Page 3: the longest journey starts with a first step...

I love to read.
And write.
I started reading when I was 8 and by 14 I had read all Solzhenitsyn.
Recently I read the Koran for the first time and I took the time to read the Bible again and the New Testament as well. Today I am half way through the Zohar.
Regularly I read again Krishnamurti's "Freedom from the known".
Every day since 10 years now I read on internet a few hours of articles and interviews about geopolitics, economy, history, geostrategy, fasting, etc...

Years back some people started to tell me I should write a book about my life.
The idea has been turning around in my head for a long time now and it's been very pleasurable even though I never got started.
It seems that I always find a good reason to postpone, the latest being that I couldn't write a book before I had first fully accomplished the project I had in mind when I came to Vanuatu some 2 years ago. As if it was the last chapter to be.
I wanted to build adobe earth bag houses for myself and my family and later share the concept to protect people from cyclones and earthquakes.
And then, when my house would have been built I could relax in my garden, under my papaya trees and write...
This nice dream vanished when it confronted reality; we can talk about it another day but these houses are just fantastic anyway.

Then the problem to solve was the form the book should have; text only? Only photographs? Or maybe a mix of both?
And suddenly it appeared to me!
My book would be a steemit book, it would be filled with text, with photographs and videos and this is actually page 3 of that book and yeah baby that's it I finally got started!!!

At this point I have to thank Yann Yoro for sharing steemit with me a few days ago: thank you bro, you're the best!

I took that picture in India in march 1997.
At this point I cannot say "I" any more so I will use "we".
We is me and my better half, Cécile (see Page 1 ;) )
You'll see a lot of Cécile in the following pages as she is my muse since June the 18th 1995, a historical date believe me!
Anyway, we were travelling in India and in march we were in Gujarat. After Palitana and its 365 Jaina marble temples we decided to go to Girnar hill, one of India's holy place.
A few thousand steps, 9000 if my memory is good, bring you up a hill, well, bring you as long as you use your legs and then you arrive at a first Hindu temple. Then the pilgrims who visit go down the mountain on the other side and up another 11,000 steps to reach a second temple, on top of another hill; the goal of their pilgrimage. And then of course they do the trip the other way around to go back home, the same day.
When we arrived at the first temple we met an Indian and two Nepali brothers who were the guardians and priests of the temple.
The top of Girnar hill is very small and fits only the temple and two tiny houses.
We stayed there with them... 11 days and we never made it to the second temple!
11 days that could have been 11 years and it would have made no difference to them.
As they lived on the offerings the pilgrims were bringing them, when there were no visitors there was no food to eat.
It didn't seem to bother them too much and some good soul from a village down the hill would bring them something if it lasted too long.
And so I took that picture after a week or so, when they didn't notice us any more. The guy was meditating in the light of the sunset; we were all out of time. And at night when we tried to go to sleep all we could hear was the wind singing "Ommmmmmm..." It was so human that we had to go out to look if someone was singing but it was just the wind.
Or our imagination?
When we had arrived first, there were three Saddhus living in the forest at the foot of Girnar hill; when we came back down after 11 days there were 600,000 people; it was my birthday, it was Shiva Ratri but that's another story.
This was made with a Nikon FM2 on Sensia 100 ISO slide film with a 105 mm f2,5.