BLINDSPOT

journey and growth (a rock)

HOÀNG ANH DUCHATELET | @saturneah

<2019>

Photography

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In many cultures, mountains are seen as holy and spiritual spaces. For the Greeks was the Mount Olympus where Gods lived and Mount Kailash in Tibet is sacred to 5 religions in total. In Buddhism, mountains are Buddha's house and the location of many monasteries and temples. They are seen as the realization of true freedom: unlike us, mountains were self before anything arose.

Growing up as a Buddhist kid and spending my summers in a monastery, I have always felt very safe next to monks and nuns. I felt like they had this wealth of knowledge I could probably never reach, but could get a glimpse of by listening to their stories and asking them advices. Thinking back about it, it really affected how I perceived happiness and success. It took me a while to realize that I was subconsciously more looking for inner peace than society's view of happiness. Instead of immense joy and goosebumps, I wanted my heart to slow down and analyze what it was feeling instead of undergoing events. I wanted to detach myself from what felt like a lot.  I didn’t really act on it though, I thought that it would be impossible to reach a nice level of detachment and inner peace while I'm still at school in a big city, and I could always postpone the meditation thing for later. To some extent today, I still think that, me being me and doing what I do, events will occur and I can't stop them from making a fuss. However, I realized that my inner peace was not going to appear when I'll have achieved whatever I think there is to achieve. It was already in me, even if I didn’t always see it. Peace is like a muscle, I have to keep it in shape and give it food. It's nourished when I take that walk in the park, or when I look deeply at a beautiful work of art, when I focus on the pace of my breathing or when I listen to my cat’s purr. Most importantly, I realized that it’s there even when everything feels a bit too much, it is only waiting for me to wake it up.