Articles
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The articles below all appeared in previous newsletter, search for any topic you are interested in:
A simple explanation of 'not-self'
The ‘house of cards’ is an image of how we construct ourselves and our world, with everything dependent upon everything else.
How to live like an artist
Being a Buddhist is about what is in your heart. Likewise being an artist about learning to paint or to write. It’s about engaging with the world as an artist would.
Finding dharma in modern culture
The arts can be a parallel path to the dharma, with the potential to open up similar insights.
Wabi-sabi, an ordinary beauty
A beauty that shows us the truth of impermanence, imperfection and insubstantiality.
Secrets to a long life
They’d lived so long despite harsh conditions, or was it because of them? Here’s what their secrets to a long life might be.
Hidden in plain sight
The wabi-sabi state of mind is one that ‘coaxes beauty out of ugliness’. For me, it’s become a metaphor for insight.
The story of things
We long for a soulful life full of real, earthy, handmade things. But how do you are getting the real deal?
Facing our mortality
Anastasia Pottinger’s pictures bring to mind the beauty of ancient olive trees. Why is it harder to see beauty in the human body?
Wabi-sabi and my punk roots
Coming across the Dharma when I did felt like being in the right place at the right time. But I soon hit a problem.
Discovering wabi-sabi
Realising there was beauty in the laksanas opened up a whole new avenue of practice for me.
Placefulness
Placefulness, paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, to the places we are in.
The greater mandala
What if we were to see all of our activities, work and leisure, as taking place within a greater mandala of aesthetic appreciation?
The failure bow
Being creative requires skill, to become skilled you must be prolific and to be prolific means making a lot of mistakes.
Befriending my anxiety
When I was 7 years old, I became a different person. Or so the story goes…
It’s not rocket science
Solving the world’s problems is not rocket science. And that’s the problem. If it were rocket science, we’d be able to achieve it.
The wabi-sabi bardo of winter
A bardo is a pause, a gap, a liminal space. Often uncomfortable, always an opportunity.
Wabi-sabi, Marcel Duchamp and Zen
What connects Duchamps’s ‘readymades’ with what the wabi-sabi tea masters did in Japan in the 1500s?
Going out in all weathers
Have you ever gone out into the grey misty rain and discovered unexpected beauty in the landscape?
Is elegant, voluntary, poverty possible today?
And how do we live romanticising neither poverty nor wealth, but instead learning to love and let go?