I was recently invited to view a lovely collection of photos a friend of a friend took recently while she was in West Africa. One of Ann Schunior's photos show how the Dogon people still live. These beautiful huts most likely follow an ancestral design that's been embedded in their culture for thousands of years.
See how precisely those reeds are placed.
How perfectly the tops fit.
And how very carefully placed their homes are within the cliff-terrain near the Niger River in the Mali Republic.
The Dogon people have intrigued me for some time. They knew about the dog star near Sirius long before later people, even with their fancy telescopes, "discovered it" and named it Sirius B, Digitaria.
It's a white dwarf, massive and super-dense. Scientists estimate one cubic meter of its matter would weight 30,000 tons! It's gravity is so powerful that it creates a wobble in Sirius causing its pulses you can see flickering in the night sky.
The Dogon call it the Po Tolo, "Egg of the World" or the "Deep Beginning." Spirals flew off, they say, and formed the Milky Way, and our earth. They measure time by its orbit around Sirius, which it circles every fifty years. They claim the Nommos, or the ones who came from Sirius, will come again on the path of the rainbow.
Their village seems to say, "We're here, in this place, and until those star people come back, we're not going anywhere. This is our home."
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