To Tracey and Sunil - Wedding Reading

I used to wonder how you might look
How you might be
What you might do
What together we’d see

I spent a long time looking
I just never seemed to find
Someone who was sweet
Clever, cute, and kind

And then i met you
At our friends wedding
And it soon it became clear
Along the same path we're heading

We dated intensively,
You even stayed with your cousins
When driving for hours to see me
Not just once or twice per week, but dozens

I was the storm
And you were its eye
We knew that this chemistry
We had to try

I see the intensive
Dating as a reflection
of the depth of our feelings and
strength of our affection

And every day I grow in the
Garden we've planted together
With our balancing forces
It will flourish, forever

Because I don’t want to be
Anywhere else when I’m with you
Nowhere else to be
Nothing else to do

Love is present
In the acceptance of now
In this moment together
It's beautiful how

In the white of your eyes
I am freed
Of all other want
Or selfish need

In the tone of your voice
I am healed
With the warmth of your touch
I can feel

What it is to love deeply
To be committed truly
To give our word
To each other, duly

So with family and friends
Present to see
Let this love be celebrated
And let this love be free

Eastern Eyes - Performed at Bestival

When I see you
I melt into your big brown eyes
Those dark eye lashes dazzle
Luring me in like a pitcher plant

You’re transfixing me
Bewitching me like
Some she-dervish...
And then you set me whirling

Slow at first,
Till I’m twirling
Round and round
Your hazel sheathed pupils

Then comes your hair
Curly and complex like your emotions:
Love and jealousy murge
Into one intense expression

I consider how your
Culture carves chasms
Into your neural pathways,
Like my culture moulds mine

Yet it’s like scaling Constantine’s walls
When you are standing 10 feet tall
On the deeply rooted voices of your
Father, mother, their parents and theirs

Ancestral lineage is alive in you, a mystery
Spanning generations and first-borders
A wisdom of lifetimes, customs, and expectations
Passed from parents to daughters

Memories lie buried in your beautiful middle-eastern features:
Eleven thousand years of the Stone Age, Troy, Smyrna, Homer;
Of Alexander, Rumi, St Paul; Hafiz, Attar and
Continued attempted conquests of Constantinople

Your ancestry blows minds back to the origins of humanity
Far from modern, westernised urbanity,
Beyond the backgammon, belly dancing, and Sufis, beyond
The wild beauty of the Kuchka mountains and the fires of Olympus

The sheer age of collective human experience
Once told by the Mongolian phonetics and clicks of tongues
Hangs in the air, held in place by Crusader’s turrets, that now
Reverberate with the megaphone verbatim of mosques

And here I stand, of Western European descent
Amazed by and immersed in the culture of you
Gigantesque in comparison to my own,
Its intrigue takes me far from home

And all I can is to honour you and your family -
Thanks for taking care of me
Now that I’m more wise
Seeing life through eastern eyes

Reading List

Here is my list of books to read:

Thinking in Systems - D.H.H Meadows
Small is Beautiful - E F Schumacher
Hopes and Prospects - Noam Chomsky
The Essential Chomsky - Noam Chomsky
Growth Fetish - Clive Hamilton
Requiem for a Species - Clive Hamilton
Thinking, Fast and Slow - D. Kahneman
The Zeronauts - John Elkington
Whats Stopping You - Robert Kelsey
The Power of Unreasonable People - John Elkington

Favourite Quotes

Float like a butterfly
Sting like bee
- Mohammed Ali

There is a time
when panic
is the appropriate response
- Eugene Kleiner

What we essentially want
is to draw something unknown to us
in all its shadowiness,
not something we know
in all its illumination
- Orhan Pamuk 'My Name is Red'

If you want to know something, then go elsewhere.
If you to un know everything, then sit and listen.
- Adyashanti

If I worry too much about my have nots,
I might not realise just what I've got
- Jungle Brothers

My world is my country
And my religion is to do good
- Thomas Paine, 'Rights of Man', 1792


- Confucious:

Back up words with weapons

A pure heart makes a pure shot

Military strategy hinges on innovation and surprise

Obstacles will be many so maintains your strength of spirit

Worldly people could probably come to understand the masters sufferings, but few would truly grasp the depth and breadth of those sufferings.


As a child learns good manners
As a young man learns to control passions
In middle age be just
In old age give good advice
Then die, without regret.
- Clearchos, disciple of Aristotle

All that matters is the people you love. Everything else is just stuff. And none of that stuff really matters.
- Richard Branson

Just as the silk worm weaves its web and is caught in it
So too do humans weave the web of their own concepts and are caught in them
- Deepak Chopra

Like the light refracting from glass
'It' is nameless and formless
But has names associated with it
To capture its reflection
- Eckhart Tolle

The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry
- tbc

Its the resistance to new ideas that leads to confusion, not the inherent difficulty of the ideas
- Brian Cox

"There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe ..."
 - Teilhard de Chardin

One of its charming miracles is that through its form,
Poetry can resist the content of authoritarian discourse.
By resorting to understatement, concrete and physical language,
A poet contends against abstraction, generalisation, hyperbole and
The heroic language of hot-headed generals and bogus lovers alike...
Poetry remains one of the astonishing forms in our hands to resist obscurantism and silence.
And since we cannot wash the polluted words of hatred the same way we wash greasy dishes
We, the poets of the world, continue to write our poems to restore the respect of meaning
And to give meaning to our existence.
- Mourid Barghouti