Desert I

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"Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature is the absence of​ spirit; to pure spirit, it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect." R. W. Emerson, Nature.

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Time is relative in the desert, stretching out into eternity, with only the occasional shadow that marks the hour on cracked, dry earth. My series, Desert 1, started when I was in a crucial period of my life and the desert provided a spiritual awakening that opened a bright portal after dark nights of a troubled soul. I was struggling to recognize it as true and legitimate, and the open swaths of land, parched and beautiful, were at once a tonic and a salvation.

 

Beauty, silence, magnetic energies, and hyper-realistic colors. I felt humbled by the splendor that was laid before me. The act of taking photographs became more creation than documentation, frame upon frame, my eyes moving back and forth across the landscape. Amid that spectacle, I could not feel time passing and I was one with what was surrounding me. Hours could have been minutes or days; the park’s horizon was wide enough to contain thousands of small miracles. 

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These are the photographs of dreams and transitions, and they evoke a sense of suspension and eternity where time and seasons and the rest of the world fall away.