Recently in Cambodia, a forest fire, ignited by a farmer near an ancient Hindu temple complex, detonated decades-old landmines. The legacies of colonialism and war fester, in a forest or the peripheries of cities, the dispossessed earth or the dispossessed of earth waiting to be set off years later on the most mundane of mornings. //
All day I’ve been distracted. I try to abstain from news about the bombings in Brussels, any taint of hysterical anti-refugee sentiment, but I look, nevertheless, like a bystander passing the scene of a car crash. Oh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head, oh, oh!
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So I wrote to a friend, picturing blue skies where she is, 5000 miles away, while I looked out at a bleak landscape of leafless trees and grey rooftops. A crane swung above those rooftops, grey in a grey sky, distinguished only by its movement. How things seem to disappear in the distance, only they are there, making things happen. Destruction and mayhem.
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An orison, then: practice grace and kindness here and now.
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