The Ballads of Mountain Wind
The Coffee Flower
303 Pages, in English
What a beautiful coffee! Your flowers blossom in the morning, abundant in groups of soft branches. You are sung in the twilight, and longed for all night long. Your tiny flowers gives a sense. You should not disappear in this current age for unrest and worry would be vanished. From the distance you look like a little kid with curly hair bubbled with laughing. Keep on brightening up the hillside.
Mountain is an incredible crop growing space that nature gives. Sindoro Sumbing and Temanggung should be an everlasting farming seat. Male trees grow exceedingly, the coffee that never forgets to bloom, the shoots of tea trees look like dwarfs walking back and forth forming scenic fields, cauliflowers, cabbages, chilis, and ludicrous feathers of corn.
It does not need a hotel, but a pump and irrigation. Self-sufficiency of manure keeps up the coffee glowing in the morning. The motion of modernization will not chop off branches of coffee flowers. Tha art of life of the authenticity of mountain should be a discourse to think and move for anyone who loves the universe gift.
The Bangilun
387 Pages, In English
We do agree that art and culture need a stage to hold a performance. Do art and culture require the audience? This question will be asked by anyone who watches Sri Lestari Bangilun Dance which carries out the performance from nine in the morning until midnight. They dance in the chill of the mountain.
Those who come minutes before twilight for they wish to see the the goddess coming down from heaven are not the audience. They are neighbors who involve themselves in the group of Sri Lestari Bangilun to rejoice the life. The group of Sri Lestari Bangilun has been dancing for more than 100 years, until the third generation. Occasionally they perform in flashes of floodlights on the stage of the province, door to door, the village hall, and also on the unpretentious stage.
Thousands times tirelessly setting up the bamboo stage is merely a struggle of the performing arts.
The sunken thin man is Pak Sabarno. He has been dancing since he was very young, for more than fifty years preserving his ancestral culture and dedicating to his ancestors. And he keeps on dancing because of his blazing spirit.
The most important is dancing happily, offering the soul to The Supernatural Being, the owner of the universe.
It is the way how culture should be celebrated. Nation will loss its essence without culture.
The Hillside Man
375 Pages, in English
Veins seems to stick out on the skin of his hands while he is digging over. His legs support his body to keep on moving since dawn. His row-shaped footprints are replica of a journey treading on life. He is Pak Kirno, a man of the hillside, who is walking down to the field. As a man of the hillside he does not ride a bike, and he climbs to the height of 1800 meters above sea level. Riding a crappy motorbike and waving their hands, Sutarsih—his wife, and Jumadi—his son, pass by him. His wife’s wave is getting further and hurts his heart. Modernity has reached the hillside: the man of the hillside who survives with his slow manner in the age of extra-fast.
Man of The Hillside of Sindoro Sumbing as well as men who lives on the slopes are the real Noble of Life winners. They are the guards of meaningful life habitation, of culture, of art, of language, of attitude. And the world does not know all elements that Pak Kirno keeps. Without mountain Man of the Hillside is like man without world. Civilization will be vanished.
Man of the Hillside reminds Indonesian people to be back to their own gracious identity, to contemplate altogether with their ancestors who has built the nation by the ideas of local content, being grateful of the simple living and holding compassion towards nature and universe.
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