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...
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Alistair Appleton
Nov 17, 20236 min read
Generosity 1: dana and dzinpa
From the first of two live sessions dedicated to the "transcendental action" of generosity, in November 2023. A recording of the practice...
247 views11 comments
Alistair Appleton
Nov 9, 20233 min read
The Paramitas: where the rubber of practice hits the road of reality
If you've been following our Live Sessions of late, you may have noticed this word paramita cropping up again and again. Apologies if it...
320 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
Oct 21, 20233 min read
How the Holy Island retreat went this Autumn...
Photos from the summer retreat courtesy of Darika Barker and Elaine Gray. Obviously, we didn't have our phones in October! We went to...
1,098 views19 comments
Alistair Appleton
Sep 13, 20231 min read
The Road Home / Gillian Allnutt
Gillian Allnutt is a British poet from the Northeast of the country and the recipient of the Queen's Prize for poetry. This poem is from...
502 views5 comments
Alistair Appleton
Sep 5, 20232 min read
To Autumn / John Keats
Just in case you think I don't like any poetry before 1920, here is the sumptuous "Ode to Autumn" by Keats. Familiar as it is, it's...
445 views5 comments
Alistair Appleton
Aug 23, 20231 min read
A False Awakening /John Burnside
I stumbled across this delicious poem in the London Review of Books (which is my only source of news these days). Burnside is a Scottish...
598 views5 comments
Alistair Appleton
Aug 23, 20234 min read
Make Your Own Retreat
I am a big fan of organised retreats. There is something so potent and human in being with a group of people who signed up for a week or...
547 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
Jun 29, 20236 min read
Going Outdoors to Enter the Presence
I am entering one of my periodic periods of great doubt. I have these on a fairly regular basis - once every five years, perhaps - and...
1,316 views28 comments
Alistair Appleton
Jun 6, 20233 min read
Sometimes A Wild God/ Tom Hirons
Something a little different. A long rollicking carnivalesque of a poem from Tom Hirons , a writer and mask-maker from Dartmoor. (The...
491 views14 comments
Alistair Appleton
May 11, 20238 min read
Victory Mind II: Sleep Is Not Enough
One of the factors that Johann Hari identifies in his excellent book Stolen Focus is the crippling exhaustion that most humans in the...
704 views8 comments
Alistair Appleton
May 6, 20232 min read
Coal Sarcophagus/William Haas
I don't usually care for prose-poems but there are, of course, some masterpieces. (Rimbaud, par example). But I have been really enjoying...
271 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
Apr 19, 20238 min read
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...
476 views6 comments
Alistair Appleton
Apr 19, 20232 min read
Apertura d'ali (Wingspan) / Bartolo Cattafi
Cattafi was one of the generation of post-war Italian poets I was inspired to read at university in the 1980s. He lived through the...
237 views6 comments
Alistair Appleton
Apr 10, 20236 min read
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...
389 views18 comments
Alistair Appleton
Apr 10, 20232 min read
Moment / Wisława Szymborska
translated from Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh This beautiful poem was suggested by Mindsprings regular Mechteld-Hanna...
259 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
Mar 26, 20234 min read
Victory Mind
What if you woke up each morning with a mind completely refreshed? What if your mind could rest on a rich subject for a long time, making...
755 views8 comments
Alistair Appleton
Mar 15, 20232 min read
The Fish / Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore is one of the greats of American modernism. Friend of TS Eliot and one of the most distinctive voices of the age. And this...
221 views3 comments
Alistair Appleton
Feb 21, 20232 min read
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet / John Berryman
Since we're nearing Mother's Day I thought I'd post this extraordinary section of John Berryman's 1953 sequence. Ann Bradstreet was the...
299 views4 comments
Alistair Appleton
Feb 8, 20232 min read
'December 18th' / Anne Sexton
So here's a muscular, sexy poem from Anne Sexton for the beginning of Spring. It's the last poem in her 1969 sequence "Eighteen Days...
1,431 views8 comments
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