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.
I turned 50 under a Dhaka sun and played hostage to a city din that hurled rickshaw bells, a cawing of Bangla jingles, and early morning drills in intervals at my 4th floor haven. These reminders of place reined me in to my retreat away from the bulging mass of life at my door. But … Continue reading »
The First Rain Majestic, gray clouds wheel past dark peaks. Wind rushes in. The flutter of banana leaves grows tremulous. Droplets of rain pelt down on age-old canopies. Cues to a drama about to unfold. Like wind-up clocks, ox-drawn carts, schoolboys on bikes, and barefoot peasants hauling in the harvest criss-cross the horizon … Continue reading »
Captive, I am no one netted by the clouds Floating wispy and lucent in boundless space Wafting through the trees Slumberous soundless vapor aloft in endless heights Ghosts in an aimless drift agelessly metamorphosing Free, I will sleep tonight in a bed of clouds. Continue reading »
A strange and surreptitious moon steals a kiss of my brow with its thin brush of light in the still of a timeless night. I awake to a crystal ball beaming radiant white, creeping towards the center of my sight from out of the veil that clasps the fathomless universe. A lone watery pearl hangs … Continue reading »
Atop my cold mountain, Mother Nature turned sky to sea and tipped it earthwards With a mischievous eye, She winks at me, calls me as a witness to her untamed fantasy. Oceanic waves cascade over window and roof, boulder and wood, valleys and knolls, reverberating its drumbeat breath through day and night into every infinitesimal … Continue reading »
I am like most people – I like to see my tax money used effectively. I like having an impact on other people’s lives, whether it is in my own community or somewhere else in the world. I care about what happens in Afghanistan or the Ukraine. But I am also a development practitioner and … Continue reading »
They storm the sky announcing the sunset and sharpen their wings on the sky’s blushing hues. They beckon me out onto the balcony of another Pristina dawn. Possessed by their haunting caws, into the twilight I am all at once drawn. Black as tar, countless as the stars, these odd birds rearrange the sky – … Continue reading »
Here we were at the end of a day’s hike, not sure if we should dutifully obey the park’s rules to exit before dark or our own whim to catch a glimpse of the reservoir in the twilight. We opted to risk the last stretch of the trail in the darkness and snaked our way … Continue reading »
You need to sail naked Through what is left of the forest To discover what the earth was in the beginning And then penetrate, deeply moved, Through the spaces of light the river offers, Where the forest and the water balance, Wisely governed by the birds. For it is only here where the earth Is … Continue reading »
The lake languished at twilight, churning out soft ripples that licked the shore. The waters darkened, beckoning my senses to what lurked beneath the surface and in the still of the evening, the plunk of a solitary pike resounded, as if no other creature were alive, except us, to bear witness to its play. We … Continue reading »