We are Love
All of Us. It's what we're made of.
The feel good photography of Cole Ramstad and Anna Bonnet.
All Images © RamstadBonnet 2012 unless otherwise noted.
RamstadBonnet@gmail.com
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Hindustan Sojourn - Part Three
The final leg of our journey took us from the rugged mountains of Himachal Pradesh to the bustling shanty metropolis of Delhi en route to Kathmandu, Nepal. The Mountain Fund is a non-profit organization, based in Kathmandu, that brings western doctors and medical specialists to remote regions of nothern Nepal, where villages accessible only by trekking may be days away from the nearest hospital. They were kind enough to lead us on a trek to Langtang National Park, on the border with China in central northern Nepal.
Krishna-ite at the train station, repping his boy hard (trident + umbrella… ready for anything).
The writing on the wall is maoist graffiti, omnipresent in this region of northern Nepal. These villages are extremely poor, and feel alienated from and neglected by the Nepali government centered in Kathmandu. Local Nepalis are almost exclusively pro-maoist in this area, but the minority population of Tibetan refugees feel a strong aversion to any chinese influence (for obvious reasons), leading to a precarious political environment for many local Tibetans.
Found! Ancient hindu rock porn.
Boredom and a little ingenuity lead to all sorts of fun game ideas. These were my favorite, powered by older brothers or just good old fashioned gravity:
We’d been warned about these guys… Leeches. Yuck.
Dinner. Yum.
And last but not least, the Digable Planets were representing in Nepal:
As was Cole’s insectual sexual brother-from-another-phylum, getting his many-armed love on.
It’s been interesting trying to rematriculate into the surrealistic oppulance of western culture. Each one of us here are vastly and inconceivable more fortunate than we can possibly acknowledge without experiencing the true alternative first-hand, and even then only as a insignificant taste of a life that these people don’t fly home out of after a few weeks of sightseeing. As annoying as it became to be viewed exclusively as a walking ATM machine, when I imagine the other perspective, tales of American life must sound like some bizarre heavenly fantasy land. In many respects, it is. Unrestricted access to clean water 24 hours a day, electricity, paved roads (that people even obey the laws of), seat belts, medical care, jobs… we really don’t know how good we have it. Most strangely of all, our indulgent lifestyles seem to lead us to love stuff more than we love each other, leaving us struggling to dominate some artificial competition concocted in our own craniums, prancing around like groomed poodles in a delusional dog show. If this is your game, you lose by default.
The real game is won with humility, compassion, gratitude, and love. We ARE love. Love yourself. Love your mother. Love Cole, and love your brother. It’s the least we can do, considering the extraordinary gifts we’ve all been blessed with.
I love you.
-Carson Linforth Bowley
