A Sensitivity to Things

Childhood favourite Kermit the Frog shows that not only kittens and puppies can be cute, as he counts through the letters of the alphabet with a young human who likes cookies.

Football and the art of meditation, a photo sublime on more levels than playing fields, by sublime photographer Pavitrata Taylor. If you see art, try to see the Artist inside it. You will do this only by taking them as one. When you see art, you will feel that inside the art there is something [...]

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 [...]

Out of the corner of my eye someone is waving to me. Out of corner of hearing, headphones on and music playing, someone is speaking to me. “Excuse me…” Seat 23A, right next to the window, United Airlines flight 870 from Sydney to San Francisco, several hours in and several thousand kilometres into journey, I’m [...]

Juvenile most of the time, reviled some of the time, but never banal, the Urban Dictionary provides an alternative take on the everyday, and the night-time in-between. It is dressed downwards of mature sometimes, maybe most of the time, but that is why it is the “urban” dictionary—just like a city, you do not visit [...]

“Go to the French cafe by the departure gate. It’s got really good coffee, and sandwiches too.” Dressed like a character from a Jack Kerouac novel, a connoisseur of places subterranean, my friend knows his coffee, and the city he lives in does too. Forget paired and halved slices of bread, I have been in [...]

My stories often have their origin in something that actually happened – an incident, a memory, something heard. (In this case it was the leap out of a plane at 12000 feet – one of the scariest things I’ve ever done). It’s then a case of finding a voice, letting characters take shape, coalesce round [...]

The following story has sentimental value for me far beyond whatever worth it may possess of its own right and writing. Not only was it written in Japan, penned during the final hours of first visit to a land that has always had a mysterious, wasabi-strong pull, but it was more or less my first [...]