A Return

I’m off into the mountains this very morning with the question, what’s the creative power of a return, swirling in my head. It’s easy to label a return as simply a rerun, an avoidance, a do-over and I’ve had every one of those thoughts leading up to today. But there’s also the other side, the unfinished side, the need for more exploration, more discovery, the need to simply be here. And so I’m back to walking long miles, back to photographing and writing and back to living in simplicity for the next three weeks in the High Sierra Mountains of California.

When I initially crafted this project last summer I didn’t know what the output would be but I purposely stripped away modern convenience by leaving behind all electronics and simplified my tools in the form of a pinhole camera and a blank journal to help facilitate creativity. Over the past year of writing and editing images I’ve come to see this project in specific terms, with specific aims. It’s evolved. It’s not random I choose to bring an old copy of Walden to read and like Thoreau the aim is not grandiose in nature but slowed observation and solitude. Solitude, not isolation nor hermit but separation through being an observer. And the Concord of my nature is the Sierra Mountains, it is the singular wilderness I feel most at home, most at peace in. It’s the obvious choice to be the canvas for this project.

But at the same time projects need an end, process alone is not enough. Art is not idea, it is a physical representation of idea. It is a final photograph, the printed words, a dance performance, a sculpted work, the music played. And I want very much for this project to have completion, for its own sake as much as a repudiation of my love to sit in the process of things. It’s a safe space to be, for in there artistic ideals are never challenged.

So I go to where rivers start, where they are but streams untamed by man, over rocks laid down eons ago. I go to write my own wilderness philosophy and think on art, solitude, disconnection and nature. I go with an eye to the end, to where I hand off words to others to edit and photographs for critique.