A misty moisty morning today, as we used to say on misty days when I was growing up. I think we got this from Maddy Prior – we often listened to Steelye Span on Saturday mornings, and I recall what was then Maddy’s crystal clear, high, pure voice, with a hint of danger, like a fast rushing mountain stream, singing something like ‘One misty moisty morning when cloudy was the weather, I met a ragged old man all dressed up in leather’. Quite what the ragged old man was up to I don’t remember, but I expect he was up to no good and that Maddy was more than a match for him.

Continue reading “Editor’s blog – Notes from an English Village”

Mist rising off the damp dark fields at the front of our cottage this morning. Not river mist, but fine wraithlike tendrils of mist rising from the strength of the sun on the damp earth. Not easy to photograph, but a fine sight, telling of the increasing power of the sun, and the waning of winter. The monochrome drama of the drifting white mist over the raw, inert black earth  holds my attention for some time. Then my eye is drawn to a lonely farmstead on the horizon, with its guardian oak. The day is widening, and hazy blue skies are promised.Continue reading “Editor’s blog (notes from an English village)”

We are already hard at work on issue 30, which is going to be a celebratory issue, Urthona is 21 years old! We will allow ourselves the indulgence of a little reminiscence about the early days of the magazine, and how its vision was originally forged. We plan also to have some material on William Blake, our guardian mentor, as well as two big features on great movies.

Ratngarbha

Issue 26 is out and about in the shops, and we are looking into a distributor on the East Coast of the USA. We are starting to think about issue 27, which will be on the theme of Buddhism, culture and ecology. Views of nature, and the natural, are as many and various as there are human beings. In my article for the upcoming issue I will attempt to interrogate the notion that nature is the only valid category of reality, which is a reaction to the previous notion that all values must come from the human. Buddhism has an amelioritive stance, which is that man is a particular node of being within the much vaster natural cosmos, which includes the imaginal as well as the physical. I will be looking at how the romantic stance of Blake has definite affinities with this view.Continue reading “Editor’s Journal 8th September 2009”

Last night I went to a very interesting talk here in Cambridge on the theme of Wabi Sabi as a buddhist practice. Wabi Sabi is a Japanese idea which is very hard to sum up in a few words. The speaker Vajradarshini brought together Wabi Sabi as an aesthetic quality of imperfection and transience with Wabi Sabi as an attitude to life. When you ask Japanese people what Wabi Sabi is, they may point to a tea house, or a cracked pot, or touch their chest and say ‘Japanese Heart’.Continue reading “Editor’s Journal: 26th June 2009”