Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 69

This week's photo was taken by Swen Stroop, a Norwegian photographer. This is Callanish Stone Circle, on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland. Swen has some amazing photographs. Check out his site for more.

I thought of what story these stones really told, in contrast to all the strange ideas that we come up with to try and explain them. But in truth we don't know. There is a great deal that we don't know. And here I dabble in that.


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Truth

It hurt my soul to see it this way, so skeletal. It had been so majestic in its day, and I missed those days sorely. They would now be considered days of hedonism or living in utopia, but they;d been normal back then. Civilisation had been exactly that - civil.

I smiled when I thought about what they said this place had been and the tales they told; they couldn’t be further off the mark. Why was it that anything that couldn’t be explained had to have some strange religious meaning? Why did it always have to be a place of worship or be tied to some other cult rituals?

They had looked round the circle of bare stones that had once been the backbone of an incredible building and noted the sun shined through in certain places at certain times of the year, which seemed to verify to them that that had been the intention of the placement of the stones originally. Apparently it was so they were in alignment and connected to some new fangled idea of religion that existed back then. But as they had no concept of what the original structure had looked like they had no idea how wrong they were – let alone that religion was a new creation in the current civilisation, one used to control people, something completely unnecessary back then. Some days I could laugh at it, but some days it frustrated me.

When I visited other sites across Europe, and talked about similar structures that had once been tombs, they knew that what they were looking at was the bare bones of the structure, so why didn’t they realise that with the stone circles?

They would say it was because there was no ‘evidence’ of anything else. But as they had the aging process wrong and their understanding of time was completely out of whack, they didn’t realise just how old the stones really were, and how long they had been standing there. I did. I felt it in every sinew of my soul. I had lived through so much now and I could feel myself tiring – or was it just this time, this moment, watching civilisation yet again taking a dive and all of them oblivious as to why?

The clock was ticking loud now; if someone didn’t put the brakes on there might be a little bit more than a culling; they risked annihilation at their own hands. Although they were busy squabbling over weapons, thinking that whatever killed them would be man-made, but you didn’t fuck with nature. This was something they had forgotten for more than a couple of thousand years now.

It brought me back full circle to where I was standing; how this place too had fallen and people wiped out. Nature didn’t discriminate, it just abided, come what may.

Their tombs might be found here and there, but once they had been so much more. And these stones, these mini monoliths were all that remained of what had once been a palace – one of hundreds that fell across the landscape and housed the communities that lived in them.

Those communities had relished their life and embraced everyone and everything. It was pitiful to think that it was now being reduced to an obscure fantasy of dogma or doctrine, idolising an imaginary creator, something the people who had lived here would have never perceived.

Those people had been sure of themselves and confident in their pure essence, seeing themselves as pieces of a whole that needed to live symbiotically to enjoy the human experience. Not some individual fracturing to gain more than their neighbour so they could play cruel games of ‘mine’s better than yours’, or conditioned from birth that they weren’t enough without those gains – that some imaginary person was judging their every movement, and threatening them with horrors after this life if they didn’t conform.

I sighed. And these people wondered why their lives weren’t fulfilled, and why they suffered mental and emotional maladies. They were oblivious and had been taught to be.

What was here now was in need of cleansing so that the truth could return. I hoped for them all that it wouldn’t be much longer.