Reflecting on 2023 Before Easing Slowly into 2024
During the past two weeks, I have mostly disconnected from social media and spent time hiking, cooking, dining out, and visiting with my family. These moments of connection are so precious and deserve my full attention. Instead of feeling a constant pressure to accomplish something, I delighted in being quiet and enjoying each moment, much as I see these horses do every day. It also gave me time to reflect on the past year–especially how it started out for me and where I am now. In June, I published The Poetry of Being, a collection of haikus and photographs mimicking the original platinum-palladium prints. Since the book came out, I have put more and more of myself into my work and allowed my hopes, desires, struggles, losses, and small victories to enter into the forefront of my creative process, so that I can live a more conscious life and make work that is even more meaningful to me. I even embarked on a series of nude self-portraits in the woods that I will share soon.
Like this beautiful horse that lives in the field behind our house, one eye is looking to the future, while another is focused on the past. It is too easy to live in a state of amnesia and go from project to project or place to place without reflecting on why or how my perception is shaped by previous experiences. I am sure I am not alone in falling into this state of being. Too often our desires for future outcomes, whether the quest for success or filling in what we perceive as missing pieces in our present state, cause us to lose sight of what we actually have and the value of being fully present in the moment. Instead of being grateful for what is and the light that shines even in the darkest moments, we focus on lack. A yoga teacher recently told our class that gratitude can be defined as knowing that what you have is enough and that you already contain everything inside you that will enable you to become who you desire to be. This horse always comes to visit my dog Takoda and me when we walk past the filed on our way to hike up the mountain. He moves calmly towards us, while remembering where he came from and where the other horses are grazing. He teaches me daily about the importance of multi-faceted awareness, patience, and being fully grounded in the place he calls home.
Winter is such a great time for understanding the continuum of time. Dormant branches are reminders that life will flourish again in the spring, and long shadows symbolize the duality of light and dark in every moment. The way they stretch across the landscape suggests the inherent movement in seasonality, versus the way things seem static in bright light. Darkness and our unconscious are the source of possibility. The sun’s rays have to travel through more of the earth’s atmosphere to reach the ground and this creates longer shadows, especially since the planet is tilted away from the light. But the presence of the shadows is a sign that we are still receiving life force energy. I find winter light incredibly compelling, since it allows a sense of mystery to remain in the landscape. I have spent much of the past year reflecting on light and darkness and how neither of these qualities would be known without the other and that both are always present and should be embraced instead of repressed or ignored.
This fall we experienced a period of severe drought with many fires followed by a few torrential rains. Our weather patterns have become increasingly severe and that has made me more leery than ever of the effects of climate change, which I try to do my part in helping to slow down. However, the truth is it will take government action to force industrial fossil fuel users to take action to switch to less consumptive practices.
For this reason and other personal reasons, I did not experience the desire for 2023 to be over immediately and forgotten, and for 2024 to start as quickly as possible like I did in 2020 and 2021 when the pandemic was wrecking havoc on our lives. It has made me want things to slow down personally and collectively. There are too many looming political threats, and peace is looking more and more difficult to achieve internationally. People close to me are experiencing health issues that may or may not improve, so I don’t know if 2024 will bring more light or more darkness yet.
To take our minds off of politics and strife, one of my children and I went for a hike in Dupont Forest on the last day of the year. There had been two days of torrential rain a few days earlier and the water was crashing over the waterfall, obliterating the rocks beneath and creating turmoil below. The destructive power of water flowing too fast was palpable. The last time I had been at this waterfall, I had hiked all the way to the base but it wasn’t possible this time. We would have gotten washed away. It made me realize that we can’t stop the flow of life, whether it is teeming water or the passage of time in our own lives. All we can do is look to our own intuition to determine which actions or inactions will help us navigate the chaos and find calm within.
The photograph on the left was taken in a swampy area near the top of High Falls. The water from the river had spilled over its banks and flooded this depression in the earth. The reflections were mesmerizing and it felt just as William Least Heat-Moon described a swamp in his book Blue Highways. He said life was teeming and going on about the business of life. Yet there was also a pervasive sense of stillness in this area created by the dense vegetation and the lines of the trees. The landscape expressed so many profound dualities. The image on the right was taken in the New Forest in the North Carolina Arboretum. All these trees had fallen on the path as a result of the storms, since they were younger and thinner and their roots weren’t as established as those of mature trees. The way the light fell felt like an invitation to proceed further, even though the branches were a barrier to entry. I am particularly drawn to photographs that aren’t easy to enter into, since sometimes the most profound journeys we make, whether interior or out in the world, are the most difficult. When things come too easily, we may not perceive or appreciate the lessons we can learn when we have to struggle a bit. Symbols can be overlooked and we might find ourselves skating on the surface of life.
The first image conveyed the tension between surface and depth to me and the second made me feel that sometimes seeing through the superficial appearance of things allows us to connect with the underlying and more mysterious aspects of existence. Life is so complex and operates on a multitude of levels all the time. We can never perceive even the simplest of scenes in their entirety due to all the subatomic particles and connections that can’t be seen by the naked eye. Our brains can’t process all the stimuli that our eyes are able to take in either. Seeing deeply often involves a process of not-seeing and an opening to seeing with other senses or our intuition instead of what our conscious mind expects to perceive. Photography is such a great medium for exploring perception and it reminds me to slow down. The very first exhibition I was ever in was called Walk Slowly, Look Closely. It was a community call that arose in conjunction with an exhibition by Clyde Butcher that was on view. I had taken my first photography workshop with him a month earlier and he’d told us to walk into nature with our arms open and see from our hearts.
My Family on Christmas
When I truly see with my heart, I appreciate beyond measure the amazing family that I am blessed to be part of. These connections are the most important of all to me. My children don’t often like to be photographed, but they indulged me out of love which made me even more grateful. When I reflect on how graced I am to be able to spend time with these wonderful people, I realize that everything else I do pales in comparison. For this reason, I am embarking on working on a project with my family archive in the coming year. Though young people don’t always express interest in their ancestors, they might when they get older. It’s funny how the closer you get to leaving this earth, the more we become fascinated with our lineage and the mythic stories of our past.
I wish you all a wonderful New Year, even if life gets tough. A friend shared this beautiful sentiment with me yesterday that her friend shared with her. She wrote, “We can hope for peace in our hearts even if peace in the world seems out of reach at the moment.” I encourage you all to savor your memories from 2023, to cherish the present, and to send prayers of peace for the future, while remembering the importance of non-attachment since all we really have control over is whether or not we act with grace even in the midst of upheaval. Sometimes that takes slowing down and turning within and what better time for that than the winter.