September

“Be brave. Be Kind. And then act. Because it’s action, however imperfect, that begins to bend the world towards justice, towards compassion, and towards change”. Tirana Hassan, September 2025.

Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC), September, 2025.

Equinox

A new cycle begins. “(…) it’s about as full circle as it gets. (…) One day at a time, and suddenly you realize life is brighter, life is lighter. You made it through the storm” (Dunbar, 2024), except, other entities bully your neighbors, make them suffer, threaten them, persecute them, injure them, kill them and destroy everything. And in the end, they hope to live happily and securely ever after? Is this the implosion of humanity, cause surely it is not a vision for a better world...

Lucy Claire Dunbar (2024). The Book of Gifts. Fotografia de Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC), março de 2025.

PS - Banda sonora pode ser a que li no que Flora Graham escreveu no Nature Briefing de 11 de fevereiro de 2025, sobre o músico Cosmo Sheldrake (com Nature) que ajudou investigadores a registar «the wonderful, wet and complex” sounds of the fungi and other organisms in the soil, in the words of evolutionary biologist and co-author Toby Kiers»: soil.

September

"Because it is always tempting to over emphasize autonomy and independence, these helpless creatures are here to remind us that no one is, in the end, 'self-made'; we are all heavily in someone's debt. We realize that life depends - quite literally - on the capacity for love. (...) All this she will later forget and they will be unable or unwilling to convey to her." Alain de Botton (2017). The Course of Love. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC). September 6, 2024.

Setembro

"Feeling the touch, discovering the colour, memorizing the smell. Weaving quietly different textures and tensions. Creating peace to guide action. Liberating the mind to shape possibilities." June 2021, What can we do with what we already have?...

Photos by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

March

"Depth

We must be still 

Heart breaks 

Soul Fire 

Flood lines 

Earthquakes 

Depth over distance 

Deep roots 

And charred ashes 

Hardship carves stones 

Bring out the passes 

Scars make us beautiful, 

flawless, individual" 

Depth by Rising Appalachia (2021). 

Photo by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

September

"Because digital minimalists spend so much less time connected than their peers, its easy to think of their lifestyles as extreme, but the minimalists would argue that this perception is backward: what's extreme is how much time everyone else spends staring at their screens." Cal Newport (2020). Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Photo by Monica Pinheiro free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

March

"Creativity, while it needs certain conditions to flourish, refuses to become subject to prediction. The creative process moves from disorder towards some kind of order which may include the order of random patterns. But it does not know in advance which order will emerge." Helga Nowotony (2016). The Cunning of Uncertainty. Painting by Menez (Maria Inês Ribeiro da Fonseca).

September

 

Equinox. Equilibrium between night and day. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

March

 

“There are a total of 399 protected areas in Portugal, 167 Natura 2000 sites - 62 Special Protection Areas (Birds Directive) and 102 Sites of Community Importance (Habitat Directive) - as well as 232 sites designated under national laws. The protected area network in Portugal is strongly influenced by Natura 2000 sites, which make up 60% of the total area covered by protected areas.” in Biodiversity in Portugal [data displayed in February 17, 2021]. 

See Green Infrastructures in Portugal. See also report from EU (2020) "Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services: The state and trends of ecosystems in the European Union", that gives an assessment of the key ecosystems in the EU, evaluates the EU 2020 biodiversity targets, and provides a baseline for the 2030 biodiversity policy and EU nature restoration plan.

September

"Stillness presents a break or pause in the flow of habitual events, whilst illuminating temporal gaps and fissures within which alternative, even unexpected possibilities - for life - might emerge. (...) Here, stillness offers the simultaneous possibility of termination and also of a new beginning." Emma Cocker (2011). Performing stillness: community in waiting. in Stillness in a Mobile World, edited by David Bissell and Gillian Fuller. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

March

"Wherever you are now, however urban or interior your life, nature is still there for you - anchoring, inspiring, helping you become more of what it is you set out to be." Gary Ferguson, 2019. The Eight Master Lessons of Nature. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

September

"If restoration is not possible for a disturbed ecosystem in an irreversibly changed environment, then rewilding is the adaptive tactic for regaining and maintaining functionality, perhaps with introduced components. (...) the rise of the rewilding concept is a sign that new approaches are urgently needed to conserve biodiversity and maintain ecosystem services under increasingly unpredictable global conditions, as traditional approaches on their own are demonstrably unfit for the challenges ahead." in Rewilding needs a conceptual framework. Is the adaptive cycle the answer? Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

March

"This is the third in a series of reports on the circular economy in support of the framing, implementation and evaluation of European circular economy policy from an environmental perspective. The two previous reports applied a systemic approach to framing a circular economy and to the products within it. This report on the bioeconomy addresses circularity aspects of bio-based products and the sustainable use of renewable natural resources." The circular economy and the bioeconomy — Partners in sustainability. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

Fall Equinox

Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

A new cycle

"We are back to family, to the life cycle, to human fragility and experience (...) above all, the virtues of appreciating relationships with all their attendant conflict, ambivalence, and meaning." Sherry Turkle,  2005. The Second Self: computers and the human spirit. MIT, Twenty Anniversary Edition, 298. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC) 

Layers

September in the garden, 2017. Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)