A Bridge Between Two Worlds

As I gaze out over the vast expanse, I am transported back to a world of distant dreams, and I wonder whether they were, in fact, memories.

So many times over the past few years, I have been led to a place for the first time and experienced a feeling of familiarity, as though I have stood there many times already.

This is such a place. Five-hundred metres up on a small rocky outcrop in a foreign land, I am far away from everything that I thought I had known.

Silhouettes of pine trees dominate the horizon and appear as dark brushstrokes against a wash of violet and mauve; the kind of fleeting colours that are only visible during these ephemeral sacred hours. Beyond the trees, snow-covered peaks of distant mountains float serenely above an advancing ocean of fog.

As the fog rises from the valley beneath me and wraps itself around me in the warmest of embraces, my soul feels a sense of safety and peace. It is during these sacred hours, when the earth becomes a sanctuary of temporary silence, that two worlds meet, and I feel like I have returned to the home that I have been eternally longing for.

The camera is the bridge that connects these two worlds. Not only does it capture what it sees in the external world that is so familiar to us all, but it reflects, at the same time, the inner world of the artist; one that is completely unique and so often unknown and unseen, even by the artists’ eyes at times.

The eyes are a window to the soul, and for many of us, that soul has been abandoned and forgotten throughout our years here on earth. Just one look at the news headlines on any given day is a stark reminder that many of our bridges have been built so long that it is difficult for us to remember where we came from, and what we were when we entered this familiar world.

Another world exists inside of me, as it does inside of you, too, and it is in the safety of this inner sanctuary that our souls reside, buried somewhere beneath the wreckage and debris of our personal and collective pain and suffering, where they are left clinging onto and protecting our fragile innocence.

These worlds are our own original creative masterpieces; and many of us, myself included, have been so desperate to tear down the walls that have guarded these inner worlds from the demons that patrol the outer one for an eternity.

In my own case, my early childhood experiences and encounters with demons in the outer world have played a vital role in the formation of my rich and vibrant inner world. The only escape from the pain of my childhood was to retreat across the bridge into the safe confines of my inner sanctuary and build the walls high and wide to keep it guarded and protect, at all costs, my own innocence.

Many of my happiest childhood memories are from the times that I spent in solitude; those precious moments spent curled up with my head in a book or role-playing outdoors in the muddy no-man’s-land that was my garden with my tanks and toy soldiers. In later years, this evolved into a world of fantasy as I locked myself away in my bedroom and escaped into post-apocalyptic landscapes and magical realms as various characters in computer games. This is a story that is shared by many, I am sure, as we have sought to escape the tragedy of our own existences.

Though my own ‘escaping’ was seemingly innocent, it took me decades to understand the depths of the effects that it was having on my sense of self, and it took for me to reach a dark place in my mid-twenties for me to begin piecing together the puzzle of my life and find the courage to revisit some of my most painful memories; the points at which I had abandoned pieces of my own soul as a means of safety and survival.

This innate ability to do whatever necessary to ensure our survival and gain acceptance to the ‘tribe’ throughout our early years, even if that means sacrificing a fundamental part of who we are; a piece of our own soul, is what makes us human beings so intelligent.

Survival is essential as we navigate the earliest and most treacherous stages of our lives, but there comes a point when it is no longer enough to merely stay alive, and we must shift our efforts towards living beyond the mode of survival in the outer world; towards truly thriving here on earth.

This meant, for me, that the desperate urge to share more of my inner world with the outer world became too strong for me to ignore. I had to find the courage to open my sensitive heart up, face my fears in the form of the demons that now haunted me in my mind, and reveal the eternal beauty that was locked away in the corner of my heart where the light of my fragile innocence still dwindled.

With reference to Donald Kalsched’s book titled, ‘Trauma and the Soul’.

A New Dawn

A familiar stillness is in the air. The world has not yet woken up and I seem to be the only one here on Earth. It feels almost post-apocalyptic. I think back to many of the films and computer games that have inspired me throughout my life so far, and, on mornings like this, I feel like I am the character inside of my own.

All of this time alone on the road gives me time to think. That is the beauty of being awake during these sacred hours, and another reason why I love to travel outside of my immediate local area for photography occasionally. The thinking time in the car is almost as important as the photography itself. I put on some music - ‘Immunity’ by Jon Hopkins is often one that I listen to during travel. The beautiful melody and vocals inspire me to go deeper into my own thoughts; deeper into myself. I often dream about my future, and piece together the puzzle of my life by reflecting upon the past.

This morning, I am in the process of deep reflection. I can’t help but go back to visit a previous version of myself; one who hadn’t held a camera yet, and actually had no idea about what ‘photography’ was.

I never harboured much interest in art when I was younger. I put in minimal effort during art class in school, and instead sat and daydreamed about the computer games that were waiting for me back home. I was an avid gamer from the age of around five or six, until the age of twenty-five. I still remember, as if it was yesterday, the morning when me and my older sister stealthily sneaked downstairs before the sun had risen to turn on our stepfathers’ games console for the first time. That morning, we probably managed to play for an hour or two before he woke. In later years, I could easily rack up ten, sometimes even twelve hours of screen time. I can’t help but think about how much my life, and I, have changed in a relatively short period of time.

Instead of roaming around dreamed up worlds, playing a character from the imagination of someone else, I find myself trudging through ‘Dead Marshes’, roaming the forests of ‘Fangorn’ and post-apocalyptic wastelands here in the real world.

I am inspired to dream again. I wonder what might be possible for this character that is myself, given another few decades of growth. I have been recovering many of the lost parts of myself; the skills and superpowers that I left behind and ran away from as a child; those of empathy, sensitivity and curiosity, all of which us humans are at our core. Now that I have them, and have discovered more of a sense of my authentic ‘Self’, I can’t help but think about many of the other characters that are roaming this world as they play out their own stories, and try to find their own place here in this gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

I look out of the window at the world that is whizzing by. Silhouettes of pine trees against the twilight blue sky. These are the moments that help to reprogram my mind. The order that follows from chaos. No future, nor past. I take a deep breath, and come into the ‘now’. Everything is still. I can hear the stars whisper. Promise of a new dawn echoes in the clear night sky. The mountains draw near. Their outline dominates the horizon. A sense of safety washes over me. I am home.

My destination this morning is a small area of heathland beneath the Moelwynion mountains, just a stones throw away from the birthplace of the red dragon and the grave of the legendary hound, ‘Gelert’. I stumbled upon this land and made friends with a beautifully expressive silver birch tree there back in the summer of 2021, and I return today with the hope of creating a photograph that has been formulating in my minds’ eye since that afternoon.

A blanket of mist has been drawn over the landscape overnight. It seems as though the trees are still tucked in and dreaming beneath the sheets. I dare not wake them up prematurely, so I park up beside the road and tread the half-mile track as lightly as a ballet dancer would on its’ stage.

This landscape, a stage all of its’ own, and the main character in this performance is my friend, the silver birch. As it begins to awaken, I join it on the stage to express myself in the ways that I have learnt to over the past few years; with my camera and words. Two characters in perfect harmony.

I often see parts of myself inside of my photographs, and express from a place deep within. In this case, I see some further parts of myself that perhaps went missing through my younger years. Expression wasn’t particularly encouraged as I grew up. My mother, unsurprisingly following years of abuse, was chronically depressed throughout much of my childhood, so our house was never filled with too much joy. Me and my siblings would play, but always quietly and carefully. My stepfathers’ volatile moods ensured that we would be walking on eggshells for most of our waking hours. He would also place expectation on me to ‘be a man’, meaning that there wasn’t much room for me to display my emotions.

It fills me with a great amount of gratitude to have finally found my methods to express the deeper parts of myself and my emotions using my camera and pen, but still, I look at my friend, the silver birch, with a hint of envy, and wonder what it might be like to sing or dance in front of a crowd, as it does every day to the mountains.

I stand here and dream again for a moment. ‘Who knows where this path might take me in the future’, I think to myself. I come back to the moment, and enjoy the silence and stillness of this magical morning. I open up the shutter on my camera to capture the photograph that I have been dreaming about for eighteen months. It is even more beautiful than I could envision. With this photograph, comes the promise of the new dawn, as whispered by the stars. I have been granted the chance to make of it something better than yesterday.

Why I Create Photographs

The art of photography has been something of a spiritual practice for me. I don’t wish to discredit the pursuit of creating photographs for creating photographs sake, but I have always been looking for something more from photography than the mere documentation of a place or time. I seek to express who I am at my essence. I strive to communicate emotions. I want to share my own human experience and allow the viewer to feel what I feel when I am standing out there, all alone in these wild places, and maybe even go some way to helping them answer some of the questions that they have about their own lives.

Around six and a half years ago, I reached a place of complete discontentment with my life. A relationship had recently ended and I had begun to feel trapped. I was working a dead-end job in a local supermarket, with no vision or direction for my life, and, to be honest, I had completely lost sight of who I was. I wasn’t content to let this precious life pass me by so I decided to wake up one day and make it one worth living. I had a story inside that was beating at my chest and needed to be released, so I picked up my phone camera and began telling it.

It was never going to be a straightforward story, and it’s one that will probably take me until the end of my days to tell effectively. I’m trying now though, and that’s a big step along this journey of mine. There was a time when all of this was locked away inside, and that was incredibly painful. I knew that I had experience and knowledge that could help people, yet I was too fearful of what the world might think about me to open myself up and air it. My fragile ego kept me imprisoned, and held me back for many years.

I guess it goes to show how much I have grown. I’m now in a place where I can talk about the things that once brought unexplainable pain and suffering, whereas I was once a closed book, hiding myself away from the world; often too afraid to be seen, never mind allowing my voice to be heard.

Being a quiet type; people always assume that there is something wrong with you. My main concern when I am busy talking is that if I am talking, then I’m not observing. If I am not observing, then I am not learning, and if I am not learning, then I am not growing. So that, I guess, is the first reason why I create photographs. Photography requires observation. It requires introspection. It requires that I pay attention, and, most importantly, it allows me to learn; about my artistic medium, the world, and about who I am. It allows me to be myself, and to make use of many of the traits and quirks that I have been hiding for much of my life.

If I expressed myself as a child, I would usually be met with shame from the father figures that I had. I was too sensitive, emotional, and open for them. They disapproved of the pure, childlike love that I had for this world, myself, and my mother.

You see, my openness, purity, and innocence reflected back to them everything that they weren’t. I can understand that now as an adult. It’s the case anytime someone makes a criticism about another persons’ character. As a child, of course, it’s difficult to comprehend this, however, and the words of others, especially caregivers, sink in right to our core. I allowed the words of these men to affect me deeply throughout much of my life, and only recently have I started to understand the impact that they had on my development throughout my earliest years.

The world that I lived in through these early years was completely unsafe. The three men that I had around at different stages throughout the first eleven years of my life were all volatile, violent, and wildly aggressive. They were often fuelled by alcohol and drugs and it was difficult to know which version of them I was going to meet. Each one of these would bring out a different version of my mother, too, so, as a child, I was often on guard and in a state of hypervigilance as a way of keeping myself safe. I developed a deep understanding of my own complex emotional landscape as a result of my early experiences. This, I believe, allows me to translate how I’m feeling whilst out in the woodland, or beneath mountains and, therefore, helps me to communicate things through my photographs that words have never allowed me to. These photographs, I believe, are representations of the inner world that I began creating in my moments of dissociation from the real world that I belonged to in my youth.

These early experiences formed the foundations for my deep affinity with Mother Nature and the stillness and silence that she provides. The consistency that she offers was something that was foreign to me, having grown up around complete chaos. As my trust has been growing with this world over the past few years, I have been more and more willing to express my truth and reveal more of what is in my heart, and I am able to make more sense of this during moments of reflection whilst immersed in nature.

The past half decade or so has been a process of unpackaging, understanding, and unlearning much of what I believed about myself and the world around me. It hasn’t been at all easy, and I often wonder why I bothered to embark on this journey to begin with. It would have been much easier for me to stay sat in the comfort of the office that I had fallen into after working in the supermarket. The pull that was, and still is, inside of me to do something meaningful with this life however, proved to be too strong for me to ignore, and it’s what keeps me going when darkness falls along my path.

The practice of photography has brought a much needed sense of catharsis, and, through my creativity, I have been able to express many of the emotions that were repressed inside of me for decades. I feel as though each click of the shutter lightened my heavy burden somewhat, and I feel like a huge space has been created inside of myself which I can now take out into the world and offer to other people, so that they might unload some of their own baggage, too.

It is my belief that the process of photography, and the time that I have spent outdoors in nature, have proven to be two vital components in my journey to heal my relationship with Mother Earth, and the relationship that I had with myself, in turn, has healed and deepened extensively. I have learnt to love the sides of myself that I was once running from and doing my utmost to hide from the world. These parts of myself have been integrated into the version of me that stands here today, and I feel as though this is a much more complete, well-rounded, understanding, empathic, and loving version of myself. In allowing myself to exist fully, I believe that others are encouraged to do so when they are around me, and I have noticed it in many of the conversations that I have been having over the past year or two, in particular.

Recently, I have begun dreaming about a world in which we can all heal, and work towards becoming our best and truest selves. If we all worked towards this healing, and achieving a deeper understanding of self, doesn’t that allow us to further empathise with and understand the people surrounding us? What might that mean for this world? Instead of meeting people with judgment and criticism, maybe we could meet them with the same unconditional love that, through our own creative and healing processes, we have developed within ourselves. Perhaps then we will realise that any shortcomings might not be ‘them’ but the unconscious, unhealed, and unintegrated parts of ‘them’ coming to the surface. The parts of ‘them’ that is, perhaps, a result of their own unhealed trauma, inflicted upon them from their unhealed parents who simply lacked access to the knowledge that we have at our fingertips today.

I offer my own story as an anecdote for what Mother Nature can do for the human spirit and souls on this earth. I act as a mere conduit for what exists out there beyond this vessel that I find myself in. There is, I think, such a thing as a universal consciousness here on earth and through silence, stillness, grounding and creativity, I feel as though I am finding my own way to interpret and articulate the message that Gaia wishes to share with us human beings.

What I believe we need, is more awareness for the healing powers of Mother Nature, and understanding of the deep wisdom that she holds. That can only happen through conversation. It can only happen when people like me and you swallow our pride, face our fears, open up about some of the things that we have lived through that brought us pain and affected our consciousness, and share some of the lessons that we have learnt along our collective way. The lessons that I learn, I’m sure, can help you. The lessons that you learn, I’m sure, can help me. Together we learn. Together, we heal. Together, we create lasting change in this world, and, perhaps, make it a better place to exist in together.

Relinquish Control

‘We must concern ourselves absolutely with the things that are under our control and entrust the things not in our control to the Universe.’

~ Musonius Rufus

When we are young, we struggle to even control our bodily functions, and we rely on our caregivers to keep watch over us. As we develop, we gain control over these functions, if we are lucky, but then we realise that we need help to control other areas of our lives such as our finances, our diets, and our weekly schedules, so we might take a course or hire personal trainers, coaches and personal assistants to help us. Most of our lives are spent pursuing control, in some way. The greatest of which, I believe, is the quest for control over our minds. In many cases, it is this lack of control that leaves people feeling the need to control others, and how often do we see this desire in the teacher that has lost their temper when they lose control of a classroom, in the coach who loses his mind when the team won’t perform as they have been coached, or even in the incessant alpha-type friend who doesn’t appreciate how you have tried to undermine his leadership by attempting to change the plans for your pack?

What I love most about nature photography is that so much of it involves relinquishing control to the outside events. We are taught humility on the grandest scale as we stand before Mother Nature with our preconceptions, hoping for ‘a little more light over here’ or ‘a touch of mist to blow in and cover that tree over there.’ I have lost count of how many times I have been out to one of my favourite locations with an idea in mind of what I want to happen, only to stand disappointed when nature throws me something unexpected to deal with and accept. On the other side of the coin, I can also count times when I have been out for a walk with zero expectations and faced some of the most extreme and unpredictable conditions that have resulted in some of the most interesting and exciting photographs in my portfolio, and generally exhilarating experiences of my life.

So many of my photographs are produced after months of scouting out locations, waiting patiently for colours to change, or for the conditions to fall favourably, or for me to connect emotionally to a place so much so that I might feel drawn to create a photograph to tell its’ story. I often find myself falling into the dangerous trap of forming my own preconceptions when it comes to my art. The desire to control how my images look, in the hope that they might be recognisable to others, might, perhaps, be limiting me in what I am able to see when out in the landscape.

There is a small portfolio of my work forming, however, from those days on which I have ventured outside and reacted impulsively to the conditions and the environment that I find myself in, with no idea of what to expect, and no previous experiences to teach me where might be best to stand. These are the days on which I feel as though I have relinquished most control. I have no choice but to succumb to Mother Nature who shows me just how powerful and frightening she can be. All of my senses are heightened and as the thunder claps overhead, and lightning strikes all around me, I spare a thought for the trees that have fallen victim to her over time; remnants of which stand like memorials on the nearby hills that I have walked, and I wonder what she might be able to make of me with just one strike of her electrically charged whips.

Aside from the technical workings of the camera, and my choice in which lens I attach, the only thing that I really have control over when outdoors in the landscape is myself; where I decide to stand, where I point the camera, what story I decide to tell, and whether I bother to put myself out there in the hope of capturing something at all.

In this instance, whilst walking in Eryri/ Snowdonia a few weeks ago, I noticed that I had been met with an inner conflict, and I had a choice to make. A little voice in my head was telling me to escape the storm and seek the comfort and security of the warm van that was waiting for me. My intuition, however, was telling me that something special was going to happen once the storm had passed over my head. I took a moment to silence the mental noise. I listened to the inner voice that was calling, and hurried over to this lonely oak tree that I had spotted on the walk up the mountainside earlier that day. You might find it strange when I say this, but trees often speak to me when I’m outside walking, and this one was calling my name as the rain began to fall.

Luckily, Mother Nature was on my side that day. She granted me a few precious moments with this tree that will live on in my memory for a lifetime. Moments for which I will be eternally grateful. I received yet another lesson from this journey that I’ll be able to take with me forever, and it was one in which I became the victor over myself, in my pursuit of my highest self.

In life, we can get caught up all too easily inside of our own thinking minds, perhaps becoming too identified with our egos which demand certain outcomes based on past experiences, opinions, future predictions, worries and fears. What being out here in these elements gives me is, of course, the ultimate sense of presence and complete oneness with the Universe. Relinquishing control of all outcomes and desires, I am merely an extension of this consciousness that surrounds my body. It takes me over. I become the observer of this very moment. No longer identified with my egoic mind, I tune into my intuition and senses; attuned to the magical light, connecting with the trees via breath, feet grounded firmly on the floor, raindrops falling from the sky and onto my delicate skin. All of this occurs and I notice a subtle shift in my energy. Over time, these subtle shifts, of course, compound to something magnificent. In these moments, I am something much bigger than ‘me’. I become Mother Nature herself.

What I crave most from this life is growth, and that goes above absolutely anything. If I am learning and acquiring wisdom, then I am at my best and most fulfilled. These lessons that I receive from Mother Nature are invaluable, as I look towards something to make up for the lack of a father figure in my life. She is, after all, our greatest teacher and many of the problems that exist within our world and society can be traced back to the fact that we are so out of alignment with her ways, blind and ignorant to the lessons that she has to teach.

The ancient wisdom that many of our ancestors left behind through philosophies such as Stoicism and Taoism, both of which draw inspiration from nature, seems to have been widely forgotten, as we generally choose to lead lives in which we remain relatively comfortable, pursuing nothing but profit in our pursuits of happiness. Discipline and self-control seems to be a thing of the past, most noticeably within our diets, as highly processed fast food is so easily accessible for most and anyone that prioritises eating well with home-cooked natural ingredients might, as from my own experience, be known as a ‘health freak’. The Stoics taught the game of self-mastery, of winning the mental battles that occur inside of all of our heads; doing the things that we don’t want to do because we know that the version of us that exists tomorrow will thank us for it.

As I stood on that mountainside, dancing bare—footed under stormy skies, dodging hailstones the size of blueberries, watching on with more than a little fear as thunder cracked above this wild and exposed landscape, flashes of lightning illuminated the sky and reminded me of just how little control I had over any of this environment. My body wanted nothing more than to return to comfort. My soul, however, was singing and dancing inside because it knows and understands that it has a purpose here on Earth to observe and create that makes any pain and discomfort somewhat bearable and, perhaps, even embraced. We humans build great civilisations that consume so much of this earths’ power and resources, yet Mother Nature could wipe them all out with one fateful strike of lightning in the right place. It is with the thought of this unfathomable power that I am reminded to remain humble, to succumb to Mother Nature, and to remember that my ability to control lies only within myself.