This work began just like a tunnel — dark and cold and descending. It started taking shape at a time when I was going through a period of unending grief. I had lost a few very important people in my life, suddenly to accidents. Death seemed like a constant repetition, a reminder. I was unable to stop the feeling of its threat on anyone and anything that I touched.
In 2019, I took long walks on abandoned roads on the outskirts of a foreign city. I kept walking until the end of the night. I sought comfort from the darkness of the night but when night fell, all I could think of was the fragility and uncertainty of life. One night, I sat under a scaffolding of a huge building in a Buddhist Monastery to rest. When I returned back to the same place the next night, that building had collapsed. I heard 3 people had died. That night, I sat next to the rubble and waited for the night to end. All I could sense was my own beating heart, my breaths, slow and steady.
Life is just one long tunnel that we have to pass through. There may be nothing at the end. But the presence is true.