Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Of course, that very civilization has increasingly encroached upon village life - not only in Bengal, but all over the world.

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

But it was stepping back into my life in England and looking back towards India that I realised how much I had left behind. And I could not fail to return, many, many times.

 

 

The sense I had and still have, is of a less fragmented way of living than I experience in the West. I do not think I am alone in this.

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

That the villagers felt closer to that way of living than I was only relative. Rooted in the land though they were, they envied me the trappings of Western Civilization. What they had, they took for granted. It was all but invisible to them.

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Yet even if by only a single step, their way of living represented an orientation, looking back along the way civilisation has come. Long before the invention of crops led to trade and the establishment of fixed communities, the way of the shaman, the hunter gatherers - that way of living, which connects us to the roots of our own origins and which miraculously survives, made manifest in the cave paintings of the Cro-Magnon hunter gatherers, who first heard the meaning in the thunder - that way of living still survives in the remote corners of the world.

 

 

 

 

And these are the steps we have all but lost.

 

Next: Before They Pass

[Flex Mentallo]

Thanks for sharing Michael great pics

 

You're welcome Jack - good to know they are appreciated.

[jimjum12]

Thanks for sharing Michael great pics

 

You're welcome Jack - good to know they are appreciated.

 

.... VERY much appreciated. This thread always fills me with a sense of hope. GOD BLESS...

 

-jimbo(a friend of jesus) (thumbs u

[Pat Calhoun]

In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”

 

Thomas Hardy (1915)

 

 

I

 

Only a man harrowing clods

In a slow silent walk

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

Half asleep as they stalk.

 

II

 

Only a thin smoke without flame

From the heaps of couch-grass;

Yet this will go onward the same

Though Dynasties pass.

 

III

 

Yonder a maid and her wight

Come whispering by:

War’s annals will cloud into night

Ere their story die.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 20, 2014 by pcalhoun

[jimjum12]

In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”

 

Thomas Hardy (1915)

 

 

I

 

Only a man harrowing clods

In a slow silent walk

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

Half asleep as they stalk.

 

II

 

Only a thin smoke without flame

From the heaps of couch-grass;

Yet this will go onward the same

Though Dynasties pass.

 

III

 

Yonder a maid and her wight

Come whispering by:

War’s annals will cloud into night

Ere their story die.

 

 

 

 

..... damn, P, .....that's profound. What a fantastic bit of verse..... GOD BLESS...

 

-jimbo(a friend of jesus) (thumbs u

[adamstrange]

The pictures are almost as good as the stories you are sharing.

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The pictures are almost as good as the stories you are sharing.

 

 

Thanks Adam, Pat, Jack, and Jimbo, and everyone else out there following.

 

Great choice of poem, Pat.

 

Adam, the subjects of the photographs are way past my poor photographic skills to do full justice to but I have to say, my little digital camera did me proud for five years.

 

But the next set of posts will show what a professional photographer can do to document the world we are so rapidly losing...

 

 

Edited January 20, 2014 by Flex Mentallo

[Flex Mentallo]

Threnody

 

“Ha! I scent life!”

Prometheus Unbound

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

“Thy statues have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimages”

 

Psalm 119:54

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Jimmy Nelson

In an earlier post I said that the world of the hunter gatherers - the world that still remembers and follows the Shaman's Path - is still with us in the remote corners of the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

In 2009, photographer Jimmy Nelson set out to visit 31 secluded and visually unique tribes, to witness their traditions, and create a photographic document that would be an ethnographic record of a fast disappearing world.

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]