The Oxford Word of the Year is "rage bait" 🙁

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£1,000 donation helps Matt’s Café serve hundreds of meals a week in Swansea

A Swansea charity that serves hundreds of hot meals each week to people in need has received a £1,000 boost from Tata Steel subsidiary UKSE — funding a new freezer that staff say is already transforming their work.

https://swanseabaynews.com/1000-donation-helps-matts-cafe-serve-hundreds-of-meals-a-week-in-swansea/

Sometimes, you need to switch off.#Reading and enter another world.

Advent has arrived

Advent has arrived like a soft-footed guestslipping through the dusk with a lantern in handand the whole world seems to hold its breathCandles wake with gentle firetheir small bright voices rising in the quietas if they wish to sing before the choir beginsThe air tastes of spice and promiseof pine trees dreaming in the stillness…

http://juliehodgson.blog/2025/12/05/advent-has-arrived/

Coyote, Kelly, Wyoming. March, 2018. 📷 Fujifilm X-T2 + XF100-400mmF4.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR 🎞 400 mm – 1/500″ – f/5.6 – ISO 500 🏷️ #Wildlife #Photography #NationalParks #Coyotes

Now

I stand in this breathas if it were a soft doorwayopening to the wild hush of everything. The world leans inholding its cup of warm lightand I drink it slowly. Time forgets its hurryand becomes a friendly straycurling at my feet. For a momentthere is no beforeno afteronly thisbright bead on the string of living. JH

http://juliehodgson.blog/2025/11/19/now/

Step away a while….

There are moments when the world feels like it has had far too much tea and is humming with nervous energy. Every screen glows like a tiny sun and every notification tugs at your sleeve. That is when the universe itself seems to whisper go outside for a breath and touch something real. Let your toes wander into grass or sand or onto a quiet bit of earth.

http://juliehodgson.blog/2025/11/15/step-away-a-while/

In Quiet Fields

In quiet fields where soft winds roam, we stand And feel the breath of those who marched before. Their names drift through the grass like distant sand And settle in our hearts forevermore. We promise them our memory will stay As still as dawn that trembles into day. The poppies rise in gentle crimson light, Their petals catch the turning of the sun.

http://juliehodgson.blog/2025/11/08/in-quiet-fields/

Honesty

Soft truth in the airVoices clear as morning bellsHearts open like dawn Eyes meet without shadeWords fall pure as spring waterTrust blooms in still light JH

http://juliehodgson.blog/2025/11/03/honesty/

No filter #olhao #Portugal

Love em

Daily writing prompt Do lazy days make you feel rested or unproductive? View all responses I love lazy days, it's a time for reflection, chilling, reading a good book, or finishing off something you wanted to do for a while... Lazy days..bring them on..

http://juliehodgson.blog/2025/10/17/love-em/

“The chemicals used in plastic are now extremely well known to contribute to disease and disability that cuts across the lifespan, from cradle to grave, from womb to tomb”

Three CNN reporters on three continents wore chemical-tracking wristbands. The results were alarming
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/07/climate/chemicals-plastic-wristbands-phthalates-bisphenols

Trump on Monday ordered the approval of a proposed 211-mile road through an Alaska wilderness to allow mining of copper, cobalt, gold and other minerals.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/06/trump-alaska-mining-road

How Can You Sit and Be Silent?

How can you sit and be silent,while children fade from the sky?Do your lips not burn with the questionhow long, how long, and why? A man builds thrones from his lying tongue,and truth is left to die.Your silence is a shadow’s songand even shadows cry. JH

http://juliehodgson.blog/2025/10/11/how-can-you-sit-and-be-silent/

I Want More Kindness in the World

I want more kindness in the world not the kind that hides in silence, but the kind that rolls out like sunlight, warming pavements, healing strangers. I want kindness that speaks up when cruelty takes the stage, that plants itself firm as an oak and says, “No. Here, love grows.” I want kindness that lingers not a passing smile but a steady flame,

http://juliehodgson.blog/2025/10/09/i-want-more-kindness-in-the-world/

May this
Suffering
Become
So much
Kindling
For the
Fire inside
Us all,
That we may
One day
Outshine
The dark.

#poetry

Quick reminder that consuming Tylenol has a 0% chance of causing autism but consuming MAGA at all has a 100% chance of causing fascism.

Windmills of Portugal .#covilha #portugal #roadtrip.

The strange thing about Bullying and hiding behind a so-called “campaign”

It is a most peculiar and troubling spectacle to behold that J. K. Rowling, once exalted in the public imagination as a benevolent architect of whimsical childhood narratives, has instead refashioned herself into a crusader of antagonistic commentary, a self-appointed sentinel of “women’s safety” whose rhetoric, far from protecting, has functioned as a sharpened blade against other women, most…

http://juliehodgson.blog/2025/09/29/the-strange-thing-about-bullying-and-hiding-behind-a-so-called-campaign/