Itchy feet, Chagall and Schumacher

Itchy feet are well and truly setting in. I've not been in the UK for this long in years, and I'm finding the temptation of escaping abroad more and more appealing each day. Temptation is a ridiculous thing. The more you know you can't do something, the more tantalising it becomes. I'm beginning to wonder if I can stick out a year of uni and the city living that entails without spending the entire time yearning for a simpler life somewhere calm and green. Decisions never have been my strong point...

Newly added to my growing list of places to visit is this: http://www.musee-chagall.fr/ I'd forgotten how much I love Chagall's paintings until yesterday when I woke up with one of his pictures in my mind. Colours, goats, trees, music, wings...they've just got everything in them. Gorgeous.

Also came across a nice passage in a book of E.F.Schumacher's essays. He's got a succinct way of putting things on paper, which makes him interesting to read even if I don't agree with everything he's saying. This list was his response to the question, what is freedom?


I don't want to join the rat race.
Not be enslaved by machines, bureaucracies, boredom, ugliness.
I don't want to become a moron, robot, commuter.
I don't want to become a fragment of a person.


I want to do my own thing.
I want to live (relatively) simply.
I want to deal with people, not masks.
People matter. Nature matters. Beauty matters. Wholeness matters. I want to be able to care.

Small is Beautiful

I'm juggling so many books at the moment, trying to pick ones that are completely different so that I can dip into each for a couple of chapters at a time and feel like I've only just started reading. Re-reading Schumacher's Small is Beautiful last night, I remembered how much I loved some of the chapter openers - I love the confidence he had in putting forward his opinion, even when it was one that contradicted so much economic thought at the time, and still now.

'The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed.'

Anyone that can consider industry and imagination in the same breath is alright by me. Good book.