The Sound of Silence

Following the breath as it comes in and as it goes out is a practice found in almost all spiritual traditions, and is the simplest of all forms of meditation.…

I once owned a netsuke – a Japanese ornament, about the size of a walnut, made of ivory, and traditionally worn on a leather tassle suspended from one’s belt. It…

One of Laurens van der Post’s most famous Bushmen stories is about the Great White Bird. One day a young hunter stops to drink from a stream. In the water…

I have recently found myself pondering the nursery rhyme: How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and ten. Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again –…

A circle until filled contains only space, nothingness, just as the word ‘O’ has to be filled with meaning. When the actor playing Othello comes on stage saying, ‘O! O!…

Recently I wrote about the remarkable Etty Hillesum who died in Auschwitz in 1943. In so many ways she reminds me of the American poet, Emily Dickinson, who, like Etty,…

An elderly friend wrote to me recently telling how she awoke one night feeling so ill that she thought she would not be able to make it to the bathroom.…

Travellers on the London Underground are used to the announcement: ‘Mind the gap!’ This is to alert them that between the platform edge and the entry into the train there…

Wendy Moffat, in her biography of the novelist E.M. Forster, describes how, during the First World War, Forster served in the Red Cross in Alexandria as a volunteer, and spent…

Some time ago a member of our meditation group went to stay with her sister in the Channel Islands. She had just had a major operation and sought, as she…