It is Good Friday and I wasn’t meant to be here. I was meant to be in a little village in Spain watching all the villagers get ready for the Good Friday Easter Procession.

I wandered down to the beach early and despite the seaweed and the accompanying smell and flies, it was so beautiful, so good for the soul.

While I was walking I listened to a Conversations episode between Richard Fidler and Julia Baird, the author of Phospherescence. It was wonderful and inspiring and humbling and just the thing to listen to on this particular morning. My friend, Mrs L, has just bought it and she had read some excerpts to me. Is this why we find so much joy and nurturing from a walk along the beach, or just gazing out to sea?

 

I think I’m going to have to get this book, apart from the cover which is just gorgeous, it is a book written before it’s time, exactly for this time!

Happy Easter everyone. Keep safe.

A beautiful, intimate and inspiring investigation into how we can find and nurture within ourselves that essential quality of internal happiness – the ‘light within’ that Julia Baird calls ‘phosphorescence’ – which will sustain us even through the darkest times.

And more than that, when our world goes dark, when we’re overwhelmed by illness or heartbreak, loss or pain, how do we survive, stay alive or even bloom? In the muck and grit of a daily existence full of disappointments and a disturbing lack of control over many of the things that matter most – finite relationships, fragile health, fraying economies, a planet in peril – how do we find, nurture and carry our own inner, living light – a light to ward off the darkness?

Absorbing, achingly beautiful, inspiring and deeply moving, Julia Baird has written exactly the book we need for these times.