The Silence of Scales
A staircase inhales; each step remembers serpents carved in silence.
The staircase inhaled.
Every step remembered serpents once carved, their stone backs arched against time.
Moss threaded the hollows.
Pearl-light gathered in cracks.
Silence pressed close as if it, too, were carved.
A traveller placed a foot.
The step answered with a hush.
Flame from the torch leaned inward, listening.
River air climbed from below, carrying the scent of wet clay and forgotten offerings.
The traveller climbed, counting not numbers but pauses:
silence, then breath, then silence again.
With each pause, scale brightened—
as if a lidless eye had turned.
The serpent’s silence became flame.
It did not burn.
It illumined.
Pearl-light revealed hunger as devotion, not threat.
The traveller’s breath caught—half fear, half awe—
as stone shifted beneath their hand, alive yet patient.
They climbed to the landing and did not look back.
Silence rose with them, unbroken.
In that silence the scales learned to breathe again.
The staircase exhaled.
Also in Library
Hands of the Sculptor — The Craft as Meditation
In the hush of the galleries, the sculptor listens rather than strikes.
Each breath, each measured blow, opens silence a little further.
Unfinished reliefs reveal the moment when mastery becomes meditation—
when patience itself is carved into being,
and the dust that falls at a mason’s feet becomes the residue of prayer.
The Asura Within
At the gates of Angkor Thom, gods and demons share a single serpent.
Across this bridge of struggle the pilgrim learns that the asura is not evil but unfinished — the restless force within each of us still grasping for light.
To cross the naga is to balance passion with compassion, struggle with stillness, shadow with dawn.
Garuda and the Serpent · Flight and Surrender
Between Garuda’s wings and the Nāga’s coils, Angkor breathes its oldest truth: flight and surrender are one motion. In the carvings where sky and water entwine, the pilgrim learns that freedom depends upon gravity, and that stillness itself is a kind of flight.
