The Universal Language

 India

A warm smile is the universal language of kindness.
- William Arthur Ward

Tibet

Afghanistan 

A smile is the universal welcome.
- Max Eastman

Burma

Afghanistan

India

A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.
- Washington Irving

  An Indian tailor caught in the monsoon floodwaters in
Porbandar, India

Look back, and smile on perils past.
- Sir Walter Scott

Afghanistan

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.  
- William Shakespeare, Othello

Kashmir

Afghanistan

Cambodia

Every smile makes you a day younger.
- Chinese Proverb

Burma

Laughter is day, and sobriety is night;
a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both, more bewitching than either.
– Henry Ward Beecher

China

Honduras

 Tibet

Celebration in Berlin, Germany

Peace begins with a smile.
- Mother Teresa

Afghanistan

Vietnam

The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress,
and grows brave by reflection.
– Thomas Paine

Burma

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but
sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
- Thich Nhat Hanh

Afghanistan

Family and Friends

Tibet

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you,
but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach,
because you do not just live in a world.
A world lives in you.
- Frederick Buechner

India

 

India

Words are easy, like the wind;
Faithful friends are hard to find.
- William Shakespeare

Yemen

 

Afghanistan

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
- George Bernard Shaw

Vietnam

Nor need we power or splendor, wide hall or lordly dome;
the good, the true, the tender- these form the wealth of home.
- Sarah J. Hale (1788- 1879)

Baluchistan, Pakistan

 

Italy

Friendship is one mind in two bodies.
-Mencius, Chinese philosopher, 4th cent. BCE

Karelia, Russia

An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship.
- Spanish Proverb

Peru

There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home
that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating
virtues of human, are created, strengthened and maintained.
-  Winston Churchill

Honduras

What can you do to promote world peace?
Go home and love your family.
- Mother Teresa

Tibet

 

India

There is only one good-looking child in the world, and every mother has it.
- Chinese Proverb

Afghanistan

The two things we can give our children are roots which firmly anchor them,
and wings which allow them to become independent.

Yemen

There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends.
I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.
 - Jane Austen

Paris, France

A true friend freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly,
takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably.
- William Penn

Fiji

 

Yemen

 

New York, United States

 

India

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Silent Language of Hands

Afghanistan

Behold the hands
how they promise, conjure, appeal, menace, pray, supplicate, 
refuse, beckon, interrogate, admire, confess, cringe, instruct, command, 
mock and what not besides, with a variation and multiplication of
variation which makes the tongue envious.
- Michel de Montaigne

Sharbat Gula, Nasir Bagh Refugee Camp, Peshawar, Pakistan

 

Vietnam

Our hands often reveal what we really think but do not say.
They can show a range of feelings and emotions from confusion and frustration
to joy, understanding, love, and compassion. 

Afghanistan

Among all species, our human hands are unique — not only in what they can accomplish,
but also in how they communicate. Human hands can paint the Sistine Chapel, pluck a guitar,
maneuver surgical instruments, chisel a David, forge steel, and write poetry.
They can grasp, scratch, poke, punch, feel, sense, evaluate, hold and mold the world around us.
- Joe Navarro

Florida, United States

 

New York City, United States

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us,
we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions,or cures,
 have chosen rather to share our pain
 and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.
- Henri Nouwen

Cuba

Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted
according to the graces we have received and
let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.
- Mother Teresa

Tibet

Hands calm us, feed us, and scratch our backs.
They intimidate, bless, encourage, and stop us.  They soothe and caress.
They draw our attention to the good and the bad, often suggesting exuberance or fear.
- Charles Flowers introduction to Elliott Erwitt’s Handbook

Mali

 

Kashmir

 

Tibet

Hands have saved lives and taken them just as easily.
They create the saviors of life as well as the purveyors of death.
Creating and destroying with a single move
a finger can move mountains or search the unknown heavens.
Hands live to caress and love.
Hands live to fight and die.
Forever living hands, forever exploring hands.
- Bruce Alan Humphrey

Afghanistan

To receive everything, one must open one’s hands and give.
- Taisen Deshimaru

Burma

Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as
beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.
- Rumi ( 1207 – 1273)

Ireland

 

Japan

Hold a true friend with both hands
- African Proverb

Paraguay

To pray means to open your hands before God.
- Henri Nouwen

United States

 

Kunar Province, Afghanistan

Kunar Province, Afghanistan

Russia

The hands which beckon,
embrace, soothe, and comfort us
Bid us farewell.

Uganda

…For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 5
-William Shakespeare

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Power of Play

Ethiopia

It is a happy talent to know how to play.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fiji

Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent, and independent with a
tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play.
- Henri Matisse

Tibet

The true object of all human life is play.
- G. K. Chesterton

China

 

Afghanistan

 

India

 

Cambodia

Men do not quit playing because they grow old;
they grow old because they quit playing.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Tibet

 

India

Play is the exultation of the possible.
- Martin Buber

India

A child loves his play, not because it’s easy,
but because it’s hard.
- Benjamin Spock

Mauritania

People tend to forget that play is serious.
- David Hockney

Afghanistan

 

India

In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior.
In play it is as though he were a head taller than himself.
- Lev Vygotsky

Burma

When children pretend, they’re using their imaginations to
move beyond the bounds of reality.
A stick can be a magic wand. A sock can be a puppet.
A small child can be a superhero.
- Fred Rogers

Ethiopia

 

India

 

Mali

Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play;
music and dancing were pure play….
We have to conclude, therefore,
that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played…
- Johan Huizinga

Australia

 

Burma

Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning.
- Diane Ackerman 

Ethiopia

 

Yemen

Play, while it cannot change the external realities of children’s lives,
can be a vehicle for children to explore and enjoy their differences and similarities,
and to create, even for a brief time, a more just world
where everyone is an equal and valued participant.
- Patricia G. Ramsey

India

India

Play is the highest form of research.
- attributed to Albert Einstein

India

 

Cuba

Sometimes you have to drop the rake and play in the leaves.
- Douglas V’Soske

Burma

 

India

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Food for the Soul

Conversation is food for the soul.
- Mexican Proverb

Omo Valley, Ethiopia

 The great secret of succeeding in conversation is to admire little, to hear much;
always to distrust our own reason, and sometimes that of our friends;
never to pretend to wit, but to make that of others appear as much as possibly we can;
to hearken to what is said and to answer to the purpose.
- Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790

Yemen

The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense,
the third good humor, and the fourth wit.
- Sir William Temple, 1628-1699

Tanzania

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another’s observation, not overturning it.
- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton, 1803 – 1873

Morocco

The great gift of conversation lies less in displaying it ourselves than in drawing it out of others.
- Jean de la Bruyere, 1803 – 1873

Italy

 The character of a man is known from his conversations.
- Menander, 342 – 292 BCE

Poet Khalil Khoury, Baghdad, Iraq

 

Japan

 

India

Conversation. What is it? A Mystery!
It’s the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest,
of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.
- Guy de Maupassant, 1850 – 1893

Lourdes, France

 

China

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
-  Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection, 1533 – 1592

Turkey

 

Russia

 

France

 

Afghanistan

A single conversation with a wise person is worth a month’s study of books.
- Chinese Proverb

Italy

India

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

Tanzania

In my opinion, the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is in conversation.
I find it sweeter than any other action in life; and if I were forced to choose,
I think I would rather lose my sight than my hearing and voice.
- Michel de Montaigne

Tibet

The very act of preparing and serving tea encourages conversation.
The little spaces in time created by teatime rituals call out to be filled with conversation.
Even the tea itself–warm and comforting-inspires a feeling of relaxation and trust that fosters shared confidences.
Emilie Barnes, If Teacups Could Talk

Italy

The highest good is prayer and conversation with God.
- St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, 347–407

Paraguay

 

Steve McCurry in Omo Valley with men from Surma Tribe

 

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Going Home

Home is where one starts from. 
- T.S. Eliot

Rajasthan, India

The ache for home lives in all of us…
- Maya Angelou

Omo Valley, Ethiopia

My home is my retreat and resting place …
I try to keep this corner as a haven against the tempest outside,
as I do another corner in my soul.
- Michel de Montaigne

Cave Homes in Bamiyan, Afghanistan

Tibet

He is the happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan 

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown.
It may be frail — its roof may shake — the wind may blow through it — the storm may enter — the rain may enter —
but the King of England cannot enter! — all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.
-William Pitt the Elder

India

All language is a longing for home.
- Jalaluddin Rumi, 13th-Century Persian poet

Russia

 Mali

Uganda

Peru

Mauritania

Home is any four walls that enclose the right person.
-Helen Rowland

 Tibet

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
- Benjamin Franklin

Kashmir

Tihamah Plain, Yemen

A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
- George Edward Moore

Refugees returning to destroyed homes, Herat, Afghanistan

Russia

There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues,
the most dominating virtues of human society, are created, strengthened and maintained. 
- Winston Churchill

 Tanzania

Philippines

 Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.
- John Howard Payne

Afghanistan

Morocco

 My home is not a place; it is people.
- Lois McMaster Bujold

Bosnia

Brazil

Russia

Life’s a voyage that’s homeward bound.
- Herman Melville

Omo Valley, Ethiopia

It takes a lot of living to make a house a home
It doesn’t make any  difference how rich you get to be
How much your chairs and tables cost, how great your luxury;
It isn’t home to you though it be the palace of a king,
Until somehow your soul is wrapped round everything.
- Paraphrase of Edgar Guest poem, Home

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Simple Act of Waiting

Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.
-Khaled Hosseini,  A Thousand Splendid Suns 

Tibet

Often the act of waiting is anything but simple.
Many people hate to wait because they are waiting to do something,
get something, or go somewhere.

Tibet

Waiting doesn’t seem like an act, but the lack of action;  however,
the decision to be patient and willing to wait is an act of courage and perseverance.

Crowds at the Kumbh Mela await their turn to bathe in the Ganges.  Allahabad, India

A person who is a master of patience is master of everything else.
- George Savile

Waiting for medical care. Kabul, Afghanistan

A mother waits for news of her missing son.  Afghanistan

Refugees wait in line.  Thailand

Endurance is patience concentrated.
- Thomas Carlyle

Women queue in Yemen

 Patience is the companion of wisdom.
- St. Augustine

A ballerina waits backstage for her cue. Zagreb, Croatia

Shoppers wait for a bus. Dublin, Ireland

The faithful wait for healing. Lourdes, France 

Waiting in line for a church service. Los Angeles, USA 

Waiting for the train.  India

Waiting for a bus. Ahmedabad, India

Waiting for a look through the Berlin Wall.  Germany

Come what may, all bad fortune is to be conquered by endurance.
- Virgil

Waiting to perform. Hong Kong, China

People count up the faults of those who keep them waiting.
- French Proverb

Waiting for customers at Amber Fort, Jaipur, India

Dog waits for door to open. Porbandar, India

The Patience of Ordinary Things
by Pat Schneider
… I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.

Cambodia

Right as Rain

During the year I shot the monsoon assignment, I learned to see it as a critically important event, 
and not the disaster it had first seemed to my Western eyes.
Farmers experience the monsoon as an almost religious experience
as they watch their fields come back to life after being parched for half the year.

Varanasi, India 

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India’s annual monsoon rains have arrived at the southern Kerala coast,
a top weather official said on Tuesday, brightening prospects of higher farm output by aiding
farmers to plant summer-sown crops such as rice, soybean and cotton on time.
- June 6, 2012

Goa, India

Rain is grace;
Rain is the sky descending to the earth …
– John Updike

India

For half the world’s people, good monsoons, those rain-bearing winds of
Asia and the Subcontinent,  mean life and prosperity.
Poor ones are marked by famine and death.

Bangladesh

The rains fall on one horn of the buffalo, and not on the other.
-Indian Proverb

Kabul, Afghanistan

Java, Indonesia

Nepal

Northern Territory, Australia

Tokyo, Japan

Tibet

It is no use to grumble and complain; It’s just as cheap and easy to rejoice.
When God sorts out the weather and sends rain – Why, rain’s my choice.
- James Whitcomb Riley

Sri Lanka

Indonesia

Cambodia

The drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.
- Lucretius

Porbandar, India

India

Dalit women cleaning streets, Mumbai, India

Burma

Only He shakes the heavens and from its treasures takes out the winds.
He joins the waters and the clouds and produces the rain. He does all those things.
- Michael Servetus (1511-1553)
Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer

Cambodia

Monsoon History
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
The air is wet, soaks
into mattresses, and curls
In apparitions of smoke,
Like fat white slugs furled
Among the timber
Or silver fish tunnelling
The damp linen covers
Of schoolbooks, or walking
Quietly like centipedes,
The air walking everywhere
On its hundred feet
Is filled with the glare
Of tropical water.
Again we are taken over
By clouds and rolling darkness.
Small snails appear
Clashing their timid horns
Among the morning glory
Vines.

Bojonegoro, Java, Indonesia

Monsoon Festival, India

For months there is no rain, and then there is too much.
Half the world’s people survive at the whim of the monsoon.

Two men try to cross a monsoon swollen river after the bridge was swept away, Goa, India

Silhouettes and Shadows

Bodh Gaya, India

 The Sun never knew how wonderful it was
until it fell on the wall of a building.
Louis Kahn, Architect
quoted in forward of In Praise of Shadows,  Junichiro Tanizaki

Mud Mosque, Mali

Look round and round upon this bare bleak plain,
and see even here, upon a winter’s day,
how beautiful the shadows are.
  Alas!  It is the nature of their kind to be so.
The loveliest things in life are but shadows,
and they come and go, and change and fade away…
- Charles Dickens

Cambodia

Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows,
the light and dark which that thing provides.
- Junichiro Tanizaki

Kabul, Afghanistan

We are but dust and shadow.
- Horace

Preah Khan, Cambodia

You can only come to the morning through the shadows.
- J.R. R. Tolkien

Thailand

Burma/Myanmar

Mauritania

Brazil

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
- T. S. Eliot

Italy

Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow.
The shadow is what we think of it.  The tree is the real thing.
- Abraham Lincoln

New York

Kandze, Tibet

Burma/Myanmar

Kabul, Afghanistan

China

Kashmir

Korea

Hindu Kush Mountains, Afghanistan

Ancient Catacombs, Rome, Italy

A shadow on the wall
boughs stirred by the noonday wind
that’s enough earth
and for the eye
enough celestial participation.
- Gottfried Benn
Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

It Takes Two

 Here are some pictures of couples all over
the world who have a relationship that is
evident in their gestures of caring, their body
language, their eyes.

Mauritania

If we are a metaphor of the universe,
the human couple is the metaphor par excellence,
the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms.
The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
– Octavio Paz, Mexico, Nobel Laureate in Literature

Havana, Cuba

Brazil

Chiang Mai, Thailand

Venice, Italy

What is essential is invisible to the eye.
 - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Rome, Italy

Grow old along with me.
The best is yet to be, the last of life,
for which the first was made.
Our times are in his hand who saith,
A whole I planned, youth shows but half;
Trust God: See all, nor be afraid!
– Robert Browning

France

 

New York City

Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan

Life has taught us that love does not
consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward
together in the same direction.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
Wind, Sand, and Stars

Tagong, Tibet

Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
– Robert Browning

Gostivar, Macedonia

 

Agra, India

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of. 
- Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

Uganda

To love someone deeply gives you strength.
Being loved by someone  deeply gives you courage.
- Lao-Tzu

Sanaa, Yemen

 

Dublin, Ireland

 

Belgrade, Serbia

One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life.
That word is love.
– Sophocles

Rome, Italy

 

Istanbul, Turkey

Cambodia

 

Rome, Italy

The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
– Octavio Paz, Mexico, Nobel Laureate in Literature