It’s as if something only has worth if it refers to something else. That’s a kind of craziness! It’s always looking elsewhere for what is actually right here.

The more I think about it, the more I’m struck by how planning has its own aesthetics. It’s like curating our time the way we’d curate any visual space.

Do we understand that felt anger often does less harm than suppressed anger? Suppressed anger becomes violence. Sadness too has its place, and when suppressed becomes depression.

Some Buddhist texts say we should be ‘guarding the gates of the senses’. But I would argue that most sense pleasure is innocent - perhaps we can even think of it as a safe refuge?

That that the day of your death is written is the kind of idea I would normally reject straight away as not only un-Buddhist but unattractive. That is until you think about it more deeply.

A realisation recently came into focus. It’s that I now see, in a way that I haven’t before, that everything that’s happened in my life, everything I’ve done, couldn’t have been any other way.

My wife went to the corner shop to pick up a few bits and came back with a gift for me, a squashed tin can. That’s odd, you might think, but not remarkable, that is till you hear the next part of the story…

I love the aesthetics of work, even desk work. It's even better with manual work. Clearing the table for baking bread, the leather apron, sprinkling flour onto the board…

Why don’t I do this more often, I thought, go to a rock concert with a crowd of pensioners?

Deep truths hidden in a goofy poem from Jack Kerouac

When we talk of ‘being in service’, are we in service to living beings? Or to an abstract ideal?

Even when someone is being an asshole, they are still a person, and every person is worthy of compassion.

Are those worrying thoughts in the night just there to protect me from my own essential vulnerability?

You make more of a difference than you think. Why we should gather in big numbers.

Notes from an interview with Marina Abramović on the Talk Art Podcast

Moments of insight can arise at anytime. Often in the middle of the most mundane activity

At this time each year I read this piece by Jeanette Winterson. It’s about the night and darkness, but also about winter, the season of ‘nighttime’.

John Smith illustrates the Buddhist insight that there isn’t any essential ‘me’ running the show.

Finding the 10 Fetters in the poems of Rumi.