Owls! TWO of them arrived together and settled in their reassuring 'hootery' that resonated across the courtyard. Within seconds, neighbours gathered on balconies in silence. We all smiled at each other, seeing something in them and in us that we haven't seen in a while.

Just a beach on the Western Cape Peninsula; people gathered around fire performances after the piper had bagpiped the remains of the final evening of 2024. Community naturally form circles.

That's home. That's us...The aggregate of our joy and suffering ... religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader" ... lived there-on a mote of dust.
CARL SAGAN

'In life, I want students to be alive and on stage I want them to be artists' (Acting teacher) Jacques Lecoq

I wonder if the reverse might also be true?

"The stories we tell ourselves, true or not, are always real. We make meaning from the stories, and they determine which lives we live."

- Darrel Bristow-Bovey
'Finding Endurance: Shackleton, My Father and a World Without End'