When I launched this blog, I identified the overarching themes that would dominate it: sustainability, words, making. Over the past sixteen months, I’ve seen a pattern emerging that takes these three topic areas beyond ‘these are a few of my favourite things’, stringing them together and showing how they relate, influence and inform each other. To illustrate this more explicitly, the blog is undergoing a tweak or too. Same kind of content, but greater clarity in how it all hangs together.

Papier-mâché Thoughts: “Intentional living in the every day”

• intentional: not drifting through life but ensuring our thoughts and ideas are followed by genuine action that is considered and considerate, values-driven and evidence-based.
• living: not just rhetoric or discussion but action with impact
• every day: sometimes a life isolated from society, consumerism, the grid, can sometimes seem the only way to achieve our goals but I hope, and work towards, another way. Trying to live out our values in the the mundane, the job, the diary….

I primarily think and write about how this is outworked across three areas of life. The things we:

• choose: decisions, behaviours, attitudes that are intentional in their expression
• speak: words are beautiful in their aesthetic, powerful in their use. I want to build up, not tear down.
• make: creativity that respects the environment and other people as well as refreshing the soul.

These three areas interrelate and inform each other. I’m trying to ensure that they’re considered and educated. They layer up and together inform the life I’m trying to live and, for the last sixteen months, share in this space. That’s where the name for this blog came from. The idea of these thoughts, ideas, experience being like:

Papier-mâché | Chewed paper
mulling it over,
building up the layers,
seeing what they become.

So, take home message. Some content; it just hangs together a little better. That can only be a good thing.