Almost Composed

Meditation and curiosity

Poems in Urthona & Live Canon

February 8, 2016

I’ve had some poems published recently, including three in Urthona: Buddhism & the Arts. It’s a great magazine if you’re into Buddhism, meditation, and literature. Here’s ‘Waiting for Al-Khidr’ from the magazine. Also in the issue are ‘The Pearl’ and ‘How I Became a Prophet’. It’s the current issue so consider subscribing if you’re interested […]

categories: poems

Impermanence

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 […]

The Hero’s Inner Journey

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 […]

categories: essays, journeys, reflections

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

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