The Third Lap

This is a repost of my blog entry on Rose City Transplants.
It was originally posted on Sept 16, 2015.

September the 11th.  For Americans, it’s a date that carries a lot of memories and sorrow.  It also carries with it a rising level of jingoistic rhetoric and overly patriotic statements, the tragedy too large, I think, for our sound-bite culture to digest properly, too real to be actual memory.  It’s a political day, as all events in the US are, it seems, as politicians reach out to their base with varying levels of thinly veiled xenophobia or condemnations/accusations of such.

Okay, enough of my fatigue of American politics.

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Without Justice

This is a rewrite of my blog entry on Rose City Transplants.
It was originally posted on September 28, 2015.

My legs are stiff and sore, the result of climbing countless steps on our journey to heaven.  Many of the great temples of Angkor are designed as representations of Mount Meru, the holy mountain of the Hindu, Buddhist and Jainist faiths, the five spires of the temples symbolizing the five peaks of the mountain.  The most famous of these temples, Angkor Wat, the largest religious building in the world, looks like it only has three spires when viewed straight on, but it too is a symbol of heaven on earth. We stood in queue to climb to the top of that building, waiting our turn to see heaven.

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