Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
Ganesha (aka Ganesh) is the elephant-headed Hindu deity.
Perhaps the best-loved of Hindu gods, Ganesha is the “remover of obstacles”, and is associated with good fortune, wisdom and prosperity.
Q: what on earth is he doing in a decidedly “touristic” street in a southern Italian seaport/resort city?
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In the “western” world most drums are made from metal, wood and “skin” (although that “skin” is now usually synthetic) and they are usually played with sticks, mallets, or brushes.
In Asia and Africa, however, many drummers hold no stick or mallet, and their instrument is a clay pot or a vegetable gourd.
Doubtless, some “westerners” imagine that music played by a hand drummer on a clay pot is necessarily simple, crude, “unrefined”.
That assumption is dead wrong…as is strikingly illustrated by this post’s “musical bonus”.
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(The musical bonus features a man who was very possibly the greatest tabla player in recorded history. It is hard to imagine that there has ever been a more prodigiously gifted player of any drum. I am around 99% certain that you have never heard of him, let alone heard him. For the final 49 of his 66 years he lived in Lahore)
Immediately after our more “formal” welcome, we were made even more welcome, more personally, in a courtyard adjacent to Delhi Gate.
Drums and garlands were involved.
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As highlighted in this series, Flnders Island’s shorelines are both beautiful and very demanding – especially for plants.
I imagine that not a few visitors perceive a place such as the one pictured above as “unspoilt”, “wild”, “pristine”.
The above adjectives are “wildly” inaccurate!
(I took the photo on the southern half of Flinders Island’s west coast at 10.08 am on March 2025. I love such places, where things “hard” and “soft”, “massive” and “petite”, “inanimate” and “living” all coexist, near terra firma’s edge)
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I took this post’s photo at 9.49 am on 18 March 2025, as we were walking along part of the southern portion of the western shore of Flinders Island.
Flinders is much the largest in the Furneaux Group, which sits at the eastern edge of Bass Strait, off the northeast tip of Tasmania’s “mainland”.
The Furneaux Group has circa 100 members; whatever shorelines you walk on Flinders Island, other islands are always visible.
The pictured “island in the sun” (whilst our vantage point was still cloud-shaded) is variously known as “Mount Chappell Island” or as “Hummocky”.
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The headline above is the key sentence in an essay published on 04 May 2025.
That essay’s headline: Are the Liberals in danger of becoming the Kodak of Australian politics?
Yesterday’s Pelican Yoga post included its most telling paragraph.
It is a direct quotation from a speech delivered in 1946 by a young, multiply-wounded ex-RAAF pilot; in 1949 he became a Liberal senator.
In 1968 he – John Gorton – became Prime Minister.
As the essay’s author observes:
His vision was generous, compassionate and cosmopolitan: of an Australia and a wider world “in which meanness and poverty, tyranny and hate, have no existence.”
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Western Australia’s south coast is mostly unspoilt, uncrowded, wonderfully wild.
However, in February 2025 sunshine, strong winds and big waves were generally “AWOL”, and the usually-brilliant, clear light was mostly flat, hazy and/or smoke-tainted.
This trip yielded an unprecedentedly low number of worthwhile opportunities for landscape/seascape photography!
Nonetheless, even on a “flat, grey day”…
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This post’s forest floor “natural abstract” was photographed a couple of minutes later than was the “5” Porongurup image.
Their locations were only a few footsteps distant from each other.
One of the world’s greater guitarists has (unwitttingly) provided a sublime musical accompaniment..
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“Stay here with Mom. Dad’s going fishing.”
In the pictured instance no such words had been spoken, nor contemplated.
It was a quiet delight to observe a father who so well understood that “joyful fishing is not just about catching fish”.
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I do not believe in the notion that any single player/composer/writer/whatever kind of artist is – or ever was the best.
That said, Zakir Hussain was undoubtedly the most influential, most eclectically-inclined, and most ubiquitous hand-drummer/percussionist in human history.
(Jim McGuire took the photo of him)
Zakir Hussain died on Monday, in his adoptive home city of San Francisco.
He was born 73 years earlier, in what was then Bombay, now Mumbai.
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