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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...

Alistair Appleton
Jun 2, 20228 min read


Lana Turner Has Collapsed / Frank O'Hara
I love Frank O'Hara's poetry and I wrote an IG post on his birthday a few months ago. "One of the most delicious and intoxicating poets I...

Alistair Appleton
May 30, 20221 min read


We're building the ship as we sail it / Kay Ryan
Kay Ryan is an erstwhile America Poet Laureate and a Pulitzer Prize winner. But what is so delicious about her poem are the mordent...

Alistair Appleton
May 26, 20221 min read


Sunday Morning / Wallace Stevens
This long poem by the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens is one of my favourites. He was an interesting fellow. High-ranking...

Alistair Appleton
May 23, 20222 min read


The 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 Appleton
May 22, 20222 min read


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.

Alistair Appleton
May 8, 20223 min read


Finding Adonis
A trip to A favourite London bookshop unearths one of the great poets I’d never heard of.

Alistair Appleton
Apr 21, 20222 min read


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....

Alistair Appleton
Apr 1, 20222 min read


River
Just watched mesmerising film by Jennifer Peedom, simply entitled River. in the tradition of Koyaanasqatsi and Baraka it is mostly images...

Alistair Appleton
Mar 31, 20221 min read


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...

Alistair Appleton
Mar 18, 20222 min read


Every broken heart is sacred
The 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 Appleton
Jan 21, 20224 min read


No more future anymore
This 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 Appleton
Jan 5, 20226 min read


But now there is a forest
This 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 Appleton
Dec 15, 20214 min read


Playing at enlightenment
The fourth of my re-vamped blogs from 2014. This one on play touches on the vexed question of boredom in meditation which usually...

Alistair Appleton
Dec 15, 20214 min read


Like worms towards the motorway
The 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 Appleton
Dec 15, 20216 min read


Intention destroys the zombie mind
Continuing my excavation of blogs from the past. These are my ponderings following a teaching that Ajahn Sucitto gave in Portugal. If you...

Alistair Appleton
Dec 3, 20216 min read


Sucitto Thoughts #1
Today is the birthday of one of my early Buddhist teachers, Ajahn Sucitto, who was the abbot of Cittaviveka monastery in East Sussex when...

Alistair Appleton
Nov 3, 20216 min read


In 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 Appleton
Oct 28, 20215 min read


Coming out is (still) good for you
This 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 Appleton
Oct 11, 20216 min read


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...

Alistair Appleton
Sep 10, 20214 min read
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