Barry Graham's Blog, page 10

Not all members of the Zen sangha are human

This morning I sat zazen by the River Kelvin, and was joined by a colourful companion who sat on my robe for an hour.

Glasgow shows its welcoming heart by rejecting trump

Photo: Bob McDevitt Yesterday, thousands of people gathered in George Square, Glasgow, to protest Donald Trump's visit to Scotland. There were elderly people, small children, and all ages between, people of various nationalities and ethnic backgrounds. I was fortunate enough to be one of them.

The protest, which lasted for three hours, was entirely peaceful. There was a counter-protest of sorts early on — made of up four people — but the police, who were amiable and professional throughou...

Good advice in Glasgow

Ten Little Brexiteers (And Then There Were None)

Events in the British government since last night remind me of Agatha Christie's novel Ten Little Indians.

Butterflies and other people

Photo: Benny Mazur Fourteen years ago, I was living in a house on the edge of woods, on the edge of Chattanooga, Tennessee, between a sewage plant, an American Indian burial ground, and the state mental hospital.

Outside my house I saw a butterfly, the most radiant being I had ever seen — blue and black and ivory, incandescent. A friend later identified it as a spicebush swallowtail.

The lifetime of Papilio Troilous is, at most, about 14 days, so the one I met has been dead for many butter...

Summer day in Maryhill, Glasgow

Night Exposures by Gerry Loose

Night Exposures , the new poetry collection by Gerry Loose, has just been published. Here's what I said in my blurb for the cover:

In the poetry of Gerry Loose, medicine and sickness heal each other. His Dharma eye sees the unity of the relative and the absolute, the local and the cosmic, the personal and the political. He is an artist beyond category, and this may be his best book so far.

Agnes Varda's Vagabond

I saw Vagabond at The Glasgow Film Theatre more than 30 years ago. I never saw it again, because it seemed to disappear quickly, and there was little discussion of it in English-language media. But I've thought of it often, and still remember it vividly, so it's good to read this appreciation by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

Emotional abuse

Richard Powers: "We're completely alienated from everything else alive"

I think humanism is the cause of most of the problems of the communities of this planet (including human communities), so I'm happy to see a small intellectual trend turning against it. The latest is this from novelist Richard Powers.

"Environmentalism' is still under the umbrella of a kind of humanism: we say we should manage our resources better. What I was taking seriously for the first time in this book was: they’re not our resources; and we won’t be well until we realise that."