A Sensitivity to Things

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 [...]

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, [...]

Here in New Zealand, where real men eat meat and real men are all you meet, vegetarianism remains the practise of people “with a sheep loose in the top paddock.” Or to lose the colloquial, in a game of marbles, the vegetarian would be missing a few. Wooly in the head myself for the last [...]

Quarter acre sections; a sky tower that doesn’t really go all the way to the sky; spotlessly clean suburbs; rolling, semi-green, semi-bald hills covered in sheep and mountain bikers; speedos for fashion rather than the beach; xylophones; a calypso beat, and druids in a city where almost nothing is older than 150 years—just some of [...]

Already at work, early morning here in New Zealand and trying to do a spot of writing before the day proper begins, I had half an eye on the World Cup Rugby, a live game being played between Scotland and Romania—I, the world’s most lukewarm rugby fan snatching a few seconds here and there, eyes [...]

I got hit in the head the other day. Never having been concussed before, it’s hard to say whether I was, or in fact still am, but having headaches two days later probably isn’t a good sign. Boys will be boys as they say—grown men as well. On holiday and playing a game of frisbee, [...]

A tiny dog with a kingly name and a king-sized heart passed away it was reported recently, and were he human, he would have been buried with a medal. George the Jack Russell terrier died after saving five children from a mauling or worse by two pitbull terriers in the tiny Taranaki, New Zealand township [...]

Sumangali.org’s recent musings on Englishness, or eccentricity really—for the two in this particular instance are painted indistinguishable—has led me directly to ponder come celebrate the woolly-brained, cockamamie qualities of my own nation, perhaps not so distant in heart from England—all be we as distant as it is possible geographically. Not so distant in blood either. [...]