Eversden wood is an ancient managed woodland in South Cambridgeshire. Rather than carpets of bluebells as in Hampshire or Somerset the insouciant flowers hide between ferns and saplings.
Longing for the swifts
High summer approaches. For me this time of year is very much associated with that most aetherial of birds, the swift. I’m waiting eagerly for them to arrive. Remembering sitting in the garden at peace on summer afternoons; looking upwards into depth upon depth of blue, where the screaming swifts are seen looping through the sky in their great, unhindered gyres. So sad that their numbers have declined in recent years, not enough people have proper wooden eaves under which they can make their nests anymore.
Orc in the fires of hell
I have just updated our website – let us know what you think of the new look. The featured image is now Blake’s engraving of Orc in the fires of energy, from his book America a Prophecy.
URTHONA Buddhist arts magazine
Explore art & culture from a Buddhist perspective
Welcome to Urthona magazine, taking its name from William Blake’s zoa or archetypal spirit of the creative imagination Urthona blends a Romantic concern with inner and outer spiritual freedom with the insights of the Buddhist East.
Click on MENU items above for online features on Literature, Art & Society, Fine Arts & more. Access all 35 printed back issues at URTHONA SHOP. More on our vision at ABOUT URTHONA link above. Scroll down for EDITOR’S BLOG – musings on art, landscape and spirit of place.
CURRENT issue (35) E-Mag: American Zen
Full contents below. The American Zen issue investigates the influence of Zen Buddhism on American letters and fine arts, from Pound to Cage via Abstract Expressionism.
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Current Issue American Zen – order CLICK HERE
Ginsberg and the Beats – by Acarasiddhi recalling a 50s childhood in California 
The Crack of Vision – Gary Snyder, Pound and American Zen influenced poetry 
Interview with Peter Cavaciuti modern master of Zen painting – photos by Jeremy Peters 
‘Tomo Series 2’: painting by Abhayavajra who talks about a quest for a ‘dimension of changing flow and interaction’ in his artistic process. 
FULL CONTENTS of issue 35 
GARY GACH on Bresson ‘nourishing, noble, needful…’
CLICK HERE for FREE 9 page sample of full 72 page issue
NB The American Zen issue (35) is only a available as digital download due to Covid restrictions. Issue 35 explores the dynamic encounter between American culture and Buddhism, especially Zen in the mid 20th century. From John Cage, to Beat poets Ginsberg & Snyder plus Abstract Expressionist painters such as Mark Tobey. In fact many of the most iconic figures of American arts are on these pages. Contents includes: * The Crack of Vision: Buddhist influenced poetry in North America – Pound to Snyder. * Fine new poetry from Dhivan, Paramananda, Rachel Jagger, Penny Hope and many others. * Rothko: Horizons, Emptiness and Perfect Vision by Donal Mac Erlaine. * Zen and Abstract Expressionism. * Ginsberg and the Beats – a personal memoire of 50s California from Acarasiddhi. * Gary Gach on Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. * Fascinating abstract art from Abhayavajra in Suffolk…
If Romanticism did away with the notion of art as a mirror, D. T. Suzuki introduced another mirror to the discussion: the Zen mirror, an ubiquitous symbol of the clear mind reflecting reality as it is… Suzuki wants it both ways: he asserts the value of originality and creative particularity but insists that this should be neither personal, as the Romanticist claimed, nor social, as many contemporary thinkers argue, but should be based on an immediate access to and representation of reality that transcends the personal and the social.
This quote from David L. McMahon’s groundbreaking study The Making of Buddhist Modernism sums up the encounter between a modernism still deeply indebted to Romanticism and a vision of Zen shorn of its normal cultural and ethical context. This attempt to discover the deepest truth of the everyday, of ‘this very life we are living’ in the words of John Cage, who was profoundly influenced by the writings of D. T. Suzuki, is the topic of our 35th issue. Here we explore the transformative encounter of Buddhism, especially Zen, with 20th century poetry and painting.
Urthona’s Vision
Urthona, appearing once a year, is a lavishly illustrated, 68 page, glossy magazine: with original and inspired poetry, fine art & photography features, reviews plus in depth articles on a fascinating theme chosen for each issue. Themes have included Indian Art, Romanticism, Art & Ecology, Writing as a sacred art…
We explore art, literature, culture and imagination from a modern Buddhist perspective. Our inspirations are William Blake and the Romantics, the zen poets of Japan, symbolists, psychonauts and radicals of all ages and climes.
Editor’s blog: musings on art, literature & spirit of place – scroll down this page.
On top menu above: click ‘ABOUT URTHONA + CONTACTS‘ for more on our vision.
On top menu above: find links to feature pages for longer online essays / art features on many dimensions of art and the sacred for the 21st century.
BELOW: Editor’s blog posts – musings on art, photography, poetry, literature & spirit of place…
New post: a major essay on ambivalent faith and doubt in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill
‘Unction and Slaughter’
Faith and Doubt in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill
by Ratnagarbha (Ambrose Gilson)
The only Megalith in Essex?
This standing stone was spotted just outside Hatfield Forest, north east Essex. Although it has clearly been set up by a farmer just outside his farmhouse as an interesting feature, the stone itself does look very old and extremely weathered. It is some kind of conglomerate with many small pebbles ingrained in the rock. Surely someone trying to manufacture a megalith would not use this kind of stone as it doesn’t look especially mythic or impressive. However its shape is certainly very like some of the smaller standing stones at Avebury. So if a forgery a clever one…
PS I hear rumours of a church somewhere in Essex that is supposed to have a ring of buried megaliths all around the edge of the grave yard. I hope to report on this properly at some point in the future. Any pointers gladly received…
The Old Straight Track
Stourbridge Common –
tracks to nowhere, the iron bridge, memories of the fair…
Stourbridge Common is the nearest piece of semi-rural land to where I live in Cambridge. It is only a five minute cycle ride away but on dark winter afternoons it can take on an epic doom-laden appearance… The straight track across its centre becomes a walk into the infinite instead of a few hundred yards towards the railway bridge.
Watercolour is alive and well
Some fine water colour paintings by Buddhist artist Sudhi S. Pooniyil. He finds inspiration in the village life of his native India, as well as scenes in the UK. More on his website at https://sudhispooniyil.com
Backstreets of academe
Some recent sightings in the backstreets of Cambridge, not exactly dingy but not well heeled either. Raffish encounters with odds and ends…
Golden tunnel
to nothing good
Littoral Fringes of the New Forest
Many of us would like to have a corner of the earth with which we have a special connection. But I suspect I am not alone in finding myself pulled in two directions: there is the place where I was brought up, on the fringes of the New Forest and the edge of the large estuary of Southampton Water – a shoreline but not a seashore, with industrial relics, and intrusive modern gravel banks, a boundary zone for which the word liminal is far too airy fairy…. Continue reading “Littoral Fringes of the New Forest”
