Toumba, Saieen Zahoor, Coke Studio Pakistan, Season 2

Why we travel

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, “The Philosophy of Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher wrote, “to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”

http://www.worldhum.com/features/travel-stories/why-we-travel-20081213/

Ali Hewson, Bono, Renzo Rosso talk sustainable fashion at IHT Luxury 2012

Simone Cipriani, Head, Poor Communities and Trade Programmes & Chief Technical Advisor, Ethical Fashion Initiative, International Trade Centre Joined by Ilaria Venturini Fendi, Designer, Carmina Campus for Q&A / discussion

Deborah Turbeville - Casa No Name

I love the mood of her images, they are so romantic and evoke a bygone time.  These images are taken from her house in Mexico, Casa No Name, as well as from her travels around Guatemala.  She has captured the spiritual nature of Mexican culture by incorporating into candlelit interiors traditional religious artifacts from colorful painted tin retablos, hand-carved saints, wooden tableau boxes, to a central wooden figure of the local Virgin Saint Maria Candelaria: aged objets that are handmade, tell stories, and are arranged in artful vignettes.

Incredible India

Photographer and Revolutionary - Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti was an Italian photographer, model, actress, and revolutionary political activist.  She emigrated to the USA in 1918 and met Edward Weston in 1921, moving with him to Mexico City in 1923. There he taught her photography. Modotti’s early platinum prints were close-up photographs of still-lifes such as wine glasses, folds of fabric or flowers.  She also made prints of finely composed architectural spaces. By 1927, when she joined the Communist Party, she was starting to incorporate more overt social content in her work. She also gave up making expensive and time-consuming platinum prints in favour of silver gelatin prints.

Modotti photographed political events, as well as bullfights and the circus; she focused on the proud faces and hands of mothers, children, artisans and labourers. She was deported from Mexico for her political activities in 1929; during the next decade she dedicated herself to revolutionary and anti-fascist activities in Russia and Spain and took few photographs. In 1939 she returned to Mexico City. Although Modotti photographed from 1923–32, her work is relatively scarce.

Strength and Vulnerability

The Power of Dreams

"All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together."

Style and Wisdom

Rebranding Africa in NY Times

Check out interesting article in the NY Times on Rebranding Africa

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls. Anais Nin

Thoughts on Traveling and Belonging

"Yet people call me the African, but I am neither from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia. I do not come from any country, any city or any tribe. I am a son of the road. My home is the caravan and my life is among the most unexpected of the wandering."
- Hasan al-Wazzan aka Leo Africanus (Arabian historian, traveler, 16th century)

"And thus ever, by day and night, under the sun and under the stars, climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the weary planes, journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one another, move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life."
- Dickens

Culture

“Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future” Albert Camus

The Inspiring Colours of Global Crafts

Iris Apfel - The Jewellery Queen

Merchants on Long selling One Fine Thread on L'attitude

See Merchants on Long from Cape Town selling One Fine Thread on L'Atitude

One Fine Thread Coverage Featured in WhoWhatWear

One Fine Thread coverage featured in WhoWhatWear

One Fine Thread available at L-atitude

Please see One Fine Thread's Jewels of the Kalahari collection at L-atitude L-atitude,is an online portal, where fashion meets travel, for shopping trips around the world. L-atitude introduces exotic, exclusive and edgy finds from the world’s most stylish cities to you.

Laurens van der Post, author of The Lost World of the Kalahari

"To me it was simply that the older I got, the more and more I felt that we had lost, there was a bushman in everybody, and we'd lost contact with that side of ourselves. And we must learn again from the bushman. Trying to find out what is that side about.

I thought how strange it was that people were digging up old ruins -- archeologists excavating to find out what archaic man was like, and here he was walking about in our midst. Why didn't we ask him? That really is at the back of it: the fact that the bushman personified an aspect of natural man which we all have, but with which we've increasingly lost contact and that has impoverished us and endangered us.

And when I spoke to Jung about it he said this is not an extravagant thought at all. He said every human being has a 2 million year-old man within himself. And if he loses contact with that 2 million year-old self he loses his real roots. So this question of why modern man is in search of his soul and has lost his religious roots had a lot to do with my interest in the bushman.

Because I found that the difference between this naked little man in the desert, who owned nothing, and us was that he is and we have, but no longer are. We have. We've exchanged having for being.

So if the bushman goes, through what one knew of him, his stories, and his art, he would still be important to us. He must live on through these things. And that's what I've tried, merely tried, to bring back -- to use him as a bridge between the world in the beginning, with which we've lost touch, and the now."

- Laurens van der Post at 87, 1994, interviewed in his home in Chelsea

That Tribal Feeling......

Realisations