A group of sleeping tigers, as photographed from our bus at Safari World. The entire zoo is open and without fencing and tourists are driven through the property, safari style, to view the animals in their natural habitat. The predatory cats were kept in a special area which required the bus to pass through two sets of steel fences, reminding me of the opening scene in Jurassic Park in which the first visitors were allowed into the park.

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TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake
1757–1827

A guard watches the gate outside Wat Phra Kaew in Bangkok, Thailand.

The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, 1850, vol. II
The City in the Sea
by Edgar Allan Poe

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters he.

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently-
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free-
Up domes- up spires- up kingly halls-
Up fanes- up Babylon-like walls-
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers-
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye-
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass-
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea-
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave- there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide-
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow-
The hours are breathing faint and low-
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

-The End-

Don’t be discouraged when a door closes on you. That path was not your destiny.

Often in your journey you will be distracted by the glimmer of a promise only to realize that you have spent great time and effort going in the wrong direction. So when the path is cut short by the closing of a door, take it as a sign and embrace the new doors that have yet to open before you.

These are the temple doors at the Wat Phra Kaew in Bangkok, Thailand. The detail is amazing and I could spend a entire week photographing this temple. Unfortunately I only had an hour here so I must come back here some day to finish my work.

Life is not just a journey from one goal to another. Life itself is in all the details around us and we tend to miss them when we are trying to get from one point to another. Take a moment to look around and notice what hidden secrets lay in the world that surrounds you.