An ode to the grand and peculiar magic that awaits us all in the hard corners of our very darkest places. Poverty. My friend, Made,* has it. Made’s world is collapsing. We have been watching it, visibly, sinking into the sand, succumbing to wind and rain before our very eyes these last few days in … More Angels on a Knife-Edge ~ the island of the Gods loses the last of its Good Men
Come with me for a moment, away from the roar of mad thinking and the crush of despair – there is a voice in the garden, a song in the rice field… I fled back to Bali with a face sucked dry by the Antarctic winds that gnaw on the bones of remote southwest … More Voices from the rice field… how Bali lost it all
I hit the boy in a daydream. He strolled his motorbike straight out onto the highway where my 50km an hour cruise in flipflops and sun dress was abruptly confused into a squall of bent metal, shredded petals and grating skin. It was a bright morning, the scent of papaya and grass smoke on the … More Through the window
The moon
tiptoed like a fleet of silken fairies
across a busty chorus of cloud,
across the pretty lawn, doused in nightdew
and through a lattice of gum leaves … More The poet, by moonlight.
There was a story once, about a girl so in love, and so confused, that even though the man she adored was near her every day, she never once dared risk his attention. Years and years went by before, one day, she found herself beside him and, even though she was tattered from the heavy seas of … More Love bird
How Charles Darwin’s ‘Struggle for Survival’ theory produced a sick-minded, hell-bent humanity which has failed to notice that… the scum also rises. Jetting into the Galapagos Islands is like taking a slow-motion swan dive into the infinity rock-pool of the cosmos. You rise out of the hell that is Guayaquil – with its horrendous infestation of … More The Scum Also Rises… Galapagos Diary # 2
If you’re on the path to peace, you’ll find out pretty quick that those be shark-infested waters! A guide for toe-dipping, the Curse of Darwin and who’s who in the spiritual zoo. Twenty years’ down the road less traveled and that gorgeous, lonely path is now some of the most fought-over real estate on the planet. … More Survival of the Sickest – the mess, the cause and how to fix it.
As ayahuasca tourism explodes into a frenzy of expensive retreats, gringo-shamanism, one-night love-ins, and do-it-yourself thrill-seeking across the planet – a shaman from the Amazon sends a postcard on which he writes, only this…. beware the kiss of the vine of death. If you were sick, I mean really – and abandoned on a sandbank in the Amazon -would … More The Bitter Cup: Ayahuasca – beware the hand that serves you
If mankind were offered by the gods just one more thing – a magic elixir, a secret, a piece of wisdom or a wish; here’s one scientist that would stand up immediately and shout, “Toothpaste!” Bring us a toothpaste, and make it from flowers!” You do not want to play Scrabble with Dale Millard. And … More Flower power
Pitter patter … pitter patter… a pit-pat-pitter splat …a blat splat ting! The smoky Andean twilight of the second last day of the world is giddy with raindrops. They hurl in sideways from a ghostly-white dusk and drum their little bodies, fat with Amazon, upon the domed roof of my new adobe home. These orbs … More A Sticky End
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