Life as a Journey

Ten years ago, I began this project as an exploration of our human relationship with the natural world. It evolved into a broader metaphysical meditation on the meaning of being alive in these troubled times. Both the human and natural worlds seem poised at the edge of disaster, and yet spring comes again and water keeps flowing down to the sea.

These images, while real, tell stories in a mythic space; a space of dreams and metaphors; a space of the stories we tell ourselves to get through our days. Through these images we follow the quiet odyssey of a life being lived; told as a journey through and with the land. It is a journey undertaken alone, because it is an inner rather than an outer journey. However, I never truly feel alone when I am in nature, even when nature is cold, hard and unforgiving.

But this is not a heroic journey of the conquest of nature or even conquest over some inner world. As men we are taught to conquer. That has failed us. I am instead on a quest for something deeper and richer.

The land is central to this story. It holds our memories and echoes back our emotions. The land tells back to us the ever-renewing stories we bring to it in our joy and sorrow, peace and trouble. The land can be soft as flowing water but also hard as cold, broken stone. As can life.

Along the way, the trappings of civilization occasionally intrude, as a reminder that we humans always seem to come with material things.

The journey begins in the far off, imagined past, in a peace born of innocence. It carries on into a time of uncertainty, fear and sadness. Every life has such times. At the last, it looks towards renewal: to a peace born not from the absence of troubles but from the acceptance of what is and what must be.