Jogyata's Blog

April Celebration 2008

Jogyata Dallas — Mon, 12 May 2008 02:44:47

April Celebrations were wonderful. For ten days, a full immersion in our remarkable path with its many joyful activities, putting aside the seeming importance of worldly concerns to focus entirely upon the renewal of our discipleship, rededicate ourselves to our soul's manifestation promise and our great task, God-discovery. And surrounded by the aspiration of eight hundred other God-seekers.

If grace is responsible for virtually all of our progress, as Guru so often reminded us, then this grace rained down in bucket loads this April – you only had to be there. It came as renewed inspiration, in the conviviality of our global families' friendships, in the many shared stories and proving anecdotes of Guru's post-October 11th 'livingness'; in musical performances and meditations that touched the soul. And to stand again before the white stone Samadhi with its bordering flowers and tall candles – I found it so comforting to know that Guru's physical lies here, still embodying the consciousness of everything He is to us; hallowed ground, a sacred site, earth sanctified by an immense power of spirit and a measureless divinity.

When Daylight Comes

Jogyata Dallas — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 23:50:38

If you leave here in the dark, rouse yourself protesting from a warm bed, pick up a friend, head out on quiet night roads to the west, you can be at Karekare before sun-up. This is a lovely place I am often drawn to, a holy place for me that soothes the spirit – a huge canopy of sky slowly coloring in at daybreak, silver rumpled folds of sea, a long mile-wide shoreline of tidal flats, dunes, swamplands and secret lakes, paradise of wildfowl and timid animals. Down the endless shoreline you can amble for hours, never see another human being. You feel unburdened here, immersed in eternity, a speck in this sweep of distance. You can pray to your God, sit on a sandhill and weep at your life and your memories, meditate to the seas cadences that are soft and rhythmic, beguiling. This is a place to be alone in – as of a shrine where Mother Nature is your only companion. Rough poetry that you won’t bother to polish or revisit comes easily and you scrawl lines on a piece of paper. You look at the dawn sky and talk to your Beloved without effort or guile – you are all sincerity, just yourself, babbling in the dawn at this great shrine of God.

When Daylight Comes

When daylight comes
you roam the crinkled shores
stride out to a beckoning emptiness.
Wednesday’s sun flares up
from the crook of grey hills.
Your footprints weave
the virgin wastes like an aimless drunk,
beetle across this wilderness of rumpled dunes.
The sands are a map
and last night’s other lives
have left their feeble tracks and tiny stories:
claw prints of a bittern
soft paws, a rabbit under moonlight,
stitch marks of a swift predator–
millipede, night hunter on the prowl–
the strutting bold stride of a pheasant.
And here a tiny death–
last nocturne of a beetle
a black eight-oared boat toiling
the mineral heaving dunes
it's final furrowed wake in a
moonscape’s wrinkled swells
till shipwrecked here,
speared by a beak at dawn.
Sunrise scatters golden light.
Frail thing of flesh, you lift
stick arms in supplication
captive to a sky of cirrus charms
eyes raised up
to it’s tousled random beauty.
Might some grace yet come?
Subdued by sea mists
the dawn sun stares,
a tamed red Gorgon’s eye.
You come here sometimes
comforted by seas that measure time.

Acorns

Jogyata Dallas — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:38:17

Our parklands are carpeted with autumn's acorns at present, lovely fields of them spreading away under the deep aerial greens of towering oaks—you pick them up in handfuls and marvel at how perfect they are, how different each is from any other. A little seasonal miracle. Out jogging this morning, writing a little jubilatory acorn ode in my head—back home, searching for a pen before I forget.

Acorns

In drifts and banks
of burnished gold
they mass, those tawny
roly-poly nuts
that crunch and crackle
underfoot in glades you stroll,
weaponry in the warrior feuds
of boys. When pigs
can fly they'll flock
squealing into this parkland paradise
gorge, fossick, glut,
pig-heaven, utopia of nuts
hand painted each by autumn's
lovely brush, a palette
of browns and bronzes, coppery hues
hardened in the kiln of sun.
All night long they tumble down
rattle and patter, clutter
my eaves, bounce and clatter
like playful garden gnomes
lie winter long
in the nurseries of my gutters
and while I sleep
burst quietly into leaf
take root in loam
next spring march out
reclaim their sylvan dynasty.
Go forth my leafy legions
repopulate the barren vales
those former hills of home.

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Heartland

Jogyata Dallas — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 14:27:20

Last week two visiting New York friends, Bipin and Mridanga, accompanied us to a favorite spot in the mountains for three days, a six hour drive down through the central North Island. At the tiny rural settlement of Raetihi we take a back road out of town, a slow ride south down a bony, narrow gravel road that winds down to the Wanganui River, snakes through scrubland, hill farms, valleys clad in the variegated olive greens of native forest and bisected by dark ravines. Arriving an hour and a half later, weary from the corrugated road, at our destination the 'Flying Fox'. Here two cabins await you over a river and your only access is by a small box car suspended from a single wire cable.

Just Added: Three Items

Jogyata Dallas — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 00:30:15

Two articles:

Pondering on Writing - Today in Karangahape Road where I live they were having a colourful street carnival. In the throng of young people many had arm and ankle tattoos and dyed hair – red, blue, purple, yellow – and wore strange, brightly coloured clothing, body jewellery, a philosophical and fashion cult.
A Wedding and A Funeral - On the long (painful) flight from the U.S. to Auckland recently I was remembering some people from my long ago, and penned this little semi-autobiographical story...

And a poem:

You - A little poem written at my shrine this midnight when I should have been meditating...

Tea With A Neighbour

Jogyata Dallas — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:13:35

Sometimes I spend half an hour with a ninety year old neighbour two doors along on my street. Some say she is a little mad but her human face, the polite masks and conventions of behavior, have simply been stripped away by time. I had a cup of tea with her the other day and she shared some photo albums with me. A recent life of brave travel, taking refuge from loneliness in perpetual motion. Here she is in Hanoi, a solo journey aged eighty-eight, with a boa constrictor wrapped around her neck against a backdrop of dark green jungle; and here in Kukup, Johor, aged eighty-seven, stepping off a game fishing boat with a beaming Indian guide; and now in Singapore last year, in a wheelchair and aged eighty-nine, dark glasses, mad lady tourist laughing with a group of Asians in a fruit market.

Quiet Christmas

Jogyata Dallas — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:07:15

It’s strange, this Christmas period. My very first in New Zealand for fifteen years. Our Sri Chinmoy Centre family has vanished away to relatives down country, an odd ritual here like some seasonal homing instinct, a migratory impulse, reflexive and unquestioned and honed through childhoods of summers, of holidays in small, warm seaside settlements where an uncle owns a bach, and Santa visitations. They have vanished as unexpectedly as characters suddenly written out of a play – you are left, a little bewildered on stage, without cast, character, plot or purpose. One or two still come to the centre, often late at night to meditate.

Two New Articles

Jogyata Dallas — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:29:21

Two new articles have been added to Jogyata's Articles folder:

A Few Reflections

Sometime after Sri Chinmoy's passing I jotted down some reflections and reminiscences, letting the flow of memory with its sweet things and moments of understanding carry me along...

Late summer is a vivid blaze of green, in the shading boughs of oaks and sycamores at Aspiration-Ground, in the all engulfing mass of driveway vines – but look carefully, autumn is stealing in, a hint of yellow high up in the crowns of trees, in the industry of squirrels, a sudden night chill. Winter stirs in the falling sap. In the afternoon breezes, a slow flurry of falling leaves, tawny golds and browns tumbling down, the season turning on its heel. Many dread the coming months, the long summer of our Guru’s earth-life now in one sense ended, the bereft contemplating the chill of a harsh new season. But no, this is not the case. Guru is alive, and alive too in each one of us, a part of us. There in the silence-nest of meditation we can quickly find him. And the outer goal which he embodied and held up to us is the inner Self within each of us – enlightenment is an act of remembering. Read more...

Christmas Trip Notes

On the long haul to North America, thirteen hours plus some, a chance to cram in some of the old unvisited classics on our personal screens. I really liked The Bridges of Madison County with Clint Eastwood – a very thoughtful look at human love, its quirks and foibles and its sometimes underlying beauty. How is it that this perennial experiment so entrances us, and when it has failed, so haunts us with its memories? Perhaps because our botched human entanglements and sorties were the closest we ever came to love’s final flowering in God-oneness, and sensing it in the shadowlands of human life we mistakenly sought its fulfillment there. And it was there too, like a blade forged and tempered by the fire and the anvil, and we would refine our understanding through suffering and loss to at last understand where true satisfaction really lies.
Read more...

Enjoy...

My Favourite Heroines

Jogyata Dallas — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 07:48:40

This article was originally written for Inspiration-Letters – a theme that was to have been entitled 'Women Who Have Changed Our World'. But that all changed and so it has found it's way here...

A sampling:

It’s a pleasure for me to offer a few appreciative thoughts on the many women who have changed our world. It gives me, too, an opportunity to write about my maths teacher, Mr. Pennington, an amateur historian who filled my teenage school years with harrowing tales of ruthless, scheming women who maneuvered, murdered, swindled or charmed their way to power. Although avoiding becoming a misogynist – I had three great sisters and a wonderful mother – I did develop a fascination with scurrilous, successful people, specialising in Mr. Pennington’s own area of expertise which was ancient China.

Academically, Mr. Pennington valued loyalty and perseverance over mere intelligence and so surrounded himself with an admiring society of under-achieving boys like myself who in later life would march to the beat of a very, very different drum – merely by attending all of his classes we were given a generous pass mark even though they left us mathematically dysfunctional for life. But I know a few things about evil, world changing Chinese women that, if disclosed, would give you many a sleepless night.

New (Old) Poem: Jodie

Jogyata Dallas — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 22:16:07

This morning while looking for something entirely different to what I would find and sifting through a dishevelled corner of my room (here a muddle of discarded things, doodlings; a ruined volume of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, the pages tumbling free; my father’s lost letters; a slither of sepia brown antique snaps; a teddy bear holding a flattened pink parasol) I came across a faded, neatly folded sheet of paper inscribed with a poem, inside a picture of a man leading a horse through a field, a little girl clinging to the saddle. Oh, floodgates of memory! This was a farm owner I had worked for to pay my way through my studies and with whom I became good friends, the little girl his niece Jodie who died very young of leukemia. The photo touched my heart.

Read more: Jodie

Recently Added: Two Short Poems

Jogyata Dallas — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 02:53:26

Read More: The Birds and Anniversary.

A Wedding and A Funeral

Jogyata Dallas — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 08:33:59

On the long (painful) flight from the U.S. to Auckland recently I was remembering some people from my long ago, and penned this little semi-autobiographical story...

In his three days in America Brad Anders attended first a wedding and then a funeral, the marriage of one relative and the burial of another, neither close to him but reason enough to pry himself out of his going nowhere life for a short vacation. Both experiences left him in somber mood, the wedding for its unsettling sense of something lost, his long ago unrequited loves still tugging, the funeral for it’s stark reminder of mortality, his nineteen year old niece Annie lying almost ludicrously dolled up for all to see in an open casket, quite radiant though definitely not breathing and shortly thereafter reduced in the undertakers furnace to a small mound of grey ash, a portion of which was later placed ceremoniously in his hands, a small unmarked casket, for keepsake or scattering.

In an almost empty funeral parlor Brad contemplated his departed niece. Rigor mortis had begun to undo the mortician’s careful toil, the cute final smile tightening at one corner into an almost quizzical grin, the portrait of a happy exit betrayed by sagging flesh, a drooping eyelids half wink. A single tear of brown fluid stained the mascara’d cheek; and partially visible, one milky blue eye, a dead cod’s stare. Trussed up though in her prettiest finery, a red dress to counterpoint the pallid laced hands and sleek golden hair. Staring at her as though to memorize her face or wrest some close-by secret, some answer to his own incomprehension.

Five Reminiscences

Jogyata Dallas — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 02:19:47

A few brief recollections jotted down on a long, sleepless plane ride, Los Angeles to Sydney...

Subarata Goes Shopping

In January, 2000, we were on vacation in Brazil, staying in a hotel flanked by a great expanse of parkland in the city of Brasilia. Subarata had been having pain in her stomach area and it was here that we came to learn of her illness. It was here too that we went on our last shopping trip together.

Read More: Subarata Goes Shopping

Soul Connections

Subarata's father, popularly known as 'the Major' in recognition of his wartime exploits, in later life lost much of his memory – perhaps happily, and as old people sometimes do. On one of my Dublin stays, the last one when I would see him alive, each morning when we called in to visit he would look at me, or rather glare, and say, "Who's are you?"

Read More: Soul Connections

A Walking Meditation

In this April in New York on a cold wet day, Sri Chinmoy invited his seven hundred or so visiting disciples to a walk-by meditation and prasad in front of his house. A steady downpour had led to the cancellation of our function at Aspiration Ground; instead we would receive this walking meditation blessing. A long line stretched for over three blocks, and we inched forward under umbrellas and a bright assortment of raincoats while light rain fell.

Read More: A Walking Meditation

How To Make The Fastest Progress

Many years ago Sri Chinmoy offered a very fortunate group of his students a glimpse into an unexplored and unfamiliar corner of their spiritual life – he offered to disclose their best inner quality, their worst quality and how each could make the fastest spiritual progress.

Read More: How To Make The Fastest Progress

Yesterday Musicians

In the early days of the Sri Chinmoy Centre in New Zealand lots of interesting characters came to the path and idle moments and Joy Days and random evenings together seemed filled with funny and entertaining trifles. Toshala was at the peak of her accordion prowess and could dash off some madly difficult classical piece with dazzling and effortless brilliance while we held our breath in disbelief. We would clamour for encores and she would oblige with another then another.

Read More: Yesterday Musicians

My Mysterious Encounter

Jogyata Dallas — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 20:46:46

I went out to Auckland's unpopulated west coast last Sunday for a dawn ramble. Two very nice boys from our meditation classes came with me. They had not met each other before but almost instantly became friends – more, it was as though they had discovered a profound commonality of character and interests, like a meeting of two long separated brothers. How they talked – they were conversing endlessly. We were driving for much of an hour through bewitching forested hills, vistas of sea, picture postcard scenery unfolding on all sides but they were consumed with their conversation, serenely oblivious. Their talk swept across a bewildering range of topics – natural healing; kundalini yoga; car accident experiences; organic gardening; favourite novels; Fellini – screen giant or fraud?; Asian travel highlights; the moon landing – fact or fiction?; the epic journeys of Marco Polo; preferred classical composers.

Four New Articles

Jogyata Dallas — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 04:04:26

Four new articles of varying hues...

Dawn Scribbles – At Last Autumn Comes

Now at last the curtain falls on summer’s last act, it’s benediction bounty, the sovereign wide blue of months past relinquishing it’s dominion in this first deluge of autumn pelting down. Rain is bucketing, lashing at windows, a dawn assault, this lovely onslaught filling gutters with rivers of rain, summer’s dust and dead leaves sluicing off roof tops and temples and no warning of this wild and sudden invasion.

Spiritual Master Lifts Elephants

Recently (March 2007) published in the 'India Tribune' – a monthly newspaper that serves the Indian community of New Zealand and Australia.

Read More: Spiritual Master Lifts Elephants.

God the Supreme Runner

I have been looking at my bedroom shrine this morning and giving myself a mark out of ten. A beautiful tall photo of my teacher soars over a miscellany of things beneath – a single white candle, some japa beads personally given out to us all on a Christmas vacation, several favourite unframed photos (curling at the edges), a small picture of myself aged four to remind me to be childlike and not an old grouch.

Read More: God the Supreme Runner.

Soul Flight

In January, 1992, Sri Chinmoy visited the island of Tenerife. A mist of orange dust hung in the sky and I was told it was fine desert sand from the Sahara, blown across the Atlantic Ocean and this archipelago of volcanic islands by the big seasonal trade winds that roam East-West across the African continent.

Read More: Soul Flight.

Seven New Articles

Jogyata Dallas — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 06:50:49

Seven new articles of varying hues...

A Devoted Heart

Subarata, my wife of 23 years, was born on February 2, 1955. If she were still among us we would be celebrating her birthday today in a lively manner and her friends would be giving her many simple gifts.

Read More: A Devoted Heart.

A Mountain Meditation

From any room on the thirteenth floor of this hotel you can look right across the rambling city of Chiang Mai with it's smoky urban sprawl and golden temple spires, across the maze of roads and alleyways that teem with a million lives, right across the evening haze to the pale blue skyline of wandering mountains framed like a watercolour in your window pane.

Read More: A Mountain Meditation.

Extraordinary Worlds

Even after a 26-year association with spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy and these many years of first hand exposure to the extraordinary and the miraculous, I am still surprised at how much discipleship has unveiled whole new worlds of knowing and knowledge.

Read More: Extraordinary Worlds.

Our Lamb Guests

In spiritual literature the lamb is an often recurring symbol of the qualities we should desire to have in our relationship with God – helplessness, purity, innocence, sweetness.

Read More: Our Lamb Guests.

Surprising Rewards

In a world where from cradle rock to last breath our wellbeing and survival are founded upon physical security – a home, a job, money in the bank – the notion of a life not concerned with these things, and not measuring its success by their abundance, is most definitely not in vogue.

Read More: Surprising Rewards.

The Polite Policeman

December, 2002. Sri Chinmoy is in New Zealand with an international group of his students. We had crossed the Cook Strait on the inter-islander ferry after a free public concert in the Wellington Town Hall on the previous evening. In Picton our group boarded several buses or caught rides in our small convoy of accompanying cars, then together we began the leisurely drive to Christchurch.

Read More: The Polite Policeman.

The Wedding Gift

I’ve only ever been to two weddings in my life. One was my own – hardly a wedding at all but a registry office formality about as inspiring as a visit to the bank.

Read More: The Wedding Gift.

Recent Postings

Jogyata Dallas — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:25:50

Three new articles of varying hues...

The Nature of the Supreme

Spiritual progress is always tested in the proving ground of everyday life and our maturing is always examined there. To be peaceful during a deep meditation is one thing, but how peaceful will you be when someone is rude to you? To be filled with loving kindness on a friend’s birthday is fine, but can you still see the divinity in someone who has just stolen your car?

Read more: The Nature of the Supreme.

All Credit to God

Spiritual masters who have truly realised God are very rare souls and most human beings will almost certainly never encounter one. And if they did, how many would recognise in this encounter a being genuinely immersed in God. For the lives of God-realised souls are characterised by humility and simplicity, not the overt trappings of pomp, power and status that characterise most other forms of human celebrity.

Read more: All Credit to God.

An Immoderation of Mice

Before we found our current Sri Chinmoy Centre premises in Auckland we occupied a large upstairs space in an old building scheduled for demolition. The only other tenants here were mice and a few attic pigeons – many of us also felt that a ghost had settled into an old and disused stairwell exit as well, although the consensus was of a harmless one, and we had many late night experiences that indicated this probability.

Read more: An Immoderation of Mice.

A Divine Phone Call

Jogyata Dallas — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 21:10:49

'Guru' is a Sanskrit word meaning 'the one who illumines' – although my own Guru always tells us that the One who illumines and the only real Guru is God. I call Sri Chinmoy 'Guru' in this short account, for among the many wonderful teachers I have met, he is the one who has accepted responsibility for my illumining and I am certainly the one who needs illumining – posthaste!

Three New Articles

Jogyata Dallas — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:49:37

Three short pieces of various hues - do hope you enjoy them.

A Swimming Pool Meditation

To be living on this earth when a great master lives, breathes, moves amongst us – what an incalculable blessing. We read about the highest of these, the Avatars, but usually their physical absence numbers long centuries, even longer millennia, though their legacy is eternal.

Read More: A Swimming Pool Meditation

The Ways Of Love

Writing about the tattoos adorning a long dead girl or the life of a cranky uncle may invite the charge of being 'unspiritual' – but spirituality permeates every part of God's lovely world just like the all-pervasive invisibility of air and the elusive intangibility of consciousness, the living stuff of all being. And love – one of the most powerful forces in our universe – although hidden away in the troubled lives of my characters, I saw it there, a tiny furtive thing promising one day to bloom. And it delights me to recall its brief flowering.

Read More: The Ways Of Love

Wrestling In Spaghetti

In 1979 my companion Subarata and I travelled from Perth in Western Australia to Adelaide in South Australia via circuitous ways and innumerable adventures, eventually settling out near Port Adelaide and the beginnings of another kind of odyssey.

Read More: Wrestling In Spaghetti.

New Year Odyssey

Jogyata Dallas — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 06:14:06

Last day of 2006...

Nine boys from our Auckland Centre are spending a few days away over New Year, an unhurried ramble by car, looping 700 miles around the northern part of New Zealand. No maps, no plans, the winds of impulse and whimsy filling our sails. I love landscapes, opt to sit in a back seat exempt from chatter, watch instead the ever new beauty of life unravelling all around. We head north early, over the arched spine of the Harbour Bridge and out through multiplying suburbs, industrial estates, a green field dotted with white cricketers, someone running up to bowl.

Karangahape Road

Jogyata Dallas — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 20:12:51

A stroll along an urban road...

Why I Didn't Become A Quantum Physicist

Jogyata Dallas — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 18:23:24

Somebody plonked a book on quantum physics (!!) onto my chair after a class the other night and said "have a look – seems very much like the ideas proposed in meditation." Now quantum physics and any possibility of my ever considering the subject vanished out of my life a very long time ago, way back when my high school maths teacher quietly confided to me, a sixteen year old confronting an even then murky future, that where mathematics/calculus/geometry/anything using the logical realm of the brain was concerned I showed zero aptitude. In that one watershed moment any hope of humanity discovering Jogyata the trailblazing nuclear physicist perished. So I might have been forgiven for tossing the book scornfully into a neglected corner of my room, but on an impulse I flipped through a few pages before sleep – and was hooked! Here an alternative description of our familiar world of consciousness/unity/soul/meditation and quite startlingly so, two different modalities converging at the same conclusion.

Puppy Power Revisited

Jogyata Dallas — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 02:27:27

I have been enjoying Sumangali's trilogy of dog stories very much – lovely prose and a very beautiful poem, showing us again the wonderful talents of a writer and such affection for her canine and other friends. May I share a few short memories of my own.

Weekend Away

Jogyata Dallas — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 04:25:15

You stand there, three hours from home, high up on the pass over the ranges, a gravel rest-a-while overlooking big vistas of hills and the far away blues of sea and sky. A slow wind passes almost imperceptibly through the surrounding forest, moving through the dark trunks of trees like an unseen hand trailing softly across the undercanopy of ferns, gently caressing as it passes. This is not a wind moving through a forest but the forest itself sighing. It is living, breathing, whispering and every part of it is eloquent with the softest chittering of leaves, the rustling fronds of ferns and the obsequies of tiny nodding flowers. You huddle in your thin coat, climb back into your car and amble down the switchbacks and steep turns of the mountain road towards familiar things, now into the village of Miranda, a cluster of cottages where rough and lonely farmhands shuffle cards at kitchen tables and dream of the Saturday night dance.

A small group of us, members of the Auckland Sri Chinmoy Centre, were away on an adventurous sojourn, a sunny weekend in a tiny village on the east coast of the Coromandel Peninsula. Here lots of small unpopulated golden beaches, clear, cool turquoise seas, spectacular limestone arches and sea caves inviting exploration. Once you've forced yourself, grimacing and yelping, into the cold ocean – a few tourists stare in disbelief - you can swim around headlands of green sea and wade ashore into cool dark grottos tunneled by an eternity of waves. Inside, the absolute silence of a yogi's cave, eerily silent. You could meditate here through a cycle of tides if the weather behaved – but it might not, and that would be the end of you, your mahasamadhi.

Of Tempests and Lost Fishermen

Jogyata Dallas — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:42:32

I love storms and tempests. Weather! – enchanting you with it’s lashings of character and wild, intemperate ways, not just climate with it’s bland and predictable days of unremitting sunshine. People grumble about Auckland and it’s mood swings – sweeping winds keener than grief; great columns of cumulus banked up and towering out there on the sea’s horizons; here a random rainbow; over there to the West blue skies and the promise of imminent summer. Mornings you step out in a thin shirt, bare-armed, whistling a cheery tune, then a winter blast sweeps you away and you rush back inside, muttering in retreat, rummaging through your stuff for a whole new wardrobe.

A storm brews behind me...

An African Safari

Jogyata Dallas — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 21:30:02

I have just returned from eleven days in South Africa, in Johannesburg. I've been here before but my knowledge of this continent is very small - impressions from a raft of Hemingway novels and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness still linger.