At the River’s Bend
Dusk leans against the bank and the water forgets its hurry. A heron fixes the world with one unblinking bead of light. Across the far reeds, someone counts under their breath—not numbers, exactly, but commas between breaths, like a rosary of pauses. A boy skims a stone and the circle widens, then loosens, then disappears into small attentions.
I watch the river practise memory. It keeps what is heavy, lets go what is bright. The cicadas begin as if re-threading a broken necklace. A fisherman touches the hull of his boat with a hand that knows the grammar of wood. He waits. We all do.
I walked home with wet cuffs and an old thought: perhaps art is learning where to place the pause. Not the note, not the image—but the hush that allows them to be heard.
Also in Library
The Serpent Beneath the Kingdom
The Naga is one of the oldest truths Angkor kept in stone. It rises from balustrades, frames thresholds, shelters the Buddha, coils beneath Vishnu, and becomes the rope by which gods and demons churn the ocean of immortality. To understand the Naga is to understand that Angkor’s sacred imagination does not only rise. It descends.
Where a Name Could Not Follow
A boy in the sandstone quarries beneath Phnom Kulen learns the first law of sacred building: not strength, not speed, but attention. Where a Name Could Not Follow imagines the life of an unnamed Angkorean stone-master whose hands helped move mountain into temple — and whose name vanished where the stone endured.
The Apsara Against the Assembly Line
In the darkroom, the print rises slowly from the tray: silver darkening into shadow, stone gathering itself from blankness. At Angkor, the apsaras offer the same lesson. Though repeated in their thousands, each waits to be seen. Against the assembly line of speed and sameness, slowness restores the soul’s signature.
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If this piece found something in you, you may wish to continue the journey elsewhere.
On The Lantern Chronicles, I gather writings from Angkor, myth and legend, contemplative essays, and poetry — works shaped by silence, beauty, wonder, memory, and the deeper questions that follow us through the world.
It is a place for stone and story, reflection and vow, shadow and revelation.
You would be most welcome there.