Finding a Place in the Great Tapestry of Life
It is a beautiful thing to belong; to have found your place in the great tapestry of life. Most people spend their entire lives desperately searching for the ephemeral place of belonging, and it is terribly sad that so many will leave this life having never found where it is that they are truly meant to be — having never experienced a state of belonging and presence and got a sense of the inner peace and stillness that allows us to hear the whispers of what we have come to label so commonly as ‘God’.
I have observed, throughout my life so far, so many people who are completely lost, wandering the earth devoid of purpose and yearning for something to live for. I am sure that is why some choose to have children at such a young age. Others, instead, may identify with groups — religions, political parties, and football teams — pledging their allegiance to something outside of themselves in an attempt to belong.
I am one of those people who found a sense of belonging in both religion and a football cult at one point in my life, although I am, thankfully, yet to fall for the political charade that divides so many people and is the cause of so much angst within the world. In my thirty-something years on this earth, however, I have felt the strongest sense of belonging after spending a morning outdoors in some sacred outdoor place with only my camera for company. It is as if a great spiritual reset button has been pressed inside of me. My soul feels cleansed at the deepest level.
I have, this week, experienced two marvellous, soul-cleansing mornings; the first of which inspired this essay. I went to visit a mystical stretch of the River Vyrnwy with my partner, Darcia, for the first sunrise photoshoot together in our two-and-a-half-year relationship. We witnessed such beauty and majesty beside the river, and felt a sense of connection to something deeper that, I can say on my part at least, had been vacant for some time.
I have desperately missed being outdoors during these sacred hours of first light — a combination of a lack of creative motivation throughout the summer months, the responsibilities of business, and my soul-searching expeditions following my Finding Light exhibition all meant that I haven’t taken part in the great majesty of morning for a while. The feelings of awe and wonder all came rushing back to me whilst I was wandering the banks of the river on Monday. I entered the state of deep presence that I can only find when I am fully engaged in my creative practice, whilst held in the safe and non-judgmental embrace of Nature’s unconditionally loving arms.
If I could pack up these feelings into a box and gift them to everyone in this world, I would do it so they can experience the same bliss and deep peace that I experience when I witness the profound beauty and majesty that Nature so graciously grants me access to sometimes. I suppose that is, quite simply, why I choose to take photographs: I have a hope that, at some level, other people might be able to feel something similar to what I do when I stand amidst these spectacular landscapes armed with my camera in one hand and a flask of coffee in the other.
It comes from a place of the deepest empathy, I guess. I know what it is like to experience the complete opposite: to have been born into what I can only describe as a hell; to have experienced eleven years of chaos and non-belonging; to have evacuated my own heart space and abandoned my soul in pursuit of acceptance from the people who adopted me as their friend when I moved home time and time again as a child.
So when I now have a camera filled with photographs, and a heart full of Nature’s medicine, I walk with great vigour, renewed purpose, and a feeling that I actually belong somewhere, doing something. I return home with a story that adds something to the life of any interested person who might have miraculously been made aware of the work I am doing with my creativity and chosen to follow me on one of the many platforms where I share my photographs and writings.
Through the fires of my artistic initiation and my relentless pursuit of meaning and belonging, I have managed to forge myself a place in a hungry world that often swallows so many people before they find out who they are and what they are here to do. I have done this not by looking out towards the heavens or towards a team of eleven men charging around a football field, but by looking inside the walls of my own beating heart with the same depth of passion and intensity as I once did from the stands of a football stadium.
The quest for belonging is one of mankind’s most beautiful and challenging adventures. It is a pursuit that we are all on to some degree; there are just many pathways home, and everyone’s pursuit looks so different from our own. Some find their belonging in churches, whilst others find it inside stadiums amongst 40,000 others. Some people spend their whole lives searching, and only find that sacred, ever-evasive place of peace and stillness at the end of a bottle.
I have, thankfully, found mine in a special place here inside of myself — a place that I have gained access to through the portal of Nature that is revealed to those who approach her ancient landscape with respect, reverence, and the deepest and most sensitive and open hearts.