I am a traveller here. Which is to say: I am temporarily unburdened. Back home, I am a port supervisor. I work with tide tables, cargo manifests, and radios crackling with instructions. I have spreadsheets, rosters, and responsibilities. Here, in Anxi, I am simply a man in the hills drinking tea. And that is a kind of disguise.
Continue reading The Third Infusion
I stand before the hull and imagine Marco Polo standing here in Quanzhou, seven centuries ago, watching these same ships being loaded with porcelain and silk, ready to sail to Java, to Sumatra, to the Malabar Coast, to Hormuz, to Basra, to the edge of the known world. Continue reading The Thirteen Compartments
I’m getting off to get lost in the air,At the edge of the world where the light is bending… – … Continue reading The Temple by the Sea
The Light is the first most glorious being,limited by no number…– Mani, as recorded in the Fihrist (the Manichaean scripture) … Continue reading The Buddha of Light
“Our lives are made in these small hours, these little wonders…”– Rob Thomas 4:16 AM in the Old Town. Outside, … Continue reading In My Neighbourhood
Waiting for the colour of spring.Let me breathe… – Talk Talk, April 5th. A hot, pale blue sky arches over … Continue reading The Colour of Spring
Later, I see a plaque. Carved stone, old, official. Two characters: “Civilisation endures.” I do not know what to do with these two things: the girl, the plaque. But they belong together. They must. Continue reading The Girl in the Doorway
The tide is coming in. It does not rush. It never rushes. But it is relentless; a slow, patient rising … Continue reading High Tide on Luoyang Qiao
At Waterton Lakes National Park–a landscape of perpendicular mountains and deep, glacial lakes on the eastern edge of the Canadian … Continue reading WHERE THE PRAIRIES MEET THE MOUNTAINS
On the overpasses, cars crawl through the mirage, each one a sealed bubble of air-conditioned defiance. But the city doesn’t care. The heat is indifferent, eternal. It radiates from the concrete, rises in waves from the road, presses down from above: a three-dimensional sauna of light and dust. Somewhere behind all that sun-glare, the desert waits, unchanged and unimpressed. Continue reading Heat and Dust
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