To inspire my friends who shun the cold and the snow, here are a few choice photos of Quebec City at the most lovely time of year, with Christmas cheer, ice skating under the moonlight, and a German Christmas Market to bring on the season that everybody loves to escape, except me . . . come …
At Kinney Lake, so placid and perfect it might shatter if you coughed, we were still another 15 kilometres from Berg Lake at the foot of Mount Robson, the highest mountain in the Canadian Rockies at 3,964 meters. It was the last and most formidable hike of our journey. We would be gaining an elevation …
One of the most magical cities I have ever been to, Sanaa, the capital city of Yemen, is like stepping into a dream and turning the clock back 2000 years. I never would imagined how many times I would fall in love with the places I have been called to and this one stole my …
“A cloud gathers, the rain falls, men live; the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die. In the deserts of southern Arabia there is no rhythm of the seasons, no rise and fall of sap, but empty wastes where only the changing temperature marks the passage of the year. It is a bitter, …
Be the motion of my breath and the salt of my sweat. Come in, come in to my heart and be the song that never ceases humming and humming, joyous, yes, in being, timeless yet forever changing, day after day, wave upon wave, no two ever the same. Let me be your ears. Hear the …
The Himalayas has been the abode of saints and yogis for over 5,000 years. Livings in caves thousands of feet removed from human settlement, the sages continue to be the source of wisdom for civilization. As high and wide as the Himalayan mountains themselves, stretching over 1,500 miles in length and reaching to 29,000 feet …
“Meanderings” is my own ideal of a space where I am allowed to meander, not aimlessly, but rather seamlessly, between the mundane and the exotic, or one corner of my world and another. I join up all the pieces of the fragmented self in the way we live our lives into an integrated whole. Here, I don’t have to leave a part of me “at home” when I get on a plane to Burundi or Bangladesh and call it work. There is no compartmentalizing between the metaphysical, the natural world, my sense of social justice, and the methodological issues that dog me on the job. In meanderings, I concede that every experience and thought I have belongs to the personal.
As someone who has spent a lifetime traversing different cultures, borders, and geographies, here I am able to build the bridges where there were no connections before, all on the plane of my own life journey. But the most formidable boundaries are erected by the mind and those are the world we carve out of our roles, identities, and presumptions. In this space, I am without a role. I am who I am, inviting the heart into conversation with the mind or the body or the soul, sustaining one another like old friends. And I do not need to show up with answers; on the contrary, meanderings ushers me into the play of life with a question and where it leads me, I am only certain to find another question. All of it is just fine.
A bucolic, sylvan lifestyle has always appealed to me. For as long as I can remember, I have secretly harbored a longing to live “in the country.” But my career has kept me tethered to an urban abode. Admittedly, I have managed to abscond from the megalopolises of Paris, Berlin, Cairo and Dhaka to a … Continue reading »
It takes some courage at first to ward off the impending sensation of wet and cold. I overcome it by the strong desire is to accompany my friend into the dark waters that will envelope our bodies permitting no view of what lurks below. As we wade further in, the skin begins to warm and … Continue reading »
If time does not exist, then it cannot be ceaseless. Sitting at the boulders’ edge of the Potomac River at the tail’s end of a craggy, waterlogged path, I sense something more in my connection to the fast and furious current, more than the rapturous beauty of nature’s wild rush. It’s that endless quality of the … Continue reading »
My mind has a tendency to switch to the quest channel – tuning in to the endless search for answers, the meaning of life, the expression of multiple universes, the space that exists within the atom, until the search for my cell phone or my keys jolts me out of cruise control. What truly keeps … Continue reading »
I am reviving my poetic version of Bangladesh below for my readers and sharing photographic memories from my recent trips. The first is set is a boat trip with some girlfriends on the haors under the rain in Sunamganj: And the second set is a tea estate in Sylhet: And here is my dedication to Bangladesh, … Continue reading »
We are creatures of habit. As are our pets. I marvel at the way my housebound grimalkin contentedly repeats the same ol’ routine every day. At the sound of the living room door, she creaks her way to the fridge, those old bones, and still gets there before I do. She does not eat salad … Continue reading »
Most people, as they get older, are forced in one way or another to think about what they eat. Fortunately, I have not had medical reasons to do this; I am grateful for my partner whose athleticism has made him a tad health-conscious. I admit the happiest outcome for me in greening my diet has … Continue reading »
Sitting on the shore of Heart Lake in the Adirondacks, the perfect spot for recovering from yesterday’s strenuous hike and for contemplating . . . lies. It has been a few weeks since I returned from a field visit in South Asia for a pilot and training on data collection tools. We were assisting a … Continue reading »
I thought it appropriate to announce my blogsite on the occasion of the summer solstice, what we in the North know as the longest day of the year. The day celebrated by ancient civilizations the world over, the solstice is a festive event well known to the Celts, the Sioux, and even in Quebec where … Continue reading »
What could be more mundane than milk, you ask. What could be more basic to all of creation than a mother’s milk? And what could be more available at any street corner anywhere in the world (okay, except Asian countries) besides bread but cow’s milk? In India, you’re almost sure to get it fresh from … Continue reading »