September 6, 2016
So the nights are getting longer. I was doing walking meditation in the library courtyard, feeling relaxed and yet self-conscious enough to walk at such an angle that the late shift librarian couldn’t see me from the café. He didn’t care, he was playing an electric piano, though I couldn’t hear it through the glass. Libraries are […]
July 20, 2016
The ship’s design pictured is the Titanic. The cross-section is drawn at full scale and the length at quarter scale. I visited the Titanic exhibition in Belfast recently. The timing couldn’t have been better as I’ve been reading Matthew Syed’s Black Box Thinking, about how we learn from failures both catastrophic and small. The ‘unsinkable’ […]
February 3, 2016
In the co-ordinator’s office of the meditation centre where I’m volunteering, there’s a piece of wood engraved with the following: A beautiful day. It will not come again. As a call to appreciation, it seemed more urgent than carpe diem. This came home to me while looking out of the window of a bathroom on the […]
November 14, 2015
This morning I belatedly saw a connection between two ideas I’m interested in: the hero’s journey and attachment theory. The hero’s journey is a fundamental narrative that’s claimed to be at the root of all stories. It was proposed by the mythologist Joseph Campbell in books such as The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The theory goes that […]
September 20, 2015
There was a great piece in Tricycle recently, A Gleeful Foreboding, excerpted from Clark Strand’s book Waking Up To the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age. Strand describes what happened when his town near the Catskill mountains was bumped off the grid by a hurricane. “That the larger storms sometimes turn deadly does little to chasten […]
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