The marching feet had got halted there as if rooted to the ground. There was this image of darkness consuming light or helping it to emerge out of silent eerie shadows, corporeal beings holding out inanimate promises in search of an illusory destination or just directing fellow travelers from a point in time where they had reached earlier only to discover they were at yet another milestone.

Who was it or what was it - a contortionist's portrayal or just a creative interpretation of the phenomenon of life? Visual gratification, mental challenge and the resultant exhilaration or exasperation or just an urge to simply move away constitute various aspects of an experience while viewing the physical expression of a creative urge that surged forth somewhere in some bosom at some point in time It was an image for sure but what did it convey or depict?

Can non-existent things or beings be projected or visualized as images? Irrespective of its contents and intended message an image has to be just another expression of an existent entity. The vast plethora of shapes and sizes, forms and names that pervade our mundane existence found a compellingly engaging reflection in that image. It reflected the echoes of flesh and bone, muscle and marrow, thoughts and actions - the universally fundamental constituents of our manifest world. Thoughts that emerged from a shadowy past, an ambiguous future or a remote ephemeral realm dictated all the actions performed on the terra firma. Thoughts holding out a promise, conveying some hope or containing just a compelling stimulus to act and the ensuing actions bringing forth the consequential satisfaction or disappointment '  were all manifest in that image.

Image and the reality, the projection and the projected, the seen and the unseen all seemed to exist simultaneously, sharing the same plane and complementing each other. From where had the echoes of the mundane, reflections of the ethereal and all that was being expressed and experienced emerged on the canvas? In that image the entire gamut of manifest and unmanifest was reflected but how about the viewer and the creator of the image? Did their existence figure anywhere in the image or somewhere outside the image? 

The canvas, the colors and the contours had all imperceptibly merged enclosing that image. The image gathered their individual entities in its bosom along with the reverberations of the creator's breath and beatings of the viewer's heart. The physical and metaphysical, the terrestrial and the ephemeral all merged into one and all emerged forth also from just the one. The image was the viewer the creator as well as the created. And nothing else remained to be seen, as nothing else existed.