Dream Theatre
Tahlequah, Oklahoma
© C.C. Brooks

"It's all about perspective.  To have an ordeal or to have an adventure."
                -Chester Bennington, lead singer of the band Linkin Park

From Ethiopia
photo by A.F.

 

" . . . you don't need to have a four star hotel - you have a thousand star hotel every night."
                         -Bao Phi, Vietnamese American poet




From Ethiopia
photo by A.F.
 

"Time is a river; your measurement of it depends on what you fish out.  Routine compresses time and the strange stretches it."
                         -Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan





From Ethiopia
photo by A.F.
 

"The colours too were both clearer and brighter than I had ever seen, invested somehow with an added depth, as though alive and moving; and in memory too, I could direct a beam of recollection back to the earliest days of my childhood.  All this I suppose, this conjuring act of the senses, was the result of a very focused kind of attention . . . But it was not a way of focusing [in war] I have ever wanted to repeat."
                -Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan




From Ethiopia
photo by A.F.
 

"Only a madman will tell you the whole truth about what went on there."

               -Soviet Afghanistan veteran, as qtd. in An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan




From Ethiopia
photo by A.F. 

"I was not the only one to ask: what sustained these people?  Was it a collective spirit of defiance written so deeply into a culture that no room was left for ordinary fear?  Was it the fatalism of a people who believed all things were written from Above, and who were willing to accept their own extinction in accordance with His will?  Was it merely the indifference of the war-weary?  Or was it the economics of sheer poverty that drove people back into the streets, the relentless pressure of having to strive ceaselessly in order to survive, to earn, to feed their children?"
                 -Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan            




From Ethiopia
photo by A.F. 

" . . . there was a natural reaching-out between souls caught in the net of the war.  I was reminded of studies revealing that the incidence of mental disease in a society drops during war time to a tiny proportion of its peacetime figure."
                  -Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan            



From Ethiopia
photo by A.F. 

"Their outer world was in chaos and ruin, but their fundamental orientation to the world, what was in it and what was beyond it, and from which the kernel of the culture was nourished, was not subject to the same forces of change."
                   -Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan    

    


From Ethiopia
photo by A.F. 


"The creek bed in front of our casita has many tracks . . . Foremost I love the tracks left by hundreds of species of birds that remain in the air like we do."
               -from Songs of Unreason by Jim Harrison