Category: Articles

  • ART SKILLS TRAINING WORKSHOP IN KENYA

    Art and the Teacher’s Eye: Arts Skills Training Workshop for Teachers, Kenya. On Tuesday the 8th of October I will be in Kericho, one of Kenya’s main tea plantation towns in the upper Rift Valley region, to meet up and make art with twenty secondary school teachers from four schools in the area. The teachers…

  • WATER: THE ESSENTIAL SPIRIT OF PLACE

      Deep inside us we all know that the challenges we face as individuals and as a community are not merely of an economical and technological nature. They concern our basic values and our fundamental conception of what it means to be human. This is the story of the substance that makes life on earth…

  • AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIEN GRYPE: NEW LIFE THAILAND

         JULIEN GRYPE, CO-DIRECTOR OF NEW LIFE THAILAND  We’re sitting in an airy little room at the end of a row of units used as accommodation for the volunteers and residents of New Life Thailand. This room is commonly used for counselling, life-coaching and therapy. Julien sits across the table looking calm despite his busy schedule…

  • THE THREE INTERRELATED Ds

    The Three Interrelated Ds: Death, Dan, Development                                                           A funeral procession in Boudha, Kathmandu   Death is the theme of today. Mark died ten days ago in a dramatic incident on the then…

  • THE PILOT AND THE PRIEST

        The Pilot and the Priest   A priest dies and is waiting in line at the Pearly Gates. Ahead of him is a guy who’s dressed in sunglasses, a loud shirt, leather jacket, and jeans. Saint Peter addresses this cool guy, ‘Who are you, so that I may know whether or not to…

  • Mindfulness and Me

    Mindfulness and me I was born in India to Buddhist parents. My father was a Buddhist priest. However, I have never been a devout Buddhist.  In fact, I was sent to a Roman Catholic school in India and I learnt more about Hinduism and Christianity than my father’s religion. I have heard a lot about…

  • EAGLE’S WINGS

    Eagle’s Wings There is a story about a traveller who, climbing among mountains, came upon a village. Ramshackle and uncared for, it’s dwellings pitched here and there on sodden ground, its tenuous life seemed almost exhausted.   Passing through the outskirts

  • Holy Island

      HOLY ISLAND: THREE PERSPECTIVES You can’t come to Holy Island and not be impressed! For the naturalist, there is an abundance of wild plants including bluebells, primroses, wild strawberry, wild thyme, bog myrtle, the curiously-named quaking grass and pale butterwort, an insectivorous perennial that gets its nourishment from various flying bugs. As well as the…

  • INTERVIEW WITH JOHNNY HO by Albert Harris

      The Vajra Buddhist Centre in Singapore is at the top of a narrow wooden staircase, the entry to which is through an unassuming doorway on the busy corner of Geylang and Lorong 40.  At the side of the doorway is a Chinese vegetarian restaurant, a rarity in this city of gastronomic diversity.  I’m here…

  • LIVING IN A TECHNOLOGICAL WORLD by Vicki McKenna BA Lic Ac

    A High Tech Flood Many of us are finding the digital revolution to be overwhelming. Some of us are in agreement with the novelist Jonathon Franzen when he calls Twitter “unspeakably irritating…” and describes Facebook as “all one big endless loop…” Still we flood the world with our texts and tweets – in Scandinavia more…

  • Tweet Your Heart Out

      Twitter is funny, kind of strange.  And trying to explain it to someone who has never used it is equally strange: ‘ So, you write short passages of text, no more than 140 characters, about anything you want (you can add pictures too) and post it for mainly strangers to see.  And people follow…