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. Table of Contents 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 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. Emma Byrne is a graphic designer and artist. She is a graduate of Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design. She has won numerous awards for her design including The IDI (Irish Design Institute) Graduate Designer of the Year, the IDI Promotional Literature Award for her work on Brown Morning, and a Children’s Books Ireland Bisto Merit Award for her work on Something Beginning With P: New Poems from Irish Poets. She has illustrated many books, including Best-Loved Oscar Wilde, Best Loved Yeats, The Most Beautiful Letter in the World by Karl O’Neill, a special edition of Ulysses by James Joyce, and A Terrible Beauty by Mairéad Ashe Fitzgerald. She lives in a thatched house in Co. Wexford.