Colorful saris are draped in a courtyard in preparation for a wedding in India.

Music from what sounded like a drunken high school marching band reverberated down the street full cows, hucksters, potholes and people.  I knew the cacophonous sound meant one thing – a celebration.  Walking toward the rowdy music, I turn into a courtyard regaled in reds, oranges and the many colors of the rainbow as the misty morning light began to harden.  A wedding was at hand!  My visual love affair with India is renewed.  She never ceases to surprise and delight in a visual feast for the eyes.

The sun rises over Dar es Salaam as dhow’s under lateen sail make their way to fish the open ocean.  I love waking in a strange land to bear witness sights like this, always wondering if people foreign to the country of my birth watch in the same raptured awe the first time they see cars clogging the freeways of America.

Their job for the day: to carry baskets of shit on their heads to prepare the terraced soil for planting potatoes.  I try to imagine doing their job with even one tenth the joy – and cannot.  How humbling to be in the presence of their smiles as they heave the next basket onto their heads and walk it down the row.  My hardest task for work — trivial in comparison.

Walking a dirt pathway at a elephant camp in Tamil Nadu, India – this scene turns my head.  Washed in the warm evening light a moment in time that shows better than any essay how working elephants are often treated as family. Mom and daughter washing the days laundry, dad washing the elephant.  Its such a tender moment I can’t help but smile every time I see the image.

I don’t care how poor a man is; if he has family, he’s rich. – Dan Wilcox

Standing in the salty water, the long four wheel drive and pre dawn alarm that it took to get here are distant memories.  The Pacific is calm and playful this morning.  Unusual for Moomomi preserve with its wind whipped dunes.  I watch the small joyful waves jump into the air as they tease the rocky shore.  With every whoosh they say ‘we will not win today, nor tomorrow, nor the day after that.  But someday our persistence will whittle you down to sand and smooth your rocky face’. I lower my camera to inches above the water and for a moment – for many moments, time stood still.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.
-  Henry David Thoreau

A young girl rides a moped in the rain with her father, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.  ~Clarence Budington Kelland

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Walking near the temple a splash of color catches my eye.  A devotee sits contemplating a flower.
I am reminded of  the words of Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism:
If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.

This man washes clothes eight to twelve hours a day, every day, standing in soapy water
until his skin begins to dissolve.  Yet every piece of clothing he washes
he inspects with pride in his work.  Ghandi once said satisfaction lies in the
effort…full effort is full victory.  Every piece of clothing he washed is his full victory.

The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.
-Kahlil Gibran