Finding the Timeless Center of Your Being

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“There is a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no created thing can touch.” - Meister Eckhart

The late John O’Donohue (Irish poet, theologian, philosopher and author) referenced the above quote during an interview with Krisa Tippett in 2008 for The On Being Project. The quote was by German philosopher and theologian Meister Eckhart back in the fourteenth century. Despite over the five centuries that have since passed, this quote remains just as relevant and soul stirring, as if serving as a linguistic remnant that proves the existence of that deep and timeless center that exists within each one of us, though often going unknown within the heart of the ordinary man.

O’Donohue expanded on Meister Eckhart’s timeless sentiment, giving the quote an enlightening atmosphere of simplicity that speaks as a soul-nourishing stream of peace:

“There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there is a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you, and I think the intention of prayer, spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner sanctuary.” - John O’Donohue

Through his words, O’Donohue gently calls us back home into that timeless center of our being that exists free from all of the pain, worries and fears that have slowly obscured the lens in which we see and understand not only ourselves but the world around us as well. There is no roadmap to find that center of our soul, but the intentions we set for ourselves will undoubtedly guide us towards the secret path of the heart.

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Listen to John O’Donohue’s entire interview with Krisa Tippett published in The On Being Project in 2008, titled “The Inner Landscape of Beauty” (https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty/)

The Shape of the Moon

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The Shape of The Moon (Self-Portrait, NYC, 2022)

She is vulnerable yet indestructible, resilient and soft, visible but hidden, shrouded in a luminous mystery of her own soul’s design. The moon lives alone in darkness yet loneliness nor fear overtake her. She journeyed through hidden worlds to find the all knowing light of love, and in the end she discovered that what she sought was in herself. The moon does not seek, but reveals, does not attach, but flows in the tides of her own gravity. So I took up the path to search for her light, only to feel her warm presence glowing from my soul.

(Published in Helix, Issue 06, 2022, Istanbul. View excerpts from this publication below and view the full virtual issue here)

Excerpts from Helix, Issue 06 (Left image is available for purchase as a print here)

Sometimes a Closed Door is Not a Closed Door

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Sometimes a closed door is not a closed door, but a request of patience. Is the dream you seek worth the wait? True, you cannot sit around expecting the dream to come to you. But oftentimes, attentive non-action proves more fruitful than action. And perhaps during the moments of patience life requests of you is when you truly begin to live, for the inner workings of ones emotions and the subtleties of deeper understandings reveal themselves only when the heart is quiet. The desire to tear the door down or pick the lock is of the ego and can only end in suffering, while the patience to wait for the door to open at the proper time is the way of the heart. So until then, you sit, watching the light dancing under the door, reminding you that the most divine revelations are worth lifetimes of patience.

 

From the series Traces of Being (Prints available for purchase here)

She Dreamed of Eight Moons

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Eight moons encircled us in the night sky above

As I stood in the heart of a familiar forest.

Every pearl slowly revealed herself after the last,

Clear yet veiled by a familiar mystic design.

The radiance of a boiling star passed as she spoke,

“true wisdom lies beneath the illusion of distinctions”.

We awoke in the luminous shade of Crescent street,

I could not find the moon for she became me.

From my newest series She Dreamed of Eight Moons (Purchase prints here)

A Crow Landed Onto a Nest...

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Print available for purchase here

A crow landed onto a knot of loosely hanging wires,

his head cunningly in search of the mother.

Seeing no one, he darts into the tiny makeshift nest

tucked between an apartment window and rusted security bars.

The innocent white egg stands out against the thief’s black coat

as he flies through the twilight, noticeably conscious of his guilt.

The mother returns, still as a just-shattered heirloom

before collecting her pieces to race out in the direction of the crow.

Inner Silence Amidst Outer Chaos

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~ THIS POST MARKS THE ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY FOR BEGINNING THIS ONLINE JOURNAL ON JUNE 7, 2021 ~

Up until very recently, I have been accustomed to life in small towns: Nature greets you at your back door, silence is a reliable friend, and the only chaos to be found is the neighbor’s dog escaping their fence. Nature was always the main event, whether it was a hike through the woods, going out on the boat or hitting the beach. Mims is the small town of Florida I will always call home, and I love knowing that few people have ever even heard of it.

From the series Transitional Chaos (2022)

In a small town, it is second nature to discover inner stillness as there is not much to do on the external level. This lack of external stimuli inherent of rural environments holds a mystical capacity for unlocking the inner stillness within oneself. Having grown up with this kind of innate solitude as my baseline of being, it has naturally become a cornerstone to my sense of personal identity.

Now, having been in New York City for almost a year now, I have undergone innumerable internal crises related to my relationship with internal silence. I have lost and found that familiar inner stillness countless times in the city, however, when I have found it, those moments are far between and extremely brief. Where once the inner stillness was my center of gravity, it has now become a fleeting acquaintance. Living in the largest city in America has made me realize that I took the familiar ease of inner silence for granted. I assumed that my inner peace could pack up and travel with me anywhere I go. While this sentiment is in fact true, it holds a caveat: the louder the environment gets, the more conscious awareness I must give to the inner stillness in order for it to stay. If I want to keep inner peace as my baseline of being in this city, I will have to give more attention to it. Without attentive awareness, inner stillness becomes wilted like an unwatered plant.

From the series Transitional Chaos (2022)

My natural reaction has been to blame the city as the reason for my feeling more stressed, ungrounded and less centered. While the city environment has unquestionably played a vital role in this internal struggle, it is not the city at fault. Ultimately, it is my own actions and lack of conscious awareness that has brought me to where I am today. If anything, I must thank the city for exposing my faults and weaknesses. To get back to my center of internal peace, I must devote more effort and care to mindful engagement with the present moment. I will take the city as a test, a test to expand and deepen my mindfulness, because I know that if I can find my inner peace here, I will surely be able to nurture it anywhere.

From the series Transitional Chaos (2022)

Abstractions: Rural vs. Cities

From the series Traces of Being

From the series Traces of Being

Photographing in a city is naturally different from photographing in a rural setting (both images above were taken in NYC). While I apply my same way of looking and abstracting through composition and proximity, the images prove very different results. In city based images, there is a strong presence of stark contrast, harsh light and seeping textures, where in rural areas I find softness and a gradual ebb and flow of tonal gradations. I tend to prefer the less stark images, the more gentle and subtle aesthetic, but the more I continue photographing in NYC the more I feel my sensibilities expanding. I do not wish to swap one for the other or create a hierarchy between the two aesthetics, it is more of an experimentation. Like the yin and yang, their differences do not disturb the other but rather enhance each others’ qualities. Understanding this helps me to see my own life as an experimentation, to expand and evolve in ways I haven’t done before, in ways an old version of myself may not have liked or even thought of.

And yet...the light calls

5th Avenue / 59th Street Station Exit, NYC

Rushed. Tired. Anxious. Exhausted.
And yet…the light calls
And when it sees me, I am still.
The light cuts through my emotions and speaks directly to my heart, reminding me once more
of my true nature as she whispers:
presence, presence, presence.

05/16/22

Welcome home baby,

It’s been awhile since

We last saw you.

You’ve been pretty busy, huh?

Ah, well

Ah, so

Here we are

Again -

At last:

Welcome to forever,

Welcome to your center.

How may I direct your call?

Moving from Knowing to Feeling

Maybe to be truly alive emerges from the momentary revelations we never even knew we had. It’s not in the knowing, it’s in the being. To know is to reduce our very own feelings into analytical data. We are not machines, we are quirky little star beings naturally comprised of infinite nuances, many of which we will never even realize in our own self. I once thought the essential point in life was to ‘know the/my self,’ and at that time in my life maybe that was the point, but I’m finding now that knowing is just a perfectly straight road with an endless dead end. Knowing, or the sense of knowing, removed what made me vitally human. To live in a sense of knowing is tempting: it gives you an immensely comfortable sense of stability but at the price of stagnating the rivers of openness, curiosity, imagination, deep feelings. So, give me back the confusing roundabouts and the small winding mountain roads, let me get lost in the feelings of being human.

To Know Your Self

Do you know how to find out if you know yourself? If you do, then you do not. The prerequisite to knowing yourself is for your self to be incinerated, obliterated, utterly annihilated. Only then can you hope to know yourself, only then does the true journey begin. 

Culture as a Cultivator for Consciousness

Rise above the surface of illusion. You are suffering (however that may manifest, such as states knows as stress, anxiety or depression) because you see the illusion as real. You see the job you work at and the myriad of tasks you have to complete as bigger than you, as something that overpowers you. But remember that the job is a small piece of a larger cultural structure, and it all began from the mind of a human, and human minds tend to cast a kind of psychological trap over other minds. The strongest, most convincing net is the trap that wins, but culture does not call them traps, rather they are considered ideologies, and when a certain ideology persists through generations, we come to beleive the frail ideology as a concrete, fundamental structure of reality. You must see the job and its tasks as smaller than you, you overpower them. No man made mental construct can overpower you unless you allow it, for you are from a much more ancient lineage. The mind is of a temporal land while your consciousness is an extension of eternity. Do not despise the temporal realm, simply see it for what it is: an illusion appearing as reality. When you can go beyond the veil of illusion, the veil of believing the man made world is dominant over you, then you are set free and experience a peace more still than the furthest depths of the sea. A job is but one example, one shard of the illusion. There are shards all around us as we tip toe our way through the illusion, but break even just the tip of one, and you’re off on a lifelong adventure. By recognizing the material world as illusion, one is able to live more fully in it, becoming re-born as a consciousness that chooses to play the game rather than a prisoner forced to serve his self-imposed sentence. 

Beyond Culture

The artist’s “authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination..”
- Joseph Campbell (learn about him here)

The greatest are does not come out of culture, it comes from that deeper source and pierces through culture.

The favorite books of mine (like Solaris by Stanislaw Lem or The Island by Aldous Huxley), the songs I am drawn to, the humans before me that I feel an indescribable connection with, they all live at different lengths of the same thread: they do not merely reflect back culture’s mirror, they offer underground tunnels through the confined corners of culture and into the infinite wonderment of being itself.

There are only two great voices: the voice of culture, and the voice of the soul. For most people who live out their lives in the construct of culture, they have heard only the call of the world and move according to the changing voice of culture. On the other hand it is the people who, through one experience or another, find themselves alone out on some unmarked trail deep beyond the undergrowth that live by the voice of the soul. Before the creation of culture, the voice of the soul rang the clearest. The dawn of civilized man, filled to the brim with his new heavy cinderblocks of logic and thought, came the setting of the soul. This is not to say logic and soul cannot co-exist, but that logic, the mind, has undeniably overshadowed the soul in our society for some time now. The ‘soul’, or ‘heart’ (or however you linguistically identify with such a representation) does not raise or lower its voice. It does not change tone or have an age. The voice of the soul is eternal, untouched by time, synonymous with the linguistic references of ‘truth’ and ‘sublime clarity’. The voice of the soul runs deep, she is the root of our entire being, of our entire universe, of all that exists and does not exist. The voice of the world is the opposite: evasive and rooted in the shallow grounds of the mind. No matter how much you nourish the shallow ground, it will never compare to the soul-nourishing depth of the voice that beckons, ever patient, ever present, ever loving. Her voice has never left. The soul has been here all the while, for she is timeless and knows that eventually the voice of culture will tremble, crumble and fall, and through the wreckage of culture will emerge the infinite wisdom of her eternal being. But she will not command your attention. To find her, you must quiet your mind and go far within beyond the reaches of culture, of the mind itself. While the voice of culture brought you outward into the clanging world, so the soul will call you to the deepest most silent source of your being.

Tunnels Into Eternity

‘Poetry’ is just a term, a human made term of logistical nature to describe that which is beyond logic, that which is beyond language itself, yet here I find myself time and time again, talking about what cannot be spoken. Words are but pointing fingers, secondary references, unable to be that which they appear to define. Don’t get hung up on the words, go beyond the edges of the mind, out into a field of endless wonderment. Take any term, it doesn’t need to be ‘poetry,’ choose any you like, then all you have to do is follow it into itself until its logical nature inverts upon you and a tunnel into eternity is revealed. All this and you didn’t even have to go across the street. The greatest mysteries, the greatest discoveries and journeys, they all happen within oneself, and when you follow yourself into itself, its illusionistic separatist-nature inverts upon you and a tunnel into eternity is revealed. You see, there are endless tunnels, and if you follow but one through to its end, I will greet you at the threshold. And, eventually, digging new tunnels becomes a silly, childlike game of hide and seek with the universe. There is nothing heavy about the game, in fact this subtle game is the exact opposite of ‘heavy’: it is the emptiness of the mind, it is the weightlessness of body, and it is going in the opposite direction that the ego desires to venture towards.

Childish Wonderment

 
spring has sprung in Central Park 🌺🌼🌸 frolicking with @savvyzone 💖
you look for the light in other people, in other places, but the light you really seek is within yourself, hidden underneath the rubble of the ego’s disguise 💜
It was a sliver of a dream I hope one day will swallow me whole
what we know of others is but a mere fragment, we are all marvelous mysteries, even to ourselves
morning light stroll ✨

Finding more fascination in the process of looking, of visual discovery, of childish wonderment, rather than securing a tidy end-result product, composed to perfection, flirting with the potentially treacherous precipice of commodification (via Instagram)