Alistair Appleton23 hours ago1 minPoetryWe're building the ship as we sail it / Kay RyanKay Ryan is an erstwhile America Poet Laureate and a Pulitzer Prize winner. But what is so delicious about her poem are the mordent...
Alistair Appleton4 days ago2 minPoetrySunday Morning / Wallace StevensThis long poem by the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens is one of my favourites. He was an interesting fellow. High-ranking...
Alistair Appleton5 days ago2 minMeditationThe two big questions for meditation beginners.One of the MIndsprings members asked a very pertinent question today about starting out on her meditation journey: Where am I going to do...
Alistair AppletonMay 83 minCultureLetting the Holy Spirit in my EarphonesAlistair takes time to listen to James Macmillan's dazzling 5th Symphony, Le Grand Inconnu, and feels the Holy Spirit fluttering.
Alistair AppletonApr 212 minQuotesFinding AdonisA trip to A favourite London bookshop unearths one of the great poets I’d never heard of.
Alistair AppletonApr 12 minCultureVirginia Woolf: I finally get to the LighthouseI must have started and re-started To the Lighthouse three or four times in my life. I’ve always thought that I should love this book....
Alistair AppletonMar 311 minCultureRiverJust watched mesmerising film by Jennifer Peedom, simply entitled River. in the tradition of Koyaanasqatsi and Baraka it is mostly images...
Alistair AppletonMar 182 minCultureBe Here Now - at night, alone, with earphones.Sometimes when Daniel goes away, it's a chance for me to do nothing very much. When he's here we hang out or I have to carve time to do...
Alistair AppletonJan 214 minMeditationEvery broken heart is sacredThe final blog in my series of seven from 2013 is perhaps the juiciest of them all. I was all tender from a very intense, heart-breaking...
Alistair AppletonJan 56 minEmbodimentNo more future anymoreThis is a rather epic blog about the future and the nature of stress. Looking back from the vantage of 2022, I can see how the eight...
Alistair AppletonDec 15, 20216 minBuddhismLike worms towards the motorwayThe sixth of the blogs from 2014. This one is quite self-contained and doesn’t require many annotations from 2022. There is a Nibbana...
Alistair AppletonDec 15, 20214 minPsychologyBut now there is a forestThis is the third of the set of seven blogs I wrote back in 2014 following a chance encounter with one of my Buddhist teachers Ajahn...
Alistair AppletonDec 15, 20214 minPlaying at enlightenmentThe fourth of my re-vamped blogs from 2014. This one on play touches on the vexed question of boredom in meditation which usually...
Alistair AppletonDec 3, 20216 minDharmaIntention destroys the zombie mindContinuing my excavation of blogs from the past. These are my ponderings following a teaching that Ajahn Sucitto gave in Portugal. If you...
Alistair AppletonNov 3, 20216 minDharmaSucitto Thoughts #1Today is the birthday of one of my early Buddhist teachers, Ajahn Sucitto, who was the abbot of Cittaviveka monastery in East Sussex when...
Alistair AppletonOct 28, 20215 minPsychologyIn Praise of Idleness“Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.” Soren Kierkegaard This is a very old book review from...
Alistair AppletonOct 11, 20216 minLGBTQ+Coming out is (still) good for youThis is an article I wrote almost 10 years ago but it still seems to hit the right note. COMING OUT IS GOOD FOR YOU. This article was...
Alistair AppletonSep 10, 20214 minCultureOur Love for the CityOn the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, I was thinking about how we relate to those events – both at the time...
Alistair AppletonAug 13, 202111 minPsychologySame world, different sunglassesThis is a transcript from a Mindsprings Practice Space session. I’ve got a great question from one of our community, who submitted it in...
Alistair AppletonAug 6, 20213 minSpiritualityAvebury Magic and Anti-magicAnother scoop from the archives. Funnily enough, I may have changed my mind from the rather Puritan stance voiced in this blog in the...