"in the beginning there was Blackness.
only the sea. in the beginning there was
no sun, no moon, no people. in the beginning
there were no animals, no plants, only the sea.
the sea was the mother. mother was not people.
she was not anything. nothing at all.
she was when she was. Spirit.
she was memory and possibility.
[...]They say that we mutilate the world because
we do not remember the great mother.
She is not a distant God.
She is the mind inside nature."
—From the Heart of the World / Alan Ereira
BBC 1990-2012
RAINFOREST SERIE .I
RAINFOREST .II —in progress
"And we have a language which teaches us
that the world is made of things, and these
things are separate from one another, and
they have boundaries, so we can take 'a thing'
out of its context without damaging or affecting
the context. Kogi language doesn't allow for that.
The language itself sees what is in the world as
having extension into the world that it's in, and
in fact my own view is that the Kogi concept of
what we consider things is that they are fields,
which interpenetrate the world around them.
So their concept of taking the obvious things,
a river, a mountain, so on, those are not things
with defined limits, that can be separated from
the rest of the world. They are fields that extend
into the world beyond what we see as their limits,
and which affect (and interact) a much greater
area than we suppose. But that also applies to
everything else, even a rock is actually in their
terms better thought of as something which
exerts a field, that has extension beyond what
we perceive as its physical boundaries. And that
means that their whole sense of what the world
is driven in a different way from ours."
—Alan Ereira, Documentary Film Director,
Author, Anthropologist / an interview
