Watched the inauguration and just finished enjoying the Celebrating America Show. It was a festival of joy celebrating all America. Artists of all genres and traditions performed and celebrated the great Americans, average Americans who have been working to feed, heal, and serve our nation. We have two choices. We can embrace the good. We can embrace our diversity. We can embrace the work and service we need to conduct to bring our nation back. We can embrace the peoples and other nations of the world as we share the planet with the fellowship of humanity and our will is not supreme. Or we can be the mob, embracing grievance, embracing violence, brandishing symbols of hatred past and present. I am choosing the America I watched tonight, where the various hues of our cultural mosaic were on display and celebrated. I am choosing the America where Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Obama, political opponents, stood together pledging to work together to rebuild Amer...
On Friday, took a one-hour ride on a jukung, a traditional wooden Indonesian boat to the Gili Islands, a popular destination for divers and partiers and laid-back expats. First stop was Gili Trawangan, the biggest and most lively of the islands, though COVID has turned Gili T, as the locals call it, into something resembling a ghost town. Then we motored to Gili Air. It was even emptier. However, I liked it much more than Gili T in that it is much more rustic in its commercialization and somehow it seems as though the place is carrying on in a fashion as it may have existed before tourist development started to take place in the 1980s. Off the shallows of Gili Air, my guides took me snorkeling. No photos, I am afraid. I had enough of a challenge figuring out how to deal with my mask and snorkel and float suit and fins to worry about photography. After I took to the water, I learned why my guides had been carrying a bottle filled with chunks of bread around with them in the b...
Because I spend almost all of my time in my apartment, I sometimes forget I am living in the tropics. But this torrential downpour serves as a reminder of where I am situated. And pictures from a phone really don't capture the full force of the deluge. More rain in an afternoon than Naryn gets in half a year.
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