From a Poet

September 9th, 2014

A short walk yesterday evening took us through grassland and along the river Rapti.  When we had proceeded far enough from the habitations, we were met by a black rhino not but 20 meters away, swishing his tail in a rather annoyed manner until he lumbered off to a tiny mud pit into which he sank up to his belly.   There are no boundaries in the jungle and the cries of monkeys in the tops of trees or the crocodiles that distractingly appear and disappear only a few meters away as you float down the river in a dugout, fill the gaze with a very shallow alertness that seems to focus on everything but what one is trying to focus on.  At times, our guide stood up in the canoe to point out a type of kingfisher; at others, he remained seated to let a crocodile pass, but that did not prevent some villagers from cutting fodder along the banks or casting out a net to fish.  The whole scene, instead of being impregnated with simplistic beauty, was out of place, nothing truly r…

September 8th, 2014

Chitwan

Chitwan: the Nepalese Terai, the land of the Tharu.  These are the lowlands of the Himalaya, a vast jungle filled with rhinos, tigers, and crocodiles, interspersed with the irrigated fields of the natives.  From Kathmandu it is a 5 hours bus ride along narrow and sometimes precipitous roads in which the drivers take every advantage of passing one another regardless of blind curves or the stories of overturned buses only days before.  And yet the driving is not reckless; for when you see your driver passing another bus without any hope of gauging a head-on collision, you are able to find in his unshakeability a small comfort, knowing that the danger he has put you in, he may now save you from, as he swerves back with amazing dexterity only seconds before another bus would have brought upon your ruin. This is only one of the shocks though; the city of Kathmandu itself holds more than one could ever imagine; danger becomes no more than an inability to understan…

August 25th, 2014


The early fall of chestnuts and hazelnuts before the blackberries have turned ripe....  Even in the midst of solitude, surrounded by forest and mountain, time is our greatest constraint.  The further we walk the longer is the return and the wrong path means a wasted day.  It is not that we are burdened by our everyday affairs when doing other things, but that we are guided under a different mask to the same duration.  I walk in the woods as I walk in the street and only take note of trees as if they were passing cars.  The one has not polluted the other, but the source of the pollution is unified through me, and until that habit is broken, everything will always be the same.
Douglas Thornton

August 23rd, 2014


Sometimes we recognize the problem squarely in front of us, but take hold of it awkwardly; or sometimes we hold with a genuine hand that which needed not our guidance; and of the many other ways we may circle around the matter, it all comes down to aligning our perception with our intelligence, thereby forcing the former to perceive something that we have made ourselves believe, finding the solution inexistent, but nonetheless created by our own troubles.  Certainly problems exist and certainly solutions as well, but there is a point at which the mind is dulled and goaded into drudgery by them.  This derangement becomes a romantic illusion, which seems enviable and necessary to take after if we are to attain a somewhat unattainable goal--it is never taken for the stale nature it turns out to be.  For this very reason, confusion is cultivated because it is exciting and yields a chance to bring order, whereon solution becomes an end and not a means to create.
Douglas Th…