Almost Composed

Meditation and curiosity

Of storms and night walking

September 20, 2015

There was a great piece in Tricycle recently, A Gleeful Foreboding, excerpted from Clark Strand’s book Waking Up To the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age. Strand describes what happened when his town near the Catskill mountains was bumped off the grid by a hurricane. “That the larger storms sometimes turn deadly does little to chasten […]

categories: essays, journeys, reflections

The New Default

September 1, 2015

Our gadgets come out of the box ready to bombard us with emails, distract with SMS messages, snare us with headlines, and amuse us with status updates. In our technocratic culture, the expectation is that we are always ready to respond. Yet the pace of information grows ever more frantic. We could create a new default. […]

categories: reflections

The Story of Stuff

July 27, 2015

The Story of Stuff is a powerful indictment of consumerism. In twenty minutes it paints a horrific picture of the planet-stripping supply chain that furnishes us with ephemeral gizmos. For instance, did you know that for every binload of recycling you put out, there are 70 bins of waste produced further up the chain? Most astonishing is […]

categories: reflections

Moving house, the not-so-minimalist way

April 23, 2015

Moving house is a time for deciding what to keep and what to throw away. A chance to be minimalist, if only I had the cojones. We’ve decamped from Cornwall and marched on Devon. Now we are faced with many Things To Do, not least of which is deciding which of my faded treasures and […]

categories: essays, music, reflections

The zenith of stuff

February 24, 2015

There’s a statistic doing the rounds that claims more than 50% of Earth’s species will be extinct within 85 years. E.O. Wilson, the Harvard professor behind this proclamation, has written about interdependence within ecosystems and the increasing pressure human activity is placing on life on Earth. The idea that more than half of our biodiversity – both species […]

categories: essays, reflections