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.

Becoming Nature

The impact that Mother Nature has had on my life over the past few years has been profound, to say the least. My life is, in so many ways, unrecognisable to the one that I was living just a few years ago, not to mention the one that I was living throughout my childhood years, during which I was often too afraid to leave my bedroom. Those people in my life who have known me for a while have even made comments about the significant changes within myself in recent times, and I believe that is a testament to the trees, mountains, and lakes that I have been frequenting over the past half decade.

The natural world that we inhabit is in a constant state of change, and it is only natural that we as human beings, children of Mother Earth herself, live fully in alignment with her, and do what we can to change, grow and evolve, too.

The key for my own happiness and, more importantly, fulfilment, as I have learnt recently, is change and growth, and I believe that it is the same for all of us, whether we are conscious of it or not. Be it business growth, physical growth, personal or spiritual growth, the key for most of us is more, bigger, better, and stronger, and I feel like much of our general discontentment as a species comes as a result of stagnation, and lack of awareness that what we crave and so desperately need is growth and change.

With that being said, I also firmly believe that the root of our unhappiness and discontentment can be found when we observe the increasing distance in our collective relationship with the source of all life itself, Mother Nature.

As human civilisation continues its’ rapid charge into the Information Age and beyond, and we spend more time plugged in, wired up, and completely disconnected from our nature, it is difficult not to observe the dramatically rising numbers in mental health conditions and neurological disorders throughout the world.

It seems to me as though we can’t cope with our own rate of ‘evolution’, and are quickly becoming too caught up in, and identified with our thinking minds. Lack of education around how to manage these fragile devices of ours too often sees people falling into a trap and becoming consumed by their own thoughts. Increased time on screens forces comparison, and often leaves people feeling empty, worthless, and unfulfilled. We also seem to be more divided than ever, with everything now apparently becoming a war of two sides, and our screens certainly don’t help matters, only serving to encourage and accelerate division. We are in desperate need of unity.

Nature, from my personal and anecdotal perspective, has provided me with an escape from my own mind and allowed me to disconnect from my own thoughts and enter into the all-important and often too ephemeral state of ‘being’. This is a topic that me and Marc Robbins discussed in great depth on my latest episode of ‘Finding Light’, and I found it most interesting that many of our own reasons for practicing photography align, having walked similar paths through life. When I feel any negativity creeping into my own thinking, and a disturbance of my own emotions, the first place that I go is outdoors into the warm embrace of Mother Natures’ arms. She presses the reset button and usually brings me swiftly into a state of ataraxia. In nature, too, as I have observed, there is no judgment based on who I am, what I believe or what colour I am. Out there, we are all the same. We are united as one.

Having become increasingly conscious of the effects of early trauma in my own life and development, through observation of myself as well as that of the lives of my parental figures and siblings, I have some understanding of how our bodies hold onto our experiences, and how our own energy has been affected and disrupted, causing behaviours, reactions, and emotions that are seemingly beyond our control in certain situations. It is my belief that the time that I have spent outdoors in nature over the past few years has created a huge shift in my own energetic body, and, as Eckhart Tolle might call the ‘pain body’, bringing healing to my wounded spirit, and helping me to build the bridge between who I was and who I am now, lengthening the distance between my unconscious actions, driven by early observations, and my conscious actions, driven by this state of ‘being’ and ‘presence’.

As mentioned in an earlier essay, I believe that, for myself, the trees have played a role of therapist, as well as best friend, and father, and the branches have untangled the knots within my own mind, helping me to make sense of who I am, or, perhaps, ‘what’ I am, because, with every walk outdoors, I become a little more like the trees that I choose to connect with. The trees and landscape, as a whole, has provided me with a non-judgmental safe space to simply ‘be’. Mother Nature has accepted me wholly, as I am; and that all-accepting, unconditional love is something that I feel I have been able to take out into the world and offer to other people. It makes me wonder what the world might look like if we all worked to develop a deeper level of self-love and self-acceptance.

The identity that I spent some time building throughout my twenties, I now strive to disidentify from, as I recognise the oneness that I, and all of us, collectively share with Mother Nature herself.

It has come to my awareness, all the more recently, that man is not separate from or superior to nature, but we are nature itself. My body remembered when I took my first steps outdoors after my awakening back in 2018. Feeling lost and somewhat depressed as I lay in my room in tears one night, unsure of what my life had come to, and which way to turn next, I found the camera and the camera took me home; outdoors into the wilderness. The voices of my ancestors whispered softly as I took my first steps along the icy path to Llyn Idwal one bitterly cold, winters’ afternoon, and my soul remembered how it felt to be at one with nature once again, laying to rest the deep yearning for belonging that has been ever present in my life for as long as my memory serves.

The deep feelings of inner peace that I experience whilst outdoors, continue to point the way towards healing, towards home, towards that very oneness that we all so desperately need with Mother Nature, and I hope that these words and photographs can echo her cries for unity. With this being said, I have been feeling, with increasing strength recently, that this isn’t ‘me’ creating these works, but that they are simply being channelled through me from the planets’ life force; Mother Gaia herself. My next chapter, I feel, is about continuing to explore the disidentification from myself as my soul remembers its’ place here in the eternal, and how, in some ways, I am this earth, and Gaia herself, as are we all.

There is a wealth of knowledge and wisdom to be gained from Mother Nature and the places that we visit here on earth. The trees and woodlands themselves hold plenty of secrets; many of which we are only just beginning to discover, and, if we learn to silence our minds for long enough, maybe then we will hear more of what the trees whisper to the winds. With enough time outdoors, walking beside the rivers and along mountaintops, perhaps we might all be able to remember who, or what, we are. Maybe then, we will form the community that many of us deeply desire.

It is my belief, as mentioned earlier, that we are all one here on this planet; one collective consciousness, and I can’t help but feel as though the earth is trying to make us all remember, waking us up one person at a time. That is why being outdoors in nature feels so healing to us all, in my opinion. Mother Nature gives us her love, so that we might pass it on to each other, and live how we are supposed to live; here in the moment, and in harmony with her, and each other.

We are nature, and we desperately need to go back. Back to a time when nature was diagnosed whenever we had a problem, instead of prescription pills in the name of profit. Back to a time when we all understood the secret language of the trees, and shared their stories with each other so that we all might live deeper and more meaningful lives. Back to a time when we kept a community tightly around us, all looking out for one another, picking one person up if they fell.

A world of isolation is not healthy for anyone, and I can’t help but feel as though we have all spent far too long by ourselves in recent years. Maybe you have doubts about who to trust and keep around you. I think that you’d be justified in being a sceptic after recent world events. I can’t help you there, or tell you which way to look, but I can tell you that Mother Nature has yet to fail me since I placed my trust in her. She has been letting me into many of her secrets as I sit in silence beside the lakes in Eryri, and the ancient trees nearby have been sharing much of their wisdom; talking to me with love and kindness as they allow me into their safe spaces. They have brought plenty in the way of healing to my wounded spirit over the past five years, and helped me to accept and love myself fully. I wonder what she has been bringing to you in that time, and what the trees have been whispering to you in your moments of silence?