Art = suffering: Snicket

[Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket] said people are attracted to dark and subversive stories this time of year, in part because of the dark and cold outside.
“In real life, I prefer miracles and goodness. In a work of art, I prefer the opposite. I think people often get confused over what they like in one [...]

Exciting times

This from the Spiritual Cowgirl site of author Sera Beak. She wrote The Red Book, and is collaborating with B.C. filmmaker Velcrow Ripper, who just released the documentary FierceLight this fall.
This is taken from Beak’s blog post about an interview with Joanna Macy – eco-philosopher and scholar of Buddhism, deep ecology, and systems theory.
Joanna began [...]

I’m with this guy

‘Tis the season. The season to climb under your bed and not come out until the Boxing Day sales. I don’t want to come across as Grinchy, but puh-leez … the consumer orgy has reached such a pitch that even the consumers are not enjoying it anymore. Will we ever smarten up?
This item dates from [...]

Good-guy survey

The folks at non-profit Ecotrust Canada (“building the conservation economy”) are conducting a survey of WestCoast residents.
At 30 minutes it’s not a toss-off, but i for one am a great believer in having reliable information to hand when people make decisions that affect us all. Too often it’s seat-of-the-pants or shoot-from-the-hip, and too often it [...]

Shenpa

Stumbled across in At the End of the World (Economy), What Will I Need?, by Linda Solomon in The Vancouver Observer:
Shenpa, Chodron says on her audio book Getting Unstuck, is the “hooked quality,” the “attachment that is a fundamental part of the human condition.” She says that in order to transcend staying hooked to habits [...]

Movement—but to where?

I’m off tomorrow (Tuesday) to Tofino for 4 days. Then it’s a house/cat/dogsit in Ucluelet for a week. Then it’s … well, i really don’t know. There’s a standing offer to be “houseboy” for an executive-type gal in Victoria, though neither of us seems to have any idea what that means.
But there are also a [...]