TAKE YOUR TIME 

Take your time with these images and be sure to connect with the side bar for each.  As I borrowed from Shakespeare in “The Breath of Falling Water”, slow down enough to find the good in everything. 

I discovered in creating this series that I was doing just the opposite of the old adage “not seeing the forest through the trees”.  I was actually missing the trees for the forest! Once I began to pay attention to them, I found that each had a story of “Beingness”, living their life as we all do.

 It seems so much better in the forest to know the beings that live there, and maybe to know ourselves in the process.

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– The Willfulness of Being: Finale –  

 

This last of the series explores the essence of what it means to exist and the unique qualities that make each living Being remarkable. Each is an individual in a world full of living individuals whose authentic selves follow a singular path from its beginning, through its life, and to its end. I find this intimate Willfulness of Being to be an essential part of the infinite and timeless expression of life itself. 


Beingness:  The essence of existence and which embodies the intentions and experiences that define a Being's presence in the world. 

Willfulness: The agency of existence and which is to act with intention or deliberate purpose in the service of Being. 

As the Viewer: Try to inhabit the space between literal and metaphoric, between physical Beingness and what it means to Be.

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ZEN AND THE ART OF FEARLESS LIVING - Medium Format Infrared Film Scanned for Processing

A giant sequoia and a bed of ivy embrace their opposites. Gandhi said that in a gentle way, you can shake the world. This image says the same thing.

“Only when you can be extremely pliable and soft

can you be extremely hard and strong." Zen proverb

Being that balance is to become fearless, and risk becomes your friend.

 

 
 

FINAL RESTING PLACE - Medium Format Infrared Film Scanned for processing

 

A fallen cedar 

Near a rushing mountain spring

Into its good night

No raging here (as Dylan Thomas pleads of his father) but the willful acceptance and embrace of life's end. 

 
 
 

SKIN - digital exposure and processing

I looked thru a magnifier 

at my skin thinking 

not that this is human skin 

but that this is my skin.

 
 
 

WILD POETRY OF THE DANCE - digital exposure and processing

Dancing trees have inspired many artists and writers throughout history. They hold deep cultural and spiritual significance for people around the world. Many also believe that trees have souls and can communicate with humans.

“Ever notice how trees do everything to get attention that we do ... except walk?” Alice Walker, The Color Purple 

 In truth, some DO walk.  The Socratea Exorrhiza, a palm tree in the rainforests of Central and South America, is one that does. 

 
 
 

MOTHER TREE, THE COMEBACK - Medium Format Infrared Film Scanned for processing  

In stillness 

Beats a troubled heart

That finds itself again 

As of today, still struggling to recover what it once was, the Mother Tree continues to willfully embrace life even as its days are clearly numbered.

 
 

REQUIEM IN THE GLADE - Medium Format Infrared Film Scanned for processing

This may be more fittingly a wake, in the presence of such life and vitality.  But in R. L. Stevenson’s Requiem he declares: “Glad did I live and gladly die”.

 So, less a diversion for those still living,

let those gathered here instead honor a Being’s

Willful rite of passage – a Requiem in the Glade

 
 

COMPANIONSHIP - digital exposure and processing 

These companions, connected and communicating through their mycorrhizal networks - according to Richard Grant in the Smithsonian Magazine - must surely experience the lost limb of one. The Willfulness of each is shared with the others such that they can stand together.

"Even the weak become strong when they are united." Friedrich von Schiller

 
 

HERCULES AND THE HYDRA - digital exposure and processing

As is possible observing cloud formations, here, in the frozen remnants of a long dead tree, is a depiction just as ancient:  The Greek mythological battle between Hercules and the Hydra, between good and evil, light and darkness.

Perhaps its intention is frozen as well, to exist long after its passing. 

 
 
 

TENDING THE GARDEN - digital exposure and processing

This image begs to find a relationship between the garden and the tender. In a partly metaphorical sense, we can see the embrace, assume the intention. Is it any less so for the decades it took? Time becomes irrelevant, except for the moment captured. 

 
 

THE BREATH OF FALLING WATER - digital exposure and processing

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 

Sermons in stones, and good in everything. 

Shakespeare, As You Like it

 
 

Solitude in the Beingness of nature is a profound source of meaning and self discovery. 

Perhaps one is not so alone there after all. 

 
 
 

ABORIGINAL SCARRING - digital exposure and processing

Scarring is a record of an individual life's journey. The Australian Museum calls it a story of pain, endurance, identity, status, beauty, courage, sorrow or grief.

This image reveals a story as well - of Beingness willfully endured. 

 
 

METAMORPHOSIS - digital exposure and processing

The transformative evolution of a Being's essence, often involving significant changes in identity or state of existence

Here, it symbolizes the journey of Be-coming. 

Is it a tree seeking to root itself, or a root now becoming a tree? Is it struggling to survive or is it dead already? Time is nearly irrelevant.

Willfulness is undeterred. 

 
 

STEPPING IN - Medium Format Film Scanned for Processing

Once a young tree beside the concrete steps of a historic old house, this cedar advanced over the years, willfully pouring itself around and onto these steps. I wonder if it will live out its full life or succumb to the wiles of a homeowner before its time. Whatever end in store, those years from beginning to end hold the individual story of this ancient tree's Being. 

 
 

THANK YOU JOYCE KILMER - Medium Format Film Scanned for Processing

“I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree”

 
 

This tree, through disease, infestation, and trauma that define its presence in the world is, like an Arbus image, what we notice but pretend not to. Lovely or otherwise, Beingness is not a burden here but embraced as its own. 

 
 

ORGANIC - digital exposure and processing

Hundreds of years ago its life began, then existed, and finally ended, drifting with the Pacific, finally naked and worn on the crest of a 17-million-year-old basalt shelf. In the context of geologic time, this organic Being's time was momentary. Ours, by comparison, is but an instant. In the span of infinite time and space even the rocky shelf is finite and brief. But life itself endures beyond all passings. Time becomes irrelevant. 

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LIFE AND DEATH 

I began this journey following a diagnosis that encouraged me to begin considering mortality as an unavoidable part of life. 

Personal experiences, especially those related to mortality, can’t help but influence creative expression. But it was important for me not to overly focus on my own end and instead explore the broader uniqueness of all Beings living finite lives. 

I believe that Being is an idea most of us can understand.  With Willfulness, try not to think of law, Webster, or psychology, of choosing right or wrong. Those are all human constructs.

Think instead about the enduring act of Being, of the unique and finite embrace of life itself, by all Beings.

 And if it helps, I have another reference pulled from a biography of Diane Arbus.  She said of the photograph:

  "What it's of is always more remarkable

than what it is".