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’.

The Art of Curiosity

Life as I know it could be entirely different right now if it wasn’t for one simple act of curiosity; of listening to an impulsive thought that came from beyond the ego.

It came back on a morning in the summer of 2018. A friend of mine had asked me to go out to visit one of our local beauty spots; a waterfall called Pistyll Rhaeadr set in the heart of the Berwyn mountains here in mid Wales.

I was going through a stage of transition in my life; the end of a relationship had created a domino effect of change. I changed my job, began coaching an Under 16’s football team for the first time, made new friends, and committed to transforming my body and mindset through long and arduous gym workouts.

My new path was clear; I would become a bodybuilder and personal trainer and spend the rest of my life teaching others what I had learnt. That was until I walked past my sister’s bedroom that morning and caught sight of something glistening on her shelf.

I had spent the last 18 months posting photographs and videos of myself in the gym to the Internet. I would share my dumbbell presses, squats and before vs after photographs; me at 19 years of age weighing 8 and a half stone vs me at 26 years of age weighing 12 and a half stone. The art of bodybuilding had me feeling curious about the human body; our potential for growth, change and transformation.

Through the bodybuilding process, I learnt the power of discipline, grit, resilience, and, most importantly, of listening to the voice that exists inside of all of us, behind our egos; the voice that Carl Jung would call ‘The Self’. There was something beyond ‘me’ that was pulling me to post these photographs and videos to the Internet. The same thing pulled me towards the glistening object that was sitting on my sisters shelf that morning. That object was a camera.

As far as I remember, I’ve had a mindset that has been focused on growth and improvement. When I was a child and into my teens, I would spend most of my days playing computer games. I became obsessed with role-player games, and the idea that I could level up the characters that I had adopted in-game. I carried this mentality into my adulthood, albeit, at times, it lay dormant. My ventures into the gym brought it back to life and I remember thinking that the camera would be the perfect tool to level up the photographs that I was taking to tell the story of my transformation.

Little did I know at the time that answering the call of curiosity inside of me, and picking up that camera would change the course of my life forever.

On that first visit to Pistyll Rhaeadr, I encountered plenty of what Steven Pressfield, in his book ‘The War of Art’, calls ‘resistance’. As with all of us, I have my fair share of demons trying to hold me back; one of which comes in the form of a step father who would abuse me whenever I expressed my feelings or emotions. Photography would never have been encouraged by such a man when I was young, so there was always this idea that it wasn’t the kind of thing that a ‘man’ did in this world. I’d also never worked a camera before, I had nobody to show me how to use it, and no manual to guide me either. All of the settings were foreign to me, and it would have been easy for me to give up trying to figure out the formula for a successful photograph, but ever since I was young, I had a knack of picking things up and making them work.

With the camera set in its’ ‘manual’ mode, I went about pointing it at everything; indoor plants, my friends tuna sandwich from the café at Pistyll Rhaeadr, my friend himself, and the waterfall. I also did what every ‘Instagrammer’ would do and took a photograph of my feet dangling over the edge of the 240ft drop.

It wasn’t until I got home that night, that I realised most of my mistakes. The photograph of my feet was out of focus, and most of the others were completely black or white because I didn’t understand how to make use of different shutter speeds.

I put one toe into the Internet rabbit hole by asking the simple question, ‘how can I take better photographs’. A huge rabbit came and pulled me under. I haven’t been able to escape since.

‘The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.’ 

— Aristotle

My personal trainer studies were placed on hold because I couldn’t resist the urge to go out into the world to put what I’d learnt into practice. One adventure outdoors would lead to ten questions, each one of them to ten more. What initially started out as me learning about how to work the camera led to me learning about the landscape that I found myself in. Learning about the landscape posed new questions about myself.

The camera quickly became a tool for self study and a vehicle to share what I was learning with the world.

Five years on, and I am here. I don’t know exactly where that is in comparison to where that may have been, had I ignored that little urge inside of myself to pick up the camera back then.

I guess that the inner voice is something that we all ought to try to tune into a little more often. I believe that it speaks to us in the form of our emotions and feelings. I retreat to nature so often to get a better idea of what it is trying to tell me. If we listen to society, perhaps we may find ourselves being discouraged from doing so. Humans are natural conformists. We tend to walk in the direction of the crowd, through fear of being rejected from the tribe, or worse, being made fun of for being ‘different’. We crave acceptance. The child that puts his/ her hand up to often in school is often shamed for asking too many questions by the ‘cool kids’ who want to hurry up and get out of the class to go and play.

Humans are also naturally curious. We all want to understand things, learn about new topics and acquire new skills. I remember picking encyclopaedias up off the shelf at the age of three or four years old and scanning them cover to cover to learn about this world and everything within it. I often wonder, at what age did I begin to lose my curiosity? Well, I guess that the emotional abuse that I received from my stepfather didn’t help. He was a man who never could accept me as I was and tried to mould me into something else. I also remember receiving some criticism from a friend in school when I sang a song, and so I stopped because I believed more in what he said than what was on my own heart.

Curiosity is something that needs to be nurtured and trained, like a muscle. It is particularly important that we encourage it in children. Leonardo Da Vinci, a man known for his multitude of talents that stretched far beyond the artwork that most people know him for, would use his journal to nurture his own curiosity; regularly sketching, drawing, recording observations that he made on the street that day, and asking himself all sorts of questions that he would then go on to answer. He famously prompted himself to ‘describe the tongue of a woodpecker’, before proceeding to dissect a woodpecker later on in his life to scratch his own curious itch.

Exercising my own curiosity muscle as an adult has led me to some of the most beautiful places that Wales has to offer. I found the location of ‘Eden’ by stepping foot off a dusty track that appeared to have been walked by herds of sheep for centuries and into an overgrown and, as far as I know, unknown paradise.

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvellous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries to comprehend only a little of this mystery every day.”

— Albert Einstein

Training curiosity requires discipline, and we can all find our own ways to exercise it. I find myself intentionally practicing being curious throughout my days now. I believe that my photographs of tomorrow are a result of what I subject my mind to today. I want to learn about the world, and the people within it; therefore I make a point of finding out about all kinds of weird and wonderful topics, and I’ve trained myself to find out more about people, too. I was once a kid who hid from the world behind his mother when out in public, but I make sure that I do all I can to be the opposite of that child now because I’ve seen how important it is to learn about everything and anything.

Thankfully, I picked up a dumbbell a few years ago out of curiosity, transformed my physique, and developed self-confidence and self-belief. This led me to pick up a camera and gave me the confidence to release my work into the world. Now I feel that the same force is pulling me to write.

Resistance still regularly tells me to ‘stop! Because you don’t know who is watching and judging.’ But, I was always curious to see where this path might lead. Now I am here, and I don’t ever want to go back. I just want to see what’s waiting for me around the next corner.

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