Listening for the Drum Between Raindrops
The sandstone gleams with dew, each droplet resting briefly before slipping into a vine-carved groove. The sound—softer than a moth’s wing—is lost to the jungle, but the stone remembers.
The apsara stands in a quiet rhythm. Not posed, but listening. Her fingers offer a gesture that does not close. A pause that does not end. I lean into the hush, aligning lens and breath. The tripod settles like a spine into earth.
I press the release and wait. Not to take, but to receive.
In the stillness, the world becomes tonal: light in gradients, sound in vapour. Her anklets do not chime, yet I hear them—the memory of motion in a body now held by time. The exposure completes, and the air returns like an aftertaste.
Later, in the darkroom, the chiaroscuro flows from silver grain, not as invention, but as retrieval. The stone becomes skin. The silence, voice.
The print arrives not as a product, but as an echo—the one I first heard beneath cloud and rain.
Her silence turns
wild rain into measured pulse;
roots listen, undisturbed.Light rests on a braided crown—
echo of a thunder that never breaks.She offers two fingers,
opens a gate inside the chest
where stone may learn to sing.
Also in Library
Those Who Keep the Way Open — On the Quiet Guardians of Angkor’s Thresholds
Quiet gestures shape the way into Angkor — a swept stone, a refilled bowl, a hand steadying a guardian lion. This essay reflects on the unseen custodians whose daily care keeps the thresholds open, revealing how sacredness endures not through stone alone, but through those who tend its meaning.
Multiplicity and Mercy — The Face Towers of Jayavarman VII
A new vision of kingship rises at the Bayon: serene faces turned to every horizon, shaping a world where authority is expressed as care. Moving through the terraces, one enters a field of steady, compassionate presence — a landscape where stone, light, and time teach through quiet attention.
Stone That Dreams
Bayon wakes like a mind emerging from shadow. Its many faces shift with light and breath, teaching that perception—and the self—is never singular. In walking this forest of towers, the pilgrim discovers a quiet multiplicity within, held together by a calm that feels both ancient and newly understood.
