It’s A Big World After All

Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

It’s so easy to sit here, exurban house with woods, center of North America, a long string of way below zero nights and three feet of snow on the ground, it’s so easy to sit here and not see the rest of the world.

Case in point.  My brother writes from Muhayil, Saudi Arabia.  It’s in the southern third of Asir province, red on this map.  You can see that Asir borders Yemen, right where the red touches the gray.

He received a warning from the American embassy today about terrorism.  The embassy does not allow their staff within 50 miles of Yemen. He’s 100 miles. That’s not far as the shrike flies.  In the same e-mail he talks about a man crucified nearby for practicing witchcraft.  That was 2011.  He says the Saudi government can and does publicly behead criminals, then flys their body around attached to a helicopter.

That’s terrorism, witchcraft, beheading and public display of a body by helicopter.  True, we have Michelle Bachman, crack houses, pick-up trucks on the lakes and snowmobiles but we can’t touch that four.