A Sensitivity to Things

It’s happening right now, and you can board the Peace Train via live video streaming here, a song which Yusuf a.k.a. Cat Stephens has incidentally just finished performing.

With apologies and thanks to Walt Whitman for the title lifted, a brief ode—first published in Inspiration-Letters—to the now faded, sun-filled days of childhood, and the eternal summer of meditation, where the inner child, bathed in a sunshine that will never fade, eternally plays. The journey from child to man is said to be a [...]

As featured in Inspiration-Letters 17, a biographical account of a journey in search of self; a journey in search of the sunlit path. He was a bear of a man, with a bear-like, straggly grey beard, the last vestige and visage of the Rabbinical life-path his Hebrew parents had probably intended, in a preacher-like occupation—Religious [...]

A visit to a Zen monastery in Japan, meeting with a monk, more similarities than meet the eye. Hotel Mets, Ofuna, Japan. On the outskirts of Tokyo, a city that begins and then never seems to end. I am here on a whirlwind, week long visit with Sri Chinmoy and students, sharing a room with [...]

I can’t speak highly enough of meditation. It has truly, irrecoverably changed my life. If someone told you that you could do something for only fifteen minutes a day that would make you happier, less stressed, have more energy and be more creative, you would do it right? Why on earth wouldn’t you? Learning to [...]

Find an empty space in the sky and stare into it. Anywhere. Up there, over here, left of somewhere or right of over there, it doesn’t really matter, just pick a spot and stare, stare and stare. What you find might change the very universe. And it will almost certainly blow your mind… In 1995 [...]

Strangely and very much disconcertingly absent from pen and desk, writing paper blank now curling at the edges these past few months, I’ve finished and submitted a story nay epic 4000 word behemoth to the soon to be published Episode 17 of Inspiration-Letters at the Sri Chinmoy Centre. Here is a sneak peak, teaser and [...]

A trip to visit a mysterious uncle, whose sagely, intuitive advice proved to be presciently exact (with apologies to Sumangali). While still somewhat new to meditation, and some months before becoming a member of the Sri Chinmoy Centre, I discovered to my great joy my Mother’s sister was a practitioner of this new, seductive art, [...]

Thrift stores, cheap chocolates and masterpieces by Van Gogh and Cezanne—so begins the 16th edition of Inspiration-Letters, magazine style forum for inspired writers of the Sri Chinmoy Centre. A fitting beginning it is too, for all the authors are koan-carrying members of a meditation group espousing a philosophy of merging the heights of spirituality with [...]

Time passed writing about passing time in an airport coffee shop… Travelling. Again. In Melbourne Airport, for four and half hours, but not my final destination, or even second to final in this marathon, budget airline leapfrog across the Pacific, Tasman and Indian Oceans. I am in an airport café sipping the oh so treasured [...]