{"id":1435,"date":"2012-01-14T09:17:30","date_gmt":"2012-01-14T14:17:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=1435"},"modified":"2012-01-14T09:21:44","modified_gmt":"2012-01-14T14:21:44","slug":"from-simple-to-complex-overnight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=1435","title":{"rendered":"From Simple to Complex Overnight"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday’s utterly simple little offering on the beach was replaced this morning by a much more complex one, beautiful in a way, too:<\/p>\n

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I haven’t seen one quilte like it.\u00a0\u00a0 The overall layout of the ‘installation’ is the upper left hand pic, then the other sections show different parts of the whole arrangement.\u00a0 All the usual elements\u00a0are there in abundance, including flowers, candles, the dead chook (as usual, the head pointing east, towards the sea) various grains of rice and corn, fruit, plus the white round things are small meringues; however\u00a0there’s no\u00a0fabric (but it might be hidden)\u00a0\u00a0 Imanja, goddess of the sea, is vain (there’s a tiny little green plastic comb sticking out of the top of one of the yellow plums) and she likes pretty things, flowers, ribbons, beads and anything blue or shiny – I couldn’t see anything shiny, but there’s plenty of blue.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Elsewhere this morning we came across a couple of other placements\u00a0of much more basic offerings, all chickens, several of which were still in plastic bags.\u00a0 They’d all been beheaded and the\u00a0heads were nowhere to be seen.\u00a0 These felt rather joyless, lacking the careful exhuberance of the offering above, \u00a0and so\u00a0possibly sinister, rather like the goat legs and heads I found\u00a0grouped on\u00a0the beach last year.\u00a0 This is the first time I’ve seen this exact style, too.\u00a0 They were all aligned with tops of necks pointing out to sea\/east.<\/p>\n

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As a friend we met for coffee later reminded me,\u00a0although these\u00a0things can be supplications for help of some kind, \u00a0or give thanks, some of\u00a0these things contain voodoo spells for harming someone.\u00a0 He married a Brasilian, has seen a lot of it up there,\u00a0and he personally finds it rather creepy. I\u00a0just think it is fascinating; but then on the other hand I\u00a0don’t expect to be put under its influence any time, either.\u00a0 \u00a0Mind you, I not disturb even as much as a grain of corn or a chicken feather whenever I observe one, just in case… \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I would like to find an impartial expert sometime to help me ‘read’ them, know\u00a0which ones are joyful and which ones are something else….\u00a0and in the meantime I will continue to photograph the ones I come across, and not presume anything from what I see.\u00a0 My regular readers will already know these can be found on the shore any time of year, \u00a0but I am expecting to see more important\/interesting ones over the next few weeks, leading up to Imanja’s birthday on feb 2nd.\u00a0\u00a0 A particular beach\u00a0closer to the city is where the most amazing ceremonials and boat launchings reportedly\u00a0take place on feb 2nd, and I am planning to go along there this year and check that out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday’s utterly simple little offering on the beach was replaced this morning by a much more complex one, beautiful in a way, too: I haven’t seen one quilte like it.\u00a0\u00a0 The overall layout of the ‘installation’ is the upper left hand pic, then the other sections show different parts of the whole arrangement.\u00a0 All the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[168,178],"class_list":["post-1435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-beach","tag-offerings"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6uxpF-n9","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1435"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1441,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1435\/revisions\/1441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}