V2.C.P2= Kalimantan (trailer: butterflies and mushrooms)

It took me so long to bring myself to write about Kalimantan... I am not exactly sure why but I have ideas:

It can be because I didn’t know where to start and end, as the geographical, spiritual, intellectual and psychological merged and diverged from the beginning to the end.

Or because I wanted the sound/taste/feel/look/smell as great as it were in reality reflect on what I write –which I think is impossible- so I hesitated.

It may as well be because of what was lacking and what was abundant and how they related to one another (I’m not only talking of lack of booze and abundance of great conversations here!)

In either case, I took more than a month to start writing about the Kalimantan trip and I could only do so by giving up on the reflection bit. I will not attempt to describe what it was like. Nothing can look, feel, smell that wonderful. Nothing feels so real and so much touching my heart. Nothing so far has justified my life so straightforwardly. In no other time I felt at the top of the world without making any effort -so much for trailers… The easiest way of writing about Kalimantan is to refer to a previous post: small is beautiful.

What amazed me most was the butterflies and the mushrooms in the rainforest. The former were constantly around, and very hard to take a picture of, but they did play with us, almost constantly. They were small and fragile, and we think they have a short life... uh oh, what a life, and what an exhausting one in my opinion. Although they were particularly in love with Vince, they gave all of us some attention at some point. The butterflies alone would make it!The mushrooms, my little mushrooms...
I felt like Alice just by looking at them. They were constantly giving messages, "I'm poisonous" said one, and "I'll prove you the wonders of the microcosmos" assured the other...

The smallest and most interesting of all were the ant-eaters: radiating the smell of a sweet substance and then closing their "lit" once the ants are in, they reminded me of... life? or love...And finally, this little photo-proof, diamond-shaped spider (that looked like nothing but a spider) reminded me of a quote from the Earthsea Cycle: As the Master Hand was examining a spider web, one of his students asks if one can turn a rock into a daimond:

"To change [a rock into a jewel, to do that even to such a small] scrap of the world is to change the world. It can be done. Indeed it can be done. […] But you must not change one thing; one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on the act.
The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. Power of changing […] can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

A rock is a good thing, too, you know… Let the rocks be rocks..."