water-ings.

turn away from the obvious, the glaring.
start instead,
with a study of Reflection:

[all photos taken at tasek bera, pahang, malaysia]
they reflect, but not necessarily mirror. they show the same, but even more; they claim to obscure but in fact reveal the underlying.

how so?
taking our attention off the surface and superficial, their shifting surfaces deceptively confront with the whole, the entire, your overall shape. its as a conjurer occupies your eye with busy details that you forget the true magic of the mechanisms at work.

in the reflection you now see your true form.

your wrinkles are smoothed over, but the dark bitterness within now overwhelms; you see not the accolades hung over your neck and placed upon your crown but the young dream you once had; you are no longer a single independent entity but one amongst the fellow living creatures of your time.

seeing the self vulnerably reflected/ refracted, along with the rest of the vast nature-
your existence lies there in the serene impersonal waters. there ceases to be any 'you', any 'they', any separate 'other', when all are but a part of a single whole.

the water seduces you to be a part of it drown in me but one need only look up to feel reassured of a larger whole.


shaking out the silken tapestry of earth's beauty.
the lines dissolve, colours harmonise and its very reality quakes... a reflection entices with 'what is' and 'what could be'. look up and be told,

but look down into the reflection,
and imagine.



the dividing land, a boundary between objective reality and subjective representations?
which do you dwell in and which manifests a truer vision?

one mind, the type of all, the moveless wave
whose calm reflects all moving things that are,
necessity, and love, and life, the grave,
and sympathy, fountains of hope and fear;
justice and truth and time, and the world's natural sphere.

- p.b. shelley

(when murky depths dont offer much,
look up, go for air. )

often we dont look up enough, past the overgrowth of life swarming, bustling around us, be they concrete buildings or abundant green, external events or the unquiet mind.

look up,
water light as air turned white in the heavens, surveying our sisyphean tendencies.

look up upon its white calm and eternal blue,

recall the constant principles with which you carry out your earthbound life.

the day sets.
the reflection darkens, and our time for plumping any eternal truth is up.

and what were thou, and earth and stars and sea,
if to the human mind's imaginings
silence and solitude were vacancy?
- p.b. shelley