Yearly Archives: 2020 For the last three weeks, fires have been raging across the Western States of the USA: in Oregon, California, and Washington millions of acres of land have been razed, more than 30 people have been killed, and thousands of homes have been lost. I’ve been watching in horror as the images coming out of the […]  India is an intensely sensory experience. For me – a Westerner who grew up in a conservative culture of lowered voices and subdued shades in the northern prairie lands of snow and open spaces – the colours, the smells, the heat, and the press of the crowds in India can quickly lead to sensory overload. […]  Fraser Island is a unique and wonderful place; it is a poem in sand, punctuated by the occasional sculptured rock. I’m not much of a geology student, but the landscape of Fraser Island is a living, pulsing thing that transcends time. As written in the UNESCO-World Heritage listing, the “immense sand dunes are part of […]  The grassy fields outside the Mt Hagen Showgrounds were dotted with clumps of people gathered around jars of body paint and suitcases full of precious feathers. In the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, the annual Mt Hagen Cultural Show was soon to start, and tribal performers from all over the neighbouring Highlands provinces – […]  Sri Lanka is said to be the oldest continually Buddhist country in the world. When Buddhism first spread beyond India, the two countries that embraced the teachings were Gandhara (lands that are now in northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan) and Ceylon (called Sri Lanka since 1972). Buddhist scholars believe that the Buddha visited the island […] |
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