Elizabeth Nugent

Some years ago, I moved to a small holding. When we arrived, we had pigs and let them graze for several seasons: rooting, turning, tearing up the ground. The surface looked ruined. Churned mud. Broken turf. Uneven, unsettled earth. It didn’t look promising. Eventually, we decided it was time for sausages, and the following spring, we planted sunflowers. Hundreds of them. They grew absurdly tall. Taller than me. Thick stems, heavy heads tracking the sun. It turns out all that rooting, the...

“It’s not about the money.” People say this in families, workplaces, trainings, institutions, friendships, politics, and therapy spaces. And usually they are telling the truth. Families fracture over inheritances whose material value seems disproportionate to the intensity of the conflict. Professionals exhaust themselves for salaries that could never adequately compensate for what is being surrendered. Teams collapse over apparently minor disputes that quickly become charged with grievance,...

Last weekend, two political marches took place in London, drawing thousands who gathered to demonstrate their support for competing visions. As I watched the news, these large gatherings, while certainly driven by personal motivations and nuances, seemed to express more than firm beliefs or political disagreements on the highlighted issues. Both events carried a festival-like atmosphere, with families and friendship groups uniting to make a rallying cry for attention and change. There is a...