And Life Lights Up

Let Alice Taylor encourage you to live in the now, to really live your experiences and to treasure the special moments in your life.

With Alice as a guide, explore the steps and ways to live a conscious life and focus on the goodness of the world around us. Alice's beautiful and captivating writing is an act of mindfulness in itself, and she shares her favourite moments in life, encouraging us to ponder our own. Alice also inspires the reader to be attentive to the here and now and embrace moments as they arise.

A beautiful and enchanting book by a bestselling and celebrated author.

Auteur

Alice Taylor lives in the village of Innishannon in County Cork, in a house attached to the local supermarket and post office. Since her eldest son has taken over responsibility for the shop, she has been able to devote more time to her writing.

Alice Taylor worked as a telephonist in Killarney and Bandon. When she married, she moved to Innishannon where she ran a guesthouse at first, then the supermarket and post office. She and her husband, Gabriel Murphy, who sadly passed away in 2005, had four sons and one daughter. In 1984 she edited and published the first issue of Candlelight, a local magazine which has since appeared annually. In 1986 she published an illustrated collection of her own verse.

To School Through the Fields was published in May 1988. It was an immediate success, and quickly became the biggest selling book ever published in Ireland. It launched Alice on a series of signing sessions, talks and readings the length and breadth of Ireland. Her first radio interview, forty two minutes long on RTÉ Radio's Gay Byrne Show, was the most talked about radio programme of 1988, and her first television interview, of the same length, was the highlight of the year on RTÉ television's Late Late Show. Since then she has appeared on radio programmes such as Woman's Hour, Midweek and The Gloria Hunniford Show, and she has been the subject of major profiles in the Observer and the Mail on Sunday.

Alice has written nearly twenty books since then, large exploring her village of Inishannon, and the way of life in rural Ireland. She has also written poetry and fiction: her first novel, The Woman of the House, was an immediate bestseller in Ireland, topping the paperback fiction lists for many weeks.

One of Ireland's most popular authors, her most recent book is And Life Lights Up.

Contenu

Introduction - Golden Moments 9
Part 1 AWARENESS
Out of Our Minds page 15
Meeting the Morning 21
Repairs and Maintenance 29
Afternoon Tea 35
An Ordinary Day 39
Finding My Feet 45
The Wonder of Wood 51
Take Good Care of Me 56
Part 2 ROOTS
Beauty from Boredom 67
The Gap 73
The Well 77
The Fort Field 82
The Sacred Earth 90
Part 3 SPECIAL MOMENTS IN THE GARDEN
Dancing with the Day 101
Red and Yellow 104
Black Gold 107
Blue Brilliance 112

Fresh Flowers 115
Waiting ... 124
The Plantsman 129
An Old Tree 133
Part 4 SMALL KINDNESSES
The Black Bubble 143
Beautiful Mind 147
Battered Chalice 152
Never Suppress a Good Impulse 156
Let It Be 161
A Passing Kindness 165
Part 5 THEN AND NOW
The Agony and the Ecstasy 172
A Time to Write 178
From There to Here 182
Refeathering the Nest 189
It Takes So Long to Say Goodbye 193
Both Sides Now 197