Meanderings

A catharsis of pent up passion from the authors observations and perspective on people and how they channel thorough life.The authors thoughts on many topics compiled from years of journaling. The confliction of actions or inaction when juxtaposed to thinking, saying and doing .and how the simplicity of using lifes toolbox as a how to guide for basic everyday living is all that is required.

Paradise lost? Op-ed journalist Rajendra Ramlogan has used his weekly column to cast a critical yet fond eye over life in his native Trinidad and Tobago, often doing so within the context of regional and international developments. Can these sister Caribbean islands play to their strengths to throw off the corruption and crime that threaten to drag them down? Since independence in the 1960s, the struggle for Trinidad and Tobago has been to fulfil its early promise, with politics descending into name-calling and self-preservation rather than attaining the aspirations and hopes of early post-colonial leaders. Its cultural diversity, with a population of mixed African and Indian descent, makes TT a unique place with music, food and holidays like nowhere else, but it can also cause tensions. Ultimately to really love a place, one must truly know it in all its imperfections.

Lois E Hunter is a New Zealand poet, whose ancestors arrived in Christchurch, New Zealand, five generations ago from both Ireland and Cornwall. She grew up in Point Chevalier, Auckland, and has been writing and publishing her poetry for the past thirty years. Now retired, she has accepted her age. She cant go back, only forward, and the time is approaching where shes aware she needs to leave her home of seventeen years and select her forever home. As she moves further and further out from her existing home, her poems follow the paths she takes both mentally and physically, contemplating which direction to take with, as yet, no urgency to decide. These are poems of people-watching and places, both from her past and the present. There are four parts. Part one is a preview to choosing her existing small island home. Part two is taking day trips away to familiar places. Part three is travelling further afield. Part four is a plateau that has been reached with her future still ahead. Lois says, The special thing I love about poetry is the similarity between poems and cartoons. With a few deeply considered pen strokes, they both give the reader a complete minimalistic story, thought, or vision.

Book Four in the series Meanderings in Medical History contains seventeen essays about various subjects pertaining to medical history. Each vignette was prompted by something that was relevant to my professional or personal experience. The emphasis is on narrative history, stories of physicians at different times and places. As historian Allan Nevins (no relation) once wrote, History should be enjoyed, not endured.

What appeals to me intellectually and emotionally about your book is that reading these pieces together creates a very new context to hold the experience of life. Spirituality, what you call meditation, is the glue that holds all the parts together. I feel that all your contributors are committed to integrate the fragments of what knowledge and methods we have acquired with real life experience. John Lounibos, PhD Intimate Meanderings is an inspiring array of insight and bears witness to human life and our innate movement towards wholeness. Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao, Abbot ZCLA, Buddha Essence Temple This book is an amazing potpourri of wisdom. Intimate Meanderings should be required reading in every Jesuit tent. Dan Berrigan, S.J. Most memoirs are I-full. Morgan gives us a lot of We-full. Robert Blair Kaiser Intimate Meanderings shares the wisdom, inner-thoughts, and vast experiences of over twenty-five contributors who offer their inspiring reflections on meditation, religion, community involvement, hospice, and death, ultimately piquing spiritual and literary curiosity for those contemplating their own pilgrimage through life. A glance at the list of contributors, their articles, conversations, and poems illustrates their breadth and depth as well as diversity; personal historiesboth positive and negativethat need to be told and not forgotten; spiritual journeys that still have a powerful impact; and poetry that captures emotional and motivational moments. Zo-Callahan and friends honestly communicate their deepest desires and yearnings as they explore the inner and inter-relational processes of obtaining serenity and joy.

The politics of everyday life is to be found, time and again, in meandering movements, in making connections across and between things in the rough and tumble of the seemingly banal, fragmentary and quotidian experiences that make up our day-to-day existence. The key point of the book, ideally as well as practically, is to realize that there may be something potentially significant, and politically significant, in the very act of making such connections, of understanding the supposedly trite and trivial world of the everyday against a broader political backcloth. There is merit in sifting the fragments, the fragmentary experiences, of everyday life in order to see how they imply a broader political totality in which they are situated and, at times, cleverly made to function. This intuition, broadly inspired by Henri Lefebvre, is reflected in and through the various and varying ways Porter puts to work the ideas and provocations of thinkers such as Raoul Vaneigem, Gilles Deleuze, and Soren Kierkegaard.

The Channel Country is of special interest because its extreme aridity is disrupted unpredictably by summer monsoonal rains, causing massive flooding, and is followed by prodigious growth of plants and reproduction of animals, before returning to daunting conditions of drought. Yet, it is a region teeming with life, both plant and animal, possessing unusual capacities for existing there. It is also a region favoured by hardy pastoralists and their livestock, who have learned to coexist with this harsh climate. In Meanderings in the Bush, the authors describe their many adventures and misadventures in the region, with its climate, its animals and its human inhabitants. They also discuss results of their research which reveals some of the secrets for survival of many of the native animals, including marsupials, rodents, birds and the remarkable desert crab. These studies are cast in the light of both the prehistoric and historic records of the Lake Eyre Basin, including the probable impacts of changing and/or stable climates, Aboriginal occupation, later European pastoral development and the influences of introduced exotic mammals.

These essays about various unrelated medical history subjects were composed over some three decades; some written recently, others published in my previous books. The title word meandering suggests randomness, but should not be mistaken for pointlessness for each vignette was prompted by something which at the time seemed relevant to my professional or personal life. The emphasis is on narrative history, stories of physicians at different times and places, for as my famous namesake Professor Allan Nevins once wrote, history should be enjoyed, not endured.