The lotus flower rising out of mud and dirt is a powerful symbol associated with spiritual awakening in Eastern cultures. The dark, putrid mud is the fertile ground from which the seed will sprout and pierce into the light as a flower of the greatest purity and beauty.

This is an allegory of our own spiritual journey and of our capacity for transformation and renewal: from darkness to light, from the mud of our ego to the freedom and radiance of our higher consciousness.

I have often photographed lotuses at our home in the South of France, where my father had a lotus pond built in the 70’s, near his studio.  I was prompted recently to go back to the pond and follow the complete cycle of the lotus, after making a book on Hauteville House, Victor Hugo’s house in Guernsey.

This house, overlooking the harbour of St Peter Port, was entirely designed and decorated by my ancestor, who there created in three-dimensional form ideas and philosophical concepts he had expressed in his writings many years earlier—and continued to express.  In this poem of wood and stone Victor Hugo transcribed an idea central to Les Misérables and underlying many of his poems:  that of the progression of consciousness from darkness to light, that “All human beings, within their own night, move towards their light.”

The enabling of such a transformation is central to all spiritual teachings, and indeed the verse from Les Contemplations mirrors the expression “No mud, no lotus“ coined by the spiritual teacher Thich Nhat Hahn, who thus proposed that our dark side is the ground of our enlightenment.

It is with all these ideas in mind that I observed the lotus pond over several months to produce this series of photographs.

*No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering by Thich Nhat Hahn (Parallax Press, 2014)

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