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…
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…
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 nameless. Stories, like steam, rose from the pot. They curled into the night air, dissolving before they…
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…
Clouds gather in the sky. Their shades of grey multiply, their shapes transmogrify. The wind sweeps through, a gentle messenger bringing the scent of rain. A hush fell over the land where its earth had been toiled, dislodged and resettled. The air when once, filled with dust and debris, din and drill, now swells as rain begins to form. And when the first raindrop lodges…
"Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that…
When fragmentation occurs and the path taken bends unexpectedly, the physicality of being begins to shred little by little. On the mat, realignment occurs. Breath slows down and becomes the companion that cleans the slate. A reset. The shade of sun and earth begin to colour the walls, glowing and warm so that the attention of the dweller turns out to the beauty that lays…
The first days back in the tropics took a little adjustment. Memories of the brisk-paced city were lucid and poignant but the senses, having taken a euphonious nature of rural mellowness for a good time, took to returning with less fervent. There was the constant hum of the compressor in the background, the impatient and incessant traffic that had a life of its own and…
Fog blanketed the sky like stained muslin hovering above, gifting nothing to vision. Devoured by darkness, dawn could not penetrate. Yet, darkness offers solace - so infiltrating, tranquillizing and still. The arrival of cool wind shifted the clouds. It was a relief but it was also a precarious prelude to a thunderstorm. The wind howled, ushering the mighty pavlova ones before the sky released its…
The day expired in rouge. Throngs of whistling fork-tail birds weighed the trees. The windows became black mirrors and faces watched back. Out there lay stillness from human centrism. Things were beginning to get unsettling as sepia grips the landscape and the forest transmutes into a haunting neighbour. Shadows of dismembered branches thrust deep into the ground to prop new life, stood stoic like haggard…
It seems to be that the first day of the year is always a good day for cake. And 6 days later. And 13 days before the new year. It is the annual cake triathlon peeking at the intersection of the close of one year and the beginning of another and there is cause for celebrating the birth of 2 boys and 1 man, or…
We have been rooted to the earth in a way in which that hour between dusk and dawn awaits for quiet, for rest and recuperation. Time seems to stop. But at the darkest hour, the throbbing that hums beneath our feet surfaces above the tranquillity. For the nocturnal, it is an opening of portals to mischief and play, an opportunity to listen to the shadows…
It came with a ruffle and a tussle and a year late. We finally found ourselves shifting earth dust of our new home during Navaratri 2021. The final touch came with helping hands, jitterbugs and blessings from extended family across the Indian border and other Nepali towns. The kitchen went through a startled startup when the installation of the gas stove made a fiery scene.…