the extraordinary quality of being ordinary and commonplace, of having habits and believing in words and smiles — In the film Gloria Bell, John Turturro sits on a sofa with Julianne Moore. It must be a Saturday afternoon. There is that ease Saturday afternoons have when you are in love. Not your first love, not your second. Those loves that happen when everyone has already set their life…

Do you remember? We’d given up on the high street jewelers. The rings fit on your finger, but they just didn’t fit us. A few weeks later, we were in Portugal. It was beginning to rain and we ducked inside a tired little shop in that backwater town. …

There is no colour called love in this world. Yet how thoroughly it has dyed my heart ~Lady Kasa, Japan, mid-8th century People have been using the medium of art to represent and explore their spiritual connection with their world, for over 35,000 years. The earliest cave art speaks to…

Loving service is the natural position of the soul. Sanatana dharma He skipped lunch to rush home for half an hour as she was engulfed in fever waves; returned to the office, was late for the meeting of the year. Promotion went to someone else for five years in a…

The people in this photograph are neither me nor my mother. My mother was diagnosed with cyclothymia. All the family was dragged along in cycles of depression and fits of anger whose heights could last for days. The disease lasted years and its cycles too. I learnt the pain of objects which break on…

Papers scattered, his art hanging on walls. Somewhere in the Northern hemisphere, breathing on the equator East, an ocean away, flown over every night At times, between deluges, a rainbow fusing the Caribbean and Southern Europe Words. Plentiful crossing time zones hopping clouds wind transported Words. First words combed into poetry laid on scars…

Polly dealt with the news of her husband’s illness as she had dealt with most things that threatened to blow her life off course. She did not think of her ship sinking. Just that the voyage had become more challenging. She knew that it was too late to avoid this…

though your dress conforms, your manners comport, though the offences you give, may be measured at naught, though in society’s net, you are inevitably caught, may your garlic wild heart, question all that it’s taught though your surface be steady, placid and still, may your lungs stretch to bursting, may…