Om
Nov- Dec 2011
“All of them interlinked and interwoven, bound together in a thousand ways. And all of this together- all the voices, all the goals, all the longing, all the suffering, all the pleasure, everything good and everything bad- all of it together was the river of occurrences, the music of life. And when Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this thousand-voiced song, when he listened neither for the sorrow nor for the laughter, when he did not attach his soul to any one voice and enter into it with his ego but rather heard all of them, heard the whole, the oneness- then the great song of the thousand voices consisted only of a single word. Om, perfection.”
– Siddhartha (1922), Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946 and Siddhartha is his most famous work. This book is about Siddhartha’s journey of self-discovery. After Siddhartha stumbled through many good or bad life events, he sat in front of a river and was being attentive to his mere being. He found that for the longest time, he had been being absorbed into one event or the other, without looking life from a global perspective. Things might be bad but they define one-self by letting one to know his/ her potential; Things might be good at one moment but everything fades.
We constantly fail to recognize how beautiful life is because we seek and run after things that we cannot keep. And we always feel the utmost sadness when things are not as good as we anticipated. Instead of indulging self into joy or bathing in sadness, if one could see life as a whole, one should be able to realize that life is perfect.
The sound of Om means that it sustains life and runs through breaths. Om also represents the four states of the Supreme Being. The three sounds in Om (AUM) represent the waking, dream and deep sleep states and the silence which surrounds Om represents the state of perfect bliss when the individual recognizes his/ her identity with the supreme.
For this photo series, I tried to capture the tragic beauty in emotional tagged objects and lively beauty in personal mementos. These photos collectively serve as a whole, to portrait how I appreciate the beauty within life. I hope that everyone would be able to realize how important it is to distant oneself from single life events and view life from a global perspective. Things fade, what left behind is the perfection of life.
St. Joseph, MN, United States
Digital Images
