Since the publication of my initial Ramblings in 2009, this supposedly restless mind did not suddenly acquire Zen-tranquility. It continued to be what it has been for long and here is another installment of occasional thoughts, versified. I use versified not in the strictly traditional sense because it gets a bit too restrictive for the license some of us think we have or claim to have. These ramblings are mostly in a territory that is consciously kept apart from the areas of my professional interest. This territory involves governments, politics, nature, things and people -- people of faith, deep, shallow, desert-dry or fertile with pseudo-versions of Zen and Sufism. In this territory, the things that happen are often seen and considered in a somewhat different way, and the reactions felt and expressed, not always with due respect and reverence. There is no conscious attempt to organize or sequester these thoughts into groups or categories, but if one finds any trend in this tumbling out of thoughts, it may perhaps be largely attributed to some kind of chronological, evolutionary randomness. And if in these wanderings, some hills and valleys begin to look familiar to those who may know, they could well be but, I hope, seen from a different angle, tangential to a path rather less-familiar, and offering a somewhat different view. No two sunsets over a familiar hill are ever the same to an eye or a heart that is never tired of sunsets; every wave leaves behind its own set of previously unseen gifts each time it sweeps over and recedes from a well-trodden beach. Some of these ramblings have been offered before, quite extemporaneously, to informal gatherings but if anyone detects any tell-tale signs here, it would be either incidental or that my editorial revisions have not been as thorough as I had originally intended. T. Beeth November, 2013

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