From Justine / Lawrence Durrell
Again, like my selection from Gravity’s Rainbow this ‘poem’ is actually prose. A little chipping from the strange crystal that is the...
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Alistair Appleton
- 2 days ago
- 3 min
Beingfulness vs. Abhidharma - Slicing Up the Meaty, Messy Pie of Our Experience
I was doing this practice with Mingyur Rinpoche, and he was teaching what's known as the Abhidharma, which is a very old form of Buddhism.
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Alistair Appleton
- May 28
- 2 min
Kindness / Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye is an American-Palestinian poet who lives in San Antonio. Her poetry is much garlanded and she has been Young People’s ...
354 views3 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Mar 27
- 2 min
Allerseelen / Paul Celan
Where to start with Celan? A Holocaust survivor whose pulverising poetry stretched the oppressor's language into transcendental shapes,...
224 views4 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Mar 26
- 3 min
6 Tips for Accessing the Emotions on the Cushion
This is an excerpt from the session on emotions on Monday (25th March 2024) where I give some tips about accessing the second field, the...
309 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Mar 19
- 2 min
Fricatives / Eric Yip
This poem is shortlisted by the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem in 2024. And it's got it all: sexuality, race, power, language,...
235 views2 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Mar 12
- 1 min
from XIVLINERS / Tom Raworth
I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the English (post?) modernist poet, Tom Rawoth back in 1990 when he was midway writing his great...
173 views2 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Mar 5
- 1 min
Symbiosis / Em Gray
Em Gray is a neurodivergent poet from Brighton and this haptic, ticklish poem was commended in the Forward Prize this year. Simple as it...
452 views6 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Feb 27
- 1 min
Eliza / Liz Berry
This beautiful Queen-Mab-like poem is from Liz Berry's collection Home Child describing the life of a 12-year-old orphan, Eliza Showell...
411 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Feb 20
- 2 min
from Gravity's Rainbow / Thomas Pynchon
GR is, of course, not a poem. It's a 900-page novel. Fifty years old this year. But I was so bruised, amused, amazed by it that I wanted...
282 views9 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Feb 13
- 2 min
Oh Do You Know the Flower Man / Kizziah Burton
Kizziah Burton lives and works in Hollywood. And this poem - shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2024 - is awash with florescence. And...
252 views1 comment
Alistair Appleton
- Jan 31
- 5 min
What does Buddhism have to say about sexuality and gender?
New member Fran, coming from a progressive Islamic mosque in Canada, was interested in Buddhism’s stance on gender and sexuality and so I...
875 views14 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Jan 25
- 4 min
Worrying is NOT caring
This is an edited transcript of a lovely discussion we had this Tuesday in our anxiety/stress class on Zoom. We were discussing the...
944 views3 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Dec 6, 2023
- 3 min
Discipline 2: The Fragrance of Shila
This transcript is from our 2nd exploration of the paramita of discipline or in Sankrit, shila. From the outside, these disciplines, -...
231 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Dec 6, 2023
- 4 min
Discipline 1 - The Paramita of Shila
In our ongoing exploration of the six paramitas, we have come to the second which is discipline (shila). We can think of shila as a...
187 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Dec 1, 2023
- 2 min
London London
So I was in London last night at the Barbican. My brother, niece and myself had booked tickets to Kyrill Gerstein play Rachmaninoff's...
325 views4 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Nov 30, 2023
- 1 min
Music for Well-Being
I got this interesting link from Reasons to be Cheerful (David Byrne's excellent website). How do concert spaces make themselves more...
235 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Nov 27, 2023
- 1 min
The Sabbath / W.H. Auden
Some pungent Wystan in this moment when it's hard to remain very positive about humanity's inherent goodness. It's such a lapidary poem....
399 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Nov 21, 2023
- 1 min
To Paradise (Tom Adès' Dante)
I have been listening to the last movement of Tom Adès' ballet score Dante which was released on disc this Summer by the LA Philharmonic...
178 views3 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Nov 17, 2023
- 5 min
Generosity 2: The Pinch Point
This transcript comes from the second week exploring the transcendental action (paramita) of generosity. You can join in the cornucopia...
191 views6 comments
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