Showing results by author "Sarah Sands" in All Categories

In an era of fake news and new fault lines in global politics, millions of listeners turn to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme each morning to help them make sense of the world around them. The first ever book from the iconic programme marks 60 years of programming with 60 world-changing stories. Covering everything from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Anti-Apartheid Movement to the emergence of Brit Art and space exploration, artificial intelligence and machine learning, Today explores events as they happened and reveals how they changed the world around us.

It is the Winter Solstice and Sarah Sands is sitting by her father's bedside, bracing herself for loss. What her father needs to do, she thinks, is conserve his energy - to hibernate like a hedgehog. When the hedgehog curls up in its bed of leaves, its heart rate slows, its body temperature drops and for months there it remains, hardly breathing at all. A few days earlier, Sarah and her grandson had found a poorly hedgehog in the garden and taken it to the local hedgehog sanctuary. They named her Peggy, and her fate had become a matter of pressing concern.

Inspired by the ruins of an ancient Cistercian abbey at the bottom of her garden in Norfolk, she begins to research the monks' lives who once resided there and realises how much we may have to learn from monasticism. Renouncing the world, monks and nuns have acquired a hidden knowledge of how to live: they labour, they learn and they acquire 'the interior silence'. Monk's Medicine is a quest for that hidden knowledge - a pilgrimage to 10 monasteries round the world, from a Coptic desert community in Egypt to a retreat in the Japanese mountains.