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Nepalese Notebook: September 13th, 2014

September 13th, 2014

Upper Jagat 1340m.

 The country people are remarkable for their stature and muscle though none of them are very tall.  A boy of no more than 8 or 9 years old came up the trail today carrying a bag of damp sand from the river bottom; it must have been at least 50 pounds and as tall as him because he had to bend over with the tumpline almost perpendicular to the ground to be able to move forward.  Further down we saw the father and another boy filling up more bags to be taken in turn, and these, as we found out, were for house-constructing and repairs.  A woman in the village before, where we stopped for refreshments, spoke in a rather lively tone of voice about how she wanted to have 12 children with her husband, already had 3, and was pushing 31 years old. After we passed the hot springs of Tatopani where we cleansed our hair and face, the more prevalent signs of Tibetan culture began to appear, most notably the women wearing vibrantly coloured aprons of knitted woo…
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A Poet's Journal: November 7th, 2012 (With Audio)

November 7th, 2012

The sky is overcast and somehow the more beautiful for it.  The resurgence of something, at one time held in the light, gains the absolute clearest perspective when it can be approached on cloudy days.  It is not that we see anything new, rather it is the coming into contradiction of our own perception.  In that way, what was held of interest once before, now finds conflict with how we must approach it.  This is true for the way we read books, listen to music, and try to figure out the tasks of our day, and this is also true of any solution.   The lake is deeper with the loss of light, the forest more silent; animals step with an approaching calm, and it is all too easy to forget that we must function with the rising of the sun.  The trees have gone from light yellow to dark red in the matter of a week and it is with renewed interest that I take up the terrifying banalities of life.
Douglas Thornton
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A Poet's Journal: October 29th, 2012 (With Audio)

October 29th, 2012

The 27th was the first day of autumn--a faint chill and pelting rain; the trees taking on different colours, the ferns rusting away.  One day we wake up and it is spring, another winter; for we call the first of things pure: the first taste, the first scent; but the first expression of autumn, the first realization that our earth is moving further away from the sun, in that thought alone there is the greatest solitude.
Daily life has a great warming effect to it--it is wonderful to be caught up in our habits and see from within the season changing.  Haste, anxiety, and dread, all take on new meanings, those of which we can recede into and find relief in the fact that our own storms and our own frailties are matters less eternal than the wind.  It is even soothing to rediscover a pressing need and find that the importance given to it was but an illusion caused by the summer months or the full moon--in reality, we don't know.  The way we feel a certain look, the …
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A Poet's Journal: October 11th, 2012 (With Audio)

October 11th, 2012

A large group of cranes pass over. There is something so bland in life that we become subverse to the very details that make it up; and yet, brought to our attention, those details are of no special concern, though they have created our interest in the first place.  When we ask someone to stand out, we are not asking of anything genuine or long-standing, but merely a blind antagonist to draw us in to an ever greater competition of self-worth.  But how foolish!  For he who is willing to combat his fellow-man proves he is not on even terms with him and has not attained the superiority of triumph in his own mind.  Instead of the ideas of excellence that another puts forth, should he find the terms for his own conviction.  But if there is a sage of dire consequence, he has folded up his robe, for among the vast infinitude of prophecy there are but one or two decisions to be made.  Perhaps we could still hear his echo if it were not that he too has become so bland.
Dougl…
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A Poet's Journal: October 3rd, 2012 (Audio)

October 3rd, 2012

That which is unique seems all the more to make what is around us less so that we forget the whole circumstance leans solely on the force of our own interpretation. While having dinner last night, just at the moment that I happened to look up, a greenish-blue ball of light fled across the tiny part of sky that our window encloses; but from that moment, until I spoke of the object only a few seconds later, did a confidence steadily grow in my disparaged and up until then unsure attempts in writing that everything thought childish in my life up to that instant became truth and whatever I would do from here on would not lead me astray whether I doubted or not.  It was a coincidence that touched something I had hardly ever seen; it was not a revelation, nor did I think some divine presence involved in it, but it was the circumstance that bade the whole realm of possibility, the whole realm of existence, mutual to my own poor and daily life.  Superiority and the hierarch…
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