This week's episode is a wonderful conversation from our archive of live events here on The Buddhist Centre Online, featuring our host Paramananda and his guest Maitridevi, Chair of Taraloka Buddhist Retreat Centre for Women in Wales.

Starting from a poem by W.S. Merwin, an initial conversation about gratitude for life despite all our knowledge of sorrows blooms into a shared set of reflections on impermanence, on our lack of centrality as a species, and on meditation as an exchange of gifts between us and the earth.

How do we activate a sense of everything being alive? Maitridevi evokes ideas of a 'Buddhist Animism', and of the personification of the earth as Green Tara, derived from Dridha, the ancient Indian earth goddess. She and Paramananda explore the shamanic, the punk, the Delphic and oracular; all in the service of uncovering how genuinely sacred wisdom and energy might be said to come up out of the earth. This is an intimate, ultimately encouraging exchange about the great conundrum and tension there to be experienced in anyone's spiritual practice: that the world is a mess, and yet the world is always awakening.

Join Paramananda and Maitridevi under the great tree of life, beneath the vast, open sky...

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W.S. Merwin, 'Thanks' (from ‘Migration: New and Selected Poems’)

W.S. Merwin, ‘Thanks’ (slightly different version)

‘The Blue Marble’ (the earth seen from Apollo 17, original photograph, 1972)

‘The Blue Marble’ (updated image, 2002)

The concept of ‘Viriditas’ or 'Greenness' (as employed by Hildegard von Bingen)

‘A reckoning for our species’(on Timothy Morton)

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Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission.

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