“Though lovers be lost love shall not;And death shall have no dominion.” ~ Dylan Thomas. Like most children raised in a Christian home, my encounters with death included the reassurance of heaven and an afterlife. Three of my four grandparents had died either before or soon after I was born, so I grew up only […]
“Live a life full of humility, gratitude, intellectual curiosity, and never stop learning.” ~ Gza. I never met my mother-in-law. She died in childbirth, tragically, leaving behind a husband and young children. My father-in-law I first met through letters and photographs, until I finally met him on my first trip back to Jamaica after many […]
“Life is the flower for which love is the honey.” ~ Victor Hugo. Many of us put a lot of thought into naming our children. Whether it is trying to find a name which has family significance, like naming a child after a grandparent, or to honor a culture, we forget what life will be […]
“You must be a lotus, unfolding its petals when the sun rises in the sky, unaffected by the slush where it is born or even the water which sustains it!” ~ Sai Baba. By courtesy of being connected once more to the world wide web and one of its search engines, I learned something new […]
“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” ~ Saint Augustine. It is over sixty years since first I sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, a child of almost eight, with my family. We were headed from the UK to Jamaica, to begin our life in a small town […]
“Music doesn’t lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.” ~ Jimi Hendrix. My parents were sixteen and nineteen years old at the outbreak of World War II, and living in Liverpool, UK, a city which was the most heavily bombed outside of London. In […]
“If we don’t end war, war will end us.” ~ H. G. Wells. I learned the term ‘code switch’ a few years ago, and found it quite appropriate. It describes the ability of many of us to change the way we communicate, according to our environment or our company. Since I thought I was the […]
“If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.” ~ Desmond Tutu. I self-published my first book over ten years ago, but I had been writing for years before that. At first it was handwritten in blank, unlined journals, writing down impressions of my travels, a few crappy poems, […]
“Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it.” ~ Frances Wright. I was a teenager, going to high school in rural Jamaica, when Bob Marley and the Wailers became the face of Rastafarianism. The sect emerged in the 1930s, combining elements of predominantly Old Testament teachings and African pride […]
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