skull and plant

Suffering from post Covid booster blues today has kept me inside with a chance to visit my archive in search of an image for my effort today.

Living in Indonesia for several years presented many chances to explore remote and culturally significant locations not often visited by the non-native populations. One such place, Skull Island, was a long motor scooter ride from our home and a dugout canoe ride across a mountain lake to the sacred island. Indonesian culture calls for cremating the bodies of the dead, but here near the shores of Lake Batur, this tribe places the bodies in bamboo cages to rot in the open air, placing the skulls in a central temple once nature has finished its cleaning process.

The single living thing in this scene caught my eye that day. Rows and rows of villages heads stacked haphazardly about while this single plant starts anew. The colorization of the single leaf might have been a push, but it felt, to me, a bit how I saw it that day. The only green in a sea of sun-bleached skulls.