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Aloka: Sanskrit for Illumination and Light.

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  He awoke and the gray cat was curled in a bundle beside the bed and the sun had not yet risen but silver light was coming and the line of pines and skinny oaks   were skeletal against the sunrise. This morning there was no ice and frost on the old sash windows. A week ago they were opaque and ice formed where the needle wind found its way into the cracks.   This morning he turned, as he usually did, to  gaze a minute or two on Hassan Hourani’s painting, hung on the wall in a two by three foot  black frame. The painting was Hassan’s  journey from Palestine to New York. Hassan is a character in his own paintings  and in this one lays across a steel trestle bridge in a long yellow dress that conforms in color with the peeling remains of the unpainted plaster and floral wallpaper on the bedroom wall. Hassan stretches across the bridge like a cat amid crooked tenement buildings with yellow lit windows and television aerials and lamp posts and yellow li...
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Cuba Librés with Wilfred Burchett in Cuba cha cha cha.

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Wednesday, August 22, 1979:  On assignment with Four Corners, ABC documentary unit with David Brill and Ian Macintosh. It’s the Sixth Summit of Non-Aligned Nations , a politically charged affair in Cuba. A hundred nations opposed to America are gathering ninety miles off Key West, Florida. The summit represents nearly two-thirds of United Nations' members and comprises fifty-five percent of the world’s population but it’s hardly known in the West.  After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in the early sixties Fidel Castro is still alive and we’re hoping for an interview. U.S. aircraft were not welcome nor allowed in Cuba so we flew via Kingston, Jamaica to Havana on Aeroflot. The Berlin Wall had not yet fallen and the Soviet Union still stood tall beside Fidel twenty years after the Cuban Revolution.  It’s a little over an hour’s flight, and I’m watching the white furrows of trading vessels steaming in the blue-green Caribbean Sea. And soon we descend and take a taxi to the Hotel N...
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Chapter 1. Origin Story

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    After all, I was an aspiring   journalist. I used it as a tool to travel and see the world, to understand and get inside some questions that puzzled me from my earliest days. I became a freelancer. It felt better that way, challenged me in unexpected ways and took me to unexpected places.   I was born in the shadow of the Holocaust and Hiroshima in East Melbourne, Australia. World War Two was drawing to a close and my  first faint memory is my mother holding me in her arms the day she left. And there’s a black and white picture of me and my baby brother, sitting on my grandparent’s front stairs looking straight back into the lens of my father’s Leica camera. He was documenting the departure. It was many years before I saw my mother again. And then it went blank. _____ Her name was Miss Moon and she had a kind face and curling white hair and her voice was soft. She  lived on top of a mountain, the highest point in the Dandenong Ranges overlooking ...
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