Through Their Eyes: Books by BIPOC Writers
Friends, it’s been a brutal, heartbreaking week. In the U.S., George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man, was murdered in Minneapolis by a white policeman who handcuffed him and, as Mr. Floyd lay face down on the pavement, jammed his knee into Mr. Floyd’s neck...
The Gifts of Eldership
One of the gifts of eldership is that you've experienced the truth of impermanence over and over and over again so that it transforms from abstraction to lived reality. You're no longer waiting for, hoping for, working toward a state of permanence in any aspect of...
Fever Dreams, Pandemic Visions
Instead of waiting, longing, hoping, praying for this pandemic to pass -- which it will, as all things do, though we don't know when, or how, or what our world will look like when it does -- sit with the whole grievous, gorgeous, terrifying truth of it. Sit with it as...
Panther Medicine: A True Fable
My best friend’s cousin, M, kept a pet panther in her apartment in South Bombay’s very posh Marine Drive neighbourhood. The panther was a baby when M’s brother brought it to Bombay -- an orphan he’d found shivering in the bushes near a tea plantation in Assam. M kept...
The Art of Homecoming
Art is made by choosing a set of constraints, using them to create a boundary, and then building a world inside it. With words or paint, metal or wood, musical instrument or food -- whatever your art, it is a collaboration between you, the medium you work with, the...
Desire, Trust, & The Game of Life
You can view any creation through a variety of lenses. For today, consider the unfolding pattern of your life through the lens of a game. Every game has rules that define it, that articulate the boundaries and limits within which the game is played, and the rules of...
The Power of Inner Structure
When external structures fall apart, internal structure becomes essential for your integrity and well being. Structure ≠ rigidity. Structures can be tensile, like bone. They can be flexible and pliable, like skin. They give shape and form to your day. They hold you in...
Covid-19 & the Remaking of Our World
We share this planet with an estimated 8.7 million other species, most of which we haven’t yet identified, the bulk of them microscopic in scale -- including bacteria, viruses, and protozoa, among others. Viruses are different from all other species of life because...
In Praise of Bitterness
When I was a child I loathed the bitter foods that our cook served up several times each week. Karela, also known as bitter gourd. Tittori—a variety of bitter lentil. Methi bhaji, a particularly mouth-puckering species of spinach. Bitter foods had their place in my...
Memento Mori
When I first moved to Canada, nearly half a century ago, I lived in a small, lakeside community of (mostly) holiday homes. Across the lake from my house were the jagged brown teeth of a row of cliffs, locally known as Rattlesnake Ridge. This was sagebrush country,...