MEET THE ANCESTORES - OR OBON (盆)
Obon -a Japanese ritual in which the dead return for a few nights.
Nothing more—nothing less.
What follows is a mirror:
one that does not soften the shadows.
The boundary thins,
and the dark inside answers the dark outside.
Old shapes reappear.
Not kindly, not cruelly—
simply present.
The kind of presence you cannot outgrow.
The light you set is not an invitation
but a line you draw:
a way to see how close the past stands
when you stop looking away.
Obon offers no comfort.
It is a brief clarity—
a reminder that what returns
is never only the dead.
Some of it is you.
#japan #blackandwhitephotography #promptart #photoart #myth
Inner Demons
Demons do not vanish when driven away.
They merely retreat into those regions where the mind prefers not to look.
Across mythic traditions the bat appears as a threshold-creature:
among the Maya a guardian between life and death, in China an emblem of fortune —
a being that does not fear the dark, but reads it.
Perhaps that is the essential motion:
not evasion, not appeasement, but a passage through the night
until one can again tell one’s own voice from its echoes.
Murnau in Nosferatu understood the uncanny as a shadow cast from within. Dr Jekyll learned that the monster has no address but the self.
The worst demons are always the ones
whose wings we hear inside us,
whose rustling knocks against the heart.
#bat #promptart #blackandwhitephotography #1920s #photoart