Exploring the Inner Landscape
The Formation of the Inner World
I have written openly in recent years about the early life experiences that shaped the way in which I see the world today; equipping me with a lens of compassion and sensitivity.
For those of you who are new readers to my journal, I’ll provide a little bit of context. The outer world into which I was born was rather chaotic and turbulent, to say the least. I spent many of my waking hours on guard, wondering when the next home makeover might be. It didn’t take much to send my first stepfather into a fit of rage. He usually liked to have his own way, and if he didn’t, objects were very likely to go flying across the room. Life with my second stepfather at the head of the home didn’t bring much more in the way of peace, either.
These experiences forced me to withdraw into the safe confines of my own world. It is one that I built inside of myself as a way of dealing with the chaos of the outside world. I was far too young to be able to control or influence what was going on outside of me, but I learnt early on that I did have control over my own thoughts and actions. I have been directing these towards building the most beautiful inner world since those earliest days.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
~ Viktor E. Frankl, Mans Search for Meaning
‘Enlightened’ - A photograph by Brad Carr.
Research shows that sound moves at a faster speed in water (1500 meters/sec) than in air (about 340 meters/sec). As we are formed in water whilst in the womb, I wonder whether the formation of my inner world was accelerated as the sounds of my alcoholic fathers’ rages may have affected my energy before I was even conscious. These photographs, I feel, are representations of that world. Inside, there is an overarching sense of peace and tranquillity; similar to those that you’d feel beside an isolated mountain lake at dawn, or whilst walking along a footpath between trees.
Every adventure and each new meandering footpath into the unknown introduces me to an unexplored corner of my own inner landscape; one that is equally as complex as the one that is outside of me. Sitting beside a lake in stillness allows me to reflect upon my life and make sense of who I am, and, as importantly, who I am not, and further understand the events that shaped me. As far as I have been walking outdoors into the wilderness, I have also been travelling inwards. As I deepen my understanding of my inner world, so my understanding of Mother Nature and her ways deepens, too. It is an eternal cycle.
‘‘As above, so below. As within, so without. As the Universe, so the soul.’’
‘Silent Waters’ - A photograph by Brad Carr.
The Camera as Tool for Self Study
I understand that my approach to photography is different to many, perhaps, more traditional photographers, as I choose not to focus too much on time, place, or too many of the technical elements that might take away from the deeper, and, to me, more interesting topics such as ‘why’, ‘what’, or ‘who’. The act of picking up the camera to begin telling stories of my own connection to the landscape was my process of awakening to something beyond this three-dimensional physical world. It was my way of accessing a voice that was deep within and connecting with a divine higher presence.
‘‘Who looks outside dreams. Who looks inside, awakes.’’
~ Carl Jung
Given the environment that I grew up in, I feel like I received an immersive education in psychological understanding, having been closely observing the inner world of my parents, and how they were reflected in the outer world that they created. Inner chaos created outer chaos. I choose to open up and write about my early life experiences because I believe that these adverse childhood experiences have given me a unique set of skills and placed me in a position to offer some unique insights into the psyche, and shine a light on what the creative practice of photography and writing, as well as spending prolonged periods of time in nature can offer the human soul.
At more than one stage throughout my life, I have been limited by the four walls of my home. Having nursed some deep psychological wounding as a result of my early life difficulties, I became addicted to computer games for large parts of my teenage life and early adulthood, disassociating and escaping from my reality. As a result of this addiction, I rarely ventured outside of my bedroom, never mind outdoors into the unknown. Upon reflection, I can see how limited I was in my ways of thinking, and how confined my world was; both inside and out.
By choosing to step outside one day into the wide, open landscape, I chose to open the chamber of my own psyche; stripping back old beliefs and building new ones. So began my process of both self creation and self destruction. As I discover new areas of this world and walk along previously untrodden footpaths, I allow my brain to build new neural pathways. No longer am I stuck in old ways of thinking, keeping me a prisoner of the past, but I open myself to endless avenues for exploration. Our worlds, as mentioned earlier in this essay, are merely a reflection of our thoughts, and so, by frequenting nature as often as I can, I allow myself to break many of the old thought patterns that weren’t my own, observe my current thoughts, and provide an opportunity for new ones to formulate.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Though the initial stages of my photographic journey saw me focus on the technical elements of the practice as I familiarised myself with the camera, lenses, settings, and understanding of light, I quickly began to formulate an interest in the psychological aspects of the art as I observed the many changes that were occurring within myself as I progressed along my way. I started to follow my intuition and inner guidance; ‘feeling’ my way towards new areas of the landscape and capturing my emotional state in my photographs. It turns out that many reflected the feelings of peace that I had become familiar with in the safety of my own world. It wasn’t a conscious decision to create photographs like this. I was simply following my inner bliss which led me along this footpath and eventually to the warm and safe embrace of the trees.
‘‘If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.’’
~ Joseph Campbell
I am somebody who likes to know the ‘why’ behind most things, and I began to ask myself that simple question more often about the work that I was creating; particularly throughout 2021 following a conversation that I had with my nan who used her child-like imagination to see things in my photographs that weren’t apparent to me. I became curious about my nans’ inner world, and her own apparent reconnection to her imaginative inner child, now that she was well into the latter years of her life. It raised some deep questions inside of my mind such as, ‘why would I want to wait all those years to imagine and simply play again?’ and ‘what happened to the boy who used to love getting lost in stories and at one point even enjoyed writing his own?’
Whilst outdoors with my camera following that conversation, I would begin to see things differently. Narratives and stories that were personal to me started to become apparent. Some even forced me to look at and make further sense of familial relationships; past and present, as the stories that I had ‘seen’ turned out to be reflections of many of the stories that I had buried within my psyche.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
~ Carl Jung
‘Soul Retrieval’ Through Nature Photography
That conversation with my nan forced something of an evolution in my work and the way in which I look at the world as I reconnected with my own inner child again and began to engage with my imagination to create photographs of subjects, such as the dancing trees in ‘First Dance’.
I began searching inside of myself that year to find out when I had started to build the bridge that lead me away from my own imaginative, sensitive and curious inner child, and what events caused this disconnection. Of course, I looked immediately towards the trauma that had built up inside of me after growing up in a home environment that was marred with instances of domestic abuse and violence. I also drew back on the experiences of fleeing those places that I called ‘home’ on three separate occasions as a child because of my mothers need to escape the ugliness of the environment that we were being raised in, therefore, leaving parts of my own self behind with the wreck and debris. Finally, I recalled many instances of emotional abuse that I was subjected to from these men in my life who would relentlessly throw insults at me for being a sensitive, expressive and emotional soul; traits that I believe all humans possess at their core. Upon feeling the emotional abandonment from these men, as well as that from my biological father at birth, I learnt to abandon parts of my own Self. For most of my life, up until I began this inward journey and found creativity, I hated being labelled by people as sensitive. I wrongly viewed it as a weakness, and constantly relived the rejection that I felt as a child.
This separation from parts of myself is what is known as ‘soul fragmentation’, or ‘soul loss’. It is common, once we experience something traumatic in our lives, whether physical or emotional, to try to escape the full impact of the pain by blocking it out. It is said that parts of our soul separate from us at the time and place of the event, which can cause a person to become dissociative and lead to further problems such as depression, disconnection, loss of purpose, and feelings of incompleteness and hopelessness.
In hiding and abandoning parts of myself from the world, I had also built many false sides that I would often display in the hope of gaining acceptance and approval from my caregivers and, in later years, my peers. In hindsight, I know that my addiction to computer games was my own attempt to block out much of the pain that I was feeling from my adverse childhood experiences. I felt empty, lost, disconnected and alone for large parts of my teenage years and early adulthood, and I struggled with a lack of purpose and meaning for those years of my life, too.
In recent years, as I have been further exploring my interest in psychology and spirituality, I have been reading about many interesting concepts and beliefs from different cultures and religions across the world. One of the ideas that has fascinated me the most is that of something called ‘Soul Retrieval’, which has its’ origins in ancient shamanic traditions. The word ‘shaman’, which originates in the Tungus tribe of Siberia, means ‘one who sees in the dark’. Soul Retrieval is the process where a shaman moves into altered states of consciousness to travel to realities that are outside of our normal perception, also known as the spirit worlds, to retrieve the lost parts of a humans’ soul.
By substituting the computer games for creativity and time in nature, which allows me the time and non-judgmental space to find stillness and reflect, I have been processing much of the pain that I had once been avoiding. By revisiting many of the early life experiences that caused this fragmentation of my soul, I believe that I have been integrating many of the lost and forgotten parts of myself, as well as further distancing my true self from those parts of the false self that I had created in my quest to ‘fit in’ and be accepted.
Every winding footpath and walk through the woodland leads me a little bit further into my own inner landscape. With each walk outdoors into nature, I learn that the acceptance that I was always seeking could only come from within. I owe my life to Mother Nature for her help in guiding me along my path. I am a more complete person for each conversation that I have had with the trees, and my soul now sings whenever I sit beside the silent waters in Snowdonia. This journey inwards, for me, has been an incredibly healing one, and I hope that my words can go some way towards helping other people along on their own.