A meditation on a pandemic life of privilege. As a fairly recent retiree, I was an early adopter of staying at home having followed the sorrowful and ruthless pandemic's progress through China and Asia and then Italy and Spain and Europe and now the hapless USA and Canada and Mexico and on through India - and well all around the globe. Such a long and torturous road. In the hope that poetry is contagious (we know it is therapeutic) -- here is a poem by one of my very favourite poets Phyllis Webb, long-time resident of Salt Spring Island on the wavy west coast edge of Canada's Pacific Ocean. The poem in the video is voiced by yours truly. Behind the voice, you will sense the pandemic hum of the oven baking salmon for dinner, the whirr of the computer cooling down, the whirr of the furnace heating up as the temperature drops to -22C shortly after a snow storm. Such is a lucky life at latitude 53.
Category: spirituality
Retirement 101 – the gym
My spirits are lifted up by good conversation, art, music, and frequent visits to a gym nearby. A public recreation centre, it serves a local community that includes Chinatown and Little Italy, a Somalian community, Indigenous peoples, as well as well as other settler populations. The average salary in the area is a modest $34,000… Continue reading Retirement 101 – the gym
Give Me Too Much: An Ode to Excess
27 July 2019 Today feels very bleak. (A hasty draft journal in time.) Bleakness breeds hasty remedies. Cultish solutions seem tantalizing to thoughtful people. The news of the day is all about the bitter tyrants winning. All over the world. I am caught up in meditating on a death. In the public sphere, the global… Continue reading Give Me Too Much: An Ode to Excess
Zazen
22 May 2010 calm enough after a day at a zen-do: we meet to share tea and chat this morning. Then silence: 30 minutes silent sitting meditation (zazen), 30 minutes silent walking meditation, 30 minutes zazen, 30 minutes silent walking meditation, 30 minutes zazen, one hour work in silence, lunch together in silence (sound of… Continue reading Zazen