent world. I would rather keep writing songs in a world of noise. I would rather keep dreaming of bridges while so many others are building walls.
For May 24 is also a day of bridges.
On this date in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge opened after years of labor, loss, pain, and perseverance. Washington Roebling, who oversaw its construction, became physically incapacitated during the work, and the project continued in significant measure through the indispensable work of his wife, Emily. A bridge connecting divided shores came into being through vulnerability, endurance, and partnership.
That image speaks to me.
Perhaps a life is not measured only by towers raised or destinations reached. Perhaps it is also measured by the bridges one has helped build: between people, between faith and imagination, between sorrow and hope, between church and world, between creativity and reconciliation, between the person I once was and the person I am still becoming.
I do not know all the bridges my life may yet build. I know only that I want my remaining years to matter in that way. I want my ministry to help people cross from fear into love. I want my art to help people cross from numbness into wonder. I want PeaceGrooves to help people imagine forms of community, play, and storytelling that do not require enemies to be destroyed. I want my life to say, however imperfectly, that another way is possible.
On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sent the first long-distance telegraph message:
“What hath God wrought.”
It is a phrase of astonishment. A phrase for standing before something new and scarcely believable. A phrase that looks backward and forward at the same time: marveling at what has come to be while wondering what it may make possible.
Today, on my fifty-ninth birthday, I find myself asking that question of my own life.
What has God wrought in fifty-nine years?
Not perfection.
Not a life without sorrow.
Not a straight line of accomplishment.
Not a body untouched by weakness or a soul untouched by struggle.
But there is love. There is a marriage and a shared ministry. There are songs. There are stories. There are carved and painted and imagined things. There are sermons preached and people accompanied. There is the stubborn conviction that peace is not naïve, that reconciliation is not weakness, that the imagination may yet become an instrument of healing.
There is joy that has somehow continued to rise through weariness.
There is beauty I have been permitted not only to see but sometimes to make.
And there is still more waiting.
Bob Dylan, born on May 24, shares this birthday. He is another reminder that creativity needs not stop at the borders of age. It may deepen. It may shift. It may become more weathered, more honest, and more necessary. Songs do not cease simply because the singer has traveled a long road. Sometimes, the road itself gives the song its voice.
I do not want this coming year merely to be a holding pattern before sixty.
I want it to be a living year.
I want health—not simply because I want relief, though I do; not simply because I want freedom from worry, though I do—but because I love this world and still want to participate in it. I want strength to preach and minister. I want strength to make music. I want strength to create strange and beautiful stories. I want strength to love my wife well, to be present to people, to follow the paths opening before me.
I want to be able to receive each day not merely as something to endure but as something in which grace may still take shape.
Yet even here I must be gentle with myself.
My worth does not depend upon how much I produce. My life is not validated only by completed books, successful songs, public recognition, flourishing projects, or the ability to do everything my imagination desires. Before I make anything, before I accomplish anything, before I am strong enough to do all I hope to do, I am loved.
Perhaps that is the warmth I need most.
At fifty-nine, standing in the firelight of Pentecost, I pray for the Spirit once again—not as spectacle, not as spiritual achievement, but as breath.
Breath for a tired body.
Fire for a creative heart.
Courage for a minister of reconciliation.
Comfort for the places in me that are afraid.
Patience for what is not yet finished.
Joy is not dependent upon perfect circumstances.
Healing, as healing may come.
And above all, the assurance that I remain held within the goodness of God.
Today, I am fifty-nine years old.
I do not know what this year will bring. I do not know what my body will require of me, or what new stories will be born, or what doors may open or close. But I know what I hope for.
I hope to remain awake.
I hope to remain tender.
I hope to remain creative.
I hope to keep making peace.
I hope to keep crossing bridges and building them for others.
I hope my heart is still capable of being strangely warmed.
And on this birthday of wind and fire, of messages carried across distance, of bridges spanning divided shores, of songs still being sung, I offer my unfinished life once more to the One who breathes over creation and says, even now, that it is good.
Come, Holy Spirit.
Breathe upon what is weary in me.
Warm what has grown discouraged.
Heal what is hurting.
Kindle, what is waiting.
And grant that the year ahead may become,
in ways I can not yet imagine,
another answer to the question:
What hath God wrought? -
Fifty-Nine on Pentecost: Fire, Bridges, and a Heart Still Being Warmed
A Birthday Reflection — May 24, 2026
Today, I turn fifty-nine.
#Aging #AldersgateDay #birthdayReflection #BobDylan #bridges #BrooklynBridge #ChristianSpirituality #creativeCalling #Creativity #Faith #fireAndBreath #Grace #Healing #HolySpirit #Hope #illness #JohnWesley #lifeJourney #Ministry #Music #Peacebuilding #PeaceGrooves #Pentecost #PentecostSunday #personalReflection #Prayer #Reconciliation #SamuelMorse #SpiritualReflection #storytelling #strangelyWarmed #turningFiftyNine #WhatHathGodWrought
There is something strange about writing that number. Fifty-nine is not yet sixty, but it stands close enough to feel the gravity of that approaching threshold. It is a year poised at the edge of another decade, a number that invites a certain kind of honesty. Not the dramatic honesty that pretends everything has suddenly come into focus, but the quieter honesty of looking back over the terrain I have actually traveled: the things that have blossomed, the things that have hurt, the things still unfinished, and the signs of grace that keep appearing in the undergrowth.
I would like to say that I arrive at this birthday strong and full of energy, ready to gather every creative seed scattered through my life and bring it all into harvest. But that is not entirely true.
I have not been feeling well physically. My body has been reminding me that I am not simply a mind imagining world, a spirit dreaming visions, a pastor speaking words, or an artist shaping beauty. I am a body too—a body that tires, aches, worries, and longs to be well.
There is a particular sorrow in having so much one still wants to do while feeling uncertain about one’s strength to do it. There are stories pressing at the edges of my mind. There are songs waiting for breath. There are images, games, reflections, ministries, strange and beautiful worlds, and ideas of reconciliation and peace that I still want to offer. So much creative life has been stirring. So many sparks have appeared.
And alongside those sparks has been the quiet prayer:
Please, God, let me be well enough to tend the fire.
Perhaps that is why the date of this birthday feels especially meaningful.
Today, my birthday falls on Pentecost Sunday.
Pentecost is the day when frightened and uncertain disciples, people who had already known grief, bewilderment, failure, and hope beyond explanation, were gathered in one place. They were not standing at the height of their strength. They were waiting. They were living between what had been promised and what they could not yet see.
And into that waiting came breath and flame.
The Spirit descended. Words awakened. The scattered were gathered. The fearful found their voices.
I have often thought of creativity as something like that: a rushing wind through a room that has gone still; a flame resting upon an ordinary head; a language arriving that I did not fully know I knew. A story comes. A song arrives. An image forms. An idea for peacebuilding, a game, a sermon, a strange new country of the imagination appears as though someone has opened a window in a room that had grown close and airless.
Over this past year, windows have opened.
PeaceGrooves has continued to become more than an idea. It has become a gathering place for the things I most deeply care about: peace, creativity, imagination, justice, story, music, and the hope that human beings can learn to live differently with one another. I have imagined games that refuse the old assumption that conflict must end in domination. I have thought about creative peacebuilding not merely as an interesting phrase but as a calling: the possibility that art and story and play may become instruments of reconciliation.
I have continued to write strange, shadowed, luminous stories—stories emerging from history, disaster, forgotten figures, mystical places, wounded worlds, and the possibility that even within darkness there may yet be a voice calling toward mercy. I have made images and songs. I have watched one idea open into another and then another, like doors in an old house I did not know was so large.
And all the while I have continued to minister: to preach, to walk with people, to seek the goodness of God in the land of the living. I have continued to believe that reconciliation is not a decorative word for the church, but part of the very shape of the gospel: enemies becoming neighbors, strangers becoming companions, wounds becoming places where healing may begin.
Yet I can not pretend that this year has been only creative exhilaration.
There has also been weariness. There has been discouragement. There has been the familiar ache of wondering whether what I create will ever find the audience I hope for, whether the songs and stories and visions will reach beyond the small circle in which they first come to life. There has been the weight of inhabiting a body that does not always feel cooperative. There has been the fear that perhaps my energy will diminish before the fullest flowering of my gifts.
But Pentecost does not come only to the vigorous.
The Spirit does not descend only upon those who are untroubled, healthy, young, successful, or certain. The wind blows through closed rooms. The fire rests upon waiting people. The gift is not that the disciples suddenly become invulnerable; it is that they become alive with a life greater than their fear.
Today also carries another spiritual memory. On May 24, 1738, John Wesley went reluctantly to a meeting on Aldersgate Street. Reluctantly—that word matters to me. He was not triumphantly marching toward a spiritual experience. He went while troubled, still searching, still uncertain. And there, while hearing words about grace, he wrote that he felt his heart “strangely warmed.”
I find myself less interested now in a faith that demands I always appear strong and more drawn to the quiet mystery of a heart that can still be warmed.
At fifty-nine, I do not need to have everything solved. I do not need to prove that every dream has succeeded. I do not need to deny that I am tired or that I long for healing. Perhaps the deeper prayer is that my heart would remain warm: warm toward God, warm toward my wife, warm toward the people I serve, warm toward beauty, warm toward the wounds of the world, warm even toward my own imperfect and unfinished self.
It is possible for a person to grow cold over the years. Disappointment can do that. Illness can do that. Rejection can do that. The constant awareness of limits can make the spirit draw inward and protect itself.
But I do not want to live cold.
I would rather remain tender, even when tenderness hurts. I would rather keep imagining peace in a violent world. I would rather keep writing songs in a world of noise. I would rather keep dreaming of bridges while so many others are building walls.
For May 24 is also a day of bridges.
On this date in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge opened after years of labor, loss, pain, and perseverance. Washington Roebling, who oversaw its construction, became physically incapacitated during the work, and the project continued in significant measure through the indispensable work of his wife, Emily. A bridge connecting divided shores came into being through vulnerability, endurance, and partnership.
That image speaks to me.
Perhaps a life is not measured only by towers raised or destinations reached. Perhaps it is also measured by the bridges one has helped build: between people, between faith and imagination, between sorrow and hope, between church and world, between creativity and reconciliation, between the person I once was and the person I am still becoming.
I do not know all the bridges my life may yet build. I know only that I want my remaining years to matter in that way. I want my ministry to help people cross from fear into love. I want my art to help people cross from numbness into wonder. I want PeaceGrooves to help people imagine forms of community, play, and storytelling that do not require enemies to be destroyed. I want my life to say, however imperfectly, that another way is possible.
On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sent the first long-distance telegraph message:
“What hath God wrought.”
It is a phrase of astonishment. A phrase for standing before something new and scarcely believable. A phrase that looks backward and forward at the same time: marveling at what has come to be while wondering what it may make possible.
Today, on my fifty-ninth birthday, I find myself asking that question of my own life.
What has God wrought in fifty-nine years?
Not perfection.
Not a life without sorrow.
Not a straight line of accomplishment.
Not a body untouched by weakness or a soul untouched by struggle.
But there is love. There is a marriage and a shared ministry. There are songs. There are stories. There are carved and painted and imagined things. There are sermons preached and people accompanied. There is the stubborn conviction that peace is not naïve, that reconciliation is not weakness, that the imagination may yet become an instrument of healing.
There is joy that has somehow continued to rise through weariness.
There is beauty I have been permitted not only to see but sometimes to make.
And there is still more waiting.
Bob Dylan, born on May 24, shares this birthday. He is another reminder that creativity needs not stop at the borders of age. It may deepen. It may shift. It may become more weathered, more honest, and more necessary. Songs do not cease simply because the singer has traveled a long road. Sometimes, the road itself gives the song its voice.
I do not want this coming year merely to be a holding pattern before sixty.
I want it to be a living year.
I want health—not simply because I want relief, though I do; not simply because I want freedom from worry, though I do—but because I love this world and still want to participate in it. I want strength to preach and minister. I want strength to make music. I want strength to create strange and beautiful stories. I want strength to love my wife well, to be present to people, to follow the paths opening before me.
I want to be able to receive each day not merely as something to endure but as something in which grace may still take shape.
Yet even here I must be gentle with myself.
My worth does not depend upon how much I produce. My life is not validated only by completed books, successful songs, public recognition, flourishing projects, or the ability to do everything my imagination desires. Before I make anything, before I accomplish anything, before I am strong enough to do all I hope to do, I am loved.
Perhaps that is the warmth I need most.
At fifty-nine, standing in the firelight of Pentecost, I pray for the Spirit once again—not as spectacle, not as spiritual achievement, but as breath.
Breath for a tired body.
Fire for a creative heart.
Courage for a minister of reconciliation.
Comfort for the places in me that are afraid.
Patience for what is not yet finished.
Joy is not dependent upon perfect circumstances.
Healing, as healing may come.
And above all, the assurance that I remain held within the goodness of God.
Today, I am fifty-nine years old.
I do not know what this year will bring. I do not know what my body will require of me, or what new stories will be born, or what doors may open or close. But I know what I hope for.
I hope to remain awake.
I hope to remain tender.
I hope to remain creative.
I hope to keep making peace.
I hope to keep crossing bridges and building them for others.
I hope my heart is still capable of being strangely warmed.
And on this birthday of wind and fire, of messages carried across distance, of bridges spanning divided shores, of songs still being sung, I offer my unfinished life once more to the One who breathes over creation and says, even now, that it is good.
Come, Holy Spirit.
Breathe upon what is weary in me.
Warm what has grown discouraged.
Heal what is hurting.
Kindle, what is waiting.
And grant that the year ahead may become,
in ways I can not yet imagine,
another answer to the question:
What hath God wrought? -
Becoming Zero
A Sermon on Our Value in Christ
(Note: Sermons can be heard in audio format at https://millersburgmennonite.org/worship/sermon-audio/)
Philippians 2:1–13
Introduction
There is a strange kind of math at the heart of Christian faith.
Most of us are taught to become something: successful, respected, secure, noticed. We want a place, a voice, a purpose. There is nothing wrong with wanting life to matter. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be seen and loved.
And today, as we honor our graduates, we give thanks for real accomplishment, for effort, growth, perseverance, and the doors that now open before them. But I also want to bless them with this deeper challenge: do not let the world’s calculations of what counts for success be the measure for your life.
The world often teaches us an anxious kind of success. It teaches us to add and add and add: accomplishments, things, recognition, possessions, influence, control, certainty, proof that we are right, evidence that we matter.
Then Paul gives us the mathematics of Jesus.
Jesus, who had equality with God, did not use it for his own advantage.
Jesus emptied himself.
Jesus took the form of a servant.
Jesus became obedient, even to death on a cross.Jesus became zero.
Not worthless. Not meaningless. Not erased. But emptied of grasping for power. Emptied of the need to dominate. Emptied of the need to stand above others. Emptied so completely that the love of God could be witnessed without obstruction.
Let us pray:
Que las palabras de mi boca y las meditaciones de nuestros corazones sean agradables a tus ojos, oh Dios, roca nuestra y redentor nuestro. Amén.
Homily
Becoming zero does not mean believing we have no value. It does not mean allowing ourselves or others to be diminished or abused in the name of humility. That is not the way of Christ. The humility of Jesus does not protect oppression; it exposes it. The self-emptying of Christ is not self-destruction.
To become zero is not to become nothing.
To become zero is to become free.
I once wrote a short poem called “Becoming Zero,” subtitled “The Mathematics of the Divine.” It begins:
“It is where
I need to be
not past the center
into negativity
but more of others
and less of me”That is the distinction we need. Becoming zero is not moving past the center into despair, shame, worthlessness, or self-hatred. It is the place where my needs, preferences, anxieties, opinions, and desires are no longer the measure of everything.
It is, as the poem says, “more of others / and less of me.”
And then the poem continues:
“What were gains
I now consider loss
for where the axes
meet at zero
they make a cross”Where the axes meet at zero, they make a cross.
That is Philippians 2. The vertical line: love of God. The horizontal line: love of neighbor. And at the center: Christ, emptied, humbled, crucified, and yet revealing the very heart of God.
So when Paul says, “Value others above yourselves,” he is not asking us to wander into negativity. He is asking us to come to the cross-shaped center.
Paul writes:
No hagan nada por ambición egoísta ni por vanidad.
“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves.”
That sentence alone could transform the church.
Imagine if it became not just a verse we admire, but a practice we live. Imagine if every time we entered a room we asked, “Whose good am I seeking?” Imagine a disagreement where people asked, “How can I understand the interest of the other before defending my own?” Imagine life lived where the question was not, “How do I get my way?” but “How do we become more faithful to Christ together?”
That is the community Paul is describing.
“If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion…”
Paul is appealing to what the church at Phillipi has already received. If Christ has encouraged us, if love has comforted us, if the Spirit has drawn us into fellowship, then those gifts should become visible in the way we treat one another.
La vida de la iglesia debe ser el desbordamiento de la gracia de Dios.
Church life should be the overflow of God’s grace.
If we have been comforted by Christ, we become comforting people.
If we have been forgiven by Christ, we become forgiving people.
If we have been welcomed by Christ, we become welcoming people.
If we have been served by Christ, we become servants of all.Paul says, “Be like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.”
That does not mean everyone in the church must have the same personality, opinions, politics, beliefs, preferences, background, or tastes. Christian unity is not sameness. The church is a body, not a wall of identical bricks.
La unidad significa que nuestras diferencias se reúnen bajo el señorío de Cristo.
Unity means our differences are gathered under the lordship of Christ.
We can disagree and still ask, “How do I love you?” We can see things differently and still ask, “How do I honor Christ in how I speak to you?” We can have strong convictions and still refuse selfish ambition and vain conceit.
That phrase “selfish ambition” matters. Paul is not condemning all ambition. There are holy ambitions: to serve well, love deeply, seek justice, create beauty, build peace, preach truth, care for the suffering.
He is naming the ambition that curves inward.
Selfish ambition says: I must win. I must be seen. I must be right. I must get credit. I must protect my place. I must not become less.
Then Paul names “vain conceit”: empty glory, hollow importance, the need to appear larger than we are.
Against all of that, Paul says: humility.
But humility is often misunderstood. Humility is not pretending our gifts are not real. Humility is not saying, “I am terrible at everything,” when God has given us abilities. True humility is living in the truth:
I am deeply loved, but I am not the center.
I have gifts, but they are not mine to hoard.
I have needs, but so do others.
I have a voice, but so does my neighbor.
I have interests, but they are not the only interests that matter.Paul says:
“Not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”
He does not say we have no interests. He does not say our needs do not matter. He does not command a community where some are always sacrificed for the comfort of others. In a healthy body, every member matters. En un cuerpo sano, cada miembro importa.
This is where John the Baptist helps us.
In the Gospel of John, John’s disciples come to him worried. Jesus is baptizing. Crowds are going to Jesus. John’s influence is decreasing. His ministry is no longer at the center.
And John says:
“He must become greater; I must become less.”
That is becoming zero.
John does not say it with bitterness. He does not say, “Well, I guess I failed.”
John fundamentally understands his calling. John is not the bridegroom. He is the friend of the bridegroom. John is not the light. He bears witness to the light. John’s joy is not in being central. His joy is in pointing to Christ.
John is free because he knows who he is and whose he is. He can decrease because his identity is not threatened by Christ’s increase.
Ministry is not about us. It’s about Jesus. Our identity and value are rooted in Christ. Like John, we are free because we know who we are and whose we are. And that manifests itself in our relationships with others. As Paul says:
En vuestras relaciones entre vosotros, tened la misma mentalidad que Cristo Jesús.
“In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus.”
“In your relationships.” At home. At church. In disagreement. In conflict. In leadership. In service. In community. Have the mind of Christ there.
And what is the mind of Christ?
Jesus does not humble himself from a place of lowliness. He humbles himself from the highest place. He does not become servant because he has no power. He becomes servant because this is what divine love does with power.
The world uses power to dominate. Jesus uses power to serve.
The world uses status to separate. Jesus uses status to kneel.
The world uses authority to command attention. Jesus uses authority to wash feet.This is why “Becoming Zero” is not just an individual spiritual idea. It is the shape of the church.
A zero-shaped church is a church where people make room.
It is where the strong do not use their strength to get their way, but to support the weak. It is where her members do not say, “This church belongs to us,” but, “How can we welcome those God is bringing among us?” It is where leaders do not ask, “How can I be important?” but, “How can I help others flourish?”
A zero-shaped church is where people in conflict do not rush to defend themselves first, but pause long enough to ask, “What burden, wound, hope, loss, care might my brother or sister be carrying?”
And this is where we must be honest: valuing others above ourselves is hard.
It sounds beautiful until someone else’s interests inconvenience us. It sounds holy until someone else’s needs require us to change. It sounds inspiring until valuing another person means listening longer than we wanted, apologizing more honestly than we planned, giving up a preference we cherished, or making room for a voice we would rather not hear.
There is a kind of mathematics that says: If someone else gains, I lose.
But Christ gives us different math. I call it The Geometry of Grace.
In Christ, another person’s dignity does not SUBTRACT from mine. Another person’s voice does not erase mine. Another person’s gift does not make mine meaningless.
God loved us 100% before we even learned to loved God 1%. My friends, that’s the Geometry of Grace.
Division disappears and the church grows like in Acts where people were ADDED to their number every day. That’s the Geometry of Grace.
The dignity of all of us is multiplied to become a sum greater than its parts. That’s the Geometry of Grace.
The first become last, the negative becomes positive, the least of these become Christ, and King of kings chooses to become zero….
“Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name…”
This is not a strategy for self-promotion. We do not humble ourselves in order to get applause later. We do not become servants as a clever way to become masters. That would just be selfish ambition wearing religious clothing.
But Paul wants us to know that self-emptying is not annihilation. The humbled Christ is exalted. The crucified one is Lord. God vindicates self-giving love.
Paul ends:
“Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.”
Work out your salvation. Ocupaos de vuestra salvación.
Not work for your salvation because God is at work in you. The you here is plural. Do you believe that God is working in you? Do you believe that God is working in your sisters and brothers here? Do you believe that God is at work in our community, nation, and the world?
The mindset of Christ is being formed within us. God is working in us to will and to act according to God’s good purpose.
So yes, we practice. Yes, we choose. Yes, we repent. Yes, we listen. Yes, we serve. Yes, we learn to lay down selfish ambition and vain conceit.
But underneath our work is God’s work.
God is making us into the kind of people who can love like this. God is making us into the kind of church where people do not have to compete for worth. God is making us into a body where Christ is made visible more and more each and every day.
The text today is an invitation, but it also raises some hard questions. Let’s reflect on these together:
What do you need to let go? ¿Qué necesitas liberar?
Are you clinging to status, preference, control, resentment, recognition, or the need to be right?
Where is Christ inviting you to become less, not because you do not matter, but because Christ matters more?
Where is Christ inviting you to value another person’s interests above your own?
¿En qué momento te invita Cristo a valorar los intereses de otra persona por encima de los tuyos?
Maybe it is in your family. Maybe it is in this congregation. Maybe it is with someone you are avoiding. Maybe it is in a disagreement where you have been preparing your defense rather than your compassion. Maybe it is in a ministry where you need to rejoice that someone else is now carrying what you once carried. Maybe it is simply in the daily hidden work of making room.
John said, “He must increase, and I must decrease.”
Paul said, “Have the same mindset as Christ Jesus.”
Jesus said, “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.”
This is the way of the kingdom.
Not upward grasping, but downward love.
Not selfish ambition, but shared joy.
Not vain conceit, but holy humility.
Not my interests alone, but the interests of others.
Not becoming nothing, but becoming free in everything.So let us become zero.
Let us become empty enough for Christ to fill us.
Low enough for Christ to lift us.
Humble enough for Christ to be seen in and through us.
Free enough to value one another above ourselves.
Loving enough to make room for all God’s children.And may the same mind be in us that is in Christ Jesus.
Let us pray:
Prayer (Less of Me by Glen Campbell)
Let me be a little kinder
Let me be a little blinder
To the faults of those about me
Let me praise a little moreLet me be when I am weary
Just a little bit more cheery
Think a little more of others
And a little less of meLet me be a little braver
When temptation bids me waver
Let me strive a little harder
To be all that I should beLet me be a little meeker
With the brother that is weaker
Let me think more of my neighbor
And a little less of meMay it be so
In the name of our Servant King, Jesus the Christ.
Amen
Becoming Zero by kmls #anabaptist #BecomingZero #ChristianFaith #Discipleship #faithAndCulture #findingYourLife #GodSMath #gospel #Grace #graduationSunday #Humility #Identity #Jesus #kingdomOfGod #LeastOfThese #losingYourLife #mennonite #peaceChurch #Sermon #ServantLeadership #spiritualFormation #Success #surrender #vocation -
Book of the Month: Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
This is a fantastic book by John Green, published in March 2025 and we picked up a signed copy at the Wellcome Museum in London back in October 2025. We finally got round to reading it this week, with its slight 208 pages offering a very moving historical record of one of humanity’s deadliest diseases.
Everything is Tuberculosis explores how the illness has shaped human history, from the arts through to medicine and beyond, with Green arguing the condition is primarily caused by human choices (rather than bacteria). Lets explore its compassionate pages here.
Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
“The world we share is a product of all the worlds we used to share. For me at least, the history and present of tuberculosis reveal the folly and brilliance and cruelty and compassion of humans. My wife, Sarah, often jokes that in my mind everything is about tuberculosis, and tuberculosis is about everything. She’s right.”
We got a TB jab 30+ years ago and tuberculosis hasn’t played on our minds much since. It feels like a disease of “the past”, even though it continues to kill over a million people annually. But there is a cure, unfortunately some people just don’t have access to that cure.
When we were growing up TB kept cropping in things we were interested in. One of our favourite writers, George Orwell, died of it in 1950 aged only 46. And in the cult classic film Ravenous (1999) the character Colqhuon (Robert Carlyle) recovers from the condition by resorting to cannibalism.
There’s an entire chapter in Everything is Tuberculosis dedicated to creative people who died of the condition. As during the 18th century, the illness was associated with creative genius. Stupidly, of course, as a lot of people got TB and some of them were always going to have a creative streak.
Some of the famous names who died due to TB include Emily Brontë, John Keats, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekov, Molière, and Frédéric Chopin. The disease was particularly associated with Romanticism.
There’s also the great Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), a haiku master who was still penning new prose just hours before his death. Although he died aged 34, he wrote over 20,000 stanzas. This was one of his last.
Pain from coughing,
the long night’s lame flame,
small as a pea.Tuberculosis is also a horrible disease. It was called consumption for a long time as it caused patients to waste away under its ordeals, become emaciated and skeletal in the process.
This often lent a pale, red-cheeked look that, in the Victorian era, society viewed as a sign of beauty (so other people, not even with TB, would often try to replicate the gaunt look). Yes, then, the pale and haggard look of people nearing death was viewed as attractive.
But this is not a condition you want to get.
“M. tuberculosis is a near-perfect human predator in par because it moves so slowly. The bacteria has an uncommonly slow growth rate. While E. Coli can double in number about every twenty minutes in a laboratory environment, M. tuberculosis doubles only about once per day. And so infections simply take much, much longer to make an infected person sick, as the number of bacteria remains lower, allowing the immune system lots of time to mount a defense against the pathogen.
But there’s a problem: M. tuberculosis grows so slowly because it takes a long time to build its unusually fatty, thick cell wall, which is a formidable enemy to the immune system. White blood cells struggle to penetrate the cell wall and kill the bacteria from within. In fact, it’s so hard for infection-fighting cells to penetrate the bacteria’s cell what that, instead, white blood cells usually surround it, creating a call of calcifying tissue known as a tubercle.”
And so for many hundreds of years, TB was a bit like leprosy. Something of a feared disease that could get you cast out of society, but also had that strange creative element attached to it.
But this was an era when death was just very common.
“Before vaccination, C-sections, infection control, and antibiotics, the death of children was routine. About half of all humans ever born died before the age of five. Child death was so common that it had to be acknowledged as natural. And so the acceptable times to die in much of the premodern world were 1. Early childhood, or 2. Late in adulthood.
But tuberculosis has long been known for sickening and killing those between twenty and forty-five, during the one period of life when you were supposed to be relatively insulated from illness and death.”
This was a book we bought randomly in October 2025 based on its cover. We like yellow, we love the Wellcome Museum in London, so we picked up a copy as what the hey.
It’s one of those lucky moments as Everything is Tuberculosis is a fine work. It’s tragic, inspired, at times funny, and highlights the precariousness of life on this Earth. It’s only in the last 50 years or so across all of human history that we’ve more or less banished this disease from western society.
Roy Porter’s excellent 2002 work Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine reminded us of that, too. How lucky we’ve been to exist in the last half century, coinciding with some actual proper medical understanding.
As in England, if someone you knew got TB tomorrow that’d be considered really bizarre.
Yet, for a long time it was the norm and, for some people, almost a desirable thing. As within that suffering, people penned poetry and are remembered to this day for it. That romantic concept of a tortured genius again.
And a Bit About the Writer John Green
John Green is a American author and YouTuber most famous for his 2012 book The Fault in Our Stars Adapted into a film in 2014). He’s also hosted the innovative podcast/non-fiction book The Anthropocene Reviewed from 2018-2021.
For over a decade, he’s been a major global health advocate and is a trustee for Partners in Health. Everything is Tuberculosis has a big focus on Sierra Leone and its poverty crisis, with one individual called Henry documented throughout the work.
Green met Henry when he was 17, but the nature of TB meant he looked like a young boy. Happily, Henry was able to get a proper treatment regime and is alive and well.
But the book really did make it clear to us how lucky we’ve been. How diseases like TB that seem to belong in a past age are, in fact, still causing havoc across less fortunate regions of the world. Sierra Leone is so poverty stricken as the British Empire designed a railroad system to get all accumulated wealth out of the country as fast as possible. The pernicious nature of that system is still felt to this day.
Due to Green’s status, Everything is Tuberculosis was a hit and topped the New York Times bestsellers list, remaining in the list for some 23 weeks.
#Bacteria #Books #consumption #Disease #History #Illness #JohnGreen #lifedtyle #Literature #Medicine #Reading #TB #tuberculosis -
Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
This is a fantastic book by John Green, published in March 2025 and we picked up a signed copy at the Wellcome Museum in London back in October 2025. We finally got round to reading it this week, with its slight 208 pages offering a very moving historical record of one of humanity’s deadliest diseases.
Everything is Tuberculosis explores how the illness has shaped human history, from the arts through to medicine and beyond, with Green arguing the condition is primarily caused by human choices (rather than bacteria). Lets explore its compassionate pages here.
Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
“The world we share is a product of all the worlds we used to share. For me at least, the history and present of tuberculosis reveal the folly and brilliance and cruelty and compassion of humans. My wife, Sarah, often jokes that in my mind everything is about tuberculosis, and tuberculosis is about everything. She’s right.”
We got a TB jab 30+ years ago and tuberculosis hasn’t played on our minds much since. It feels like a disease of “the past”, even though it continues to kill over a million people annually. But there is a cure, unfortunately some people just don’t have access to that cure.
When we were growing up TB kept cropping in things we were interested in. One of our favourite writers, George Orwell, died of it in 1950 aged only 46. And in the cult classic film Ravenous (1999) the character Colqhuon (Robert Carlyle) recovers from the condition by resorting to cannibalism.
There’s an entire chapter in Everything is Tuberculosis dedicated to creative people who died of the condition. As during the 18th century, the illness was associated with creative genius. Stupidly, of course, as a lot of people got TB and some of them were always going to have a creative streak.
Some of the famous names who died due to TB include Emily Brontë, John Keats, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekov, Molière, and Frédéric Chopin. The disease was particularly associated with Romanticism.
There’s also the great Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), a haiku master who was still penning new prose just hours before his death. Although he died aged 34, he wrote over 20,000 stanzas. This was one of his last.
Pain from coughing,
the long night’s lame flame,
small as a pea.Tuberculosis is also a horrible disease. It was called consumption for a long time as it caused patients to waste away under its ordeals, become emaciated and skeletal in the process.
This often lent a pale, red-cheeked look that, in the Victorian era, society viewed as a sign of beauty (so other people, not even with TB, would often try to replicate the gaunt look). Yes, then, the pale and haggard look of people nearing death was viewed as attractive.
But this is not a condition you want to get. It wastes your body away and causes lots of pain. All down to the bacteria that seems obstinate in its time taken.
“M. tuberculosis is a near-perfect human predator in part because it moves so slowly. The bacteria has an uncommonly slow growth rate. While E. Coli can double in number about every twenty minutes in a laboratory environment, M. tuberculosis doubles only about once per day. And so infections simply take much, much longer to make an infected person sick, as the number of bacteria remains lower, allowing the immune system lots of time to mount a defense against the pathogen.
But there’s a problem: M. tuberculosis grows so slowly because it takes a long time to build its unusually fatty, thick cell wall, which is a formidable enemy to the immune system. White blood cells struggle to penetrate the cell wall and kill the bacteria from within. In fact, it’s so hard for infection-fighting cells to penetrate the bacteria’s cell what that, instead, white blood cells usually surround it, creating a call of calcifying tissue known as a tubercle.”
And so for many hundreds of years, TB was a bit like leprosy. Something of a feared disease that could get you cast out of society, but also had that strange creative element attached to it.
But this was an era when death was just very common.
“Before vaccination, C-sections, infection control, and antibiotics, the death of children was routine. About half of all humans ever born died before the age of five. Child death was so common that it had to be acknowledged as natural. And so the acceptable times to die in much of the premodern world were 1. Early childhood, or 2. Late in adulthood.
But tuberculosis has long been known for sickening and killing those between twenty and forty-five, during the one period of life when you were supposed to be relatively insulated from illness and death.”
This was a book we bought randomly in October 2025 based on its cover. We like yellow, we love the Wellcome Museum in London, so we picked up a copy as what the hey.
It’s one of those lucky moments as Everything is Tuberculosis is a fine work. It’s tragic, inspired, at times funny, and highlights the precariousness of life on this Earth. It’s only in the last 50 years or so across all of human history that we’ve more or less banished this disease from western society.
Roy Porter’s excellent 2002 work Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine reminded us of that, too. How lucky we’ve been to exist in the last half century, coinciding with some actual proper medical understanding.
As in England, if someone you knew got TB tomorrow that’d be considered really bizarre.
Yet, for a long time it was the norm and, for some people, almost a desirable thing. As within that suffering, people penned poetry and are remembered to this day for it. That romantic concept of a tortured genius again.
And a Bit About the Writer John Green
John Green is a American author and YouTuber most famous for his 2012 book The Fault in Our Stars Adapted into a film in 2014). He’s also hosted the innovative podcast/non-fiction book The Anthropocene Reviewed from 2018-2021.
For over a decade, he’s been a major global health advocate and is a trustee for Partners in Health. Everything is Tuberculosis has a big focus on Sierra Leone and its poverty crisis, with one individual called Henry documented throughout the work.
Green met Henry when he was 17, but the nature of TB meant he looked like a young boy. Happily, Henry was able to get a proper treatment regime and is alive and well.
But the book really did make it clear to us how lucky we’ve been. How diseases like TB that seem to belong in a past age are, in fact, still causing havoc across less fortunate regions of the world. Sierra Leone is so poverty stricken as the British Empire designed a railroad system to get all accumulated wealth out of the country as fast as possible. The pernicious nature of that system is still felt to this day.
Due to Green’s status, Everything is Tuberculosis was a hit and topped the New York Times bestsellers list, remaining in the list for some 23 weeks.
#Bacteria #Books #consumption #Disease #History #Illness #JohnGreen #lifedtyle #Literature #Medicine #Reading #TB #tuberculosis -
Book of the Month: Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
This is a fantastic book by John Green, published in March 2025 and we picked up a signed copy at the Wellcome Museum in London back in October 2025. We finally got round to reading it this week, with its slight 208 pages offering a very moving historical record of one of humanity’s deadliest diseases.
Everything is Tuberculosis explores how the illness has shaped human history, from the arts through to medicine and beyond, with Green arguing the condition is primarily caused by human choices (rather than bacteria). Lets explore its compassionate pages here.
Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
“The world we share is a product of all the worlds we used to share. For me at least, the history and present of tuberculosis reveal the folly and brilliance and cruelty and compassion of humans. My wife, Sarah, often jokes that in my mind everything is about tuberculosis, and tuberculosis is about everything. She’s right.”
We got a TB jab 30+ years ago and tuberculosis hasn’t played on our minds much since. It feels like a disease of “the past”, even though it continues to kill over a million people annually. But there is a cure, unfortunately some people just don’t have access to that cure.
When we were growing up TB kept cropping in things we were interested in. One of our favourite writers, George Orwell, died of it in 1950 aged only 46. And in the cult classic film Ravenous (1999) the character Colqhuon (Robert Carlyle) recovers from the condition by resorting to cannibalism.
There’s an entire chapter in Everything is Tuberculosis dedicated to creative people who died of the condition. As during the 18th century, the illness was associated with creative genius. Stupidly, of course, as a lot of people got TB and some of them were always going to have a creative streak.
Some of the famous names who died due to TB include Emily Brontë, John Keats, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekov, Molière, and Frédéric Chopin. The disease was particularly associated with Romanticism.
There’s also the great Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), a haiku master who was still penning new prose just hours before his death. Although he died aged 34, he wrote over 20,000 stanzas. This was one of his last.
Pain from coughing,
the long night’s lame flame,
small as a pea.Tuberculosis is also a horrible disease. It was called consumption for a long time as it caused patients to waste away under its ordeals, become emaciated and skeletal in the process.
This often lent a pale, red-cheeked look that, in the Victorian era, society viewed as a sign of beauty (so other people, not even with TB, would often try to replicate the gaunt look). Yes, then, the pale and haggard look of people nearing death was viewed as attractive.
But this is not a condition you want to get.
“M. tuberculosis is a near-perfect human predator in par because it moves so slowly. The bacteria has an uncommonly slow growth rate. While E. Coli can double in number about every twenty minutes in a laboratory environment, M. tuberculosis doubles only about once per day. And so infections simply take much, much longer to make an infected person sick, as the number of bacteria remains lower, allowing the immune system lots of time to mount a defense against the pathogen.
But there’s a problem: M. tuberculosis grows so slowly because it takes a long time to build its unusually fatty, thick cell wall, which is a formidable enemy to the immune system. White blood cells struggle to penetrate the cell wall and kill the bacteria from within. In fact, it’s so hard for infection-fighting cells to penetrate the bacteria’s cell what that, instead, white blood cells usually surround it, creating a call of calcifying tissue known as a tubercle.”
And so for many hundreds of years, TB was a bit like leprosy. Something of a feared disease that could get you cast out of society, but also had that strange creative element attached to it.
But this was an era when death was just very common.
“Before vaccination, C-sections, infection control, and antibiotics, the death of children was routine. About half of all humans ever born died before the age of five. Child death was so common that it had to be acknowledged as natural. And so the acceptable times to die in much of the premodern world were 1. Early childhood, or 2. Late in adulthood.
But tuberculosis has long been known for sickening and killing those between twenty and forty-five, during the one period of life when you were supposed to be relatively insulated from illness and death.”
This was a book we bought randomly in October 2025 based on its cover. We like yellow, we love the Wellcome Museum in London, so we picked up a copy as what the hey.
It’s one of those lucky moments as Everything is Tuberculosis is a fine work. It’s tragic, inspired, at times funny, and highlights the precariousness of life on this Earth. It’s only in the last 50 years or so across all of human history that we’ve more or less banished this disease from western society.
Roy Porter’s excellent 2002 work Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine reminded us of that, too. How lucky we’ve been to exist in the last half century, coinciding with some actual proper medical understanding.
As in England, if someone you knew got TB tomorrow that’d be considered really bizarre.
Yet, for a long time it was the norm and, for some people, almost a desirable thing. As within that suffering, people penned poetry and are remembered to this day for it. That romantic concept of a tortured genius again.
And a Bit About the Writer John Green
John Green is a American author and YouTuber most famous for his 2012 book The Fault in Our Stars Adapted into a film in 2014). He’s also hosted the innovative podcast/non-fiction book The Anthropocene Reviewed from 2018-2021.
For over a decade, he’s been a major global health advocate and is a trustee for Partners in Health. Everything is Tuberculosis has a big focus on Sierra Leone and its poverty crisis, with one individual called Henry documented throughout the work.
Green met Henry when he was 17, but the nature of TB meant he looked like a young boy. Happily, Henry was able to get a proper treatment regime and is alive and well.
But the book really did make it clear to us how lucky we’ve been. How diseases like TB that seem to belong in a past age are, in fact, still causing havoc across less fortunate regions of the world. Sierra Leone is so poverty stricken as the British Empire designed a railroad system to get all accumulated wealth out of the country as fast as possible. The pernicious nature of that system is still felt to this day.
Due to Green’s status, Everything is Tuberculosis was a hit and topped the New York Times bestsellers list, remaining in the list for some 23 weeks.
#Bacteria #Books #consumption #Disease #History #Illness #JohnGreen #lifedtyle #Literature #Medicine #Reading #TB #tuberculosis -
Book of the Month: Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
This is a fantastic book by John Green, published in March 2025 and we picked up a signed copy at the Wellcome Museum in London back in October 2025. We finally got round to reading it this week, with its slight 208 pages offering a very moving historical record of one of humanity’s deadliest diseases.
Everything is Tuberculosis explores how the illness has shaped human history, from the arts through to medicine and beyond, with Green arguing the condition is primarily caused by human choices (rather than bacteria). Lets explore its compassionate pages here.
Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
“The world we share is a product of all the worlds we used to share. For me at least, the history and present of tuberculosis reveal the folly and brilliance and cruelty and compassion of humans. My wife, Sarah, often jokes that in my mind everything is about tuberculosis, and tuberculosis is about everything. She’s right.”
We got a TB jab 30+ years ago and tuberculosis hasn’t played on our minds much since. It feels like a disease of “the past”, even though it continues to kill over a million people annually. But there is a cure, unfortunately some people just don’t have access to that cure.
When we were growing up TB kept cropping in things we were interested in. One of our favourite writers, George Orwell, died of it in 1950 aged only 46. And in the cult classic film Ravenous (1999) the character Colqhuon (Robert Carlyle) recovers from the condition by resorting to cannibalism.
There’s an entire chapter in Everything is Tuberculosis dedicated to creative people who died of the condition. As during the 18th century, the illness was associated with creative genius. Stupidly, of course, as a lot of people got TB and some of them were always going to have a creative streak.
Some of the famous names who died due to TB include Emily Brontë, John Keats, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekov, Molière, and Frédéric Chopin. The disease was particularly associated with Romanticism.
There’s also the great Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), a haiku master who was still penning new prose just hours before his death. Although he died aged 34, he wrote over 20,000 stanzas. This was one of his last.
Pain from coughing,
the long night’s lame flame,
small as a pea.Tuberculosis is also a horrible disease. It was called consumption for a long time as it caused patients to waste away under its ordeals, become emaciated and skeletal in the process.
This often lent a pale, red-cheeked look that, in the Victorian era, society viewed as a sign of beauty (so other people, not even with TB, would often try to replicate the gaunt look). Yes, then, the pale and haggard look of people nearing death was viewed as attractive.
But this is not a condition you want to get.
“M. tuberculosis is a near-perfect human predator in par because it moves so slowly. The bacteria has an uncommonly slow growth rate. While E. Coli can double in number about every twenty minutes in a laboratory environment, M. tuberculosis doubles only about once per day. And so infections simply take much, much longer to make an infected person sick, as the number of bacteria remains lower, allowing the immune system lots of time to mount a defense against the pathogen.
But there’s a problem: M. tuberculosis grows so slowly because it takes a long time to build its unusually fatty, thick cell wall, which is a formidable enemy to the immune system. White blood cells struggle to penetrate the cell wall and kill the bacteria from within. In fact, it’s so hard for infection-fighting cells to penetrate the bacteria’s cell what that, instead, white blood cells usually surround it, creating a call of calcifying tissue known as a tubercle.”
And so for many hundreds of years, TB was a bit like leprosy. Something of a feared disease that could get you cast out of society, but also had that strange creative element attached to it.
But this was an era when death was just very common.
“Before vaccination, C-sections, infection control, and antibiotics, the death of children was routine. About half of all humans ever born died before the age of five. Child death was so common that it had to be acknowledged as natural. And so the acceptable times to die in much of the premodern world were 1. Early childhood, or 2. Late in adulthood.
But tuberculosis has long been known for sickening and killing those between twenty and forty-five, during the one period of life when you were supposed to be relatively insulated from illness and death.”
This was a book we bought randomly in October 2025 based on its cover. We like yellow, we love the Wellcome Museum in London, so we picked up a copy as what the hey.
It’s one of those lucky moments as Everything is Tuberculosis is a fine work. It’s tragic, inspired, at times funny, and highlights the precariousness of life on this Earth. It’s only in the last 50 years or so across all of human history that we’ve more or less banished this disease from western society.
Roy Porter’s excellent 2002 work Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine reminded us of that, too. How lucky we’ve been to exist in the last half century, coinciding with some actual proper medical understanding.
As in England, if someone you knew got TB tomorrow that’d be considered really bizarre.
Yet, for a long time it was the norm and, for some people, almost a desirable thing. As within that suffering, people penned poetry and are remembered to this day for it. That romantic concept of a tortured genius again.
And a Bit About the Writer John Green
John Green is a American author and YouTuber most famous for his 2012 book The Fault in Our Stars Adapted into a film in 2014). He’s also hosted the innovative podcast/non-fiction book The Anthropocene Reviewed from 2018-2021.
For over a decade, he’s been a major global health advocate and is a trustee for Partners in Health. Everything is Tuberculosis has a big focus on Sierra Leone and its poverty crisis, with one individual called Henry documented throughout the work.
Green met Henry when he was 17, but the nature of TB meant he looked like a young boy. Happily, Henry was able to get a proper treatment regime and is alive and well.
But the book really did make it clear to us how lucky we’ve been. How diseases like TB that seem to belong in a past age are, in fact, still causing havoc across less fortunate regions of the world. Sierra Leone is so poverty stricken as the British Empire designed a railroad system to get all accumulated wealth out of the country as fast as possible. The pernicious nature of that system is still felt to this day.
Due to Green’s status, Everything is Tuberculosis was a hit and topped the New York Times bestsellers list, remaining in the list for some 23 weeks.
#Bacteria #Books #consumption #Disease #History #Illness #JohnGreen #lifedtyle #Literature #Medicine #Reading #TB #tuberculosis -
Book of the Month: Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
This is a fantastic book by John Green, published in March 2025 and we picked up a signed copy at the Wellcome Museum in London back in October 2025. We finally got round to reading it this week, with its slight 208 pages offering a very moving historical record of one of humanity’s deadliest diseases.
Everything is Tuberculosis explores how the illness has shaped human history, from the arts through to medicine and beyond, with Green arguing the condition is primarily caused by human choices (rather than bacteria). Lets explore its compassionate pages here.
Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
“The world we share is a product of all the worlds we used to share. For me at least, the history and present of tuberculosis reveal the folly and brilliance and cruelty and compassion of humans. My wife, Sarah, often jokes that in my mind everything is about tuberculosis, and tuberculosis is about everything. She’s right.”
We got a TB jab 30+ years ago and tuberculosis hasn’t played on our minds much since. It feels like a disease of “the past”, even though it continues to kill over a million people annually. But there is a cure, unfortunately some people just don’t have access to that cure.
When we were growing up TB kept cropping in things we were interested in. One of our favourite writers, George Orwell, died of it in 1950 aged only 46. And in the cult classic film Ravenous (1999) the character Colqhuon (Robert Carlyle) recovers from the condition by resorting to cannibalism.
There’s an entire chapter in Everything is Tuberculosis dedicated to creative people who died of the condition. As during the 18th century, the illness was associated with creative genius. Stupidly, of course, as a lot of people got TB and some of them were always going to have a creative streak.
Some of the famous names who died due to TB include Emily Brontë, John Keats, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekov, Molière, and Frédéric Chopin. The disease was particularly associated with Romanticism.
There’s also the great Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), a haiku master who was still penning new prose just hours before his death. Although he died aged 34, he wrote over 20,000 stanzas. This was one of his last.
Pain from coughing,
the long night’s lame flame,
small as a pea.Tuberculosis is also a horrible disease. It was called consumption for a long time as it caused patients to waste away under its ordeals, become emaciated and skeletal in the process.
This often lent a pale, red-cheeked look that, in the Victorian era, society viewed as a sign of beauty (so other people, not even with TB, would often try to replicate the gaunt look). Yes, then, the pale and haggard look of people nearing death was viewed as attractive.
But this is not a condition you want to get.
“M. tuberculosis is a near-perfect human predator in par because it moves so slowly. The bacteria has an uncommonly slow growth rate. While E. Coli can double in number about every twenty minutes in a laboratory environment, M. tuberculosis doubles only about once per day. And so infections simply take much, much longer to make an infected person sick, as the number of bacteria remains lower, allowing the immune system lots of time to mount a defense against the pathogen.
But there’s a problem: M. tuberculosis grows so slowly because it takes a long time to build its unusually fatty, thick cell wall, which is a formidable enemy to the immune system. White blood cells struggle to penetrate the cell wall and kill the bacteria from within. In fact, it’s so hard for infection-fighting cells to penetrate the bacteria’s cell what that, instead, white blood cells usually surround it, creating a call of calcifying tissue known as a tubercle.”
And so for many hundreds of years, TB was a bit like leprosy. Something of a feared disease that could get you cast out of society, but also had that strange creative element attached to it.
But this was an era when death was just very common.
“Before vaccination, C-sections, infection control, and antibiotics, the death of children was routine. About half of all humans ever born died before the age of five. Child death was so common that it had to be acknowledged as natural. And so the acceptable times to die in much of the premodern world were 1. Early childhood, or 2. Late in adulthood.
But tuberculosis has long been known for sickening and killing those between twenty and forty-five, during the one period of life when you were supposed to be relatively insulated from illness and death.”
This was a book we bought randomly in October 2025 based on its cover. We like yellow, we love the Wellcome Museum in London, so we picked up a copy as what the hey.
It’s one of those lucky moments as Everything is Tuberculosis is a fine work. It’s tragic, inspired, at times funny, and highlights the precariousness of life on this Earth. It’s only in the last 50 years or so across all of human history that we’ve more or less banished this disease from western society.
Roy Porter’s excellent 2002 work Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine reminded us of that, too. How lucky we’ve been to exist in the last half century, coinciding with some actual proper medical understanding.
As in England, if someone you knew got TB tomorrow that’d be considered really bizarre.
Yet, for a long time it was the norm and, for some people, almost a desirable thing. As within that suffering, people penned poetry and are remembered to this day for it. That romantic concept of a tortured genius again.
And a Bit About the Writer John Green
John Green is a American author and YouTuber most famous for his 2012 book The Fault in Our Stars Adapted into a film in 2014). He’s also hosted the innovative podcast/non-fiction book The Anthropocene Reviewed from 2018-2021.
For over a decade, he’s been a major global health advocate and is a trustee for Partners in Health. Everything is Tuberculosis has a big focus on Sierra Leone and its poverty crisis, with one individual called Henry documented throughout the work.
Green met Henry when he was 17, but the nature of TB meant he looked like a young boy. Happily, Henry was able to get a proper treatment regime and is alive and well.
But the book really did make it clear to us how lucky we’ve been. How diseases like TB that seem to belong in a past age are, in fact, still causing havoc across less fortunate regions of the world. Sierra Leone is so poverty stricken as the British Empire designed a railroad system to get all accumulated wealth out of the country as fast as possible. The pernicious nature of that system is still felt to this day.
Due to Green’s status, Everything is Tuberculosis was a hit and topped the New York Times bestsellers list, remaining in the list for some 23 weeks.
#Bacteria #Books #consumption #Disease #History #Illness #JohnGreen #lifedtyle #Literature #Medicine #Reading #TB #tuberculosis -
Stillness and Japanese Aesthetics: What Norm Architects’ Book Reveals About the Future of Design
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Quiet is having a moment. Not the quiet of minimalism reduced to a trend board, but a more earned, more philosophical kind — the kind that asks you to slow down and actually look. Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design, published by gestalten in October 2024, arrives at exactly the right time. The book is Norm Architects’ attempt to put language, image, and structure around something most designers feel but rarely articulate: that Japanese spatial thinking changes the way you see everything else afterward.
Norm Architects — the Copenhagen-based studio known for their restrained, material-led approach to interiors, architecture, and product design — spent over a decade traveling to Japan, collaborating with Japanese craftspeople, and sitting with the country’s design philosophy before committing it to print. The result is 304 pages that function simultaneously as a travel memoir, an aesthetic manifesto, and a serious design document. Furthermore, it’s one of the most visually considered design books published in 2024.
The book is available on AmazonThis isn’t a coffee table book that flatters itself with pretty photographs. It’s a book with a thesis. And the thesis matters.
Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design. This book by Norm Architects was published by gestalten. The book is available on AmazonWhat Does Japanese Aesthetics Actually Mean for Contemporary Architecture?
The phrase “Japanese aesthetics” gets used carelessly. It’s become a shorthand for neutral palettes, natural materials, and open floor plans — the visual vocabulary of a thousand boutique hotels. But the tradition Norm Architects engages with in Stillness runs much deeper than surface style.
Japanese spatial philosophy is rooted in concepts like ma (negative space as active presence), wabi-sabi (the beauty of impermanence and imperfection), and mono no aware (a bittersweet sensitivity to transience). These aren’t decorative ideas. They’re structural ones — ways of organizing perception, time, and material experience. Consequently, they reshape how you design a threshold, choose a texture, or decide where light should fall.
Norm Architects understood this early. Their Scandinavian sensibility — already oriented toward craft, restraint, and natural material honesty — gave them a framework for genuine dialogue rather than appropriation. The book makes this cross-cultural conversation legible. It shows how two distinct design traditions, separated by geography and history, arrive at strikingly similar conclusions about what space should feel like and why stillness in design is not emptiness, but precision.
The Scandinavian-Japanese Design Continuum
One of the book’s most compelling arguments is what I’d call the Nordic-Zen Continuum — the observation that Scandinavian and Japanese design share a foundational commitment to functional beauty, material truth, and spatial modesty. Both traditions resist ornament for its own sake. Furthermore, both prioritize the relationship between inside and outside, and both treat craft as a form of philosophy.
This isn’t a coincidence. Both cultures developed design traditions in response to demanding natural environments. Darkness and cold in Scandinavia. Islands, seismic instability, and resource scarcity in Japan. When nature is a constraint, design responds with economy and depth rather than excess. Therefore, the visual affinities between a Danish farmhouse and a Japanese machiya townhouse are structural, not stylistic.
Stillness makes this argument through juxtaposition — placing images from Japan alongside Norm Architects’ built work in Denmark and Sweden. The comparison is generous and precise. You see the same thinking operating across different climates, clients, and construction traditions.
Inside the Book: Structure, Content, and Editorial Vision
At 304 pages, Stillness is a substantial document. It’s also physically imposing — nearly 13 inches tall and weighing close to five pounds. gestalten produced it to a standard that honors the material the book discusses. The paper, the binding, the image reproduction: all of it communicates seriousness.
The book organizes itself around dispatches — richly illustrated accounts of visits to Japanese landscapes, architecture, and cultural sites. These aren’t tourist itineraries. They’re closer to phenomenological field notes: observations about how a specific space affects the body, the eye, and the mind. Additionally, commentary from expert collaborators in both Japan and Scandinavia gives the book intellectual ballast beyond personal observation.
Key Projects Featured in Stillness
The book anchors its arguments in specific built work. Two projects appear as primary case studies for how Japanese aesthetics inform contemporary Scandinavian practice:
Äng Restaurant, Sweden — A dining environment where materiality and restraint create a specific atmospheric quality. The space uses natural materials, careful proportioning, and controlled light in ways that directly reflect the ma principle — treating emptiness as a design element rather than an absence of design.
Heatherhill Beach House, Denmark — A coastal residence that negotiates the relationship between interior shelter and exterior landscape with the same sensitivity found in traditional Japanese architecture. The project demonstrates what Norm calls spatial humility: the idea that a building should defer to its site rather than dominate it.
Both projects demonstrate what I’d define as Calibrated Absence — a design principle in which every element present in a space is justified not just by its function, but by the quality of attention it creates around itself.
The Core Frameworks: How Stillness Structures Its Argument
Good design books don’t just document work. They give readers tools for thinking. Stillness does this through several interlocking ideas worth naming precisely.
1. The Stillness Gradient
Not all quiet is the same. Stillness implicitly identifies what I’d call a Stillness Gradient — a spectrum running from decorative simplicity (spaces that look minimal) through functional restraint (spaces that eliminate unnecessary elements) to perceptual depth (spaces where less creates more conscious experience). Japanese architecture — at its best — operates at the perceptual depth end of this gradient. Norm Architects’ work consistently aims there too.
The distinction matters enormously for contemporary design practice. Much of what passes for minimalism today is decorative simplicity — a white wall and a concrete floor that still feels busy because nothing has been considered at the perceptual level. True stillness, as the book argues, requires active editorial discipline at every scale of the design process.
2. Material Testimony
Another framework the book develops — implicitly, through its images and commentary — is what I’d call Material Testimony: the idea that materials should tell the truth about their own nature, their age, and their place of origin. Japanese craft traditions, particularly those around wood, stone, lacquer, and ceramics, operate on this principle rigorously.
Norm Architects applies the same logic to their Scandinavian projects. The Äng Restaurant, for instance, uses materials that age visibly and honestly. Nothing pretends to be something else. Accordingly, the space develops a patina of authenticity that synthetic or highly processed materials cannot achieve.
3. The Threshold as Philosophical Device
Both Japanese and Scandinavian architecture treat thresholds — doors, engawa corridors, transitional zones between inside and out — as philosophically loaded moments. Stillness returns to this idea repeatedly. The threshold is where the building makes its first argument about what matters: how you arrive, how your body adjusts, how your perception shifts.
In Japanese architecture, the threshold is often drawn out, extended, and made generous. You’re not moved through space; you’re introduced to it. This approach to arrival profoundly influenced Norm Architects’ thinking about how their buildings receive the people who use them.
Why This Book Lands Differently Than Other Japanese Design Books
There’s no shortage of books about Japanese design aesthetics. So what makes Stillness distinct?
First, the authorial position. Norm Architects are not journalists or academics observing Japanese design from the outside. They’re practitioners who have spent a decade in genuine creative dialogue with Japanese makers, architects, and cultural figures. The book carries the authority of lived engagement, not borrowed vocabulary.
Second, the comparative structure. By juxtaposing Japanese source material with their own built work, Norm Architects make the book’s argument visible rather than merely stated. You see the influence operating in real projects, at real scale, with real consequences. This is rare and valuable.
Third, the timing. We’re in a moment when the design conversation has become saturated with digital aesthetics, AI-generated imagery, and trend-cycle acceleration. A book that argues for slowness, depth, and material honesty feels genuinely countercultural right now. Moreover, it makes an implicit argument that resonates beyond design: that quality of attention is itself a form of design.
Japanese Design Principles in a Post-Digital World
Here’s a forward-looking prediction worth stating directly: the principles Stillness documents will become increasingly central to design practice over the next decade — not because Japanese aesthetics are fashionable, but because they address a real problem.
The problem is this: digital environments have trained human perception toward constant stimulation, rapid context-switching, and surface-level engagement. Physical spaces that counteract this — that offer genuine perceptual depth, material presence, and sensory calm — will be experienced as profound relief. Designers who understand how to create this quality will be in significant demand.
The frameworks in Stillness — calibrated absence, material testimony, the extended threshold — are not historical curiosities. They’re practical instruments for designing the kind of spaces people will desperately need.
Who Should Read Stillness?
The obvious answer is architects, interior designers, and design students. But the book speaks usefully to a wider audience. Brand designers interested in spatial identity will find the arguments about material testimony directly applicable to retail and hospitality environments. Photographers will find the book’s visual intelligence instructive. Anyone who cares seriously about the relationship between space and human experience — which is to say, anyone who’s ever felt a room before they thought about it — will find something essential here.
It’s also genuinely one of the most beautiful books published in 2024. The image editing, the sequencing, the relationship between text and photograph: all of it reflects the aesthetic principles the book discusses. This kind of formal coherence is rarer than it should be.
Stillness as a Design Argument for Slowness
What I find most compelling about Stillness is its willingness to be unfashionable. In an era when design publishing often chases novelty, Norm Architects built a book around ideas that are centuries old — and made them feel urgently contemporary. That’s a difficult thing to do. It requires genuine conviction about what design is actually for.
The book’s central argument — that stillness is not absence but a quality of presence, and that achieving it requires discipline, knowledge, and genuine cross-cultural humility — feels important. Not just for architecture. For design thinking broadly. And perhaps for how we organize our lives.
The book is available on AmazonJapanese aesthetics in architecture have always been about more than visual style. They’re about how space shapes consciousness. Stillness makes that argument with rigor, beauty, and earned authority. It belongs on the shelf of anyone who takes space seriously.
Frequently Asked Questions About Stillness by Norm Architects
What is Stillness by Norm Architects about?
Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design is a 304-page book published by gestalten in October 2024. It documents Norm Architects’ decade-long engagement with Japanese design culture, exploring how Japanese spatial philosophy — concepts like ma, wabi-sabi, and material honesty — has shaped their contemporary Scandinavian practice. The book combines travel dispatches, architectural photography, expert commentary, and project documentation into a unified design manifesto.
Who are Norm Architects?
Norm Architects is a Copenhagen-based design studio working across architecture, interiors, and product design. They are known for a rigorously restrained aesthetic that emphasizes craft, natural materials, and spatial sensitivity. Their work includes residential architecture, hospitality interiors, and product collaborations across Scandinavia and internationally.
Who published Stillness and when?
gestalten published Stillness on October 8, 2024. It’s a Berlin-based publisher specializing in high-quality design, architecture, and culture books. The book runs to 304 pages with an ISBN of 978-3967041583.
What Japanese design principles does the book explore?
The book engages with several core Japanese aesthetic concepts: ma (the active use of negative space), wabi-sabi (beauty found in impermanence and imperfection), mono no aware (sensitivity to transience), and the philosophical role of craft and material honesty in spatial design. It also explores how these principles manifest in Japanese landscapes, traditional architecture, and contemporary cultural spaces.
Which Norm Architects projects are featured in Stillness?
The book features two primary built projects as case studies: the Äng Restaurant in Sweden and the Heatherhill Beach House in Denmark. Both projects demonstrate how Japanese spatial thinking — particularly around material selection, threshold design, and calibrated restraint — operates within a contemporary Scandinavian architectural practice.
Is Stillness suitable for non-architects?
Yes. While the book engages seriously with architectural thinking, its accessible structure and richly illustrated format make it valuable for anyone interested in design, photography, Japanese culture, or the relationship between space and human experience. Brand designers, interior designers, photographers, and design enthusiasts will all find the book compelling.
How does Japanese aesthetics influence Scandinavian design?
Both traditions share foundational commitments to functional beauty, material integrity, and spatial modesty. Both developed in response to demanding natural environments. The book argues — and demonstrates through comparative imagery — that these shared values create a genuine design continuum between the two cultures, rather than a one-directional influence relationship.
What makes Stillness different from other Japanese design books?
Stillness distinguishes itself through three things: the authorial credibility of a studio with a decade of genuine creative engagement with Japan; its comparative structure, juxtaposing Japanese source material with completed built work; and its forward-looking design argument about why Japanese aesthetic principles matter urgently for contemporary practice.
Discover more of our book reviews here at WE AND THE COLOR.
#architecture #book #design #Gestalten #NormArchitects #StillnessAndJapaneseAesthetics -
Stillness and Japanese Aesthetics: What Norm Architects’ Book Reveals About the Future of Design
This post contains affiliate links. We may earn a commission if you click on them and make a purchase. It’s at no extra cost to you and helps us run this site. Thanks for your support!
Quiet is having a moment. Not the quiet of minimalism reduced to a trend board, but a more earned, more philosophical kind — the kind that asks you to slow down and actually look. Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design, published by gestalten in October 2024, arrives at exactly the right time. The book is Norm Architects’ attempt to put language, image, and structure around something most designers feel but rarely articulate: that Japanese spatial thinking changes the way you see everything else afterward.
Norm Architects — the Copenhagen-based studio known for their restrained, material-led approach to interiors, architecture, and product design — spent over a decade traveling to Japan, collaborating with Japanese craftspeople, and sitting with the country’s design philosophy before committing it to print. The result is 304 pages that function simultaneously as a travel memoir, an aesthetic manifesto, and a serious design document. Furthermore, it’s one of the most visually considered design books published in 2024.
The book is available on AmazonThis isn’t a coffee table book that flatters itself with pretty photographs. It’s a book with a thesis. And the thesis matters.
Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design. This book by Norm Architects was published by gestalten. The book is available on AmazonWhat Does Japanese Aesthetics Actually Mean for Contemporary Architecture?
The phrase “Japanese aesthetics” gets used carelessly. It’s become a shorthand for neutral palettes, natural materials, and open floor plans — the visual vocabulary of a thousand boutique hotels. But the tradition Norm Architects engages with in Stillness runs much deeper than surface style.
Japanese spatial philosophy is rooted in concepts like ma (negative space as active presence), wabi-sabi (the beauty of impermanence and imperfection), and mono no aware (a bittersweet sensitivity to transience). These aren’t decorative ideas. They’re structural ones — ways of organizing perception, time, and material experience. Consequently, they reshape how you design a threshold, choose a texture, or decide where light should fall.
Norm Architects understood this early. Their Scandinavian sensibility — already oriented toward craft, restraint, and natural material honesty — gave them a framework for genuine dialogue rather than appropriation. The book makes this cross-cultural conversation legible. It shows how two distinct design traditions, separated by geography and history, arrive at strikingly similar conclusions about what space should feel like and why stillness in design is not emptiness, but precision.
The Scandinavian-Japanese Design Continuum
One of the book’s most compelling arguments is what I’d call the Nordic-Zen Continuum — the observation that Scandinavian and Japanese design share a foundational commitment to functional beauty, material truth, and spatial modesty. Both traditions resist ornament for its own sake. Furthermore, both prioritize the relationship between inside and outside, and both treat craft as a form of philosophy.
This isn’t a coincidence. Both cultures developed design traditions in response to demanding natural environments. Darkness and cold in Scandinavia. Islands, seismic instability, and resource scarcity in Japan. When nature is a constraint, design responds with economy and depth rather than excess. Therefore, the visual affinities between a Danish farmhouse and a Japanese machiya townhouse are structural, not stylistic.
Stillness makes this argument through juxtaposition — placing images from Japan alongside Norm Architects’ built work in Denmark and Sweden. The comparison is generous and precise. You see the same thinking operating across different climates, clients, and construction traditions.
Inside the Book: Structure, Content, and Editorial Vision
At 304 pages, Stillness is a substantial document. It’s also physically imposing — nearly 13 inches tall and weighing close to five pounds. gestalten produced it to a standard that honors the material the book discusses. The paper, the binding, the image reproduction: all of it communicates seriousness.
The book organizes itself around dispatches — richly illustrated accounts of visits to Japanese landscapes, architecture, and cultural sites. These aren’t tourist itineraries. They’re closer to phenomenological field notes: observations about how a specific space affects the body, the eye, and the mind. Additionally, commentary from expert collaborators in both Japan and Scandinavia gives the book intellectual ballast beyond personal observation.
Key Projects Featured in Stillness
The book anchors its arguments in specific built work. Two projects appear as primary case studies for how Japanese aesthetics inform contemporary Scandinavian practice:
Äng Restaurant, Sweden — A dining environment where materiality and restraint create a specific atmospheric quality. The space uses natural materials, careful proportioning, and controlled light in ways that directly reflect the ma principle — treating emptiness as a design element rather than an absence of design.
Heatherhill Beach House, Denmark — A coastal residence that negotiates the relationship between interior shelter and exterior landscape with the same sensitivity found in traditional Japanese architecture. The project demonstrates what Norm calls spatial humility: the idea that a building should defer to its site rather than dominate it.
Both projects demonstrate what I’d define as Calibrated Absence — a design principle in which every element present in a space is justified not just by its function, but by the quality of attention it creates around itself.
The Core Frameworks: How Stillness Structures Its Argument
Good design books don’t just document work. They give readers tools for thinking. Stillness does this through several interlocking ideas worth naming precisely.
1. The Stillness Gradient
Not all quiet is the same. Stillness implicitly identifies what I’d call a Stillness Gradient — a spectrum running from decorative simplicity (spaces that look minimal) through functional restraint (spaces that eliminate unnecessary elements) to perceptual depth (spaces where less creates more conscious experience). Japanese architecture — at its best — operates at the perceptual depth end of this gradient. Norm Architects’ work consistently aims there too.
The distinction matters enormously for contemporary design practice. Much of what passes for minimalism today is decorative simplicity — a white wall and a concrete floor that still feels busy because nothing has been considered at the perceptual level. True stillness, as the book argues, requires active editorial discipline at every scale of the design process.
2. Material Testimony
Another framework the book develops — implicitly, through its images and commentary — is what I’d call Material Testimony: the idea that materials should tell the truth about their own nature, their age, and their place of origin. Japanese craft traditions, particularly those around wood, stone, lacquer, and ceramics, operate on this principle rigorously.
Norm Architects applies the same logic to their Scandinavian projects. The Äng Restaurant, for instance, uses materials that age visibly and honestly. Nothing pretends to be something else. Accordingly, the space develops a patina of authenticity that synthetic or highly processed materials cannot achieve.
3. The Threshold as Philosophical Device
Both Japanese and Scandinavian architecture treat thresholds — doors, engawa corridors, transitional zones between inside and out — as philosophically loaded moments. Stillness returns to this idea repeatedly. The threshold is where the building makes its first argument about what matters: how you arrive, how your body adjusts, how your perception shifts.
In Japanese architecture, the threshold is often drawn out, extended, and made generous. You’re not moved through space; you’re introduced to it. This approach to arrival profoundly influenced Norm Architects’ thinking about how their buildings receive the people who use them.
Why This Book Lands Differently Than Other Japanese Design Books
There’s no shortage of books about Japanese design aesthetics. So what makes Stillness distinct?
First, the authorial position. Norm Architects are not journalists or academics observing Japanese design from the outside. They’re practitioners who have spent a decade in genuine creative dialogue with Japanese makers, architects, and cultural figures. The book carries the authority of lived engagement, not borrowed vocabulary.
Second, the comparative structure. By juxtaposing Japanese source material with their own built work, Norm Architects make the book’s argument visible rather than merely stated. You see the influence operating in real projects, at real scale, with real consequences. This is rare and valuable.
Third, the timing. We’re in a moment when the design conversation has become saturated with digital aesthetics, AI-generated imagery, and trend-cycle acceleration. A book that argues for slowness, depth, and material honesty feels genuinely countercultural right now. Moreover, it makes an implicit argument that resonates beyond design: that quality of attention is itself a form of design.
Japanese Design Principles in a Post-Digital World
Here’s a forward-looking prediction worth stating directly: the principles Stillness documents will become increasingly central to design practice over the next decade — not because Japanese aesthetics are fashionable, but because they address a real problem.
The problem is this: digital environments have trained human perception toward constant stimulation, rapid context-switching, and surface-level engagement. Physical spaces that counteract this — that offer genuine perceptual depth, material presence, and sensory calm — will be experienced as profound relief. Designers who understand how to create this quality will be in significant demand.
The frameworks in Stillness — calibrated absence, material testimony, the extended threshold — are not historical curiosities. They’re practical instruments for designing the kind of spaces people will desperately need.
Who Should Read Stillness?
The obvious answer is architects, interior designers, and design students. But the book speaks usefully to a wider audience. Brand designers interested in spatial identity will find the arguments about material testimony directly applicable to retail and hospitality environments. Photographers will find the book’s visual intelligence instructive. Anyone who cares seriously about the relationship between space and human experience — which is to say, anyone who’s ever felt a room before they thought about it — will find something essential here.
It’s also genuinely one of the most beautiful books published in 2024. The image editing, the sequencing, the relationship between text and photograph: all of it reflects the aesthetic principles the book discusses. This kind of formal coherence is rarer than it should be.
Stillness as a Design Argument for Slowness
What I find most compelling about Stillness is its willingness to be unfashionable. In an era when design publishing often chases novelty, Norm Architects built a book around ideas that are centuries old — and made them feel urgently contemporary. That’s a difficult thing to do. It requires genuine conviction about what design is actually for.
The book’s central argument — that stillness is not absence but a quality of presence, and that achieving it requires discipline, knowledge, and genuine cross-cultural humility — feels important. Not just for architecture. For design thinking broadly. And perhaps for how we organize our lives.
The book is available on AmazonJapanese aesthetics in architecture have always been about more than visual style. They’re about how space shapes consciousness. Stillness makes that argument with rigor, beauty, and earned authority. It belongs on the shelf of anyone who takes space seriously.
Frequently Asked Questions About Stillness by Norm Architects
What is Stillness by Norm Architects about?
Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design is a 304-page book published by gestalten in October 2024. It documents Norm Architects’ decade-long engagement with Japanese design culture, exploring how Japanese spatial philosophy — concepts like ma, wabi-sabi, and material honesty — has shaped their contemporary Scandinavian practice. The book combines travel dispatches, architectural photography, expert commentary, and project documentation into a unified design manifesto.
Who are Norm Architects?
Norm Architects is a Copenhagen-based design studio working across architecture, interiors, and product design. They are known for a rigorously restrained aesthetic that emphasizes craft, natural materials, and spatial sensitivity. Their work includes residential architecture, hospitality interiors, and product collaborations across Scandinavia and internationally.
Who published Stillness and when?
gestalten published Stillness on October 8, 2024. It’s a Berlin-based publisher specializing in high-quality design, architecture, and culture books. The book runs to 304 pages with an ISBN of 978-3967041583.
What Japanese design principles does the book explore?
The book engages with several core Japanese aesthetic concepts: ma (the active use of negative space), wabi-sabi (beauty found in impermanence and imperfection), mono no aware (sensitivity to transience), and the philosophical role of craft and material honesty in spatial design. It also explores how these principles manifest in Japanese landscapes, traditional architecture, and contemporary cultural spaces.
Which Norm Architects projects are featured in Stillness?
The book features two primary built projects as case studies: the Äng Restaurant in Sweden and the Heatherhill Beach House in Denmark. Both projects demonstrate how Japanese spatial thinking — particularly around material selection, threshold design, and calibrated restraint — operates within a contemporary Scandinavian architectural practice.
Is Stillness suitable for non-architects?
Yes. While the book engages seriously with architectural thinking, its accessible structure and richly illustrated format make it valuable for anyone interested in design, photography, Japanese culture, or the relationship between space and human experience. Brand designers, interior designers, photographers, and design enthusiasts will all find the book compelling.
How does Japanese aesthetics influence Scandinavian design?
Both traditions share foundational commitments to functional beauty, material integrity, and spatial modesty. Both developed in response to demanding natural environments. The book argues — and demonstrates through comparative imagery — that these shared values create a genuine design continuum between the two cultures, rather than a one-directional influence relationship.
What makes Stillness different from other Japanese design books?
Stillness distinguishes itself through three things: the authorial credibility of a studio with a decade of genuine creative engagement with Japan; its comparative structure, juxtaposing Japanese source material with completed built work; and its forward-looking design argument about why Japanese aesthetic principles matter urgently for contemporary practice.
Discover more of our book reviews here at WE AND THE COLOR.
#architecture #book #design #Gestalten #NormArchitects #StillnessAndJapaneseAesthetics -
Stillness and Japanese Aesthetics: What Norm Architects’ Book Reveals About the Future of Design
This post contains affiliate links. We may earn a commission if you click on them and make a purchase. It’s at no extra cost to you and helps us run this site. Thanks for your support!
Quiet is having a moment. Not the quiet of minimalism reduced to a trend board, but a more earned, more philosophical kind — the kind that asks you to slow down and actually look. Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design, published by gestalten in October 2024, arrives at exactly the right time. The book is Norm Architects’ attempt to put language, image, and structure around something most designers feel but rarely articulate: that Japanese spatial thinking changes the way you see everything else afterward.
Norm Architects — the Copenhagen-based studio known for their restrained, material-led approach to interiors, architecture, and product design — spent over a decade traveling to Japan, collaborating with Japanese craftspeople, and sitting with the country’s design philosophy before committing it to print. The result is 304 pages that function simultaneously as a travel memoir, an aesthetic manifesto, and a serious design document. Furthermore, it’s one of the most visually considered design books published in 2024.
The book is available on AmazonThis isn’t a coffee table book that flatters itself with pretty photographs. It’s a book with a thesis. And the thesis matters.
Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design. This book by Norm Architects was published by gestalten. The book is available on AmazonWhat Does Japanese Aesthetics Actually Mean for Contemporary Architecture?
The phrase “Japanese aesthetics” gets used carelessly. It’s become a shorthand for neutral palettes, natural materials, and open floor plans — the visual vocabulary of a thousand boutique hotels. But the tradition Norm Architects engages with in Stillness runs much deeper than surface style.
Japanese spatial philosophy is rooted in concepts like ma (negative space as active presence), wabi-sabi (the beauty of impermanence and imperfection), and mono no aware (a bittersweet sensitivity to transience). These aren’t decorative ideas. They’re structural ones — ways of organizing perception, time, and material experience. Consequently, they reshape how you design a threshold, choose a texture, or decide where light should fall.
Norm Architects understood this early. Their Scandinavian sensibility — already oriented toward craft, restraint, and natural material honesty — gave them a framework for genuine dialogue rather than appropriation. The book makes this cross-cultural conversation legible. It shows how two distinct design traditions, separated by geography and history, arrive at strikingly similar conclusions about what space should feel like and why stillness in design is not emptiness, but precision.
The Scandinavian-Japanese Design Continuum
One of the book’s most compelling arguments is what I’d call the Nordic-Zen Continuum — the observation that Scandinavian and Japanese design share a foundational commitment to functional beauty, material truth, and spatial modesty. Both traditions resist ornament for its own sake. Furthermore, both prioritize the relationship between inside and outside, and both treat craft as a form of philosophy.
This isn’t a coincidence. Both cultures developed design traditions in response to demanding natural environments. Darkness and cold in Scandinavia. Islands, seismic instability, and resource scarcity in Japan. When nature is a constraint, design responds with economy and depth rather than excess. Therefore, the visual affinities between a Danish farmhouse and a Japanese machiya townhouse are structural, not stylistic.
Stillness makes this argument through juxtaposition — placing images from Japan alongside Norm Architects’ built work in Denmark and Sweden. The comparison is generous and precise. You see the same thinking operating across different climates, clients, and construction traditions.
Inside the Book: Structure, Content, and Editorial Vision
At 304 pages, Stillness is a substantial document. It’s also physically imposing — nearly 13 inches tall and weighing close to five pounds. gestalten produced it to a standard that honors the material the book discusses. The paper, the binding, the image reproduction: all of it communicates seriousness.
The book organizes itself around dispatches — richly illustrated accounts of visits to Japanese landscapes, architecture, and cultural sites. These aren’t tourist itineraries. They’re closer to phenomenological field notes: observations about how a specific space affects the body, the eye, and the mind. Additionally, commentary from expert collaborators in both Japan and Scandinavia gives the book intellectual ballast beyond personal observation.
Key Projects Featured in Stillness
The book anchors its arguments in specific built work. Two projects appear as primary case studies for how Japanese aesthetics inform contemporary Scandinavian practice:
Äng Restaurant, Sweden — A dining environment where materiality and restraint create a specific atmospheric quality. The space uses natural materials, careful proportioning, and controlled light in ways that directly reflect the ma principle — treating emptiness as a design element rather than an absence of design.
Heatherhill Beach House, Denmark — A coastal residence that negotiates the relationship between interior shelter and exterior landscape with the same sensitivity found in traditional Japanese architecture. The project demonstrates what Norm calls spatial humility: the idea that a building should defer to its site rather than dominate it.
Both projects demonstrate what I’d define as Calibrated Absence — a design principle in which every element present in a space is justified not just by its function, but by the quality of attention it creates around itself.
The Core Frameworks: How Stillness Structures Its Argument
Good design books don’t just document work. They give readers tools for thinking. Stillness does this through several interlocking ideas worth naming precisely.
1. The Stillness Gradient
Not all quiet is the same. Stillness implicitly identifies what I’d call a Stillness Gradient — a spectrum running from decorative simplicity (spaces that look minimal) through functional restraint (spaces that eliminate unnecessary elements) to perceptual depth (spaces where less creates more conscious experience). Japanese architecture — at its best — operates at the perceptual depth end of this gradient. Norm Architects’ work consistently aims there too.
The distinction matters enormously for contemporary design practice. Much of what passes for minimalism today is decorative simplicity — a white wall and a concrete floor that still feels busy because nothing has been considered at the perceptual level. True stillness, as the book argues, requires active editorial discipline at every scale of the design process.
2. Material Testimony
Another framework the book develops — implicitly, through its images and commentary — is what I’d call Material Testimony: the idea that materials should tell the truth about their own nature, their age, and their place of origin. Japanese craft traditions, particularly those around wood, stone, lacquer, and ceramics, operate on this principle rigorously.
Norm Architects applies the same logic to their Scandinavian projects. The Äng Restaurant, for instance, uses materials that age visibly and honestly. Nothing pretends to be something else. Accordingly, the space develops a patina of authenticity that synthetic or highly processed materials cannot achieve.
3. The Threshold as Philosophical Device
Both Japanese and Scandinavian architecture treat thresholds — doors, engawa corridors, transitional zones between inside and out — as philosophically loaded moments. Stillness returns to this idea repeatedly. The threshold is where the building makes its first argument about what matters: how you arrive, how your body adjusts, how your perception shifts.
In Japanese architecture, the threshold is often drawn out, extended, and made generous. You’re not moved through space; you’re introduced to it. This approach to arrival profoundly influenced Norm Architects’ thinking about how their buildings receive the people who use them.
Why This Book Lands Differently Than Other Japanese Design Books
There’s no shortage of books about Japanese design aesthetics. So what makes Stillness distinct?
First, the authorial position. Norm Architects are not journalists or academics observing Japanese design from the outside. They’re practitioners who have spent a decade in genuine creative dialogue with Japanese makers, architects, and cultural figures. The book carries the authority of lived engagement, not borrowed vocabulary.
Second, the comparative structure. By juxtaposing Japanese source material with their own built work, Norm Architects make the book’s argument visible rather than merely stated. You see the influence operating in real projects, at real scale, with real consequences. This is rare and valuable.
Third, the timing. We’re in a moment when the design conversation has become saturated with digital aesthetics, AI-generated imagery, and trend-cycle acceleration. A book that argues for slowness, depth, and material honesty feels genuinely countercultural right now. Moreover, it makes an implicit argument that resonates beyond design: that quality of attention is itself a form of design.
Japanese Design Principles in a Post-Digital World
Here’s a forward-looking prediction worth stating directly: the principles Stillness documents will become increasingly central to design practice over the next decade — not because Japanese aesthetics are fashionable, but because they address a real problem.
The problem is this: digital environments have trained human perception toward constant stimulation, rapid context-switching, and surface-level engagement. Physical spaces that counteract this — that offer genuine perceptual depth, material presence, and sensory calm — will be experienced as profound relief. Designers who understand how to create this quality will be in significant demand.
The frameworks in Stillness — calibrated absence, material testimony, the extended threshold — are not historical curiosities. They’re practical instruments for designing the kind of spaces people will desperately need.
Who Should Read Stillness?
The obvious answer is architects, interior designers, and design students. But the book speaks usefully to a wider audience. Brand designers interested in spatial identity will find the arguments about material testimony directly applicable to retail and hospitality environments. Photographers will find the book’s visual intelligence instructive. Anyone who cares seriously about the relationship between space and human experience — which is to say, anyone who’s ever felt a room before they thought about it — will find something essential here.
It’s also genuinely one of the most beautiful books published in 2024. The image editing, the sequencing, the relationship between text and photograph: all of it reflects the aesthetic principles the book discusses. This kind of formal coherence is rarer than it should be.
Stillness as a Design Argument for Slowness
What I find most compelling about Stillness is its willingness to be unfashionable. In an era when design publishing often chases novelty, Norm Architects built a book around ideas that are centuries old — and made them feel urgently contemporary. That’s a difficult thing to do. It requires genuine conviction about what design is actually for.
The book’s central argument — that stillness is not absence but a quality of presence, and that achieving it requires discipline, knowledge, and genuine cross-cultural humility — feels important. Not just for architecture. For design thinking broadly. And perhaps for how we organize our lives.
The book is available on AmazonJapanese aesthetics in architecture have always been about more than visual style. They’re about how space shapes consciousness. Stillness makes that argument with rigor, beauty, and earned authority. It belongs on the shelf of anyone who takes space seriously.
Frequently Asked Questions About Stillness by Norm Architects
What is Stillness by Norm Architects about?
Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design is a 304-page book published by gestalten in October 2024. It documents Norm Architects’ decade-long engagement with Japanese design culture, exploring how Japanese spatial philosophy — concepts like ma, wabi-sabi, and material honesty — has shaped their contemporary Scandinavian practice. The book combines travel dispatches, architectural photography, expert commentary, and project documentation into a unified design manifesto.
Who are Norm Architects?
Norm Architects is a Copenhagen-based design studio working across architecture, interiors, and product design. They are known for a rigorously restrained aesthetic that emphasizes craft, natural materials, and spatial sensitivity. Their work includes residential architecture, hospitality interiors, and product collaborations across Scandinavia and internationally.
Who published Stillness and when?
gestalten published Stillness on October 8, 2024. It’s a Berlin-based publisher specializing in high-quality design, architecture, and culture books. The book runs to 304 pages with an ISBN of 978-3967041583.
What Japanese design principles does the book explore?
The book engages with several core Japanese aesthetic concepts: ma (the active use of negative space), wabi-sabi (beauty found in impermanence and imperfection), mono no aware (sensitivity to transience), and the philosophical role of craft and material honesty in spatial design. It also explores how these principles manifest in Japanese landscapes, traditional architecture, and contemporary cultural spaces.
Which Norm Architects projects are featured in Stillness?
The book features two primary built projects as case studies: the Äng Restaurant in Sweden and the Heatherhill Beach House in Denmark. Both projects demonstrate how Japanese spatial thinking — particularly around material selection, threshold design, and calibrated restraint — operates within a contemporary Scandinavian architectural practice.
Is Stillness suitable for non-architects?
Yes. While the book engages seriously with architectural thinking, its accessible structure and richly illustrated format make it valuable for anyone interested in design, photography, Japanese culture, or the relationship between space and human experience. Brand designers, interior designers, photographers, and design enthusiasts will all find the book compelling.
How does Japanese aesthetics influence Scandinavian design?
Both traditions share foundational commitments to functional beauty, material integrity, and spatial modesty. Both developed in response to demanding natural environments. The book argues — and demonstrates through comparative imagery — that these shared values create a genuine design continuum between the two cultures, rather than a one-directional influence relationship.
What makes Stillness different from other Japanese design books?
Stillness distinguishes itself through three things: the authorial credibility of a studio with a decade of genuine creative engagement with Japan; its comparative structure, juxtaposing Japanese source material with completed built work; and its forward-looking design argument about why Japanese aesthetic principles matter urgently for contemporary practice.
Discover more of our book reviews here at WE AND THE COLOR.
#architecture #book #design #Gestalten #NormArchitects #StillnessAndJapaneseAesthetics -
Stillness and Japanese Aesthetics: What Norm Architects’ Book Reveals About the Future of Design
This post contains affiliate links. We may earn a commission if you click on them and make a purchase. It’s at no extra cost to you and helps us run this site. Thanks for your support!
Quiet is having a moment. Not the quiet of minimalism reduced to a trend board, but a more earned, more philosophical kind — the kind that asks you to slow down and actually look. Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design, published by gestalten in October 2024, arrives at exactly the right time. The book is Norm Architects’ attempt to put language, image, and structure around something most designers feel but rarely articulate: that Japanese spatial thinking changes the way you see everything else afterward.
Norm Architects — the Copenhagen-based studio known for their restrained, material-led approach to interiors, architecture, and product design — spent over a decade traveling to Japan, collaborating with Japanese craftspeople, and sitting with the country’s design philosophy before committing it to print. The result is 304 pages that function simultaneously as a travel memoir, an aesthetic manifesto, and a serious design document. Furthermore, it’s one of the most visually considered design books published in 2024.
The book is available on AmazonThis isn’t a coffee table book that flatters itself with pretty photographs. It’s a book with a thesis. And the thesis matters.
Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design. This book by Norm Architects was published by gestalten. The book is available on AmazonWhat Does Japanese Aesthetics Actually Mean for Contemporary Architecture?
The phrase “Japanese aesthetics” gets used carelessly. It’s become a shorthand for neutral palettes, natural materials, and open floor plans — the visual vocabulary of a thousand boutique hotels. But the tradition Norm Architects engages with in Stillness runs much deeper than surface style.
Japanese spatial philosophy is rooted in concepts like ma (negative space as active presence), wabi-sabi (the beauty of impermanence and imperfection), and mono no aware (a bittersweet sensitivity to transience). These aren’t decorative ideas. They’re structural ones — ways of organizing perception, time, and material experience. Consequently, they reshape how you design a threshold, choose a texture, or decide where light should fall.
Norm Architects understood this early. Their Scandinavian sensibility — already oriented toward craft, restraint, and natural material honesty — gave them a framework for genuine dialogue rather than appropriation. The book makes this cross-cultural conversation legible. It shows how two distinct design traditions, separated by geography and history, arrive at strikingly similar conclusions about what space should feel like and why stillness in design is not emptiness, but precision.
The Scandinavian-Japanese Design Continuum
One of the book’s most compelling arguments is what I’d call the Nordic-Zen Continuum — the observation that Scandinavian and Japanese design share a foundational commitment to functional beauty, material truth, and spatial modesty. Both traditions resist ornament for its own sake. Furthermore, both prioritize the relationship between inside and outside, and both treat craft as a form of philosophy.
This isn’t a coincidence. Both cultures developed design traditions in response to demanding natural environments. Darkness and cold in Scandinavia. Islands, seismic instability, and resource scarcity in Japan. When nature is a constraint, design responds with economy and depth rather than excess. Therefore, the visual affinities between a Danish farmhouse and a Japanese machiya townhouse are structural, not stylistic.
Stillness makes this argument through juxtaposition — placing images from Japan alongside Norm Architects’ built work in Denmark and Sweden. The comparison is generous and precise. You see the same thinking operating across different climates, clients, and construction traditions.
Inside the Book: Structure, Content, and Editorial Vision
At 304 pages, Stillness is a substantial document. It’s also physically imposing — nearly 13 inches tall and weighing close to five pounds. gestalten produced it to a standard that honors the material the book discusses. The paper, the binding, the image reproduction: all of it communicates seriousness.
The book organizes itself around dispatches — richly illustrated accounts of visits to Japanese landscapes, architecture, and cultural sites. These aren’t tourist itineraries. They’re closer to phenomenological field notes: observations about how a specific space affects the body, the eye, and the mind. Additionally, commentary from expert collaborators in both Japan and Scandinavia gives the book intellectual ballast beyond personal observation.
Key Projects Featured in Stillness
The book anchors its arguments in specific built work. Two projects appear as primary case studies for how Japanese aesthetics inform contemporary Scandinavian practice:
Äng Restaurant, Sweden — A dining environment where materiality and restraint create a specific atmospheric quality. The space uses natural materials, careful proportioning, and controlled light in ways that directly reflect the ma principle — treating emptiness as a design element rather than an absence of design.
Heatherhill Beach House, Denmark — A coastal residence that negotiates the relationship between interior shelter and exterior landscape with the same sensitivity found in traditional Japanese architecture. The project demonstrates what Norm calls spatial humility: the idea that a building should defer to its site rather than dominate it.
Both projects demonstrate what I’d define as Calibrated Absence — a design principle in which every element present in a space is justified not just by its function, but by the quality of attention it creates around itself.
The Core Frameworks: How Stillness Structures Its Argument
Good design books don’t just document work. They give readers tools for thinking. Stillness does this through several interlocking ideas worth naming precisely.
1. The Stillness Gradient
Not all quiet is the same. Stillness implicitly identifies what I’d call a Stillness Gradient — a spectrum running from decorative simplicity (spaces that look minimal) through functional restraint (spaces that eliminate unnecessary elements) to perceptual depth (spaces where less creates more conscious experience). Japanese architecture — at its best — operates at the perceptual depth end of this gradient. Norm Architects’ work consistently aims there too.
The distinction matters enormously for contemporary design practice. Much of what passes for minimalism today is decorative simplicity — a white wall and a concrete floor that still feels busy because nothing has been considered at the perceptual level. True stillness, as the book argues, requires active editorial discipline at every scale of the design process.
2. Material Testimony
Another framework the book develops — implicitly, through its images and commentary — is what I’d call Material Testimony: the idea that materials should tell the truth about their own nature, their age, and their place of origin. Japanese craft traditions, particularly those around wood, stone, lacquer, and ceramics, operate on this principle rigorously.
Norm Architects applies the same logic to their Scandinavian projects. The Äng Restaurant, for instance, uses materials that age visibly and honestly. Nothing pretends to be something else. Accordingly, the space develops a patina of authenticity that synthetic or highly processed materials cannot achieve.
3. The Threshold as Philosophical Device
Both Japanese and Scandinavian architecture treat thresholds — doors, engawa corridors, transitional zones between inside and out — as philosophically loaded moments. Stillness returns to this idea repeatedly. The threshold is where the building makes its first argument about what matters: how you arrive, how your body adjusts, how your perception shifts.
In Japanese architecture, the threshold is often drawn out, extended, and made generous. You’re not moved through space; you’re introduced to it. This approach to arrival profoundly influenced Norm Architects’ thinking about how their buildings receive the people who use them.
Why This Book Lands Differently Than Other Japanese Design Books
There’s no shortage of books about Japanese design aesthetics. So what makes Stillness distinct?
First, the authorial position. Norm Architects are not journalists or academics observing Japanese design from the outside. They’re practitioners who have spent a decade in genuine creative dialogue with Japanese makers, architects, and cultural figures. The book carries the authority of lived engagement, not borrowed vocabulary.
Second, the comparative structure. By juxtaposing Japanese source material with their own built work, Norm Architects make the book’s argument visible rather than merely stated. You see the influence operating in real projects, at real scale, with real consequences. This is rare and valuable.
Third, the timing. We’re in a moment when the design conversation has become saturated with digital aesthetics, AI-generated imagery, and trend-cycle acceleration. A book that argues for slowness, depth, and material honesty feels genuinely countercultural right now. Moreover, it makes an implicit argument that resonates beyond design: that quality of attention is itself a form of design.
Japanese Design Principles in a Post-Digital World
Here’s a forward-looking prediction worth stating directly: the principles Stillness documents will become increasingly central to design practice over the next decade — not because Japanese aesthetics are fashionable, but because they address a real problem.
The problem is this: digital environments have trained human perception toward constant stimulation, rapid context-switching, and surface-level engagement. Physical spaces that counteract this — that offer genuine perceptual depth, material presence, and sensory calm — will be experienced as profound relief. Designers who understand how to create this quality will be in significant demand.
The frameworks in Stillness — calibrated absence, material testimony, the extended threshold — are not historical curiosities. They’re practical instruments for designing the kind of spaces people will desperately need.
Who Should Read Stillness?
The obvious answer is architects, interior designers, and design students. But the book speaks usefully to a wider audience. Brand designers interested in spatial identity will find the arguments about material testimony directly applicable to retail and hospitality environments. Photographers will find the book’s visual intelligence instructive. Anyone who cares seriously about the relationship between space and human experience — which is to say, anyone who’s ever felt a room before they thought about it — will find something essential here.
It’s also genuinely one of the most beautiful books published in 2024. The image editing, the sequencing, the relationship between text and photograph: all of it reflects the aesthetic principles the book discusses. This kind of formal coherence is rarer than it should be.
Stillness as a Design Argument for Slowness
What I find most compelling about Stillness is its willingness to be unfashionable. In an era when design publishing often chases novelty, Norm Architects built a book around ideas that are centuries old — and made them feel urgently contemporary. That’s a difficult thing to do. It requires genuine conviction about what design is actually for.
The book’s central argument — that stillness is not absence but a quality of presence, and that achieving it requires discipline, knowledge, and genuine cross-cultural humility — feels important. Not just for architecture. For design thinking broadly. And perhaps for how we organize our lives.
The book is available on AmazonJapanese aesthetics in architecture have always been about more than visual style. They’re about how space shapes consciousness. Stillness makes that argument with rigor, beauty, and earned authority. It belongs on the shelf of anyone who takes space seriously.
Frequently Asked Questions About Stillness by Norm Architects
What is Stillness by Norm Architects about?
Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design is a 304-page book published by gestalten in October 2024. It documents Norm Architects’ decade-long engagement with Japanese design culture, exploring how Japanese spatial philosophy — concepts like ma, wabi-sabi, and material honesty — has shaped their contemporary Scandinavian practice. The book combines travel dispatches, architectural photography, expert commentary, and project documentation into a unified design manifesto.
Who are Norm Architects?
Norm Architects is a Copenhagen-based design studio working across architecture, interiors, and product design. They are known for a rigorously restrained aesthetic that emphasizes craft, natural materials, and spatial sensitivity. Their work includes residential architecture, hospitality interiors, and product collaborations across Scandinavia and internationally.
Who published Stillness and when?
gestalten published Stillness on October 8, 2024. It’s a Berlin-based publisher specializing in high-quality design, architecture, and culture books. The book runs to 304 pages with an ISBN of 978-3967041583.
What Japanese design principles does the book explore?
The book engages with several core Japanese aesthetic concepts: ma (the active use of negative space), wabi-sabi (beauty found in impermanence and imperfection), mono no aware (sensitivity to transience), and the philosophical role of craft and material honesty in spatial design. It also explores how these principles manifest in Japanese landscapes, traditional architecture, and contemporary cultural spaces.
Which Norm Architects projects are featured in Stillness?
The book features two primary built projects as case studies: the Äng Restaurant in Sweden and the Heatherhill Beach House in Denmark. Both projects demonstrate how Japanese spatial thinking — particularly around material selection, threshold design, and calibrated restraint — operates within a contemporary Scandinavian architectural practice.
Is Stillness suitable for non-architects?
Yes. While the book engages seriously with architectural thinking, its accessible structure and richly illustrated format make it valuable for anyone interested in design, photography, Japanese culture, or the relationship between space and human experience. Brand designers, interior designers, photographers, and design enthusiasts will all find the book compelling.
How does Japanese aesthetics influence Scandinavian design?
Both traditions share foundational commitments to functional beauty, material integrity, and spatial modesty. Both developed in response to demanding natural environments. The book argues — and demonstrates through comparative imagery — that these shared values create a genuine design continuum between the two cultures, rather than a one-directional influence relationship.
What makes Stillness different from other Japanese design books?
Stillness distinguishes itself through three things: the authorial credibility of a studio with a decade of genuine creative engagement with Japan; its comparative structure, juxtaposing Japanese source material with completed built work; and its forward-looking design argument about why Japanese aesthetic principles matter urgently for contemporary practice.
Discover more of our book reviews here at WE AND THE COLOR.
#architecture #book #design #Gestalten #NormArchitects #StillnessAndJapaneseAesthetics -
Stillness and Japanese Aesthetics: What Norm Architects’ Book Reveals About the Future of Design
This post contains affiliate links. We may earn a commission if you click on them and make a purchase. It’s at no extra cost to you and helps us run this site. Thanks for your support!
Quiet is having a moment. Not the quiet of minimalism reduced to a trend board, but a more earned, more philosophical kind — the kind that asks you to slow down and actually look. Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design, published by gestalten in October 2024, arrives at exactly the right time. The book is Norm Architects’ attempt to put language, image, and structure around something most designers feel but rarely articulate: that Japanese spatial thinking changes the way you see everything else afterward.
Norm Architects — the Copenhagen-based studio known for their restrained, material-led approach to interiors, architecture, and product design — spent over a decade traveling to Japan, collaborating with Japanese craftspeople, and sitting with the country’s design philosophy before committing it to print. The result is 304 pages that function simultaneously as a travel memoir, an aesthetic manifesto, and a serious design document. Furthermore, it’s one of the most visually considered design books published in 2024.
The book is available on AmazonThis isn’t a coffee table book that flatters itself with pretty photographs. It’s a book with a thesis. And the thesis matters.
Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design. This book by Norm Architects was published by gestalten. The book is available on AmazonWhat Does Japanese Aesthetics Actually Mean for Contemporary Architecture?
The phrase “Japanese aesthetics” gets used carelessly. It’s become a shorthand for neutral palettes, natural materials, and open floor plans — the visual vocabulary of a thousand boutique hotels. But the tradition Norm Architects engages with in Stillness runs much deeper than surface style.
Japanese spatial philosophy is rooted in concepts like ma (negative space as active presence), wabi-sabi (the beauty of impermanence and imperfection), and mono no aware (a bittersweet sensitivity to transience). These aren’t decorative ideas. They’re structural ones — ways of organizing perception, time, and material experience. Consequently, they reshape how you design a threshold, choose a texture, or decide where light should fall.
Norm Architects understood this early. Their Scandinavian sensibility — already oriented toward craft, restraint, and natural material honesty — gave them a framework for genuine dialogue rather than appropriation. The book makes this cross-cultural conversation legible. It shows how two distinct design traditions, separated by geography and history, arrive at strikingly similar conclusions about what space should feel like and why stillness in design is not emptiness, but precision.
The Scandinavian-Japanese Design Continuum
One of the book’s most compelling arguments is what I’d call the Nordic-Zen Continuum — the observation that Scandinavian and Japanese design share a foundational commitment to functional beauty, material truth, and spatial modesty. Both traditions resist ornament for its own sake. Furthermore, both prioritize the relationship between inside and outside, and both treat craft as a form of philosophy.
This isn’t a coincidence. Both cultures developed design traditions in response to demanding natural environments. Darkness and cold in Scandinavia. Islands, seismic instability, and resource scarcity in Japan. When nature is a constraint, design responds with economy and depth rather than excess. Therefore, the visual affinities between a Danish farmhouse and a Japanese machiya townhouse are structural, not stylistic.
Stillness makes this argument through juxtaposition — placing images from Japan alongside Norm Architects’ built work in Denmark and Sweden. The comparison is generous and precise. You see the same thinking operating across different climates, clients, and construction traditions.
Inside the Book: Structure, Content, and Editorial Vision
At 304 pages, Stillness is a substantial document. It’s also physically imposing — nearly 13 inches tall and weighing close to five pounds. gestalten produced it to a standard that honors the material the book discusses. The paper, the binding, the image reproduction: all of it communicates seriousness.
The book organizes itself around dispatches — richly illustrated accounts of visits to Japanese landscapes, architecture, and cultural sites. These aren’t tourist itineraries. They’re closer to phenomenological field notes: observations about how a specific space affects the body, the eye, and the mind. Additionally, commentary from expert collaborators in both Japan and Scandinavia gives the book intellectual ballast beyond personal observation.
Key Projects Featured in Stillness
The book anchors its arguments in specific built work. Two projects appear as primary case studies for how Japanese aesthetics inform contemporary Scandinavian practice:
Äng Restaurant, Sweden — A dining environment where materiality and restraint create a specific atmospheric quality. The space uses natural materials, careful proportioning, and controlled light in ways that directly reflect the ma principle — treating emptiness as a design element rather than an absence of design.
Heatherhill Beach House, Denmark — A coastal residence that negotiates the relationship between interior shelter and exterior landscape with the same sensitivity found in traditional Japanese architecture. The project demonstrates what Norm calls spatial humility: the idea that a building should defer to its site rather than dominate it.
Both projects demonstrate what I’d define as Calibrated Absence — a design principle in which every element present in a space is justified not just by its function, but by the quality of attention it creates around itself.
The Core Frameworks: How Stillness Structures Its Argument
Good design books don’t just document work. They give readers tools for thinking. Stillness does this through several interlocking ideas worth naming precisely.
1. The Stillness Gradient
Not all quiet is the same. Stillness implicitly identifies what I’d call a Stillness Gradient — a spectrum running from decorative simplicity (spaces that look minimal) through functional restraint (spaces that eliminate unnecessary elements) to perceptual depth (spaces where less creates more conscious experience). Japanese architecture — at its best — operates at the perceptual depth end of this gradient. Norm Architects’ work consistently aims there too.
The distinction matters enormously for contemporary design practice. Much of what passes for minimalism today is decorative simplicity — a white wall and a concrete floor that still feels busy because nothing has been considered at the perceptual level. True stillness, as the book argues, requires active editorial discipline at every scale of the design process.
2. Material Testimony
Another framework the book develops — implicitly, through its images and commentary — is what I’d call Material Testimony: the idea that materials should tell the truth about their own nature, their age, and their place of origin. Japanese craft traditions, particularly those around wood, stone, lacquer, and ceramics, operate on this principle rigorously.
Norm Architects applies the same logic to their Scandinavian projects. The Äng Restaurant, for instance, uses materials that age visibly and honestly. Nothing pretends to be something else. Accordingly, the space develops a patina of authenticity that synthetic or highly processed materials cannot achieve.
3. The Threshold as Philosophical Device
Both Japanese and Scandinavian architecture treat thresholds — doors, engawa corridors, transitional zones between inside and out — as philosophically loaded moments. Stillness returns to this idea repeatedly. The threshold is where the building makes its first argument about what matters: how you arrive, how your body adjusts, how your perception shifts.
In Japanese architecture, the threshold is often drawn out, extended, and made generous. You’re not moved through space; you’re introduced to it. This approach to arrival profoundly influenced Norm Architects’ thinking about how their buildings receive the people who use them.
Why This Book Lands Differently Than Other Japanese Design Books
There’s no shortage of books about Japanese design aesthetics. So what makes Stillness distinct?
First, the authorial position. Norm Architects are not journalists or academics observing Japanese design from the outside. They’re practitioners who have spent a decade in genuine creative dialogue with Japanese makers, architects, and cultural figures. The book carries the authority of lived engagement, not borrowed vocabulary.
Second, the comparative structure. By juxtaposing Japanese source material with their own built work, Norm Architects make the book’s argument visible rather than merely stated. You see the influence operating in real projects, at real scale, with real consequences. This is rare and valuable.
Third, the timing. We’re in a moment when the design conversation has become saturated with digital aesthetics, AI-generated imagery, and trend-cycle acceleration. A book that argues for slowness, depth, and material honesty feels genuinely countercultural right now. Moreover, it makes an implicit argument that resonates beyond design: that quality of attention is itself a form of design.
Japanese Design Principles in a Post-Digital World
Here’s a forward-looking prediction worth stating directly: the principles Stillness documents will become increasingly central to design practice over the next decade — not because Japanese aesthetics are fashionable, but because they address a real problem.
The problem is this: digital environments have trained human perception toward constant stimulation, rapid context-switching, and surface-level engagement. Physical spaces that counteract this — that offer genuine perceptual depth, material presence, and sensory calm — will be experienced as profound relief. Designers who understand how to create this quality will be in significant demand.
The frameworks in Stillness — calibrated absence, material testimony, the extended threshold — are not historical curiosities. They’re practical instruments for designing the kind of spaces people will desperately need.
Who Should Read Stillness?
The obvious answer is architects, interior designers, and design students. But the book speaks usefully to a wider audience. Brand designers interested in spatial identity will find the arguments about material testimony directly applicable to retail and hospitality environments. Photographers will find the book’s visual intelligence instructive. Anyone who cares seriously about the relationship between space and human experience — which is to say, anyone who’s ever felt a room before they thought about it — will find something essential here.
It’s also genuinely one of the most beautiful books published in 2024. The image editing, the sequencing, the relationship between text and photograph: all of it reflects the aesthetic principles the book discusses. This kind of formal coherence is rarer than it should be.
Stillness as a Design Argument for Slowness
What I find most compelling about Stillness is its willingness to be unfashionable. In an era when design publishing often chases novelty, Norm Architects built a book around ideas that are centuries old — and made them feel urgently contemporary. That’s a difficult thing to do. It requires genuine conviction about what design is actually for.
The book’s central argument — that stillness is not absence but a quality of presence, and that achieving it requires discipline, knowledge, and genuine cross-cultural humility — feels important. Not just for architecture. For design thinking broadly. And perhaps for how we organize our lives.
The book is available on AmazonJapanese aesthetics in architecture have always been about more than visual style. They’re about how space shapes consciousness. Stillness makes that argument with rigor, beauty, and earned authority. It belongs on the shelf of anyone who takes space seriously.
Frequently Asked Questions About Stillness by Norm Architects
What is Stillness by Norm Architects about?
Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design is a 304-page book published by gestalten in October 2024. It documents Norm Architects’ decade-long engagement with Japanese design culture, exploring how Japanese spatial philosophy — concepts like ma, wabi-sabi, and material honesty — has shaped their contemporary Scandinavian practice. The book combines travel dispatches, architectural photography, expert commentary, and project documentation into a unified design manifesto.
Who are Norm Architects?
Norm Architects is a Copenhagen-based design studio working across architecture, interiors, and product design. They are known for a rigorously restrained aesthetic that emphasizes craft, natural materials, and spatial sensitivity. Their work includes residential architecture, hospitality interiors, and product collaborations across Scandinavia and internationally.
Who published Stillness and when?
gestalten published Stillness on October 8, 2024. It’s a Berlin-based publisher specializing in high-quality design, architecture, and culture books. The book runs to 304 pages with an ISBN of 978-3967041583.
What Japanese design principles does the book explore?
The book engages with several core Japanese aesthetic concepts: ma (the active use of negative space), wabi-sabi (beauty found in impermanence and imperfection), mono no aware (sensitivity to transience), and the philosophical role of craft and material honesty in spatial design. It also explores how these principles manifest in Japanese landscapes, traditional architecture, and contemporary cultural spaces.
Which Norm Architects projects are featured in Stillness?
The book features two primary built projects as case studies: the Äng Restaurant in Sweden and the Heatherhill Beach House in Denmark. Both projects demonstrate how Japanese spatial thinking — particularly around material selection, threshold design, and calibrated restraint — operates within a contemporary Scandinavian architectural practice.
Is Stillness suitable for non-architects?
Yes. While the book engages seriously with architectural thinking, its accessible structure and richly illustrated format make it valuable for anyone interested in design, photography, Japanese culture, or the relationship between space and human experience. Brand designers, interior designers, photographers, and design enthusiasts will all find the book compelling.
How does Japanese aesthetics influence Scandinavian design?
Both traditions share foundational commitments to functional beauty, material integrity, and spatial modesty. Both developed in response to demanding natural environments. The book argues — and demonstrates through comparative imagery — that these shared values create a genuine design continuum between the two cultures, rather than a one-directional influence relationship.
What makes Stillness different from other Japanese design books?
Stillness distinguishes itself through three things: the authorial credibility of a studio with a decade of genuine creative engagement with Japan; its comparative structure, juxtaposing Japanese source material with completed built work; and its forward-looking design argument about why Japanese aesthetic principles matter urgently for contemporary practice.
Discover more of our book reviews here at WE AND THE COLOR.
#architecture #book #design #Gestalten #NormArchitects #StillnessAndJapaneseAesthetics