The world seems like a very dark place right now.  I find the violence of the past decade, the past months, the past days, the past hours, specifically here in my country of residence (the USA), deeply offensive to my soul — to the eternal portion of my being.  I don’t talk about it here very often because I don’t know how to talk about it, I only know how to fight the tide of my own inner battles, to temper my own clash of darkness and light.  To be more clear, there are many different kinds of violence.  There are many different ways and degrees in which one human can murder another.  There are many different ways in which we can reach out and murder ourselves, cut away at our own personal souls, slice at our own minds and bodies.

It is our way, the human way.

It is also the human way to rise up from those small and large deaths, to shake off the bitterness of unbreathing, to bandage those shattered and fractal pieces of ourselves and each other, to learn from brokenness and darkness and to pass through the flame not as lifeless versions of ourselves but as bolder, brighter things of faith and beauty and grace — to not remain victims of ruin but to rise and to keep on rising.

A few summers ago I was reading Makoto Fujimura’s book Refractions and in one of his essays he talked about the role of artists in society.  To paraphrase him heavily (and might I add, you should read the essay yourself for a full sense of context), he said the true work of artists is to bring light to the world, to illuminate.  I took that notion to heart because it’s a beautiful notion but sometimes, it’s the only thing I have to cling to in my work, in my life.  It’s the only way I can fight back against a tide of shadows in a world that cuts itself to ribbons as quickly as it is able to heal.

So I go forth.  I walk the natural world, I glean what lessons I can from the energy cycles I witness there, I disappear, I reappear, I catch the light with my cameras, I try to tell you the what and why of my experiences as best as I can.  I attempt to find the Truth and draw it up and out for myself and for you — to light one match in the darkness and claim that flickering space for Good.

I don’t know what else to do.