Zen Peacekeeper.

Change-Maker.

Story-Teller.

Yoga-Guide.

Action-Amplifier.

Courage-Cultivator.

Story-Teller.

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Want to help me revisit Afghanistan?

Tuesday, April 24th, 2012

Earlier this year Zen Under Fire was published. It’s the story of the two years I spent in Afghanistan – the people I met there, the lessons they taught me. Four and a half years since I was last in Afghanistan, I have the chance to return. I’ve been given the opportunity to combine three [...]

Posted in Afghanistan, Doing good, Service | No Comments »

Where in the world am I?

Sunday, April 22nd, 2012

Back in January, someone asked me: Do you have any plans to go back into the field? And my honest answer was: Yes, actually I do. Or more accurately, I have a won’t-go-away, ache-in-my-belly desire for it. What I need is a plan. Well. Soon after writing that post I started to see the dots that connected [...]

Posted in Afghanistan, Coming 'home' | 6 Comments »

A few good things: Spreading creative joy

Saturday, April 21st, 2012

This summer Jen Louden and Susannah Conway and I are lead a Creative Joy retreat. So we’ve been on a bit of an adventure, exploring what exactly we mean by Creative Joy – how it can be fed, and why it matters. We asked some of our friends to share their own reflections on creative joy, [...]

Posted in Good things | 1 Comment »

The Joy of Service

Friday, April 20th, 2012

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. ~ Rabindranath Tagore This quote opens my book. It expresses what was possibly the single most beautiful and important thing I learned in Afghanistan. When I remember this, and live as though [...]

Posted in Good things, self care, Service | 2 Comments »

A few good things (my belated weekly links round-up)

Monday, April 16th, 2012

As I write this post, a battle is raging in Kabul. The Taleban have apparently launched their infamous Spring Offensive in the city. I’ve been checking in on friends via Twitter and Facebook all day. My favorite updates came from a friend who was stuck in her office with a cat and a litter of [...]

Posted in Afghanistan, Doing good, self care, Service | 3 Comments »

Weekly round-up – links and stories from across the web

Friday, March 30th, 2012

First up, I have a new site! If you are reading this post in a feed, then you may not know that I have a beautiful new website. It’s beautiful thanks to Charlotte Oliver and Kate Harding. It has a completely new book section including a trailer and some of the early reviews. Maybe most importantly, [...]

Posted in Story, Story-telling | 3 Comments »

A few good things (my weekly round-up of links from across the interwebs)

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

I started out calling these posts ‘A few good things’ And then I realised the links I’m drawn to, the things I want to share, are often a little bit intense (see today’s poem). They might not seem like ‘good things’ to everyone else. But I do believe they are good. They may not be [...]

Posted in Afghanistan, Being the change, Development, Doing good, Good things, Story-telling, Ways to help | 2 Comments »

No saint. No fearless hero.

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

One of the more uncomfortable things about doing humanitarian and human rights work is the (unearned) credit people give you for being more saintly, and more brave than others. It’s one of the reasons I included so much of my own (messy) personal story in Zen Under Fire. So I was pleased to read this, [...]

Posted in Writing | 9 Comments »

What Kony 2012 has to do with my book: this week’s round up

Sunday, March 11th, 2012

If you are on Facebook (or Twitter) then you almost certainly have seen a link or reference this week to the new Invisible Children video, which is part of their campaign to ‘Stop Kony’ – referring to Jospeph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army. If you missed the video (Really? Wow. You somehow avoided [...]

Posted in Doing good, Story-telling | 14 Comments »

A few good things (a very short round up from around the interwebs)

Friday, March 2nd, 2012

I launched my book this week. Which left me very little time for curating interesting links from across the interwebs. So here is a very short (and utterly slanted) collection of good things: Kimberly Rothwell, at the Dominion Post, wrote about Zen Under Fire, how I got started in human rights work, the complexities of [...]

Posted in Good things | 4 Comments »

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