Angkor Wat connections
I love going to Angkor Wat for a day. Sadly we have not been in awhile. So I cast backwards at my last time. We spent the day there with our mom wandering the temples. Finding the backwards ways in. My mom holding my hand all the way.
There’s something so epic yet so untold. Like this mystery that unfolds around me each time. It’s not the why or how any more. It’s the feeling of human connection down the ages. The Khmer god kings built wondrous connections. Now I visit them and feel this touching yet cold thing.
The stones so carefully erected and sculpted have their stories.
Over my coffee this morning I wander those photos. Each one speaks of some mysterious human condition. This finding and losing. We can dig the past but like my mentor was fond of saying
We cannot excavate ideas
They are riddles. Like those strange yet beautiful rock art sites in the small caves and rock outcrops we walked one day so long ago. RWR led us through this maze of little dry stream beds. We clambered to the sides of the canyons and found more. Sites painted in startling and vivid scenes of the same connections. The memory is so long ago but his wonder at each one was the spoke and the center piece of why I loved archeology and the doing of it. Not a dry and barren desk with conflicting project tasks. A wild day instead out in the northern Antelope Valley. This little part of the western Mojave that cut through mountains and left us to go look.
From there to here. It’s the connections I told someone. Some bad and some good. I found some lately I only had suspected. A person in my life once that has since become another thing. I understand how but not why.
But like I said how and why stopped mattering that day in Angkor Wat. And perhaps long ago as we walked we only marveled at the connections extending the ages to our gasps and sighs.
Visit Angkor Wat. Ask the how and why questions. Mostly look at yourself and see our human condition and connection. You won’t regret it.
See ya later.