Rick's Blog

#bunyipsbooksbeyond

Use the menu below to explore "All Posts," or delve into selected topics like "Children's Picture Books", and more.

India does not meet you halfway. This is the point in the journey where many travelers stiffen. Where carefully learned rules about food, water, family, and faith collide with something less containable. Noise rises. Crowds thicken. Plans dissolve. Systems you rely on - time, order, efficiency - begin to wobble. India pushes back hardest here, not out of hostility, but indifference. Time as a Suggestion In India, time is elastic. Trains arrive when they arrive. Meetings begin

In India, faith does not lower its voice. It rings bells before dawn. It burns incense at street corners. It spills into traffic and interrupts schedules without apology. Here, belief is not something you carry discreetly. It is something you live visibly, publicly, and often without explanation. To the visitor, this can at first feel overwhelming. And then, slowly, it feels instructive. A Majority Faith That Isn’t Quiet Hinduism is not just one belief system among many in In

In India, you are not hosted. You are absorbed. There is a subtle but important difference: Hosting  implies a boundary: a start time, an end time, a sense that you will eventually leave and life will resume its usual shape.   Absorption  has no such courtesy. Once you cross the threshold of an Indian home, you are inside the organism. You are family now. Whether you asked to be or not. The Guest Is God The phrase Atithi Devo Bhava - the guest is God  - is often translated p

You can admire food from a distance. You cannot do that with water. Water enters you quietly. It slips past intention and habit, past years of unthinking trust. In India, water is never neutral. It is watched, boiled, filtered, carried, bartered, worshiped, feared. It is life - and it is risk. You learn this not from a warning sign, but from the pause before you brush your teeth. Water Is Everywhere & It’s Rarely Innocent In much of the world, water is invisible infrastructur

Before you travel in India, you must learn how  to eat. Not what  to eat - that comes later - but how . Slowly. Deliberately. With respect. With restraint. And with an understanding that food in India is not merely nourishment, but culture, religion, family, and ritual layered onto a plate. India teaches this lesson early. Sometimes forcefully. The First Truth: India Is Generous With Food Food in India is everywhere. It arrives uninvited. It is pressed upon you. It is shared

In the high desert of New Mexico, where sunlight paints the mesas in gold and red, a simple yet powerful image radiates across the landscape. The Zia Sun Symbol . To many, The symbol is instantly recognizable from the New Mexico state flag: a red sun with four groups of four rays extending outward on a golden field. But to the Zia Pueblo , this symbol carries a far deeper meaning rooted in spirituality, harmony, and respect for the natural order of life. Origins in the Zia Pu

Last Sunday morning, I noticed her in the church yard of the San Albino Basilica in Mesilla, New Mexico, 30 miles from the border. A delicate, black, lace mantilla draped over her head and shoulders, almost blending with her hair. The mantilla has long been a symbol of faith, femininity, and tradition across Spain and Latin America. In Mexico, has its own unique identity. A blend of Catholic devotion, indigenous artistry, and social expression. The mantilla’s roots reach bac

George Orwell  gave us a useful little word for a very modern problem: Doublethink . The ability to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time, and to believe both. In Orwell’s 1984  it sounded extreme: “2 + 2 = 5” and “2 + 2 = 4” living side by side in the same brain. Today, we don’t have a 1984 Ministry of Truth , but we do have something more polite and better dressed: University leaders who are expected to be wholly dedicated to the public good, while also s

How are you to imagine anything if the images are always provided for you? Assimilate. Ubiquitous. Everywhere all the time. That little string of thoughts could almost be a lost footnote from George Orwell’s 1984 . George Orwell coined the word doublethink  to describe a terrifying mental gymnastic: The ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time and to accept both as true. It wasn’t a bug in his dystopian society; it was a feature. If the Party said 2 + 2 = 5,

When Malala Yousafzai walked onto the stage at the Mondavi Center on November 18, 2025, UC Davis wrapped itself in the language of moral courage. The Chancellor’s Colloquium billed the evening as a conversation between a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and UC Davis Chancellor Gary S. May, celebrating a woman who risked her life to speak out against injustice. But outside the glow of the Mondavi Center, the huge entertainment center at UC Davis, a different reality hangs over the c

On burrito nights, I don’t really cook. I drive to a small restaurant, stand in line with everyone else, and order dinner in foil and paper. Burritos for home. For a long time, that was the whole story. Then I started noticing a man who spends most evenings on the sidewalk nearby. Homeless? Unhomed? I still fumble for the right word. Labels never feel big enough for a whole human life. He sits with a backpack, sometimes with a plastic bag of belongings, sometimes with nothing

If you wanted to explain Roger Federer to someone who has never watched a tennis match, you could start with a single, startling piece of math. Over a 25-year career, Federer played 1,526 singles matches and won 1,251 of them - a towering 82% win rate , one of the best in the history of the sport. He collected 20 Grand Slam singles titles and 103 career titles along the way. And yet, in those same matches, he won only 54% of all the points he played  That tension - dominance

There were two paintings in my childhood home that felt less like decoration and more like members of the family. One hung above my father’s desk: The Macquarie River near Dubbo, NSW by Colin Parker , painted in the early 1960s. The other watched over my mother’s room: Through Winter Trees  by Colleen Parker , dated 1984, and purchased by my mother after my father’s death. For decades I thought of them simply as Dad’s painting  and Mum’s painting . Two separate choices, two

There aren’t many marketing professors who become household names, fewer still who manage to turn balance sheets and antitrust policy into compelling storytelling. Scott Galloway , NYU Stern professor, serial entrepreneur, podcaster, columnist, and now commentator on masculinity, has somehow done exactly that. At a moment when tech feels untouchable, politics feels tribal, and a lot of young people feel lost, Galloway has positioned himself as a kind of blunt, data-driven unc

When Georgia O’Keeffe arrived in New Mexico in 1929, she described it as love at first sight. O’Keefe said: When I got to New Mexico, that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country. Her words would later echo through decades of tourism campaigns and art history textbooks, shaping the mythology of O’Keeffe Country . A place imagined as vast, empty, and waiting to be claimed. But from an Indigenous perspective, the land O’Keeffe called mine was never hers to take. It a

I was walking along a cobbled street in the heart of Kraków, half tourist and half daydreamer, when the scene unfolded. It was one of those soft afternoons when the light seems to linger on everything. On the stone facades. On the tram wires overhead. On the small clusters of people drifting between cafés and churches. A busker a block away was playing something vaguely familiar on an accordion. The air smelled of coffee, caramel, and city dust. And then I saw them. Four nuns

There are words that feel like memories even when we hear them for the first time. Halcyon Days  is one of those phrases. Soft, nostalgic, and strangely luminous. It evokes warmth, calm seas, and a sense of time suspended. We use it to describe the peaceful chapters of our lives, yet its origin is not in leisure or luxury, but in love, grief, and transformation. The Myth Beneath the Calm In Greek mythology,  Alcyone  was the daughter of Aeolus , the god of the winds, and wife

There’s an Italian phrase that seems to hum rather than speak. Sta’ calma . Two words. A pause disguised as instruction. It doesn’t strike the ear like a command. It drifts through the air like a breeze through a curtain. In English, stay calm  feels utilitarian, even slightly anxious. A plea amid commotion. But in Italian, sta’ calma  feels elemental. It’s not merely telling you what to do. It’s reminding you what you already know. The language itself breathes for you. Techn

In an era when the edges of the map still blurred into the unknown, one young Englishman set out not to conquer new worlds but to understand them. Sir Joseph Banks  - botanist, explorer, and confidant of King George III - helped transform how Europeans saw nature itself. His name survives in flowers, islands, and libraries, yet his life remains a study in both enlightenment and empire. Lincolnshire Beginnings Joseph Banks was born in 1743 on his family’s estate at Revesby Abb

The 2025 State of the Climate Report  published today (29 October 2025) in BioScience offers the clearest warning yet. The planet’s vital signs are in crisis. Of the 34 indicators that scientists track to measure Earth’s health, from atmospheric carbon and ocean heat to ice loss and biodiversity, 22 have reached record levels . “Earth’s systems are nearing tipping points that could plunge the planet into a ‘hothouse’ regime,” warns William Ripple, co-lead author and professo