The distant dust devils of the Brahamputra Valley seem further away than they really are but there is no easy way to judge distance here

& time & space leer like a concertina or does distance distort the view of the skeletal chinese pylons climbing the ridge line there

Here amid the mad rain wet umbrella air of the wettest english summer with all it's smells of growth & death & transportation

I hold my station, witnessing what the global distance calculator tells me is four thousand seven hundred miles of wind blown dust

That must be what still stains the knees of my trousers & makes them smell of rancid butter & burned cypress & juniper leaves

That desert is where I believe the sand in the bottom of my rucksack might have originated, but belief is such a fragile thing in this world

& curled within my body is a strange kind of knowing, as sense of instant contact with the thin dry heat of Tibetan guard dog noon

Big & black & hairy with jingle bells tied around its neck shouting at the same full moon, celebrated by the same drums & trumpets

Cross legged on the same old piece of carpet ringing the bells of the awakening mind & singing the scariest words which any language could declaim:

"It's all the same to me! This dream like vista of worlds within worlds! Open! Closed! Seen! Unseen! Remembered! Forgotten!"

Barry Patterson July 2007