Dear Friends and Family,

February has turned into March—I had written—lost and found—February's blog; I liked it and disliked it. And so here are parts of it, plus more about March.

We have decided to settle here in India, in the high Nilgiri mountain range. Nilgiri means blue—so we are living in the Blue Mountains, just south of the city of Ooty, in Tamil Nadu. Thank you for your suggestions of other places to live. Our four dogs and three cats are also instrumental to our decis...

Dear family and friends,

Wishing you all warm greetings of Love and good wishes for the New Year 2012.

Some of you have not yet heard of the details about moving our four dogs and three cats from the ocean level Kerala to the Nilgiri Mountain range—some seven-thousand feet above sea level (2000 meters.) What is a cat from Kerala going to do with a bunch of monkeys in the neighboring trees?

But to begin this story, I must preface it with the disclaimer that some of you may not want to ...

Dear Friends,

What I offer to you is a modest, not-so-regular blog every month-or-so. These times seem to hinge on a lot of “information consumption,” which I think is not necessary. Take a concept like forgiveness, and practice it for a month or two consciously. Then find another bit of wisdom, and incorporate that into your practice as well. This is what is true for me. In the past, I'd “plow” through the self-help books, or sacred texts, without allowing the seeds of wisdom to ge...

The Shine

You shine behind 'India Shining,'
unnoticed by many, but not by all.
The boats cruising the backwaters
leave your unread signature,
unclogging the arteries of Kerala.
                                                           By Rajkumar Reghunathan

In 1995, the summer before my first trip to India with my university, I drove across America by myself. I was driving my grandmother's six cylinder Buick, pulling a six-foot trailer packed with my “life,” as I was planning on living in North Carolina, USA, forever. I love my country, the land, the people. They are truly unique. The idea of permanently living in North Carolina, however, shortly changed a few months later, when I traversed Indian soils. “You know, Susan, they say th...

Today I was cooking in God's kitchen. I cook every day. This is no ordinary kitchen, it's God's kitchen.  Everything in it belongs to God, and humans have the job to apprentice with God. This kitchen is like a laboratory. It is here that we create the sweet sauce of life. In this creation we are offered free will to make whatever we please, and that includes quite a menu. With God as lead Chef in this kitchen and guardian angels as assistants, we have all kinds of tools to create at wil...

Oh, the delicate things of life, such as a single fine grain of sand, the loving, lingering eye contact from your beloved, the cell membrane of a flower. What do all of these things have in common? When we make time to grasp on to life's tender details, we begin to observe God's “fine print,” the reason that we are really here.

Relationships and friendships are so important. We are similar to cells and grains of sand, that we all participate and respond and react with each other. ...

Tomorrow is Onam, a holiday celebrated worldwide exclusively by the people of Kerala. Onam includes all religions, and is a state holiday. This is my favorite holiday, because it reminds me of Christmas and Thanksgiving at the same time. Onam is a harvest festival that celebrates the abundance that God has given us. We give clothing or money to our family members and employees, or to people who perform services for us—such as our fisher woman, our trash collectors, and our coconut harvester...