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...
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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
- Apr 19, 2023
- 8 min
Can we meditate while the world is burning?
A participant in the last retreat I led asked a very good question that often arises in retreats. “It’s all very well us pondering our...
475 views6 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Apr 10, 2023
- 6 min
The Machines are Not To Blame
This is the second in my series of Victory Mind blogs exploring the ways in which we can gird our minds against the incursions of Big...
386 views18 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Jun 2, 2022
- 8 min
Two reasons why “This Is Us” might be the greatest piece of art of the 21st Century
Daniel and I sit down, rather solemnly. Me with a bowl of ice cream. He with a nice glass of wine. We want this to be a good and...
505 views23 comments
Alistair Appleton
- May 8, 2022
- 3 min
Letting the Holy Spirit in my Earphones
Alistair takes time to listen to James Macmillan's dazzling 5th Symphony, Le Grand Inconnu, and feels the Holy Spirit fluttering.
247 views3 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Apr 21, 2022
- 2 min
Finding Adonis
A trip to A favourite London bookshop unearths one of the great poets I’d never heard of.
161 views4 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Apr 1, 2022
- 2 min
Virginia Woolf: I finally get to the Lighthouse
I 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....
307 views2 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Mar 31, 2022
- 1 min
River
Just watched mesmerising film by Jennifer Peedom, simply entitled River. in the tradition of Koyaanasqatsi and Baraka it is mostly images...
93 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Mar 18, 2022
- 2 min
Be 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...
269 views12 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Sep 10, 2021
- 4 min
Our Love for the City
On 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...
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Alistair Appleton
- May 27, 2021
- 5 min
On reading James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’
This is another blog fished out of the annals. I probably wrote it about 10 years ago. I have subsequently read Joyce’s magnum opus for...
44 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
- May 7, 2021
- 6 min
“Being incarnate is a business”, Iris Murdoch.
Adrian’s boyfriend was telling me about epiphytic plants which are not directly parasitic on the tree they dwell on but rather hop on…
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Alistair Appleton
- Apr 23, 2021
- 4 min
The Supersumptuous
That voice is all wrong, really. It’s not formal, it’s not ‘correct’ but it gushes and it’s unstoppable. It IS supersumptous. And that’s wh
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Alistair Appleton
- Mar 5, 2021
- 8 min
Mother Nature doesn’t care about suffering. Buddha does.
I have been really deeply inspired by the experience of leading the Dharma Days for Mindsprings. After my initial introduction to the...
38 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Jan 14, 2021
- 6 min
Language #3: Thinking and Language as the Bridge of Love
NOTE: I think in this last blog I am in some sense arguing myself OUT of a position that I have thoughtlessly held for many years. That...
8 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Jan 14, 2021
- 5 min
Language #2: The Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic
In the first part of this blog on language and thinking, I argued that the human experience of thinking is fundamentally grounded in...
2 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Jan 8, 2021
- 5 min
Language #1: Cutting your thinking mind some slack
I’ve been grappling with the issue of language/thinking for many decades, but lately have had a few clarifying insights that I’d like to...
10 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Apr 14, 2019
- 2 min
United Simplicities of America
2 weeks in LA and Mendocino County, 2 hours North of San Francisco. Have been unconsciously avoiding America ever since Bush came to...
7 views0 comments
© Alistair Appleton 2022
Mindsprings Meditation | 5 Coastguard Cottages, Seaford, BN25 4AR | mail@mind-springs.org
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