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Some thresholds are not crossed once.
They are carried.
The road narrows.
Then the light.
Water on either side
holds the sky.
The body slows
without instruction.
Stone does not open.
It waits.
Your shoulders lower.
You did not tell them to.
Inside, distance lengthens.
Breath slows.
Figures in shadow,
mid-gesture,
balance undecided.
Movement has not happened—
and yet the air knows.
You step back.
Out of courtesy.
Rain arrives.
Leaves.
You carry away
a change in weight.
Not the stone.
Not the water.
The slowing.
The way the body
learned to wait
without being told.
Light resting
where it fell.
Time
unshouldered.
You stood.
That was enough.
Now—
elsewhere—
rooms move too quickly.
Yet sometimes
your foot hesitates.
Your breath
does not follow at once.
The causeway exists.
You know this.
What is gone
is the measure
that held you
and let you remain.
—
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18 min read
Some of Angkor’s most intimate ruins do not rise above the ground at all. They are postholes, low mounds, hearths and ponds: durable traces of a domestic city built largely from things that decay. To restore that city is to see Angkor not only as stone, but as wood, smoke, water, repair, and people living within calling distance.

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I had mistaken a gift for something being expelled.
Beneath the nāga's mouth, a stone garland descended bead by bead. Nearby, a makara opened its jaws and another form emerged. Looking closer, the whole temple began to change: serpent became ornament, ornament became architecture, architecture became foliage.
The forest did not introduce this language.
It answered it.

2 min read
Seven daughters have already been taken by Yamata-no-Orochi when Susanoo reaches the River Hi. Only Kushinada-hime remains. The Eighth Daughter retells the Kojiki episode through a family’s waiting, a girl transformed into a comb, and the patient preparation for the serpent’s return.