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Ten years ago I used to take our dog walking these country lanes.  His large, shaggy soulful frame is long gone and I am reminded, as I take the same walk, of his beautiful friendship.  This time through the heavy silent mist of a mid-November afternoon I am walking with an Indian friend from Canad…

This is the draft beginning of a book I am working on.  Any comments gratefully received. Educating the Spirit: changing the way we think. Chapter One:     Young Leaves In the evening we are taken on a boat ride along the River Ganges into the city of Varanasi. This majestic river is soiled by the …

It is cold, very cold and the show is lying heavily beside the roads, on the rooftops and on the pavements.  Krakow in Poland is a beautiful city and in the throes of a cold winter when the clear blue skies allow the sun to glisten on the long icicles that hang from the rooftops there is tremendous…

“Listen.” “I am listening.” “What do you hear?” “Nothing.” “How can you hear nothing?  Listen again.” “I can hear a dog bark….  A car go past….  I can hear the rain on the window…. I can hear my neighbours breathing……..  I can hear my breathing……..I can hear my heart beating………I can hear the blood …

Write poetry - good, bad indifferent.  Write poetry - think of the spaces between words - think of meaning. A  Song:          Last Will and Testament I don’t want to Die a hard-wired, concrete, Plastic-tubed, metallic death. I don’t want to Be surrounded with mechanical sounds drowning Out the voic…

W e are in the rainforest of Southern India among the giant roots, the elephant dung, the unidentifiable song, the close heat and the leeches.  These attach themselves unobtrusively and gorge on our blood, transforming their sleek bodies to grotesque inflations of their former selves, clinging to …

This was written in 1990, 19 years after I first travelled to India. This proved to be the first of many visits since.  I consider my many trips to India to have been an enormous privilege where the intensity of learning has been balanced by an apparent constant lack of comprehension.  And where th…

He is sixteen years old and from Turkey; she is also sixteen and comes from St. Lucia. Shaded from the ferocious Rajasthan sun by the branches of a few trees, a group of young people and three adults from a school in England are visiting India to explore and observe what life is like in a different…

The dog, thin and tired, walks in to the room and lies down with a sigh of contentment.  Its lightly breathing black and white body does not appear to distract any of the group of fifteen children seated in a circle around it.  The dog is quite comfortable on the hard concrete surface and the child…

One is aware of the increasing violence: systemic, institutionalised and accepted as a matter of course.  All religions preach peace, but many form an integral part of this aggression as they are divided, factionalised and have, in the past, contributed to some of the most spectacularly violent pas…

Although the sound of the engine is obtrusive and cuts out much of what can be heard from the shore, the fact that we are in the middle of the Ganges moving steadily towards the city of Varanasi brings intense joy and wonder.  Ahead is the vast iron bridge supporting both the passage of road and ra…

‘Each type of living being is distinct and different.  But when we pierce the veil of difference, we see unity in all beings’    Svetsavatan Upanishad (400-200 BCE) I am not always too keen to use quotations.  It is impressive in terms of demonstrating how well read we are and where other people’s …

I entered teaching governed by fear: fear of making mistakes; fear of authority and fear of the children.  What if I lost control?  What if they answered me back or questioned what I was doing?  What if they did not like me?  Despite my reading all being about the work of J Krishnamurti, AS Neill t…