Tag: spirituality

Telecommunication with the ancestors

Spirituality of native (tribal) people around the globe, from Australia to Australia, has a significant element of ancestry in it. Native people of South Africa are balancing on the edge of traditional values and the ‘comfort’ of modern times.  Hence this imaginary of a Xhosa woman calling the spirits of her ancestors for guidance.

contacting-the-spirit-of-the-ancestorsWEB

Split personality

Sometimes I hear people tell me that “… you say what you think” and with that telling me not to believe one word of their stories. Thinking, saying and doing are three different entities in our existence and getting to know each other and building up true lasting friendships has everything to do with the ability of not only opening your mind and your heart but also showing that ‘thinking’, ‘saying’ and ‘doing’ are one despite our dark secrets. Come to think of it; we’re all ‘split personalities’ and I am not an exception. We all have an ‘alter ego’ and this realization goes back to the early days of humanity and religion. There has always been ‘good’ and ‘evil’; a ‘God’ and a ‘devil’. In South African cultures there is the ‘Tokkelossie‘ or tokoloshe/tikoloshe (‘uthikoloshe‘) which represent the ‘evil’ and since everybody thinks that he/she is a good person the influence of a ‘Tokkelossie’ has to be avoided at any cost; going that far that some people believe that once put your bed on stones the ‘Tokkelossie’ does nog have a chance to pollute your ‘good being’ during your sleep.

Who am I; a ‘good’ or an ‘evil’ person? I think we all have both and some of us have more ‘good’ and the other more ‘evil’ although not many ‘evil’ people will admit that they are. And than we also have to define ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Is, for example, a mother who steals bread to be able to feed her children an ‘evil’ person? Pretty sure that there is a large grey area in which ‘good’ and ‘evil’ overlap each other. Who am I to judge?

In the recent past I published some photoshopped self-portraits. Here I publish three of them. The first picturing who I think I am; the second how others might see me and the third how I see my true self in (which?) mirror.

Images in one impression

Remember me going to the Graduation Ceremony of the pre-primary school in a nearby location (township) in South Africa? Well here is what I distilled from the few hundred pictures I made. It’s about children and the joy people have despite severe poverty. And also about a community leader as one of the many who made it all possible. There is not much written history about the different tribes in South Africa and certainly not much from books is known to people in communities like this. But they inherited a story-telling culture and history flows in one or another way from generation to generation. Not the history of facts but a history of ancestry and spirituality. Due to influences of modern times the cultural heritage is threatened with ‘uprooting’ leaving people without knowledge about their cultural background and without hope, without future….