Serendipities Of A Nomad's Life

I haven’t been this far north, and in Canada. at this time of the year for almost a decade, so forgive me for wanting to celebrate the rising of the sun this morning, December 21st, 2011 at 8.37 am local time in Alberta, western Canada. It’s been quite a shock to see – and feel [...]

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2008 Return to Gau Mukh – the sacred source of the Ganges river It’s hard to describe how emotional I felt when I returned to Gau Mukh – the source of the Ganges river -  25 years after I’d arrived there at the end of my 2000-mile walk from Ganga Sangar in the Bay of [...]

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Reposted  from English Russia Romance of the Hermit’s Life Posted on January 7, 2011 by zontic This 60-year old man is a hermit living in a thick forest somewhere in the Novgorod Region. What made him (and all such people) choose this way of life? Nobody knows…

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What Science Has to Say About Our Stuff and Happiness   Even as we rush to the mall with our credit cards, we’re likely to be repeating to ourselves and telling other people that we know “stuff” does not make us happy.   Yet our governments still measure citizens’ well-being in terms of economic output [...]

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Little Ricky is now three years ago!  He’s a Thai boy who was almost abandoned in an orphanage in Bangkok when his single mother could not look after him.  Instead mother and child came to stay with two friends of mine and they ended up adopting Ricky and hiring his mother as their maid.  Everything [...]

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photo by Carlo Bevilacqua Anyone who knows me or looks through the tags of this website will know of my fascination with hermits and my own enjoyment of solitude.  So there will be no surprise that I’m posting a link to a set of 60 striking photos of hermits in several different countries by Italian [...]

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Bodh Gaya, in Bihar, northern India.  (No! I’m still in northern Newfoundland trying to get a new transmission for the boat.)   If you’ve every wondered what the place was like today where the Buddha reached enlightenment, here are some photos I took during my short visit to India in the fall of 2008. Everyone [...]

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Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. first published in 1996. Years ago a newspaper reporter asked my mother, “Are you not afraid when you’re son goes off into the Amazon wilderness alone in his canoe that something might happen to him and that you’ll never see him again?” My mother gave what I have always [...]

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I’ve read or perused quite a few “doom and gloom” books over the last couple of years.  Almost all of them follow the same outline; first the doom, then the gloom and then everlasting hope – how our world will not end tomorrow if we take small steps today. It might be called “doom porn’ [...]

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Xploring Hungary: Hermit Caves (Remetebarlang), Mátraverebély “These hermit caves were begun in 1756. Carved into the soft stone there are a total of a dozen caves that consist of two chapels, a kitchen, a pantry, bedrooms and what served as a toilet. The hermits themselves lived in these caves during the 18th century, although it [...]

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