Chuang and earlier Zen living

The two great issues are loss of biodiversity and climate change. They are interlinked by a common cause; man's behaviour in our industrialised processes of growing, catching, mining, and otherwise creating and selling products to our species and others. It is a story of epic greed and unnecessary barbarity. The people hit hardest will be the poorest, who are the people who least caused the two problems. The people who will be least impacted are the people who have most caused these twin tragedies and disasters. In the long run none of it will matter. In the long run nothing matters. Everything dies. Planets are consumed by heat or freeze to death. But it didn't have to be this way. It still doesn't have to be this way. All it takes it some thought, intelligence, and hardest of all for our rapacious species, self-restraint and a more modest consumption philosophy.

Introduction So the chances are high that this won't last; a commentary of The Bible as I read it page by page. My ideas usually fizzle out pretty damn quickly, but I'm hoping The bible is sufficiently important to sustain my attention and stimulate my intellect and emotiojnal intelligence and mindfulness to keep me commenting on it until I've done the whole lot... and educated myself enormously in the process. Why do such a thing? Well, it is probably the most important book in human history as it has been the most influential, at least until thesecond half of the twentieth century. Even now, if you consider the influence of evangelical Christians in the USA, and the State of Israel, you can still see how strong an influence The Bible has in today's world. Yet most people, myself included, have probably only heard children's versions of some of the Bible stories, or those carefully chosen extracts read in church or school in our childhood. The vast majority of The ...

I used to read novels by the bucketload. From around sixteen to my late twenties. Hesse, Camus, Undset, Hamsun, Boll, Vidal, Vonnegut, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Greene. I lvoed them. They told me ways of seeing life. But the attraction waned. I don't know why. Maybe my four years of travelling and working my way around the world replaced novels as a way of seeing with seeing sites and meeting people as a way of seeing life. Maybe my subsequent settling down to full-time work, marriage, and parenthood did likewise, though I know many people who devour novels despite or because of these duties. Anyway, periodically I try to reignite the passion, perceiving that I'm out of touch with contemporary fiction, and that all literature is a "good thing". As an aside the one writer who managed to break through my disapointment and lethargy about novels was - maybe still is, as I haven't read him in the past five years or more - Somerset Maugham. Not the most fashionable of novel...

As I only started this blog a day or so ago there's been no mention yet of covid, but given it's the biggest thing happening in the world it would b remiss of me not to share some perspectives. Personally it hasn't affected me too much, mentally, physically, or financially. I guess the biggest change has been the absence of live talks which prior to covid I was doing regularly, at least a couple a week, sometimes more. Ironically the biggest effect of this has been physical health, not that it is bad. But getting out to the car, then out from the car, walking to the venue, standing for an hour or an hour and a half talking, all add to the positive effects on the body of movement and standing. During covid I've almost certainly been sitting much longer than usual, which is not a good thing for my body. I haven't put on any weight however; indeed, through a concentrated effort over three weeks I lost half a stone, and was only a stone overweight to begin with. I'v...

I used to have a large collection of albums, maybe around 200 or so, from two main periods: the late 60s to mid 70s ie pre-punk; then the following few years, the years of punk, new wave, and reggae. It all stopped when I sold my records in 1983 to help fund my travelling which ultimately led toa near four years working my way around the world. I say working my way but actually I onlt worked in three countries - Greece, Australia, and New Zealand. All the rest I managed to do on what I had earned from those jobs. Anyway a couple of years ago I got a record player for my Christmas and started buying albums again. And now, being an out of touch old fogey, re-bought some of the albums I already had eg. Exile on Main Street, and Blue, and bought as vinyl for the first time many albums I had bought as CDs. eg. Love's Forever Changes. In the interim years I had totally lost my love of punk and new wave so I haven't bought any more of those, not even Never Mind The Bollocks, though I ...

I'm just off from a lovely, enlightening phone call with a local printer who, amongst many other things, publishes poetry pamphlets, or chapbooks, as they're sometimes called. I guess I'll never earn my living - just the occasional cup of green tea and a coffee for my wife - from the royalties I get from poetry, but I do like the idea of publishing, especially short run, more artistic or Zen-minimalist works, and short poems, mine and others. I also like the idea of collecting obscure, cheap, contemporary poetry books. One a month would mean about £100 a year. Easy reading, doesn't matter whether I like it or not.

It's not my intention, at least not as yet, to make this public. At the same time I don't mind if anyone comes across it, so it's not secret. It's a space I can go to and offload what my mind pressures me to do, that doesn't feel like poetry, and doesn't fit into my more formal writing on mindfulenss, life, and related matters. So let's see where it takes me.