A Dialogue with Nature

This recent body of work has been an attempt to offer my meditations as I walk daily in the woods near me. The life that thrives therein is rich with inspiration that has fueled my imagination and taken me on a visual journey celebrating renewal in the spirit of Transcendentalism.

The Transcendentalist movement in America began as a reform movement.  The basic assumption being intuitive feelings rather than rational, became the means for a conscious union of the psyche with the soul of the world. Although the philosophy was not religious in the traditional sense, the followers embraced the notion that the soul of each individual is identical to the “world soul”.

“Nature is a sea of forms radically alike…Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is directly related to the whole. Each particle is a microcosm and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The natural world supplied to us the symbols that pointed to a deeper truth of existence. Nature was symbolic of a spiritual fact. The concept of “correspondence” suggested that all external reality is united with our internal psyche. Transcendentalists believed that “knowing yourself” and studying nature is the same activity. Many, like John Muir, believed the natural world was a mirror reflecting the psyche.

The Hudson River painters gave shape to the ideals of this new philosophy. Durand and Cole depicted paintings with a wilderness in which man, small as he was within the vastness of creation, retained a divine spark that they believed completed a universal circle of harmony.

I have listened to the “voice of the wood.” I celebrate this earth and the changes of the seasons, which remind me of a continuous cycle of rebirth.

“God sleeps in minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals, and thinks in humans.” – Sanskrit Aphorism