A new-materialist meditation woven around four poems by Lucretius, A. R. Ammons, Joseph Blanco White, and Mary Oliver—‘It is only enough to touch the inner light of each surrounding thing and hope it will itself be stirred to radiance’

To read this address please click on the link below: A new-materialist meditation woven around four poems by Lucretius, A. R. Ammons, Joseph Blanco White, and Mary Oliver—‘It is only enough to touch the inner light of each surrounding thing and hope it will itself be stirred to radiance’

A Lucretian Mothering Sunday Meditation

Last year on Mothering Sunday I gave an address called ‘The maternalizing of matter and the materializing of the mother’—A poetic, supreme fiction for our age and, should you wish, you can read it again at the following link: The maternalizing of matter and the materializing of the mother—A poetic, supreme fiction for our age. The Roman poet, Lucretius (c. […]

Facts not fear. Clean hands. Open hearts.—An Epicurean/Lucretian meditation on how to respond to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic

Lucretius contemplating how nature works Introductory meditation (excluding the Lord’s Prayer) adapted from ‘An Epicurean Gathering’ arranged by me, Lewis Connolly (until recently the minister of the Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House) and Dean Reynolds: The Roman poet Lucretius wrote:  In the murk of our darkness, you, Epicurus, raised your blazing lantern to show us the […]

Learning from Lucretius in the shadow of coronavirus

READING: Lines 78-58 from Book VI of the De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) by Lucretius trans. by David R. Slavitt (University of California Press, 2008, pp. 253-254) . . . But people / tend to revert under stress to their earlier superstitions and imagine cruel taskmasters, omnipotent beings we wretches / ought to fear and appease, […]