Creating is
My Heart’s Breath
It is the way that I make sense of how I experience the amazing world we live in. Since I was a child I’ve loved making all kinds of things. I’ve sewn quilts, knitted scarves, crocheted afghans, sketched, and painted. But the creative expression that I am most passionate about is making photographs.
Photography is my heart’s breath
The world has become a much more beautiful place to me since I fell in love with photography. I see beauty almost everywhere. And even when I am not carrying my camera or making a photograph, my heart sees the world through the eyes of a photographer.
My awareness and appreciation of light and color have expanded. As has my wonder, delight, joy and gratitude for all of the astonishing beauty of this world.
Like all makers I have times when I’m filled with ideas and enthusiasm and other times when nothing seems to move me or when I feel empty and devoid of energy for making photographs. The empty times seem to be a part of the process, just as the seasons turn in nature. There is a time for growth, exploration and expression and a time to shed what is no longer needed, rest, and transform before a new season emerges.
It is the inhale and exhale of the creative cycle.
Recently I listened to an interview from Sounds True with author and teacher Mark Nepo. It’s called Writing is Listening with Your Heart. In the interview Nepo talks about writing as “listening to what is.”
As no one can live without inhaling and exhaling, no one can live without feeling and expressing. The life of expression is how the heart breathes and how our spirit grows in the life that carries it.
— Mark Nepo
Making photographs is my way of listening to, experiencing, and seeing what is. It helps me express how I feel about the astonishing beauty of this world. My practice grounds me literally by taking me to my beloved woodlands and nature areas where I walk in joy and gratitude
… I believe we all must create—that is, we all must root and break ground until we flower. This necessary art of coming alive is not reserved for the few. It is every person’s destiny, though there are always things in the way.
— Mark Nepo
Photography is my conversation with life and mystery, mortality and immortality, all that is transient and all that is unchanging.
How do you converse with life?
What moves you? How do you listen to and experience the world? And how do you express all of that?
I have learned over time, after being battered and smoothed by experience after experience, that creativity, whatever form it takes, is less about creating something out of nothing and more about being in relationship and conversation with life and the unknown. The more we engage expression and writing as a way to listen and to stay in relationship with life, the more sacred our path. We are not meant to bend material to our intent, but to bend our will to give voice to life and its rhythms.
— Mark Nepo
We are makers and creators. It is what keeps us alive. Art is healing.
So we don’t create to achieve or make history, no matter how we’re schooled or what we tell ourselves. We create because we have to. And the reward for creating, in any form, is that it keeps us alive. This is why we devote ourselves to art. It is our covenant with life. And like anything we devote ourselves to, we will in time become good at it. But we don’t do it to become better. We do it to become whole. For while we can get better without becoming whole, we can’t become whole without getter better.
— Mark Nepo
May you walk in beauty.
(A few photos made through the windows of my house this week as I watch autumn journey towards winter.)
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