The marshes have their own unique way of commiserating with the human condition. Along half a mile of floating boardwalk through a marsh in Saw Mill Creek, a tributary of the Hackensack river, I encounter parallels to my own life. The Kingsland marsh discovery trail on an impoundment in the Richard DeKorte Park, southern part…
Category: Melophilia
World Music
A hint of ethnicity and fiesta politics ~ spotlight on little Manila
Awake now, scrolling through the miasma of reality that includes surging statistics on everything devastating, including the diminishing sunspot activity of our very own star. Scanning too the algorithmically curated factoids of the day and then, the morning takes on a decidedly Zen turn to meld into the present and the now. It’s a lazy…
A solitary walk, the Crazy Horse of Mathias Duplessy and a shot of optimism
A solitary walk … It appears today, that the only thing certain is the uncertainty of the following day. But even so, in this time of a huge void in our social interactions, the accompanying ennui, anxiety and various other psychosomatic effects that seem to have surfaced, it got me thinking about hope and…
A Kenyan Malaika, death, resurrection and life
It is Easter Sunday. In Pre-Viral times, the big stores employed a multitude of tempting stratagems which would have served as a reminder, as they usually did months in advance of any contemporary festival. The Easter Bunny on the fire truck yesterday also made it quite loud and clear, or this Sunday too would not…
Remembering, while on the precipice of change – Lockdown Essays
Tangled branches ~ DES A strange world it appears to be now, on the precipice of change. A few months hence, everything will perhaps be unrecognizable from what it has been before; the way we work, the way we relate, the way we live. At this point of time as a socially distant being, I…
A walk with Ali Farka Touré, the farmer who communed with spirits
As I walked out of a mental quagmire of assimilated media assertions, booming statistics, opinions and analyses of the dire situation the world faces, I realised I missed my grandmother’s 4th death anniversary in April. My brother spent a good five minutes in a welcome, but guilt inducing conversation that he most definitely revelled in,…
The Itinerant's Plan b 