Author Archives: Preston Library Website Manager

The Silvertones : Live at the Windermere Pub on Sunday 1st December 2019 at 7:30pm

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Author Julian Daizan Skinner reading from his book Rough Waking: Tuesday 17 September 2019 at Preston Community Library 7.30pm

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Tuesday 17 September 2019 at Preston Community Library, 7.30pm

Please join us for an evening with Julian Daizan Skinner Roshi, the first Englishman to go to Japan and become a Zen master in the rigorous Rinzai tradition. He will be talking about and reading from his new book, Rough Waking.

Dazian is also the teacher of Samantha Warrington, Preston Community Library’s yoga and meditation teacher.

Rough Waking is a project to raise funds for and awareness of people who are homeless or in prison, and to provide them with yoga and meditation, under the motto:

CHANGE YOUR BODY; CHANGE YOUR MIND; CHANGE YOUR LIFE
These are the three elements to the book.

Prize-winning photographer and meditator, Laz, uses words and images and an intimate knowledge of homelessness to illustrate his path through brokenness to creativity.

Inspired by Zen Master Shinzan’s joke that Zen life combines prison and homelessness, “Autumn in the monastery and other poems,” by Julian Daizan Skinner depicts pains and joys arising through his three decades in the Zen world.

Zen artist Kazuaki Okazaki who, after 18 years incarceration on death row was executed last summer, contributes a sequence of images depicting a spiritual journey from lostness and wandering, through the intense confinement of Zen training, and then onwards into a new homelessness – a vastly expanded realm of liberation and service.

The whole book underscores the Zen emphasis on direct confrontation with reality and how for all of us that alone leads to liberation. 

Please join us for this unique event.

For further information, please contact Samantha Warrington on

07801 697712

By Kazuaki Obazaki; numbered limited edition shikishi card print
Julian Daizan Skinner Roshi

INVITATION TO LOCAL ARTISTS TO PRODUCE ART WORK FOR THE LIBRARY

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Invitation to Local Artists to Produce Art Work for the Library

For the Brent London Borough of Culture 2020, the Council is commissioning local artists to work with each of the libraries.  This includes the four community libraries.  More information, including the brief for Preston Community Library, is on the LBOC website. Go to  https://www.lboc2020.com/opportunities, then look at column headed Museum of All Brent Life: call out for artists and click on link to download the brief. The closing date for submissions is Friday 12th July at noon.