About the series

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In my latest series of tree photographs, I move the camera while taking the images, letting the trees dissolve into abstract  rivers of light. The photographs are meditations on the radiance that shines through all things, and the power of going beyond the ordinary.  However, like all my art, the photographs also are practical tools to help us have direct soulful experiences that can change our lives. Far more is possible in life than most of us realize!

     In late 2023, I was trying to figure out where to go next with my art, after dealing with challenges like agonizing back pain, surviving cancer, and my mother passing away traumatically. I needed a new kind of creative outlet, and was planning to focus on something other than trees, but I kept thinking back to a photograph I took in the fall of 2019. I had gone for a walk while I was waiting for my other camera to be fixed, and came across a stunning tree with bright red leaves. I didn’t want to take a conventionally pretty photograph, so I decided to move the camera while taking "Beyond #1" to create what’s sometimes called a motion blur. The red leaves, brown branches, and white clouds behind the tree all merged together into a radiant, exuberant flow of light, resulting in this photograph.

     This experience still had an impact on me years later, so I started taking motion blur photographs of every tree I came across, and I was surprised at how beautiful any tree looks with this technique, at least from the right perspective and at the right time. Just as all parts of life can look vastly different depending on our perspective, from one angle a tree might look dark and impenetrable, while from another angle it’s bathed in dazzling sunlight

     This technique is so sensitive that even the slightest movement will totally change the overall image. Even if I try to move the camera in a precise line, I often end up with unexpected shapes, like the arabesque fireworks in this photograph. I don’t try to control what emerges, because the surprises are better than anything I could try to think up.

     Most of the trees in this series are ones I come across in daily life, like in my yard or along busy roads, as well as in more wild areas. For example, when I photographed a small ordinary tree next to my house, its dry brown leaves merged together with the white clouds, making it feel like an ancient cave painting was brought into the sunlight, with its figures dancing so ecstatically across the vault of heaven that they become a blur.

     Compared with cave people, I’m not honestly sure if the average person today is any more able to connect with soul. So much beautiful wisdom has emerged over the millennia, but the key heart of it still feels mostly lost in translation, bearing only a hollow resemblance to the original insights. When people turn away from soul and inner work, a very precious baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. 

 

In this series, one way I point to soul is with the radiance that shines through a lot of the images. Sometimes, this light might come from a leaf or branch that was turned at just the right angle to catch the sun, or from something bright behind the tree like a cloud or the sky. Even the tiniest glimmer can light up the whole image, just as a single soulful experience can illuminate our entire life. Sometimes, I keep the shutter open a little longer to let in as much light as possible, just as we may need to slow down a bit in life to connect with soul. 

     It’s not a coincidence that almost every spiritual tradition points to this radiance somehow or another, like the glow shown around certain religious figures, and in practices like Tibetan Buddhists visualizing a transcendent clear light, or Reiki meditations on the great bright light. These aren’t just symbols or metaphors, though — many soulful experiences involve actually seeing light with our eyes closed, such as patterns of light or color, or an intense radiance that takes up our whole field of vision, which I started seeing soon after I decalcified my pineal gland in 2014.

     Most broadly, though, the radiance in the photographs reminds me of the whole range of soulful experiences, and how deeply they can transform us.