In the years before the darkness, every garden in the realm had its own spirit, and the oldest gardeners swore they had seen them.
They were not hidden among the flowers. They were the flowers. A gardener could tend the same bed for a whole summer and never notice anything, and then one morning, among the peonies and the blue-needled thuja, a face would open, calm and smiling, as if it had always been there and was only now allowing itself to be seen.
People said she was the most beautiful thing in the garden. That was a misunderstanding. She was not something beautiful within the garden; the garden grew out of her. Every colour around her face was what she carried inside and let flow outward: the crimson of the peonies, the violet, the cold blue of the needles, the red of the berries.
Those who saw her went home and looked at their own gardens differently, and found that they had become more beautiful. Nothing in the gardens had changed. Something in the people had.
"There is no reality except the one we carry within us. Most people live such unreal lives because they take the images outside them for reality and never allow their own inner world to speak."
— after Hermann Hesse, Demian
If you are able to see beauty, it is only because you carry beauty within yourself. The world is a mirror in which everyone sees his own reflection.
From the Floral Fairies series. Her sister in Maze of Thoughts sleeps white and still, lost in a labyrinth of thought; here the spirit is awake, in full colour, knowing herself.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in 2015.)
