Angkor('s) Away

Angkor('s) Away
Originally uploaded by Anantya.

We wandered the ancient ruins of Suryavarman II's temple matrix in
absolute wonder.


Thrilling to amble along its crumbling byzantine pathways, through the
hidden moldering galleries which encircle its five central towering
shrines.

The sturdy yawn and long patient stretch of nature's inevitable
upending of even our greatest architectural impositions has deeply
fractured, or irreparably penetrated and ensconced, every camber,
column and veranda in its leafy serpentine embrace.


Like a some 1000 acre effigy (an improbably lude elemental slow-dance;
20 meter jungle Banyans writhing upon and lifting 20 ton sandstone
walls), this celebration of impermanence teases as easily at all our
expectations of time and place as it does the incense laden splahes and shards of
bending and broken light. A shy jungle sunset meandering along side us; amber-brown here then as suddenly breaking through safron-honey-pink there.

This timeless place of incomparable artistic devotion, every surface
dripping with chiseled cosmic filigree, telling 10,000 stories yet
somehow, like a veiled dancer trailing her amber promises but always
disappearing just out of sight around every next bend, keeps all her secrets hers.

Now a steep stairway calls us to climb up to its shady terrace where a time-scorched Shiva Lingam shrine odalisques in decadent repose. Midway mounting that steep rise dividing the stairway now in two we encounter a massive orimental wall. In the center of this towering slab, this sculpted story of worship, was a moment of such subtle revelation for me.

Time and the elements had seen fit to leave for us, in clearest relief
there at the center of our gaze as we ascended, the hands of two
lovers. Her head tossed back in ecstatic delight as she places into the
palm of her beloved a......a, a, ........(what was it?, a piece offruit, a flower bud, a, a, ....SOMEthing or nothing if not agift).......insipiring his upturned gaze, fueling his devotion and gratitude.

Heart swells as tears well and bliss descends.

There it is: us, people, mankind, loving each other in poetic delicacy
around 1000 years ago. The "gift" ...whatever. The "other" ...whoever.
This play, this pull....timeless and relentless. Even still. And in
that moment, and in their passing, and the generosity of the artist that
enshrined such intimacy for us, and we so privileged to be
wandering and wondering herenow.....all of us and even everything in cosmic
nature at once captured, embraced, upended, evolving and trying always
to dare to love here, in the crazy epic swirl of it all.



We wandered the ancient ruins of the citizens Angkor and were, forever, changed.