Home to Pushkar

Finally heading home, I have been on the road for nearly 4 months and am really, really looking forward to getting back home.
It is not the same all this travel when I have someone waiting for me, in the past I have always been heading to Ptaveen so it seemed fine to be on the long hauls, now we have a home together it does not have the same alure....life is always changing.
It is not travel I am over just the way that I do it.
Looking back this trip has been very satisfying, I have had many stimulating students in Ireland and the Uk, people have been kind and shown be around their local areas, Lichfield and Salisbury cathedral stand out as well as the Dales of yorkshire and the rolling hills of Kent, being with a local alwas adds something special to a view.
My Moroccan tour was really good fun, great travelling companions, the family holiday in Siouth Vietnam excellent as well as catching up with friends on my flying visit to OZ,
looking back the thing that really touched my heart were the fragments of embroidered tetiles in the museum in Damascus, dated at 83 AD i could almost see the hand that stitched them.
Embroidery is so reflective of the maker, tiny precise stitches, slightly boulder grafic stitches all lead you on to imagine she who stitched.
Standing in that museum looking at the fragments I felt a hand a sisterhood stretch out through nearly 1000 years to another person, we both stitch we have much in common, yet what were our world like?
I have stitched with ladies in many places across the world it is uncanny how similar we are.
That lady in Syria...she must have used a bone needle? not steel in those days surely?
how di she cut the thread?
did she weave the fabric herself, did she spin and dye the threads, amny things to wonder about and yet her work is not unlike something I could produce. Well probably not so neat but you never know.
Amazing things to ponder...


these little amulets were in the same museum, beautiful to hold in your hand and poor your dreams into...
and the little convent in Maluula [that place where they still speak the same tongue Christ used] had icons similar to these
all really magical places
and in a few short days I will be back in my very own magical place- Pushkar!! yippee!!