On thresholds, and the slow grammar of walking in.

Eight months in Anuradhapura taught me that the entrance to a building is never a door. It is the long, deliberate sentence you read with your feet before you arrive.

The first sandakada pahana I sat with for any length of time was the one outside the western entrance of the Mahasena Palace ruins — a half-disc of weather-bitten granite, about four feet across, that you could almost miss if you were watching for the obvious things. I had walked past it twice. On the third pass an elderly caretaker named Mr. Dhammika stopped me, pointed at my shoes, and then at the stone, and said, in the patient tone of someone who had explained this a thousand times, that I had been crossing a poem the wrong way around.

A door is a verb, not a noun.

The bands of the moonstone, read from the outer rim inward, do not describe what is on the other side. They describe what you are supposed to set down before you arrive. Flames first — desire, then the four animals of the procession, then the line of hansa, and finally, at the centre, a half-lotus that is also a sunrise. I am not religious. I still found it impossible, after a week, to step on the outer ring without first taking a breath.