SURRENDERED LAND
A Fine Art Collection on the Power and Beauty of Surrender
I Love My Life, 2022
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
I have created these images 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 back into the earth.
800 Years Of Creation, 2023
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
Surrendered Land is a collection that has come about from observing nature over a long period of time. Not being naturally inclined towards nature, it was something I did not really enjoy doing but nevertheless 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, mind and body failing. Finding it quite inconvenient to keep myself alive, grieving a life of despair and 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 the puzzle of my ominous existence.
Sage Of The Wilderness, 2023
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
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. I thought I could bend destiny with effort. But the more I grasped more I lost. I completely failed to notice this pattern, I was so caught up in my fear.
What’s In Front Is What’s Behind, 2023
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
I Like The Wind In My Hair, 2023
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
Heaven & Earth, 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’. Even if it sounded liberating it did not make any sense.
To make sense of it, I had 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’.
And I committed myself to it, and although it didn’t really change much for me on the physical plane and I still ended up meddling with the process by trying to at least make it interesting by capturing the undeniable, effortless beauty of the wild that I was coerced into observing, it did start to make me question my own ways.
I used to value striving over presence, intellect over intuition, impetus over stillness. But as all the things I valued came crumbling down bit by bit, the mind, the self, and the beginnings of all my desires, I think I was beginning to see something special and very very simple.
This one time I drove myself to thinking ‘no I cannot lose. Too much is at stake’. So I fought back. And I pushed and pushed and pushed myself all the way to the tipping point and off the cliff, and fell very hard.
But there was something interesting about falling so hard. I realised I have no option but to give up control because there was nothing left to fight. No amount of effort helped because I was completely incapacitated. My limbs were numb, 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.
But that is exactly where I needed to be, if I wanted to understand what living is all about and how I kept missing the subtle, invisible nuances of the magnificence of it all. Until my broken body and battered spirit opened up a clear path of receptivity, pain gave way to curiosity.
And I finally said ‘please, enough. I need help. I’m 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 instructions, I promise I’ll be a good student.’
We Will Always Be Together, 2023
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
There’s no one tending to this land
And still everything grows
Wildly
Abundantly
As if it knows exactly what to do
⠀
There’s a kind of intelligence here
Not the kind that we can control or measure
Not the kind that logic dictates or reason reasons
But the kind that emerges when things are left to be
⠀
I think this is what surrender looks like
Not passive but powerful
Not empty but deeply alive
Not wanting
Not caring
Simply being
Wild
A poem by Mudita Aeron
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