Text & photographs by the author
Each of the two booklets published by Longhouse shown here contain a chapter selected from Malcolm Ritchie's recently completed (unpublished) memoir, The Crows of Gravity.
"A Village at the End of Culture is a cameo from our three-and-a-half year sojourn in the remote farming/fishing village of Sora, on the Japan Sea coast. It describes our realization that what we were experiencing and witnessing was the last living breath of a profound culture still lived at the cradle of its birth in the cultivation of rice, and under the tutelage of its ancient gods. The fragile survival of a holistic way of life, somehow still extant, but fast disappearing with the demise of the aged inhabitants of Sora and its neighbouring communities. A way of living which expresses the true definition of the term ‘culture’ with its roots in the Latin cultura and its meaning of ‘cultivation’ – connection with the natural environment and the seasonal cycles, and its association with cultus, to worship. The loss of a meaningful life being hastened by the ravening appetites of Western materialism/consumerism and its global markets, which had already transformed mainstream Japanese culture and distorted its traditional cultural mind-set."
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A Village at the End of Culture ~
Text & photographs by the author
"Encounter with the Great Mother recounts my experience with the
psychotropic plant ayahuasca, referred to as Mother Ayahuasca by the
peoples of the Amazonian rainforest, and worked with as a sacramental
medicine in their sacred ceremonies. It describes my encounter with a
profound intelligence which spoke to me both cosmically, and with a deep
knowledge, or seeming familiarity with my own individual psyche – the
compassionate heart/mind of the planet we are in the habit of calling,
while forgetting the truth of, ‘Mother Earth’."
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Encounter with the Great Mother ~
