Nicola Tansley! It’s a name that has fascinated me for years. She is an Educational Psychologist and has been working with Tibetan kids with special needs for eight years. She is based in Dharamsala where she serves as a consultant to the Tibetan Government in exile, but she makes regular visits to Dehradun to train the staff of Ngoenga, the Tibetan school for kids with special needs here with whom we have a long association. She first visited Karuna Vihar in 2002, but I wasn’t there at the time. Everyone else raved about her, and I put her on my list of people I had to connect with someday.

She made other visits, but somehow, I always missed meeting her. Still, the name stayed in my mind. (Funny how that happens! Things that are meant to be often announce themselves long in advance. . . )

Anyway, she received the calendar every year and it turns out she is one of the ELECT – one of those people who really and truly GET it and for whom it is almost as important as it is to me.

So on her last visit, in April, she tracked me down. She came to my office and we fell into a conversation that felt like a deep lake – so much to say! So many connections and cadences and harmonies!

We had a very hard time winding up. So I invited her for dinner the next day. When she returned to Dharmasala we started emailing and finally I persuaded her to come for the weekend. She is here now and we are still only on Page Two of a very long book indeed.

She has sparked so many new thoughts and ideas I hardly know where to begin. So watch this space!