The biggest lessons sometimes come from the smallest things. This was the case for me this morning in meditation. It started with a small sandfly of some sort that flew in and landed on the windowsill right beside the Buddha statue I was focussing on in meditation. It landed, wandered around a little, then just stayed in the one place. I shifted my focus to it and watched it waiting for it to move again but it didn’t, it just sat there.
Continue reading “Sandfly life”
We poor scribblers find inspiration in the most unlikely places. An idea then picked up can lead down all sorts of paths previously unknown. This was the case recently when I was watching an episode of “Deep State” where the character played by Walton Goggins recites part of a poem as an epitaph for one of his companions who was being buried. The words “miss me but let me go” struck a chord within me and I had to see if I could find the source of this poem, if there was one. Continue reading “Let Me Go”
You know you are getting old when you have the following happen to you. We were sitting in the car at traffic lights when my wife innocently asked me “How do you feel about dying?”. I thought about it as we travelled through the intersection and then blurted out “I’m quite looking forward to it really”, a response that nearly caused my wife to run off the road. Continue reading “Beyond?”
Did you remember to take a breath in just a second or so ago? Or perhaps exhale the previous breath? Did you remember to make your heart take another beat or to push some more blood around your body? Or recirculate the blood that was coming back in to your heart? No you didn’t did you? Well, yes you probably did but not consciously. Continue reading “Beliefs and other shortcuts”
News has come through of yet another drug related death at a music festival. What a dichotomy, a festival of youthful enthusiasm and enjoyment of music marred by a death from a drug presumably taken to heighten the enjoyment and experience of the occasion. What a waste. Continue reading “Test or Not”
We have two elderberry trees in the garden outside my study, framing the window on each side with a swathe of green leaves and in their season, magnificent white blooms setting their berry fruit as they in turn expire. These leaves have lately given me a pleasant point of focus during my meditations and I have shared this view with you in the image above. As I sat meditating on the elderberry leaves one day last week a movement to my right caught my attention. Continue reading “Just A Leaf”
What is it with Halloween anyway? What a weird festival it is if the word festival could even be attributed to this very strange event. A date in the calendar when people appear to adopt all manner of pagan rituals and superstitions like ghosts, zombies, witches and skull sculpted pumpkins. When cruelty and fear becomes acceptable for people who for the other 364 days of the year are usually kind and considerate Christian people. Continue reading “The Halloween Question”
Willow stands silent and still in a front yard at the end of the main street. Obviously once a model, but her black dress, changing with the seasons, her pointed hat, broom, and a wand grasped lightly in her right hand suggest another occupation now, perhaps touching on the occult. Her presence always attracts attention, sometimes with approval, sometimes with a smile, sometimes with a little superstitious fear and trepidation, sometimes a lot of superstition and judgement leading to complaints and requests for her removal. Mostly though curiosity. Why? Why is she there? What does she represent? Continue reading “The Odd Thing About Willow”
My dear old Granpop often said “Ahhh getting old’s a bugger” and I can hear him saying it still after all these years. Please pardon the vulgarity but that is exactly what he said and to replace “bugger” with something more acceptable would be to lose the strength of feeling in his voice at the time. Of course what he meant by the expression was that getting old wasn’t something he was enjoying at all. As this baby boomer, a so-called New Age man, heads into Old Age I am starting to appreciate the depth of feeling and the essential truth in his words. Continue reading “New Age Old Age”
The gift of life comes with its inevitable companion, the sentence of death. You can’t have one without the other, there is no choice. You live, you die. As soon as you start living the clock starts ticking. Every life, human, animal, plant, no exceptions. There is no control other than adding the full stop through suicide, self-destruction. The length of the sentence is arbitrary and therefore unknown, unlike the sentence pronounced by a human court sitting in judgement. The sentence though is full of commas and colons and semicolons and capitals and hyphens, all defining the events of our life. But where does the natural judgement on the length of the sentence come from? Continue reading “The Sentence”
Weekly episodes on whatever catches my eye but with a keen interest in hearing the story behind blues musicians and craftsmen
Mike Stacey 2016
