“I knew that somehow I need to find the way back to myself.
But first, I had to completely debunk the existing idea of all that was me, everything I had accumulated about myself over the years and this constructed identity, everything had to go. And for that I needed to surrender.
I kept coming back to this word, surrender.”
- Surrendered Land, Memoir
SURRENDERED LAND
A Fine Art Collection on the Power and Beauty of Surrender
I have created these works in admiration of vast spaces of land alive with wild growth and beauty, a world that runs intuitively.
Here, there is no resistance. All is accepted — the shapes, the size, the life, the death, the creation and destruction, and time itself. For such lands, time has no meaning. Trees have lived for hundreds of years, yet no one seems to be keeping track.
Everything is in agreement. Every branch, every blade of grass, every leaf has unequivocally yielded to the eternal flow. And one day they will surrender to decay and dissolve into the earth, back to where they came from.
Sage Of The Wilderness, 2023
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
Surrendered Land is a collection that I started working on while observing nature over a long period of time. Not being naturally inclined towards nature, it was something I did not really enjoy doing but acquiesced to, in order to learn what surrendering means.
The direction to ‘go and observe nature’ came to me at the time when I was living begrudgingly, when my mind, body and heart had fallen into complete disarray. With my vitals not co-operating I was finding it quite inconvenient to keep myself alive, grieving a life of despair, wondering how did this life come about. And during the time I was nature crawling, between moments of observation, my mind would travel back trying to piece together this puzzle of my ominous existence.
800 Years Of Creation, 2023
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
It started with an itch I began to experience when I was still a child.
There are countless people in the world who live with this itch, unaware. A condition that starts with losing the sense of who you are, before even knowing what it is. The discomfort comes with spending years in continuous suppression because of lack of this essential knowledge.
I too suffered that same predicament. And like all those who share this fate I too learned to embody a perpetual state of dissatisfaction, the inevitable symptom of living far away from yourself.
When this happens, life becomes effort, the most beautiful and magnificent thing is then a burden that needs to be tolerated and dragged around with no real purpose and vigour.
Reality Is An Idea, 2023
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
So for me life meant effort, it meant waking up and fighting. Fighting what? I don’t know. Everything and everyone. I felt joy here and there, or some semblance of it. But it never came from me. It was always outside of me. And since it was outside of me, I lived in extreme fear of losing it.
So I had never experienced calmness, ever. I didn’t think it was necessary. For everything I was guided by the force of fear and frenzied effort to drive my actions. And any time the fear grew louder and more overpowering, I rebelled, I fought. But the more I grasped for things outside of me, more and more of myself I lost, until I became hollow. For years the hollowness festered, completely unnoticed, because on the surface it looked like I had everything.
This one time I drove myself to thinking ‘no I cannot lose. Too much is at stake’
This time, I was fighting to protect a feeling. A long-awaited happiness I had subconsciously longed for and have finally found. I was convinced it was the feeling of meeting my own true self, like coming home to where I belong.
But it wasn’t me. It was an illusion, masquerading to look like me. And the moment it began to fade away, I scrambled to hold onto it.
So I fought back, thinking I could bend destiny with effort. And I pushed and pushed and pushed myself all the way to the tipping point and off the cliff.
It was a very hard fall, hardest there can be.
I’m Not Afraid Anymore, 2023
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
There Is No Separation, 2023
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
But there was something very interesting about falling so hard. I realised I have no option but to give up control because there was nothing left to fight. I tried, but no amount of effort helped because I was completely incapacitated. My limbs were numb from pain, every bit of movement hurt, everything hurt, even thinking hurt. I couldn’t rely on myself any longer. The self that I always leaned on had gone, my idea of reality was gone, everything was gone.
And this extreme vulnerability in a way, forced me to surrender.
And I finally said ‘please, enough. I need help. I’m now ready. Ready to learn. Tell me how it all works. Why am I here, what is the point? How do I know what to do next? Tell me and I’ll follow directions, promise I’ll be a good student. I will do my best.’
What Was And Will Be, Is Now, 2023
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
And that is precisely where I needed to be, to stop, and start a journey that took me backwards instead of forwards, back to the very beginning, to the place where I first lost myself, in order to understand the meaning of existence and what is my role in it and how I keep missing the subtle, invisible nuances of the beauty of it all. Until my broken body and battered spirit opened up a clear path of receptivity, and curiosity started becoming stronger than pain.
By now, I knew that somehow I need to find the way back to myself. But first, I had to completely debunk the existing idea of all that was me, everything I had accumulated about myself over the years and this constructed identity, everything had to go. And for that I needed to surrender.
I kept coming back to this word, surrender.
The End, The Beginning And So On, 2023
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
We Will Always Be Together, 2023
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
I had been familiar with concepts like surrender or just ‘being’ as they kept appearing in meditation processes and spiritual contexts but I never paid much attention to them because they were completely opposite to how I lived. I always thought I can never just ‘be’. What did it even mean? Even if it sounded liberating it did not make any sense.
And to make sense of it, I was required to expand my perspective, and see how life works in the wilderness, spaces where surrender exists in abundance and life flows effortlessly. Where everything just ‘is’.
So I followed the prescribed instructions. In the beginning, little changed for me on the physical plane, and I still ended up meddling with the process, trying to bring interest to this seemingly purposeless wandering by capturing the effortless beauty of the wild I was coerced into observing. But underneath, it had started to make me question the foundation of everything I ever knew and believed to be true.
Here in this wilderness, I was beginning to see a very different world, an alternate reality, one which was strangely beautiful and powerful and above all, profoundly simple.
Surrendered Land : Memoir
written by Mudita Aeron
Forever Is Me, 2023
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
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