Rob asked me this evening about living without heating in our home. I carried the question into the shower, a hot shower powered by solar energy. Free, clean, abundant. But only when the sun remembers us. And so I shower in whatever truth the sky chooses. There is comfort but not the guaranteed kind. Not the mechanical certainty of a clock striking on cue. Some…
Dear Big A, You may not realise it, but you’ve just pulled off a quiet coup. You made the call first. Somewhere between a game of chess and a YouTube rabbit hole on Rucka Rucka Ali, you decided you wanted school. I spent weeks circling the idea like a nervous mom on trial for taking her kids out of the schooling system and then being…
The storm did not arrive; she erupted. Spitting and splitting the air that I was already breathing inside her fracture. A tempest she was, refusing to remain outside and instead, unfolded behind my eyelids tasting of iron and damp stone. I did not dare enter her but she entered me and I recognised the trespass as fear. The walls of the room trembled but it…
This isn’t in the book. Maybe it should have been. The words didn’t come until we settled back in the quietude of Astam, after the pages were printed and bound, and after the book was passed from my hands to family and friends. My truth is already out there, bare. When the noise hushed, when bird song from the forest replaced the hum of condensers…
Before the rain, the hills are like half-stories told. The kind that simmers just beneath the skin of the day, gathering weight in the silence. The grasses stand like sentences waiting for their final word, the rocks like punctuation, full stops held in place by time. The soil is dry but not indifferent. It listens. It remembers. Each root is a bookmark, holding its place…
Photograph by Sameer Tuladhar When Clouds on Tour began, I didn’t know where the path would lead.I only knew we needed to move, to listen, to build something with our hands and hearts, even if we didn’t yet know its shape. Years later, the road behind us is lined with the small, stubborn miracles that only hindsight reveals.Walls raised from the earth, children growing taller…
This space began as a quiet story of earth and effort - a journal of hands in the soil, of walls rising from dust, of children learning the language of a village. It was a place of documentation, of marking time in sweat and uncertainty. But time moved as it always does. Dust settled. The walls stood firm. The children no longer looked back. swararetreat.com…
In my earlier years of adulthood, I stumbled upon a book on the dimly lit shelves of the Edinburgh University library, and it stopped me dead in my tracks. It was the Scottish winter of 2001, the kind of winter where the sun slips away before you have a chance to notice it was ever there. But in the fading light of that cold grey…
https://youtube.com/embed/aRAuxlqlU2Y?si=OCfiZyqFI2JYCjg_The lake was tranquil on a cold January morning. We were on a boat crossing Phewa Lake to get to the trail leading to the Peace Pagoda. The boatman pushed through gently, creating little ripples around his oar, nudging the boat forwards to an infinite horizon.It was a moment to just be. And to put thoughts into words.There is an unsung song in the calm…
At the turn of the new year, I walk out of the door every morning with a heavy heart. When I look up, I see the barrenness of our sacred mountain, the Machhapuchhre, unveiled from her white crown. It pierces the heart like a sharp knife slicing through the fragility of life and our ecosystems. Yet, somehow, the new winds seem to bring forth a…
Clouds on Tour began as a simple way to share the raw edges of our journey with family and friends - a journal documenting the challenges and triumphs of building a rammed earth home and a retreat in the Himalayas, and unschooling 2 boys. But more than that, it was a line cast out to one reader: Papa. I knew he would be watching with…
https://youtube.com/embed/21k4xq02mSU?si=5NjWRWclxejDMCRe The mist rose from the Mardi River the way breath curls in the chill of dawn. The river gave a long exhale summoned by sunbeams, its breath ethereal and sinuous. And for a moment it seemed that all things were caught on the rising vapour, all of it, drawn into the immensity, then vanishing into the blue vault. The river gives it up slowly,…
Who that cares to know much about the history of pumpkins, those voluptuous enigmas of the garden, and how that mysterious squash behaves under the experiments of Time, has not pondered on the life of Mr Kodo. To speak of Mr Kodo, as he was called in his sleepy village of Astampkin is to gather the strange tale of a man whose singular obsession with…
https://www.youtube.com/embed/OO4bhOrv5owThe act of growing our own food begins with the soil, that dark and silent essence which holds in its depth, a life-giving force. Beneath the sun's unyielding glare, the ground is broken, turned over by the blade of the plough. It yields reluctantly until the furrows run deep, exposing the earth's richness. The seeds are brought forth, small unassuming things, yet containing within them…
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”William Faulkner Just as we thought the adventure had come to an end, we found ourselves in a jeep taking us home on a road that was not a road. We had thighs and knees, jittered and jellied, calves hardened like sculptures. Now our insides were shaken like a snow…
Monsoon mist hangs low. The air is thick with moisture covering the ground in a damp, quiet stillness. A tendril cusps a teardrop from the mourning sky. A tender moment caught between earth and sky. Suspended in gentleness, it is a world onto itself, a tiny trembling universe. It is a fleeting moment soon to pass but in that second, the tendril and teardrop are…
There is something quite meditative and magnetising about hanging out fresh laundry on a windy day. Just watching lines of washed cotton hanging on stretched wire dry under the sun, releasing moisture into the atmosphere. All was calm until the wild wind from the west arrived. It came howling and punching like an anguished agonising force attempting to pull away the sheets. The cloth pegs…
We are on the edge of a precipice. A precipice where we are losing all the wild places on this planet. Wild places glow with life force. And this life force sustains us and every living breathing creature. But most of us have forgotten how to listen, how to feel, and how to see indiscriminately in our surroundings. We can create a web of interconnected…
Judge a book, not by its cover. Big A has searching questions hurled towards me with prodding eyes when he saw the Mahabharata Vol.1 (unabridged translation by Bibek Debroy) and Child of God (Cormac McCarthy) glued together on my reading stack almost as if, twined by crime. Truth be told, these pages could not be more polarised in their content and culture, style and artistry.…
He was dragged out of bed after multiple callings had failed to stir him. When he finally showed himself, his face was black, like an eternal night. He trudged out - strewing, spitting, littering a trail of grumpdust. Pulled by a determined invisible hand to anchor him into the local jeep, his heavy footsteps brought a cloud of dust around his ankles and onto the…
We hear a voice with the reverberance of our uttering. We see eyes and we hear ears so like our mothers' and fathers', aunts' and uncles', grandmothers' and grandfathers'. We may see ourselves in others in ways that we do not always like or we may feel alienated from those who are supposed to be closest to us. Our love language may be of opposite…
It began with a pot. A simple one, heavy-bottomed, blackened by flame. Within it, the brew. It did not hurry, did not explain itself. It thickened, reduced, became. There was hunger, too. Of the belly, of the soul. The kind that does not ask for bread but for something else. Stories, like steam rose from the pot. They curled into the night air, dissolving before…
In the not-so-distant future, or now some argue, the moment we have long anticipated is upon us. Mama I embarks on an exploration of the hypothetical terrain where the superpower of artificial intelligence and cutting-edge technology boldly traverse the boundaries of human capabilities. Within this realm, a striking notion emerges—one where highly evolved machines stand poised to transcend humanity itself, potentially supplanting our roles and…
In the realm of our abode, a host's concern awakes,Where consumerism's grip upon nature takes,With hearts burdened by Earth's fragile plight,We beckon guests to tread with conscious light. Here, the forest creatures are our esteemed peers,So let's cherish their presence, no need for fears.This planet we share, both humans and critters,Let's be good stewards, not litterbugs and quitters. Water, oh precious elixir, let us honour…