Pebble on the Tongue

While meandering home from the Canadian Maritimes some time ago, we stopped at the suggestion of family by the College of New Jersey in Trenton to view an art exhibit about the beauty and travail of Afghanistan.  There we stumbled on the video of an extraordinary scene composed by Lida Abdul, who, exile that she […]

To say that travels will move you, is a tautology, self-evident on the face.  But Kate Daniels,  lyricist of the gritty, personal truths of the American South has penned a line that captures the traveler’s rarest take-away, the most powerful gift of a ‘traipse’: If you’re lucky ….It will bring you to your knees. Kate […]

Some years ago, I was dinner guest in the home of an Ethiopian woman in Winnipeg, Canada.  We sat on haunches in her kitchen as she made coffee in the ceremonial way, roasting beans over open coals.  The strong aroma suffused her life story. Years before, she had married for love a Muslim man back […]

Given the loss and suffering that marks these days, here is the sense of a moment recounted by Sadako Kurihara, poet of Hiroshima: In Hiroshima, in a basement, mid stench and death, a young woman goes into labor. A woman, herself moaning with pain, steps forward. “I can help with the baby. I am a […]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is not known to have written much about his epic, and often painful, travels – to Kazakhstan and his years in the gulag, to Germany when exiled and made stateless by the Soviet authorities, later around the world as a celebrated Nobel laureate, and eventually back to Mother Russia.  But he did write […]

A handful of lyrical lines can whisper to the traveler  – how vast is the sea of creative beauty – how deep the wistfulness of soul  – how strong the yearning in our sojourn – how paltry our grasp of the great yonder – how precious to find company midst ‘silent peaks’            _____________________________ Written On […]