Everything can become an offering
Late afternoon on Friday. The sun had already dipped behind the hills leaving the temple and garden in shadow, but the wide Severn valley and the distant hills ...
Category: musings
Giving up on pefection
I don’t know why I was thinking about perfection. Perhaps it was after spending three hours trying to get a new template for this website to work, before giving...
Paying attention to a world that is falling apart
The clouds are mostly just grey today; a flat sky that only gives up its colour and texture under close examination. I woke up at eight, to the sound of our old...
Fragile and Uncertain Creatures
On the top floor of the temple is a long, high ceilinged hallway between the residents bedrooms. The carpet is a mottled beige, worn down the centre. Dim lightb...
Word of the year 2017
I walked from my office, down the long dark hallway, up the stairs, past the big window that looks over the car-park, answered the door, signed for the parcel, ...
Finding Peace
I had been searching for quiet. The hills are a gift. I puffed up the muddy paths. The hills were covered in rust bracken, wet brown leaves, rabbit nibbled gras...
Dogma, the Kalama Sutta, and a Bad Book Review
Over the Christmas break a book review appeared on Amazon.com that amused me. It was a review of mine and Satya’s book Just As You Are: Buddhism for Fooli...
Free will, love and freedom
There were a handful of Christmas cards on the mantelpiece. We had spent three hours cleaning the flat earlier in the day. Rain clouds were gathering in the dar...
Reasonable attachments?
Are there such thing as reasonable attachments? In the training community I lived in, one of the old rules was that people should not be attached to their rooms...
Absolute Love —Total Freedom
I became a Pureland Buddhist in 2006. I didn’t know anything about Pureland Buddhism at the time. I had been practicing Buddhism for a few years, and then I met...