Almost Composed

Meditation and curiosity

Urgency to live

August 25, 2019

How should we live, considering that human history–as we’ve known it so far–may be coming to an end? If the ice caps melt, if the Amazon burns, if the world becomes a hot and desperate place we will lose the narrative of progress and security upon which our choices and values are based. What is […]

categories: essays, reflections

Memento

September 10, 2016

Who needs a skull grinning brightly on their desk when an apple core moulders so quickly? There’s no getting away from it. Leaves brown in the gutter. Blue islands form archipelagos in the bread. Walk through the cemetery. See how even gravestones, our markers of impermanence, decay. Then see wild grass rushing up their sides, […]

categories: poems

Turning points

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 […]

categories: essays, reflections

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 […]