Dharma Library

Written on Writing Retreat, May 24th 2024

Walking through the wet grass, with a notebook and pencil in my pocket, towards the river bank. The Rowan blossom is swaying in the slight wind offering plates of bunched, white, pearl buds. A few have opened into five white petals, crowned and softened with feathery stamens. Pausing to gaze, a moment of delicate awe arises. 

With loppers in hand I…

1994 

I attend my first Western Zen Buddhist retreat at Maenllwyd. The small Welsh farmhouse stands on a hillside at the end of a rough track below a narrow wooded valley, which leads up to a bare horizon. It just sits there, with no electricity, amidst the fields of sheep, aloof and barely visible from the straggly village some way below. The eastern horizon offers wide skies for the sunrise and…

Hughie Carroll’s public début as a poet began on social media during the first national lockdown in May 2020. The variety of direct, colloquial, honest, and tender poems were immediately engaging: pared to the core and punchy. I joined with the many who encouraged what rapidly became two books of poetic memoir: Yarn and Sunshine and Shadow. 

The early poems take us to the perilous edges of being…

I was privileged to be with Iris on two occasions during her final days, when she had gone over to palliative care and was, with cheerful equanimity, waiting to move on... A long dedicated Follower of the Way, Iris had admirably completed the Work, and recently had had two out-of-body experiences -- a preliminary reconnaissance perhaps? I was hugely impressed and not a little envious!

Iris was…

Earlier this year Nick Salt and Marian Partington, after many years of partnership, decided to get married. We joined our Quaker friends at the wonderfully remote and scenically situated Meeting House, The Pales, in Mid Wales, a place of stone, silence, air and hills. It was a beautiful occasion, which we all appreciated, Quakers and Chan practitioners together. Good wishes Nick and Marian. Eds. 

squatting on my heels
splayed fingers of my right hand
sinking into mud
your throne my right thigh
you wave your ‘glow stick’
your left hand holding mine, lightly,
in the Kennel Fields.

your wand flexible,
like the stem of a water lily,
striped, luminous you run your finger
over the arc: yellow, green
red, you stroke the fire
works into life, stir the air,
‘I am making them!’

on the black screen they sear…

My friend Chloe and I arrived at HMP Grendon and Springhill prison in early April this year. The front tyres of the car bumped over disinfectant saturated lumps at the top of the drive. We were directed to halt, exit and paw the squelchy pads with our shoes, before the back tyres got their lethal drench.¹ Did they have sheep here? 

The prison officer uniforms began too. They seemed quite friendly…

Our kitchen table is about 15 miles away from Maenllwyd. At last it is free from stamps, labels, subscription reminders and freshly printed WCF matter. Doing this mailing work is like sitting. Thoughts and images arise and fall. I watch them as my hand movements become more automatic. A pair of roguish Tibetan monks in the Golden Temple in Patan, Nepal come to mind. They sat at dawn muttering…

Not many of us have to endure for years the disappearance of a loved one. To discover that the loss was due to horrendous murder is even rarer. Yet, in places like Kosovo or Kurdistan this experience is something of a commonplace. The anger, indeed fury, can reach out to strike down whoever or whatever is deemed responsible. Justice is not always easy to be done. Killing is easier. So the cycle…