{beauty breather: a photographic pause for rest}
Join me in a guided visual meditation - an invitation into noticing the wilderness within and without while making space for the fullness of our humanity. These beauty breathers are collections of my nature photographs, part of Notes From the Wilderness.
I am in Western Canada and experience four distinct and rather extreme seasons. This cycle is integral to my experience. I acknowledge this frame of reference may not be familiar to everyone yet I hope you will still be able to enter in and feel welcome.
You can return to each beauty breather as often as you desire. Notice what is the same and different in how you experience the words and images.
If you’re wanting to slow down but find yourself rushing through, try setting a timer (I really love the Insight Timer app.) Go at whatever pace work for you.
Meet yourself with kindness and gentleness. Let curiosity lead.
Another year has begun and I am daring to dream anew. Oh, so gently.
I don’t know what this next season will require of me or if I am even remotely prepared. As I reflect on the past year, it seemed, on the surface, so achingly hard. Two long bouts of life-disrupting severe physical pain, one relentless auto-immune flare, among many other tender challenges, filled my days with hard things. I was tempted to see only the disappointments, disruptions and limitations, but I did not have to scratch too far below the surface to see a bounty of goodness in the midst of it all. The beauty in our life sustains us, doesn’t it? It helps move us into the next hour, the next day.
I had to take an unexpected but eventually intentional break from my art practice to focus full-time on renovation projects. Two and a half years of repairing a physical house and the one I carry with me as my body. The work - on the house, my body, or my heart - is certainly not finished but I’m ready to shake off the dust and start anew.
I wish I had a road map.
As I shift and rearrange, making room for this next season, I admit I do not really know where I’m going. Is it a returning? Is it a departure? I think, perhaps, both. These winter months allow for an easing into what is to come, pushing back the urge to be wholly new, overnight.
I picked up my camera for the first time in months and headed out into the rime ice. Day after day, the frost built up, coating the whole region in stillness. I wandered by meandering country roads and icy rivers, wondering on high cliffs and walking among tall trees. I may not know where I’m going but I choose hope over and over and over as I keep taking one step after another.
exhale
inhale
exhale
I invite you to look for the movement among the stillness of this collection of photographs. Where do the lines lead? Where do you see life? What remains? What departs?
May we have the courage to move into each new day. What tender hopes are you holding? What does your heart yearn for in the world? Let’s keeping moving and dreaming, moment into moment.
A gentle and beautiful new year to us all.
