You know the drill: I share the best stuff I’ve been reading, listening to and watching lately. Let’s get right to it.

BOOKS

Greetings and welcome to the second edition of Wabi Sabi’s Culture Club! The general idea with this series is that I hype the best media I’ve come across over the past week — books, music, movies, TV — but this week I want to backtrack a bit and talk about the highlights of the year so far. Otherwise I’ll be punishing some amazing work for no worse transgression than coming to my attention slightly before I started the series, and what kind of a writer would that make me? No, what kind of a person? …

One of the ways I’ve been making the last year a little more interesting for myself is keeping a record of every new book I read, film I see, show I watch, album I hear and game I play. (That last one isn’t a long list, my gaming tastes being stuck somewhere around 1999. Just don’t take me on at Crash Team Racing, I promise you it isn’t worth it.)

It’s a fun project. I don’t have an amazing memory, and somehow my aesthetic adventures seem much more solid when I archive them like this. The Buddha might have said…

Well, that was a long gap. I’d love to say I spent the time attaining enlightenment on Mt. Ararat, but “irritating health issues and various urgent things that needed my attention” is a more honest account of events. Hoping to get back into some sort of regular schedule from here on out, but who can predict the future? Anyway, good to be back.

This post is about the separating-the-artist-from-the-art dilemma. There aren’t any easy answers on this one, but I believe that with most thorny questions in life the point isn’t to definitively answer them so much as keep reformulating…

There’s nothing to do. You have no goals. You have no plans. You have no targets. You don’t need to achieve anything. Actually, you shouldn’t achieve anything. Why should you? That sounds like a lot of effort. Stop trying to do things. Stop pretending there’s anything for you to do, even if you wanted to. There’s nothing out there to act upon. You can’t influence a thing.

No-one else exists. They don’t possess anything, not even existence. They have no status, not even the status of being alive. They haven’t done anything. They haven’t achieved anything. They haven’t acquired anything…

This is Part 1 of a series on anxiety and depression. I’m not a psychologist but I do spend a lot of time sorting through my own feelings, pulling them apart and seeing what gives them their juice. I hope these posts will be helpful to anyone who’s ever felt similarly to me for similar reasons.

This post is about some of the things that cause anxiety and depression. The next post will look more closely at what they’re made up of and what they feel like. And the posts after that will discuss some management techniques. …

‘If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire…’ (Matthew 6:30)

The implication being that God loves us more than He loves birds, flowers and grass. But a few months ago I was in the garden watching grass grow — yes, I went through a phase of that when it was last warm enough to sit outside — and it occurred to me that He loves us the same way He loves those things. And I find that weirdly comforting.

Here’s what I mean. God is a…

You have something to say.

It may be something that’s already been said, but all of us habitually forget the things we already know and need to be constantly reminded of them. Maybe what you say is exactly what someone needs to be reminded of, and you’ve said it at exactly the right moment.

Have you ever read something that was so well put and so relevant to the things you’d been thinking and worrying about that it made you cry? I have.

Even if what you say has already been said, you’re using slightly different words to say it…