It is a sun­ny morn­ing. It is also Mon­day, but despite the blue sky it is def­i­nite­ly not a Blue Mon­day. This morn­ing I final­ly put on my run­ning shoes again, after weeks of lazi­ness. It was great to do my usu­al run in the park. And as a per­fect reward there was the full moon, hang­ing just above the hori­zon. The sun had start­ed to rise at the oth­er end of the park. I was total­ly in touch with my pri­mal feel­ing; I was fas­ci­nat­ed by that per­fect cir­cle in the air. I can imag­ine how peo­ple came up with all sorts of sto­ries about it.

After the Christ­mas hol­i­days, my work has con­tin­ued as though noth­ing had hap­pened. So I would almost for­get that we had a won­der­ful time on the Isle of Wight, togeth­er with Freddy’s par­ents. We also vis­it­ed my fam­i­ly in the Netherlands.

I am now work­ing on a project about respon­si­ble busi­ness. I am read­ing (dig­i­tal) piles of reports from organ­i­sa­tions like Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al about poor work­ing con­di­tions in the sup­ply chain of large com­pa­nies. There are also many ini­tia­tives to make busi­ness­es more sus­tain­able. The orig­i­nal­ly Dutch com­pa­ny Unilever, led by Paul Pol­man, is often cit­ed as a good example.

Besides my job I also try to work for Med­way Inter­faith Action, where we orga­nize activ­i­ties to bring peo­ple of dif­fer­ent reli­gions into con­tact with each oth­er. Last week we had a pre­sen­ta­tion about Pagan­ism and the role of women. Pagan­ism is also a lot about pri­mal feel­ings; the sea­sons and the bal­ance with nature. I hope to learn more about it when we vis­it the Med­way Pagans next week.

Final­ly, a ran­dom wis­dom that I found on my Yog­iTea this morning:“Joy is the essence of suc­cess”. Good luck with that this week!

The Isle of Wight:

Paint­ing: Impres­sion Soleil Lev­ant from Claude Mon­et, 1872