Observation as Devotion
On wabi-sabi, tarot & learning to notice.
I took these photographs a few years ago in London, in the garden behind where I lived at the time. I had wanted to go out into the forest, but the rain made the journey feel unnecessarily difficult, so instead I stayed close to home. The garden itself had become wild — overgrown, unrestrained, alive in its own direction — and I decided simply to go outside and enjoy taking photographs.
What first drew my attention was the water resting on the leaves. The droplets formed delicate beads that looked almost like miniature floating worlds. There is something profoundly beautiful about the way rain sits temporarily upon a surface before disappearing again. It reveals something fleeting that is always present, but often overlooked.
The camera I used was an old Fujifilm FinePix F550 EXR, which I mostly used in macro mode. I have always preferred looking closely at things. The softness of these images comes partly from the camera itself and its slightly film-like quality, but also from my own preference for imperfection. The photographs are unedited. I try to capture things exactly as I want them to feel in the moment I observe them.
I enjoy lower exposure, shadow, grain, softness, and ambiguity. I do not particularly enjoy hyper-crisp definition unless it belongs to a more overtly digital aesthetic. When definition becomes too sharp, it can sometimes flatten mystery. Clarity leaves little to the imagination, but obscurity invites participation. There is always something hidden, regardless of how much is revealed.
If you stare too intensely at one singular point, that point becomes hyperdefined while the rest of the world disappears into uncertainty. Yet if you attempt to perceive everything at once, meaning dissolves into noise. In this way, perception itself becomes selective and fragmented. You can often understand as much about a person through what they withhold as through what they choose to show.
I think this is why softer imagery affects me emotionally. Since childhood, I have always escaped toward dreams, fantasy, symbolism, and atmosphere. In my own work, I often try to use nature as a bridge into something surreal — not to escape reality entirely, but to reveal the extraordinary hidden inside ordinary life. The question for me has always been: how real can magic become? How can the mundane transform into something sacred through attention alone?
Observation itself feels devotional to me.
I spent many years studying academic sciences and biomedicine, and although I deeply value analytical observation and hard data, I also think modern scientific thinking sometimes limits itself too strictly to measurable metrics. There are internal experiences that cannot be externally quantified, yet they remain profoundly real to the subject experiencing them.
This tension between internal and external observation deeply informs the way I approach both photography and tarot.
In medicine, I learned to think systemically — observing physiological function, behavioural patterns, symptoms, environments, and relationships simultaneously. Even now, there remains a clinical aspect to the way I observe the world. I notice patterns instinctively: cellular structures, branching systems, repeated forms in nature and human behaviour. Under a microscope, biological matter almost becomes cosmic. It reveals another dimension hidden beneath ordinary perception.
Tarot functions similarly for me. Much of reading depends upon observation: observing the querent, observing emotional atmosphere, observing recurring symbols and patterns emerging between cards. I rely heavily on the imagery itself to prompt intuitive understanding.
Some people believe psychic ability should emerge without tools, but I disagree with this perspective. Tools do not diminish intuition; they provide structures through which intuition becomes legible. People often want proof of the unknown before allowing themselves to believe in it, but I think this misunderstands the nature of perception itself. Nature is constantly observing itself through fragmentation. Consciousness separates itself in order to experience itself from another perspective.
Intuition, in my experience, can absolutely be trained.
One of the most important ways to strengthen intuition is through listening — listening deeply, becoming silent enough to absorb information without immediately imposing interpretation onto it. There are many forms of intuition, and different people develop different sensitivities, but sustained attention remains central to all of them.
Silence and slowness have also become increasingly important within my creative process. I often imagine growth as spiral-like. As your understanding deepens, the cycles become larger and your sphere of observation expands. Yet in order to continue growing, you must repeatedly return to the centre. The deeper the work becomes, the slower it often needs to unfold.
Modern culture tends to value speed, optimisation, visibility, and constant production. There is a strong pressure toward sharpness — both visually and psychologically. But increasingly, I find myself drawn toward softness, shadow, atmosphere, and restraint instead.
Perhaps part of this comes with age. I no longer feel the same need to participate in everything. I want to create space around myself — enough silence to allow something meaningful to emerge naturally rather than forcing it prematurely into visibility.
This is also where wabi-sabi resonates deeply for me, though not in a purely academic sense. My mother was Japanese, and although I was not raised in Japan itself, I feel that many Japanese spiritual and aesthetic values were transmitted to me instinctively through her presence. There was both tradition and modernity within her simultaneously. Because of that, concepts like impermanence, restraint, atmosphere, and quiet beauty feel emotionally familiar to me in ways that are difficult to fully articulate.
Beauty, to me, is not surface perfection.
Beauty is coherence.
It is an extremely difficult harmony to achieve because it requires endurance, patience, proportion, timing, and truthfulness. Things become beautiful when they are able to tolerate time, imperfection, fragmentation, and transformation without losing their essence entirely.
Perhaps this is why I think paying attention is one of the purest forms of love.
Nothing competes with genuine attention. When you truly observe something without immediately imposing yourself onto it, you offer your time, your focus, and your presence completely. Observation becomes a form of devotion.
At times, this can feel painful too. To observe deeply means allowing yourself to remain open. It means resisting the temptation to rush mechanically through life without reflection. Humans are meaning-making creatures. When we stop noticing things — when we stop asking what something means, why it exists, or how it connects to us — life can begin to feel spiritually hollow.
There is a difference between looking and noticing.
Looking can exist without understanding. Noticing requires recognition. Both are beautiful, but noticing carries responsibility. Especially in tarot, noticing becomes essential. If I fail to truly observe the person in front of me, the reading loses its depth and usefulness.
Slowing down reveals all the spaces in between.
When you slow down, you become less demanding toward each individual moment. You allow experiences to unfold more naturally. Yet slowness itself also requires discipline. If held incorrectly, it can become stagnation rather than restoration. Restraint is necessary. Otherwise, intensity can easily overwhelm you.
Subtle imagery affects people deeply for similar reasons. It asks something of the viewer. It requires participation. In a world where everything is increasingly immediate and available, subtlety asks us to search again — to notice more carefully, to tolerate ambiguity, to remain present long enough for meaning to emerge.
Ultimately, I think observation changes self-understanding.
The more attentively you observe the world, the more clearly you begin to understand your relationship to existence itself. Sometimes all it takes is rain resting quietly upon a leaf to remember how much beauty still exists within simple attention.
© 2026 Serpidea