Zen Moments

“Reach out! Take a chance! Get hurt maybe. But play as well as you can…” MAUDE: Like a puff, Harold? HAROLD: Well, I really don’t smoke. MAUDE: It’s all right. It’s organic. HAROLD: I sure am picking up on vices. MAUDE: Vice? Virtue? It’s best not to be too moral. You cheat yourself out of [...]

I lost twin babies to death at a few days of age. That was forty years ago. The circumstances of the time prevented my expression of grief until I recently found catharsis in the writing of the poem below. THE SMILES Tomorrow will be another day, some told me, to offer solace or new hope [...]

“I had a great time…” 11 year old Brenden Foster was diagnosed with leukaemia, three years before this video was made. “The boy who once rushed through homework so he could play outside was now confined to a bed. “I had a great time. And until my time has come, I’m going to keep having [...]

“I don’t think that I have done anything more important in my life…” Twenty years ago, I drove a cab for a living. It was a cowboy’s life, a life for someone who wanted no boss. What I didn’t realize was that it was also a ministry. Because I drove the night shift, my cab [...]

“If you’ve practised with the small things, you’ll be able to deal with the big things.” This one stopped me in my tracks. The Abbot said he was going to get his sleeping bag dry-cleaned, and I thought “Mine could really do with cleaning too”. So I asked him “Could we get my sleeping bag [...]

“The music takes me away…” As with many of us, music provides a wonderful means of escape for me. No matter what mood I’m in, I can always find a song that helps “accentuate the positive” or “eliminate the negative.”  I can sing golden oldies, gospel songs, show tunes, pop hits or something I just [...]

“I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty…” An exerpt from “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron “…Writing about attention, I see that I have written a good deal about pain. This is no coincidence. It may be different for others, but pain is what it took to teach me to [...]

“How do you let yourself be that honest?” March holds a special meaning for me as this was the month of both the birth and the death of one of my best friends, and I’ve just gone back and relived the last days of his life.  I wrote this story and thought I’d share it [...]

“…just for an instant, the entire universe seemed perfectly balanced…” Over the summer after my first year at university, I got a job as a porter at the hospital where my mother worked. Aside from all of the patient transport, waste disposal, message carrying and numerous other duties, one of our jobs was to move [...]

“She asked if I felt frightened… and rather to my surprise I had to say no…” Well, this is how it started. I am a photographer, and Tuesday in Wincanton was a lovely sunny afternoon. I found I had a few minutes to kill before driving to an outlying village were I was booked to [...]