Photo Journal/ Weekly Photo Challenge: Purple

July 28, 2012

Every week, The Daily Post at WordPress provides a theme for photography-enthusiasts as a creative prompt or inspiration. This week, the theme is Purple. I initially thought about sharing a few of my purple flora and fauna taken around the national parks here in Singapore. However, as I was poring over our database, I chanced upon these photos from the National Mosque in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, and I thought that this would prove to be a pretty unique interpretation of this week’s photo challenge.

Purple Robes at the National Mosque, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

As we are non-Muslims, we are requested to wear these purple robes as we enter the National Mosque, a place of worship in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The building itself is magnificent, and it was truly a soul-enriching experience to witness such grandeur and be made keenly aware of the faith and spirituality one can sense from within these quiet walls.

Our gracious hosts in Kuala Lumpur who brought us to three different places of worship in just a single day. My daughter looks on in amazement.

“Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“When every hope is gone, ‘when helpers fail and comforts flee,’ I find that help arrives somehow, from I know not where. Supplication, worship, prayer are no superstition; they are acts more real than the acts of eating, drinking, sitting or walking. It is no exaggeration to say that they alone are real, all else is unreal.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments With Truth

DSC_0525 copy — Magnificent view from within.

“Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, our faith triumphant o’er our fears, are all with thee – are all with thee!”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow