Flex Mentallo

“Thy statues have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimages” Psalm 119:54

Threnody “Ha! I scent life!” Prometheus Unbound

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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

In a way this felt like a journey back in time, to a world quite lost to Western civilization.

Stepping into the village environment for the first time, I was struck by the sense in which the villagers seemed from my perspective to be close to the land.