Ever Upward

Am I late?  I worked on these last week, thinking they would be an interesting collection for Sonel’s Upward in Black and White Challenge, and then forgot I hadn’t posted them!

There are so many photographs taken of strangler figs enveloping temples at Angkor – all beautiful and extraordinarily romantic.  Here’s a quite recent invader in a destroyed temple near Jaffna, growing up through the centre, taking shortcuts across the outside walls, and whichever route it takes, scrambling ever upward toward the sun. Staying up north, there was such a flurry of gopurams building going on, that it paid to remember to look upward:

The paint was barely dry – the temple itself only a shell – but the new goparum had been inaugurated …

A new and magnificent doorway is being built behind the destroyed temple

I’d always wondered how the lights got changed, the paint freshened – here, in profile, the answer – an external ladder!

The new doorway at Naga Deepa

The first time I saw a flight of stairs leading up to the ‘mountain’ spires of a Khmer temple (in Southern Laos) my mind boggled, imagining how the king would manage the climb with any shred of dignity intact.  Then I laughed to imagine myself trying the climb, feet placed sideways along the narrow risers, scuttling (?) crablike up the impossible incline.  I think they make a good metaphor for the achievement of any goal, spiritual or otherwise.