“We were just about to leave the village. As usual, I’d been accompanied by several smiling guides, playfully competing over who’d get to carry my bags up the steep hillside. It had been all I could do to keep my camera clamped to my shoulder. In worn, plastic sandals, they stepped nonchalantly up the narrow, winding paths and I concentrated on emulating their sureness by feeling every footfall on the soft, red earth and disordered, angular rocks.

But another part of my mind kept trying to capture all the experience of those last two days, to hold it clear and simple so that I wouldn’t lose this other world that I’d only just found. But it was too much effort, too much western thinking, and then suddenly we were at the car on the dusty road above the sprawling village.

As I turned for a last look at the vast world of 2000m up in the lesser Himalaya, that’s when I saw it. The symbol that filled my mind with the entirety of meaning that was Noon Bagla.

Next to the ubiquitous crumbling walls of another ruined home towered the sunflower. Out of the earth that only months earlier had tossed away that family’s existence, a new energy had erupted as the truth of re-emergent life. An impossibly slender stem somehow supported a massive brightness, defying my sense of gravity and any thoughts of permanent sorrow. As I pointed my camera, the sunflower crowded into the viewfinder, shouting, ‘Here is what you need not understand’. And I could leave - aware of the tragedy, grateful for the faith I had found at that sharp edge of the world.