Image of the Day : Dunes

Perfect balance.

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Open spaces – be they composed of dunes or flat desert, rolling hills or flat praries how precious they are and how vital to the soul’s well-being! There is nothing like the feeling a drive through the desert gives me, especially when I am alone, or otherwise with someone who is likewise able to appreciate the splendid silence of this great expanse. As Marie-Ora says, the desert invites the soul to unfurl itself, and that unfurling is to the human spirit what a good stretch is to the body after a long night’s sleep.

I have never been on a desert of dunes, like the one in this photo, but one of my as-yet-unfulfilled dreams is to one day take a long trek through such a desert on camelback. Sounds silly, perhaps, but there is something about the motion of the camel – the ever constant sway – and the endless waves of the dunes. Like riding a boat on the ocean, only an ocean of another sort. This dream of mine first developed when I was still quite young and first saw the movie “Lawrence of Arabia,” which I think was probably my first exposure to the concept of a desert such as this. Maybe it was also the first time that I had seen a realistic image of a camel. At any rate, there is this one still-frame from the film that encapsulates this dream so beautifully – my dream of a trek through the desert by camel:
http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BNDY3ODEzOTc4NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwMjY3Nzc2._V1._SX525_SY165_.jpg

And if “Lawrence of Arabia” was the start of the dream, it was only further enforced when I read “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino, in which my favorite chapter is about a place called Despina:

“Despina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea. When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red windsocks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already sweeling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel; and he thinks of all the ports, the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another’s heads, the lighted, ground-floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair. In the coastline’s haze, the sailor discerns the form of a camel’s withers, an embroidered saddle with glittering fringe between two spotted humps, advancing and swaying; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wineskins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees’ jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by their veils, and half-revealed. Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts.”

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/30/62833589_6a6c9b0617.jpg

Love,
Savita

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It makes me think of the whole world in these dunes -that we all just a tiny grain of sand -all put together to form -move -shift -and just be .Blessings Tania

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Dunes such as water are able to change continuously and take new forms but never change in their soul…
Thanks a lot for your teachings
Stefani

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Sensual./

I feel power. Great.

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The place that I was born..Alamosa, Colorado. The great sand dunes that spring out of nowhere in the valley surrounded by the San Juan mountains. They make me feel quite.

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I was born in Namibia – a country which is mostly a desert. I never feel as close to God and Everything as when I’m standing on a dune, looking out to infinity. It is as though my Soul can unfurl itself in the vastness of the desert. If I could put a picture to my Soul – my ‘soulscape’ as it were, you would see endless rolling, shifting dunes. To my eye, there is nothing more beautiful or peaceful.
With Love and Light

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Dune is a hill built by Aeolian processes. Aeolian processes means: to the activity of the winds.
Aeolus is the son of Poseidon the God of the sea in the Greek Mythology. Aeolus is the God, the ruler or keeper of the winds. The Element of Air.
LOVE,
THELMA

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This photo gives me a sense of safety. There is peace.

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