The beauty and the pain of being human. Images.

[Iloveyou]

A STORY OF WAR

A real challenge to look at something from different angles. Learned a bit more about AMERICAN history today. Story of Chiricahua (Apache) warrior 'Geronimo'. It's the best documentary out there, I've been told.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=q79NaHAscIA

Long ago Coyote opened a bag of darkness and it spread over the world. Creatures of the night loved it. But birds and little animals longed for day. The little animals played a game to win back the light. They won, but one night monster remained. After the game, the first human, White Painted Woman, gave birth to a son. She hid him from the monster. When the boy was grown, he faced the monster and killed it. He was then called Apache—all Chiricahuas are named after him. Coyote threw a stone into water. He said, “If this sinks, all that live, will die!” Coyote knew all along that the stone would sink. For he is the trickster! Because of his stone, man must die. All that men do, Coyote did first.

The greatest thing a person can have is the power. Benegotsi. It’s scary. This is the truth. To live with Power is very challenging. It’s so potent you must be wary. To have Power is a great responsibility. You can choose to leave it alone or accept it. It’s up to you (Apache elder Ellyn Bigrope)

[Iloveyou]

...
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A STORY OF RESILIENCE
















The Power of Motherland

„ . . about the relative nature of risk, about transformative connections to home, and about the magnificent tonic of personal agency and self-determination.“

“Chernobyl was the site of the world's worst nuclear accident and, for the past 27 years, the area around the plant has been known as the Exclusion Zone. And yet, a community of about 200 people live there — almost all of them elderly women. These proud grandmas defied orders to relocate because their connection to their homeland and to their community are "forces that rival even radiation."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/eart...wasteland.html

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=93hbqLBp_HI

The Babushkas of Chernobyl. Documentary 2015. Trailer.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ApouaPlbs6k

[Iloveyou]

[Calz]

Oooops

[Iloveyou]

Now, finally I made it LOL

(where's the heavy worker gone?)

. . still some more portraits of beautiful people






















oops . .

[Iloveyou]

[Eram]

no comment...

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WPmJwFqV8Lg

[Calz]

[Iloveyou]

xxxxxx














http://www.davidrengel.es/dirty-tourism

[Iloveyou]

(original pcture replaced)

. . but lying on the sidewalk outside were a woman and a child. I had seen them before going in, the mother sleepy, the child playing. Now the child has her tiny arm across her mother’s head and both were asleep. A tiny movement of that arm threw me into tears and I can not stop crying until well after I got back to my room and they are with me still.

I took this picture of me above, them below, and it feel exploitive or a crime scene but getting closer might be worse and this is what I saw. I’m carrying health bars bought in bulk at the Boise Costco and leave some at their feet. I tuck some paper money under the child’s arm where I hope it will be found and not stolen.

The route from my hotel to Jyoti’s house earlier that day went by Dharyi, a slum that I know by name from what I’ve read, the largest slum in Asia by someone’s reckoning. I’ve been in the slums of Caracas long years ago, seen Brazil’s favelas and a lot of poor places in Africa. But just driving by Dharvi was so transfixing that I sat at attention and Oh My God came out under my breath. Maybe I’ll be there tomorrow, I don’t know.

(Jerry Brady)

[Iloveyou]

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. . from an interview with Photographer Nicolas Marino who is travelling the world on his bicycle over 80 countries and counting.


Kim: Here is the "civilised" West, we seem to live in a world of fear and suspicion. Every day we are bombarded with news images of wars, terrorists, paedophiles, corruption and global destruction, while politicians and newspapers captilise on this to create a sense of us-and-them: refugees are just terrorists in disguise or here to claim social benefits that takes resources away from our own poor and elderly, while anyone who is not Christian and White is barbaric or backwards. And yet, you travel the world almost entirely reliant on the kindness of strangers - just you on a bicycle - in a way that would seem to be very vulnerable. What is your general view of humanity?

Nico: Let me start by saying that I could write a book alone answering this question but I'll try to be brief. What is going on in the so-called "developed" world is terrifying and with this, I don't mean the bomb-attacks or the economic crisis, those are just consequences, not causes. What I find terrifying is the increasing sense of what you just have rightly said: the sense of us and them, the sense of fearing that other, the one that comes to take from me, to take what is mine, not his and because of this, they are threatening, they are dangerous.

What is terrifying is the growing lack of humanity in the general public in rich but also in all countries alike, this never ending growth of selfishness. All this, fed by governments to fulfil their own agendas, monstrous corporations that have no limits of any kind in order to profit without end, Media that is anything but independent pushing for one or the other and in the middle, there's all of us, being manipulated. Not as much as cattle, but in much more subtle ways, more dangerous and destructive ways.

Kim: There is always a reality and a dignity - you never look down on, or adopt a superiority towards the people you photograph. How important is this to you - to convey the other as not-other?

Nico: You hit the nail with one word: dignity. Dignity, is exactly what I strive to convey above everything. I want viewers to be able to transcend the superficial differences, I also want them to transcend all the visible lack of material possessions of most of the people I photograph, I want them to connect directly with another human being that has the exact same feelings as them and not in hierarchical way so to speak, but in a more equal way.

. . could I say that in the end I'm chasing some kind of ultimate wisdom? I don't know but ultimately, I think that learning through an experience like this, enriches me as a person, it brings down my prejudices, it teaches me to see the world in as many ways as the people that I find in my way, it humanises me. It connects me on a deeper level with the world, with myself, with those around me. It is a beautiful thing.

http://kimayres.blogspot.co.at/2016/...nterviews.html

[Iloveyou]

..............

[Iloveyou]

South Sudan is dying, and nobody is counting.

- South sudan, the world's youngest country, independent since 2011, after two civil wars
from 1955-1972 and 1983-2005 (http://www.enoughproject.org/blogs/s...f-history-1956)

- continuing fights, brute force and systematic violence against the civil population

- massive displacement (2,5 million people - out of a population of 11,8 million - fleeing
(most of them are trapped inside the warring nation)

- 6 million facing severe hunger.

- under-five infant mortality rate is 135.3 per 1,000

- maternal mortality 2,053.9 per 100,000 live births (highest in the world)

- more than 90% of the population live on less than $1 a day

- still 300.000 people from neighbouring regions (Darfour) seeking 'shelter' in the war-torn and raped land.

[Iloveyou]

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=I05OSDJZhaU

Gnawa music has its roots in the slave trade, which displaced many Central and West Africans (mostly the Fulani people) to North Africa. Over the years it has mixed pre-Islamic African traditions with classical Islamic Sufism, and today can be found mostly in Morocco and some parts of Algeria. "Mawama" is both a song of displacement, and one of spiritual transcendence.

[Iloveyou]

A STORY OF RECONCILIATION

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1-jQnE7OxOU

In 1994, more than 800,000 people were killed in the Rwandan Genocide,
a period of massive violence between the Hutus and the Tutsis that lasted 100 days.

Two photographers (Pieter Hugo and Lana Mesic) undertook the project in search
of the boundaries between reality and illusion and their contemplative pictures tell the story
of forgiveness as a process through time. In their photographs they capture what they describe
as the “raw and complex nature of forgiveness.”

"If forgiveness is possible after the genocide in Rwanda,
forgiveness can be possible anywhere, in any case despite the context."




















http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...portraits.html

[Iloveyou]

[Iloveyou]

. . throwing in my last pictures here for a while. May the female power, the gentle power which actually is
'no power' - prevail. May hubris, pretension and self- righteousness, dominance, competition, prejudice and
condemnation, may fear come to an end among human fellows.

















to my friends

[Iloveyou]

RIDING A MOTORCYCLE AROUND THE WORLD IN THE 70’s

and the melting together of the internal and external journey

Ted Simon's story from the 70's accompagnied me for many years and I still love it . .

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6AmscXf13vk

Be available to the world rather than trying to shield yourself from it.

In 1973, Ted Simon set of on a four-year 64,000 mile journey around the world on his trusty Triumph motorcycle. In all of those four years that he was traveling he only met two or three other people on bikes. It was a very rare thing.

"The main thing I was always really careful about, though, was to make it obvious that I was a real human being on this bike. There were no fancy motorcycle clothes in those days. The motorcycle itself, I really dumbed it down so it wouldn’t look like some extraterrestrial vehicle. I had an open-face helmet, and I had no windshield or fairing at all on the motorcycle, which amazes me now."

"People who thought of my journey as a physical ordeal or an act of courage… missed the point. Courage and physical endurance were no more than useful items of equipment for me, like facility with languages or immunity to hepatitis."

"The goal was comprehension, and the only way to comprehend the world was by making myself vulnerable to it so that it could change me. The challenge was to lay myself open to everybody and everything that came my way. The prize was to change and grow big enough to feel one with the whole world."

. . It seems that when you raise yourself up to achieve something beyond what is needed just to live day by day, the energy you generate has an effect on those around you.”

http://www.advpulse.com/adv-prepping...-on-ted-simon/

[Iloveyou]

Strangers? Stranded here? Sleeping? Lost? Awake?

[Iloveyou]

Listening to Neil Young. It tears one's heart apart.

Getting older, after a lifelong tender, desperate love affair with that marble spinning through space I look around me and realise: No way that I'm indigenous here. Came here to . . Terra for what reason ever, willingly or not, still not clear about it. What I KNOW is only that I came from elsewhere, everything else would be fanciful chatter.

At times the pain is so severe one can't breathe anymore. Pain of being thrown amongst predators, of being deceived, betrayed and lied to. Attacked and ripped to pieces. Time and again one has to go down that road, at times it seems like it will never end.

Though always, always Mother Nature will catch you when you're falling.