Hello again! We're back for a new season of The Dharma Toolkit podcast from The Buddhist Centre Online. We've had a wee break, passed through fleeting summer, and are turning towards the first fall/autumn of these strange, pandemic times ready to renew our own sense of connection through community with you. Welcome aboard!

We begin again by following up and extending our previous mini-series 'The Many Jewels: Buddhism, Writing and the Arts' about the place of poetry and art in forming a response to sorrow, to challenge, to life itself. Once more our co-host is Padmacandra, helping bring together voices and experiences that can speak to why this is both urgent and profoundly hopeful: sounding and standing through the beauty and pain with the huge perspective of the Dharma as a backdrop, akin to the universe itself, whether starry or starless.

Today we're with Sahajatara, exploring creativity and meaning at the juncture between life and death. Encountering strange creatures at the edges, feeling for the depth of the blue sea and of the earth "Apparelled in celestial light". Waiting for something to arise in the light and dark of it all.

Ted Hughes looms large; Elizabeth Bishop comes in; William Stafford speaks with the Muses; and the mad woman at the shore is there with us as the conversation unwinds into personal myth, mundane magic and the practice of the 'soulful life'.

'Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood' by William Wordsworth

Elizabeth Bishop: 'The Moose' and 'At the Fishhouses'.

The French Lieutenant's Woman (film)

'Apparition of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary' by Janet Gyatso

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Check out our Dharma Toolkit space for details of all we have on offer to help you make it through the weirdness and stay inspired.

Come meditate with us any week day!

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Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission.

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