Photography

This post was first sent to my newsletter on August 1st, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) *Clouds sailing across [Pangong Tso][wpt]. Click to enlarge* New month, new letter! As usual, click the headers to wander off to the original articles Maria Popova on How Reading Is Like Love Now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being … ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on May 2nd, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) Snow clouds rolling down a mountain peak, near Se La. Click to embiggen I don’t know the name of this bird, I only imagine his glittering beak tucked in a white wing while the clouds— which he has summoned from the north— which he has taught to be mild, and silent— thicken, and begin to fall into the world below like stars, or the feathers of some unimaginable bird ...

I lost my Mai today. Until my mid 30s, I rued the gulf that stood between Mai and me. While my parents insistence on teaching us English, as our primary language has benefited me immensely, in most everything I do, the one thing that I feel sad about is that I speak my mother tongue (Konkani) in a slow halting manner. 1 Which meant that I never could talk well with my grandmother. I am one of her oldest grandchildren, and I never got to have heart to heart conversations with her, the way my other cousins did. And yet … ...

Now we are here at home, in the little nation of our marriage, swearing allegiance to the table we set for lunch or the windchime on the porch, its easy dissonance. Even in our shared country, the afternoon allots its golden lines so that we’re seated, both in shadow, on opposite ends of a couch and two gray dogs between us. There are acres of opinions in this house. I make two cups of tea, two bowls of soup, ...

Help the folks, who need your help the most at this hour! Donate to Goonj, to help our daily wage earners and labourers. click to embiggen … I said to him: “Mr. Muir, someone told me you did not approve of the word ‘hike.’ Is that so?” His blue eyes flashed, and with his Scotch accent he replied: “I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike!” ...

Help the folks, who need your help the most at this hour! Donate to Goonj, to help our daily wage earners and labourers. click to embiggen A young boy became a monk. He dreamed of enlightenment and of learning great things. When he got to the monastery he was told that each morning he had to chop wood for the monks fires and then carry water up to the monastery for ablutions and the kitchen. He attended prayers and meditation, but the teaching he was given was rather sparse. ...