[Saint Wapiti Rings and Necklace :: sterling silver and 14 karat gold :: Patron Saint of the high country.  May the mountain always rise up to meet you.]

Hey honey bunnies.  I’m trying my best to manifest a shop update for you tomorrow, despite a handful of small but pesky natural disasters that happened in home and life here over the past two days!  I am aiming for an update time of noon, mountain time, and will let you know if that changes at all between now and then.

Also, entering the shop today will be the STAY CONNECTED POSTCARD PACK — some of you have had the patience of holy people and have been asking for a while for a new little pack of images.  Here they are.  It’s a fairly limited run with four cards in each pack, as well as one extra card (which has been my tradition for years now) of my choosing as a little surprise for you.

A little about the image selection for this pack of postcards:

Oh, it’s always so hard to choose.

The photos featured in this postcard pack aren’t anything different than the photos I usually take except they were shot with the intention of showing effortless connection to the elements.  These are self-portraits, usually partial body crops, but always, the elements are present:  earth, fire, wind and water.  Or off shoots of the elements are present, for example, objects that are carried on the wind, stone turned to dust, flowers that eat the sun…etc.  What causes these self-portraits to be specifically elemental in nature, for me as the photographer, is that when I decided to take these photographs, I felt seamlessly interwoven with the mountain, land, wind, sun, lake or river I found myself beside or on or in.  I felt connected enough, to Creation, that the hum of my own molecules was in tune with the singing of the stones, the chanting of the waters, the alleluias of the sunbeams and the arias of the wind.  I was one with it all.  Connected.  I made a tangible memory of the moment with my camera.  I try to do this all the time, but there are moments when I feel it more deeply — these photographs were taken in those moments.

I realized something about myself last summer, I even shared it with a friend or two by letter once I realized the significance of the act,  I need those moments wherein I lay myself down on the ground beneath the trees or drape my skinny bones over the river cobble and dip my finger tips in the whitewater…I need to press as much of my surface area up against the dirt of the world, feel the sky press down on me, the sun warm me through and the river lick at my hands.   It undoes what needs undoing in me, it rebuilds what needs rebuilding in me, I think I hear the Spirit of God moving over me as it moved over the dark waters in the very beginning.  I can feel the good and bad in me separate like oil and water, and then I think I feel the bad being stripped away leaving me shining and new and ready to begin again.  It is an act that is redemptive by nature, for me.

I never set out to lay around in the dirt under trees or alongside a river in an intentional way, it’s always felt like an intuitive act — I do it when I feel moved to do it.  This is generally my approach to life and work — I do things as I am led to do them.  I make things as I am led to make them.  I rarely try to control the process, it makes for a lot of mess and some seriously scattered work at times but by now, I know enough about who I am to simply go with it.  A lot of beauty eventually stems out of the chaos and those are some of the greatest moments of my creative life.  When I take the time to lay on my back, walk to the very top, collect the tiny things and really feel it all I don’t do it because I think it’s going to take a good photograph that might get me some attention, but because it’s a way for me to be consumed by an environment, to close my mind off to needless chatter and purely focus on my senses, to ask what changes I need to make in my heart in order to belong even more to the holy places, to listen and to hear, to be taken in by it all, made one with it all, cell by cell, matched in newness and decay with the world, one more piece of creation under the mighty wing of God, joyfully singing His praise, lifting my voice to blend in infinite harmony with a beautiful world.  The stars sing soprano; they pour the high notes forth like raw silver.

I’ve written about it before.  And I’ll write about it again.

This is the place these images stem from, I just wanted you to know.  Now if you see me in such a photograph, you know it is no dramatic contrivance made immortal by my camera lens and shutter, but a genuine, private moment — remembered by my camera and shared in trust.

And so, I stay connected.

I stay connected.