A Sensitivity to Things

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at the age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more [...]

Finding one’s voice as a writer is the difficult but necessary first task facing every new author—spelling and grammar perhaps excepted. While there is no better or other way to become an authentic, original writer than to write, and write, and write… the practise of making perfect, of being true to yourself by finding your [...]