When the Sun Photographs You Through the Foliage
Reversed komorebi: the light as observer, you as subject
A week after publishing my short story about the spilled milk incident, I found myself obsessed with the infinite branches that spring from every moment. This fascination deepened while watching the phenomenon of komorebi in Wenders' film "Perfect Days" — komorebi is a Japanese term describing the interplay of light and shadow when sunlight filters through tree leaves.
If the sun could speak, it would tell a different story of these moments. From above, it would see me, a photographer gazing upward, my hands gripping the camera, and my intentions to capture something that, ironically, comes from the sun itself. I would see its rays fragmenting through myriad leaves to reach my lens. The observer observes the observer, who attempts to capture the observed.
Sunlight passing through foliage creates a constantly evolving pattern — never the same twice. My March 5th story showed how a single incident — milk spilt on a sidewalk — appeared radically different to each observer.
Every mind, like every leaf, filters reality differently.
As a big photography fan, I lose myself in images of Komorebi. Each shot represents one of the millions of alternative realities in that moment.
This recalls the narrator of the milk puddle: "I am an ocean now, containing every judgment reflected on my surface." One reality, infinitely perceived.
When we shoot, we immortalize one configuration of light and leaves while discarding countless others. This is how we construct our understanding of others. When I decide you're "this kind of person," I select one interpretation while letting countless other possible versions of you fade away.
In my previous story, I concluded with the milk itself becoming the observer: "The last drop evaporates, and before dissolving, I ask myself: who is watching whom?"
We are all simultaneously the photographer and the subject, the leaf and the light, the observer and the observed.
Perhaps tomorrow, under that relentless sun that sees everything and reveals nothing, I'll look up at the sky and wonder if while I'm trying to capture the komorebi, it isn't instead the sun photographing me through its immense, burning lens.
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