My dear auntie Jean in London has been sending me photos of rainbows she encounters on her daily walks; rainbows drawn on the pavements, pinned in windows and hung on gates; a spontaneous phenomenal creative response to the personal, local, national and global crisis we find ourselves in. The images themselves appear as symbols of…
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may…
Do you know how the caterpillar turns? Do you remember what happens inside a cocoon? You liquefy. There in the thick black of your self-spun womb, void as the moon before waxing, you melt (as Christ did for three days in the tomb) conceiving in impossible darkness the sheer inevitability of wings. Kim Rosen …
Wide enough to keep you looking Open enough to keep you moving Dry enough to keep you honest Prickly enough to make you tough Green enough to go on living Old enough to give you dreams by Gary Snyder A grateful earth poem by the “poet laureate of Deep Ecology” Gary Snyder, with the…
We plant seeds in the ground And dreams in the sky, Hoping that, someday, the roots of one Will meet the upstretched limbs of the other. It has not happened yet. We share the sky, all of us, the whole world: Together, we are a tribe of eyes that look upward, Even as we stand…
The mindfulness conspiracy. It condemns all mindfulness practitioners/teachers as being obsessed with happiness and acquiescence to the causes of inequality, environmental degradation and oppression. In essence the article is all conjecture – it is based on opinion and without evidence. So, I invite you to consider a few points that I think may cause more…
There is nothing more innocent than the still-unformed creature I find beneath the soil, neither of us knowing what it will become in the abundance of the planet. It makes a living only by remaining still in its niche. One day it might struggle out of its tender pearl of blind skin with a wing…
I had a wonderful time at our conference earlier this month. It felt like a coming of age. We were our own keynotes, without needing to import big names in from the US. We acknowledged our roots with warm and insightful sessions with Rob Nairn. We acknowledged the success of our Masters students and their…
Reflecting on the Mindfulness Association Conference last week – feelings of warmth and happiness flood my body and a smile appears on my face. I’m sitting here looking through all the photos that I took over a few days – and again I see laughter and happiness reflected in the images before me. So I…