writer. traveller. life unraveller.
Recently, I decided that a great way to spend each birthday is to celebrate someone I aspire to be like. Someone with magic good-person dust, willing to sprinkle it into my needy, greedy palms. So on the eve of 38 (written four long years ago), I salute Ms Kerry and thank her, not just for... Continue Reading →
Meet Murray Robson.... This guy is a cracker, a loose cannon, a judgemental narcissist and the funniest, most blatantly honest guy I’ve ever met. I met him on my overnight bus from Bangkok to Pakse, Laos and I liked him immediately. His smiley eyes and toothless grin revealed his good intentions and natural roughness. His... Continue Reading →
It’s easy to pay lip-service to a word like gratitude, isn’t it? To find a hundred reasons every day to be grateful isn’t a difficult or time-consuming task. It merely requires us to look around at where we live and notice the comforts, the roof over our heads, the people in our lives that love... Continue Reading →
Listen here and please forgive my attempt at basic Thai!! There’s this lovely woman in Chiang Mai who reminds me of a tea cozy. She wears slacks like my grandma did and starched floral blouses, and she has baby-fine salt and pepper hair and friendly eyes looking out of a soft round face. She... Continue Reading →
Last week, I went to the hospital for some minor tests, and as I sat waiting for the doctor, I started feeling a bit sorry for myself. For recent events and for the dreaded impending blood samples about to be extracted from my plump, juicy vein via a most hated hoojie––a needle. I watched an... Continue Reading →
At long last, our stay in Bali reached its end. Three months sped by through a process of one hot sunny day, bleeding into the next, until we arrived at week’s end and wondered where the time went. Into laptops and lazy evenings spent stargazing while drinking hot peppermint tea, wondering why I’m drinking hot... Continue Reading →
When I was eight years old, I wanted a Cabbage Patch Kid. Remember those dolls from the 1980s? They had soft squishy bodies with protruding belly buttons, hard plastic heads sprouting hair, and if you turned an unclothed one over, a name scrawled on the little butt cheek. The Cabbage Patch Kid community represented a... Continue Reading →
It’s easy to get lost in a word forest. It’s the consequence of total overwhelm combined with the sheer number of words in the English vocabulary and my complete, unlimited access to all of them. If only I could remember them all. You know that saying, you can’t see the forest for the trees? Sometimes,... Continue Reading →
One of the travel questions I always get asked, especially by women who haven’t visited the tropics, is how I deal with scary things like giant cockroaches or spiders. The short answer is, I don’t really. I have no method, other than to hope I’m not confronted with one, and when (never if) I... Continue Reading →
Through travelling and living in different places as a lifestyle, I’ve been exposed to many different types of people and ways to be in this world. Through this exposure, I’ve learned that retirement, as we know it in the West, seems to be more of a developed-world, career-inspired concept than an actual phase of life,... Continue Reading →
colleen thornton 