A young boy playing among rocks on a stream, yes. But where? I took this photo in a nature park in Pyongyang, North Korea.

Gives you a different perspective, doesn’t it? This young North Korean boy, how so innocently playing amidst beautiful streams and waterfalls, has no future except to grow up to be a human robot in subjection to a tyranny. He has no idea of the fate in store for him. That’s why, for me, this is one of the saddest pictures I have even taken.

Perhaps he will escape from his political prison, but the odds are gravely against him. Life does have its somber moments. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #244 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

Song Kul. Kyrgyzstan.  Here, 10,000 feet high along the shores of Lake Song Kul, Kyrgyz nomads play buzkashi, where men on horseback fight with whips, fists, elbows over a goat carcass (simulated for us in a heavy canvas bag) weighing some 40 pounds.  There are no rules.  Whoever gets the carcass to the goal line and drops it into the circle there, scores.  This ancient game has been played for thousands of years by the nomads of Mongolia, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.  The nomads who encamp at Song Kul are playing fiercely but actually having a lot of fun – laughter abounds. After the game, we had a cup of kumiss, slightly alcoholic fermented mare’s milk, with them. An experience never to be forgotten. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #281 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

Yesterday, I found this religious decoration on the outer wall of an old mosque in the three-thousand year-old Silk Road oasis city of Bukhara. I’ve seen it in many places throughout the world, such as ancient ruins of India and Rome. Yet this is far older – it was carved onto mammoth ivory by Ice Age hunters in Ukraine 12,000 years ago.

From time immemorial has it represented eternity, prosperity, the centeredness of all that is. Why? Look up into the sky on a clear dark night. All people have studied the heavens for eons. You could always know where you were by finding North, for the two front stars of what we call the Big Dipper point to it – always.

The Greeks called it Mega Arktikos, the Great Bear – why we call Far North the Arctic today. The ancients saw the Bear every year rotating around Celestial North – now occupied by Polaris, the North Star – through all four seasons, while all the stars in the sky circled around it every night. What do you see in this depiction of that seasonal rotation?

Yes, a Swastika -- Sanskrit for “the goodness of existence.” The most heinous perversion of symbolic art in world history was to take the symbol for the goodness of existence used by people for a dozen millennia – and still revered by Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems and many others to this day – and twist it into a symbol of horrific evil. It’s an informative lesson of history. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #225 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

What many consider the world’s most beautiful mosque is in Persia’s most captivating city, Shiraz. Over four millennia older than Islam, over two millennia older than Persia, Shiraz was "Shirrazish," a city of ancient Elam at the birth of civilization in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. Even then, Shiraz was famous for wine. A thousand years ago, it was considered the best in the world. Marco Polo praised it. No more. Prior to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there were over 300 Persian wineries. Now there are none.

Shiraz is still a city of gardens and flowers. At the garden tomb of Persia’s most revered poet Hafez (1315-1390), young couples gather for discrete romance as they have for centuries. The beauty of Nasr ol-Molk – with the sun shining through its stained glass windows covering the floor carpets in color, and the interior a dazzling display of pink tile ornamentation – can be overwhelming. The same for the friendliness of the people – always welcoming with a smile for you.

Especially if you are American. All the people we met love America and despise their rulers. The Land of Persia is still here in today’s Iran, and someday it will be free, America’s ally again. The wine will flow here once more. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #83 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

Christmas Island, Indian Ocean, Australia. This huge banyan tree no longer exists. It’s been slowly strangled to death for up to a century. Seeds of fig vines were deposited by bird droppings in the upper branches of the tree, which sprouted and began to grow downward along the tree trunk, sucking nutrients from the tree along the way. Slowly year after year, they coil and wrap around the entire trunk to the ground, literally strangling the tree out of existence until all that’s left are the huge enveloping fig vines. It’s hollow inside – look carefully above the ground roots and you’ll see a shaft of vertical light.

I’ve seen a good many Strangler Figs in the rain forests of Central Africa and the Amazon – but the ones here on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean are the most spectacular. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #280 photo ©Jack Wheeler)