A Southerly Aspect

scale

asoutherlyaspect — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 11:49:55 +0000

‘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

creative

asoutherlyaspect — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:14:05 +0000

I’ve not blogged for ages, mainly because I’ve been being creative in other ways:

st bride’s centre

asoutherlyaspect — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 14:30:55 +0000

You really should visit www.stbridescentre.co.uk. We are a very cool bunch of people doing very cool things.

defining history

asoutherlyaspect — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 13:33:48 +0000

‘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

asoutherlyaspect — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 11:08:27 +0000

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

asoutherlyaspect — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:56:01 +0000

”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

lakeview

asoutherlyaspect — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:51:34 +0000

Property number four of an ever increasing design portfolio. Small, yet quite divine.

sarah and adam

asoutherlyaspect — Thu, 06 May 2010 12:50:43 +0000

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

asoutherlyaspect — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:43:27 +0000

‘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

asoutherlyaspect — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:32:59 +0000

‘‘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.’’