Almost Composed

Meditation and curiosity

Dream selves

October 6, 2015

Interesting that in dreams we seem to have a self – whether that be a butterfly or a WWII soldier – though we have no physical body, and the world around us is a tottering, malleable palace. It’s as though the mental machinery that constructs our everyday perception of self and other can at last be seen […]

categories: philosophy, reflections

Of storms and night walking

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 […]

categories: essays, journeys, reflections

The importance of imagination

September 8, 2015

The world seems apt to give rise to stories and images. Such imaginings may be the product of our minds, but our minds are nonetheless part of the world and shaped by it. Imagination is a dialogue with the world, and a feature of it. To conceive of reality only in terms of the barest […]

categories: essays, reflections

The New Default

September 1, 2015

Our gadgets come out of the box ready to bombard us with emails, distract with SMS messages, snare us with headlines, and amuse us with status updates. In our technocratic culture, the expectation is that we are always ready to respond. Yet the pace of information grows ever more frantic. We could create a new default. […]

categories: reflections

Josh Korda

August 26, 2015

Josh Korda’s podcast has been one of my favourite things to listen to over the past year. Josh is a meditation teacher at Dharmapunx in Brooklyn. A teacher in the Theravadan Buddhist tradition, it’s actually Josh’s keen passion for psychology that makes his talks so engaging, as well as his straight-talking humour. Josh will often start with […]

categories: reflections