It’s necessary to be alone to become fully aware of the way that music recalls the past, provides a soundtrack to the present, and gives hope for the future. For those of us who travel alone, music fills those empty nights closed in by the walls of concrete rooms. And it entrances us on long journeys by bus or rail, occupying the conscious mind and allowing insight to float up from...
Borders signify change and a new beginning. They’re a crossing over into unknown territory, evoking feelings of possibility that contain great hope as well as great fear. But borders are also a closing off. When we enter new terrain, we’re closing off what came before both physically and philosophically. We can never go back. Nature allows no birth without a corresponding death...
I came across a quote last week that I want to share with you. It’s taken from a letter that Charles Darwin—the Father of Evolution—wrote at the end of his life. He said: “Up to the age of 30, or beyond it, poetry gave me great pleasure. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out...
Certain skies have the power to sharpen eyesight. It is the map maker who actually creates the world, and in a landscape devoid of features, cartography turns inward. Far below the walls of Dier Mar Moussa, the sands stretched out like a hazy veil beyond the perpetual present; beyond even remembering. Such a landscape brought to mind the Temptations of St. Anthony. Exiled voices. Delirious days...
Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are “deleted scenes” from my book. Think of them as a “Special Features” disc of outtakes and curios. This incident took place in the Petén region of Guatemala… I stumbled out of bed at four thirty to prepare for the last long distance bus ride of the journey: the hard packed jungle track through the eastern Petén to the...
Scenes of natural disaster and human suffering have filled the television screens of the western world for the past week as rich countries band together to offer assistance in the aftermath of one of the worst humanitarian disasters since the Asian tsunami of 2004. I visited the northeast of Haiti in December of 1998. I remember the border checkpoint with the Dominican Republic, its more...
This is the eighteenth and final instalment in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here One “special request” we filed with our minders was to be permitted to walk into Pyongyang unescorted, perhaps as far as the railway station and back. Much to our surprise, they said it was possible. They had already added several of the places we asked to see–a grocery...
This is the seventeenth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here We said goodbye to our brave military escort at the DMZ, thankful that they’d protected us from the imminent danger of American attack. We made one last stop on our way back to the capital, just outside Kaesong city. It was reputedly the tomb of an early Korean king and his Mongolian wife, but as with...
This is the sixteenth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here Our presence on the wrong side of the frontier caused a mild scramble among the South Korean forces. Frantic radio messages were dispatched. Binoculars were trained on us. Reinforcements jogged over to take up positions half-concealed by the corners of buildings, where they conducted a whispered conference and...
This is the fifteenth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here The highlight of my time in North Korea—the moment that made all the badgering and propaganda worthwhile—was our visit to the Demilitarized Zone and the truce village of Panmunjom. This thin line bisecting two worldviews is the last Cold War frontier, and the world’s most heavily defended border. The...
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