While there is still time

  For my dear friend Reena, gardener, lover of gardens, creator of beauty "Indeed, to garden — even merely to be in a garden — is nothi...

"The Mahabharata is not a work of religious instruction. It is much greater. It is a work of art. It understands men will always fall i...

Barbara Kingsolver was introduced to me by a random foreigner who saw me at a flea market sale and ordered me, "Y...

“Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actual...

"Time is kept and curated in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them. This discreti...

Unhappiness comes to man Through two doorways The first doorway is named Not getting what you want. The name of the second doorway is...

"...Our blindness grows out of the small, daily decisions that we make, which embed us more snugly inside our affirming thoughts and v...

"If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you ha...

Longing In our longing is the foundational human instinct that we are essentially here to risk ourselves in the world: that we are a form o...

"It was only in my forties that I really began to feel young. By then I was ready for it. By this time I had lost many illusions, but ...

"Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn t...

"In his exquisite taxonomy of the nine kinds of silence, Paul Goodman included “the silence of listening to another speak, catching th...

"Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous, ...

The first November tabebuias in Cubbon Park "I am an extremely busy person. I keep an eye on the world....

“…it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used...

"For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love." Carl Sagan in 'Contact'

"I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated...

"I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trau...

 “Planners love telling us which way to walk. Our built environment– especially our mercantile spaces, shopping centres and the like – is c...

"The more difficult our lives, the more a graceful depiction of a flower might move us. The tears — if they come — are in response not...