Visiting more caves

Meanwhile i did visit 4 more caves and did several paintings inspired by them.
In the Lot area of France I did visit Pech Merle, and Cougnac. Both are impressive in different ways. Pech Merle is also a centre of information and education and extremely touristic. That does make it a little bit more difficult to really get into touch with that special feeling of meeting with our prehistoric ancestors. There are too many people, too many intellectual explanations, too many words, not enough silence to experience. Although the cave is beautiful with many very light stalactite and stalagmite formations and then on that open space underneath all the drippings are those beautiful dotted horses.
Visiting the Cougnac cave was a more intense experience. Still a lot of tourists but more silence the smaller scale of the organisation around it did allow for a much more intensive experience. The cave did feel friendly welcoming, full of beings watching us coming and going, just observing, with indifferent watchfulness.Easy to imagine that you can meet with the spirits there..

Back in Les Eyzies sur Tayac I did visit "la grotte de Bernifal". For me that was the most intensive. The cave is still privately owned and the owner an elderly man did show us around himself with an amazing amount of knowledge. It is a medium sized cave with stalagtites and stagmites close to the river. It did give me more an impression how it has been with many coloured and engraved paintings and drawings and with sound too. The cave does inspire to sing or make music. The stalagmite pillars look like guardians, more old then humans allowing for a human experience of their presence. The presence and passion of the owner made a clear connection with the far away past, without too much effort to commercialize it or intellectualize it, a very human down to earth connection. I did love that.

Of the 4th cave I will write in a next post as it is in the Province ot the Ariège in the Pyrenees and a very different setting.