myths, legends

I see the world in pictures
here's a story of images and no images: yesterday, the new Aoteaora blog carnival went live. the theme of it is: Past Myths, Present Legends.it turned into a rich carpet of tales, posts, reflections, and: images. the collage above is created from it, and reflects only 4 of more than 20 contributions.

the edition is guest edited by Rachel Fenton, whose introduction comes with 2 simple, complex lines that spoke to me. One is "I see the world in pictures". which also is true for me. there's a reason why the blog posts in this blog all come with an image. it's not really a conscious decision to blog like this. it's rather that i feel there's something missing when there is no image there.

but back to the edition: the thing is, in the last days before going live, the edition developed an on mythical character. some edits refused to show. some paragraphs appeared, then were gone again. we put it all up in a testblog, and in the end, all was ready and looked good. yet when the edition went live, the images were missing. to add to the mystery, that was invisible to us at first: while logged in, the images still showed. after some mails, things were solved and it finally was all online.

the episode brought a good reflections, though. here's a note from my mail to Rachel: "the interesting/surreal thing is that in your opening lines, you write about how you see the world in pictures – which i can very much relate to. and then this carnival went online without images. which made me then think, that the images make such a difference. and now the images are back."

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the past is in the future
the other complex and simple line of the introduction is: "the past is in the future." - the full explanation is included in the introduction, but basically, it's about viewpoints: from a Western Historical perspective the past is ‘behind’, while from a Maori perspective, it is ‘in front', while the future is behind - as it is something you cannot see. "To conceptualise this, you must reverse your notion of history.”

it's an idea i am still chewing on. but it's not that abstract: this weekend, when i drove to the Alb mountain plateau, and sat in a place for a while, i thought: this really is the past in front. in a mountain landscape, if you start to think in timelines, you start to see the landscape as a formation that formed in millions of years, like this maar in the blog post right below: home journeys to wider views

looking very forward to read through the myths and legends step by step.
the link again: Past Myths, Present Legends.

and here, the direct links to the collage images:
Escape Behaviours by Rachel Fenton
Once Upon at Time, an Empty Page (my own contribution)
The Long Way by Michelle Elvy
The Pa Boys Movie by Himiona Grace