“In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi. My father loved words. Until dementia stole his cognitive sharpness he would read for hours, do obscure crossword puzzles, play Scrabble with my mother. Like some of us on Facebook, he would become annoyed by little […]
“Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.” ~ John Donne. When I left Jamaica in the mid 70’s, I hadn’t heard the word ‘Soca’ used to describe the music we associated with those small islands of the Caribbean. It was Calypso music back then, and we mostly heard it in a 5-minute block […]
“The countenance of one man brighteneth another; Iron sharpeneth iron” ~ Joseph Hill, Culture. I have never doubted the power of the mind. My mother was a strong believer in mind over matter. It mostly had to do with you ignoring all of those things you wanted to use as excuses not to get a […]
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ~ Maya Angelou. Jamaicans (and maybe many other people), tend to blame many of their symptoms on gas. Shoulder pain? Gas. Chest pain? Gas. Of course, the obvious ones like bloating and cramping, also gas. In England the term for passing gas (flatulence, […]
“Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” ~ Berthold Auerbach. One of the challenges of writing a message every Friday morning, is trying to knit together the variety of threads that catch my interest during the week. Some weeks random items come together in a harmonious message, eventually; at other times […]
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” ~ Henry David Thoreau. Wales is known as the land of song. It is the land of my forefathers too; both of my parents were descended from men and women that lived in that historic piece of the United Kingdom. It is a […]
“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” ~ Nelson Mandela. My father-in-law was a character. He was well known in the village where he lived, for he was loud, he did […]
