In the Market The lad behind the stall sells me garlic and early potatoes. He isn’t pushy so I return each week to chat and buy. Watching him today in baggy pants I express amused concern as he unloads a box of apples and rises stiff with pain. Eager to help and meet him, with…
Here is a new elegaic poem about the young men who die every few months or so it seems in my home city of Galway, on the River Corrib, on the wild North Atlantic. Its pubs were once described in a Rough Guide to Ireland as full of “a sullen hedonism” which much amused…
An Exhibition of Photographs Taken by Israeli Soldiers During Their Period of National Service Hosted by Trócaire Gallery of Photography, Meeting House Square, DUBLIN. Since Trócaire had awarded me €100 for my poem “Glaciers” I decided to use some of the prize money to visit this exhibition hosted by them in Dublin. I had of…
The Anchorhold “I must go down to the seas again…. To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a Whetted knife….” Sea Fever, John Masefield. There are no ghosts in this house, those that lived here have all left the house in peace. Even the hungered souls that built it died…
What do we mean when we describe a feeling or experience as “spiritual”? In a You Tube conversation with Pyrrho 314, Matt Segal (Footnotes to Plato, see my blog roll) makes some comments towards a definition of Spirituality. I felt we didn’t quite get to grips with it on that occasion and wanted to explore…
(For some reason I can’t get this to copy my actual format of the poem correctly, however, here it is!) Jean Genet Son of a Bitch (A one man show at the Outhouse Dublin) For Zion Ashkenazi “…we hopefully elevate ourselves – without giving in to smugness – above the self-limiting level of voyeurs,…
I was there too! I read a lot of Genet and thought this has to be interesting! And it was….thanks Zion,
The Thwaites Glacier, Antarctica: (pictured below right) http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/05/west-antarctic-ice-sheet-collapse “This Antarctic glacier may be history, says new research. It contains almost two feet of sea level rise, and that’s just the beginning. NASA.” ( by Chris Mooney) The Glaciers (Posted for my friend Rolf) “And death shall have no dominion… Though they sink…
For the link to this lecture go to my friend Matt Segal’s blog at http://footnotes2plato.com/2014/05/10/evan-thompson-ciis-tonight/ (The lecture was given at the Californian Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco.) My comments on this will be general and so I hope understandable even if you have not seen the presentation to some extent. My first worry…
Daniel Barenboim’s East West Divan Orchestra: This is an orchestra formed of young Arabs and Israelis based in Sevilla, Spain, once a centre of Islamic/Jewish harmony. After the concert in Ramallah in 2005: Finally, an emotional Barenboim stepped onto the platform. “It is our belief that the destinies of these two peoples, Israel and Palestine,…
The Hug of Gaia 