Montreal Writer Kai Cheng Thom on learning to love monsters in her work, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars. By Lee Pepper on January 4, 2017 originally posted at http://apt613.ca/writer-kai-cheng-thom-on-learning-to-love-monsters/ Prolific writer, performer, social worker, and spoken word artist Kai Cheng Thom is coming to Ottawa in support of her latest book and first novel. What does that make her, a quadruple threat? Quintuple?… Read More Here Be Monsters
by Charles Eisenstein Originally posted on Nov 10, 2016, at http://charleseisenstein.net/hategriefandanewstory/ This essay has been translated into German as well as Spanish and French. Normal is coming unhinged. For the last eight years it has been possible for most people (at least in the relatively privileged classes) to believe that society is sound, that the system, though creaky, basically works, and… Read More The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story
This monkey’s gone to heaven. . . http://www.historyofphilosophy.net/india-origins King’s College London is offering a free podcast course on the History of Indian philosophy, from the Rg Veda to the Upanishads, to Buddhism and Jainism, Nagarjuna, Advaita Vedanta, the Samkya, to the Mahabharata and much more. There are 32 episodes in all. ‘Origins’ is 1 to… Read More History of Indian Philosophy
Published on Dec 6, 2016 http://democracynow.org – The legendary singer, poet and author Patti Smith performed two songs Monday night at Riverside Church celebrating Democracy Now!’s 20th anniversary. Smith opened with “Peaceable Kingdom,” a song she wrote for Rachel Corrie, the American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003. Smith dedicated the… Read More Patti Smith at DN’s 20th Anniversary
The EcoDharma Centre, Catalonia, is a retreat and training centre of the Triratna Buddhist Community. This brief documentary explains their view of the tensions and fruits of combining spirituality and activism.
I’ve written before about defining shunyata, or ’emptiness’ as “the possibility of existence.” The great philosophical and scientific question is, why does anything exist at all? The Buddhist answer is shunyata or “emptiness,” the possibility (space, potentiality) of something coming into existence. Even Dzogchen Ponlop once said that emptiness is “room”; Chogyam Trunpa called it “spaciousness.”… Read More Shunyata: Creation without God
I’m posting this article because it captures many of the arguments on the left for a stateless transition to a post-capitalist society, achieved not through violent revolution, but through ‘interstitial’ social transformation. “Interstitial” I understand to mean thousands of tiny social movements, in localized places, networked together. (Much of my Ph.D. work, on autonomism and horizontalism, is on this kind… Read More Autonomism: Stateless Post-Capitalism
