Inevitably it is necessary to give a historical perspective of this yearly festival that takes place in the city of La Paz, Bolivia in the first week of June. The celebration transforms and stimulates the social life of La Paz every year, emanating from a particular way of understanding and living Andean Catholicism. The Parade begins with a procession through the western part of the city. This procession is central to the event, involving 40,000 devotees who dance and sing in an offering to the patron saint. The dance has a sacred significance for the sixty-nine fraternities involved, which are greeted in the streets in a euphoric atmosphere where the music of 7,000 musicians resonates. It is so owe inspiring that it is rightfully a UNESCO Wold Heritage event (Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity). The image venerated with dance and music is believed to have arrived in the city at the founding of the convent of the Mothers of the Sacred Conception on the 8th of December 1663.

"Ring them bells for the blind and the deaf. Ring them bells for all of us who are left. Ring them bells for the chosen few who will judge the many when the game is through..." Bob Dylan. Ring Them Bells

From Cormac McCarthy's "Border Trilogy, The Crossing" ...yet more dark and darkening still where it ran on to the east and where there was no sun and there was no dawn and when he looked again toward the north the light was drawing away faster and that noon which he'd woke was now become an alien dusk and now an alien dark and the birds that flew had lighted and all had hushed once again in the bracken by the road.

Another still life including Marilyn Durkin's painting

A few views of the garden of England: Kent.

A reflection on religion and its disorientation: Mary faded in the foreground and the Anfgel addressing her in the background....

Inspired by Uelsmann's analogue work...

Cherries and a blue bowl, not being the season I hunted for both. The generosity of Badger Badger, a coffee restaurant in Deptford, London, provided me generously with the bowl.

A memory of a garden in late spring with the iPhone