A Southerly Aspect
fresh perspectivescale
‘It was logical and natural to produce, consume and organize as locally as possible, which inevitably meant on a smaller scale. Therefore, to him the question of size was an overriding and overarching principle. Beyond a certain scale the people involved are disempowered and a bureaucratic machine takes over. Large hospitals, large factories and large businesses lose the purpose of enriching human wellbeing and become obsessed with maintaining and perpetuating the organization for its own sake. Therefore, it could be said almost invariably that if there is something wrong, there is something too big. As in economics, so in politics. So Schumacher believed in small nations, small communities and small organizations. Small, simple and non-violent were his three philosophical precepts’
Satish Kumar
st bride’s centre
You really should visit www.stbridescentre.co.uk. We are a very cool bunch of people doing very cool things.
defining history
‘We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage — almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.’
Thomas Cahill
Pace
Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.
Alan Watts
the daily wonder of life
”People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the curious eyes of a child – our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
sarah and adam
Sarah and Adam are two very special people doing a very special thing for Douglas. They’re currently somewhere between Lands End and John O’Groats, pedalling like their lives depended on it, to raise more than £3,500 for the refurbishment of St. Bride’s Centre. You can follow them here: http://stbridescycle.wordpress.com. Send them messages to help keep them going please!
me, the stranger
‘We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity — but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our “biography,” our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards. . . . It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?
Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn’t that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?’
Sogyal Rinpoche
raymond carver’s late fragment
‘‘And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.’’
