Enigmatic: mysterious and difficult to understand. Energy centres: yet another challenging subject to write about and aim to portray with the photographic image!

I’m only too aware my last blog was posted in February! There have been a number of reasons impacting this, with three primary causes:

By way of explanation…

This is my first blog since August 2023 and I’ve waited in anticipation for this moment to arrive. The extended gap hasn’t been caused by a loss of motivation or interest in photography, a lessening of my shamanic beliefs/practice, or any diminution in the desire to be creative. The third period of December to January has naturally become the subject for this blog, and the sixth in this shamanic series: my annual hibernation…

This is the fifth in the series of key elements of shamanic healing and how they can be reflected in photographic expression. These now start to delve into areas which are foreign to many peoples’ everyday experiences and which they might rather not explore. This is OK and if you feel this, read no further but simply appreciate the images for what they are. They’re certainly more challenging to write about in ways that make sense in the context of the theme – but here goes!

This blog is a departure from the current series. It reflects a very welcome holiday in Corfu, reconnecting with the quaint little Greek town of Agios Gordios after a break of nearly four years due to Covid. I was able to focus some time on my photography and you’ll find some of my favourite images below.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This blog has been written with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence: Chat GPT on 31st May 2023. Passages that appear in italics are drawn from the AI short essay created, and some are more poetic than I might normally write: however, they challenge me to express my inner feelings and help overcome any vulnerability that I might otherwise feel. I’ve written the rest as I normally write, integrating relevant AI passages where appropriate.

An important facet of shamanic healing is recognising that there are various natural rhythms and patterns throughout the year, all with links to different aspects of the natural world. Before human habitation, Earth had been developing for over 4.5 billion years. Homo sapiens appeared ‘only’ @ 190,000 years ago and so it’s not surprising that particularly in the early days of the hunter-gatherers, this environment not only determined the success of their existence, but also became the source of their developing understanding and questioning of the world around them.

Most people will have an understanding of who their immediate ancestors are, probably most typically parents, grandparents and maybe even great-grandparents. Some are moved to research their family trees: indeed, members of my own family have researched back as far as 1701 on my paternal side and 1796 on my maternal side. These can give one a sense of one’s place in history and how/why/where at least some of one’s own experience, beliefs and values originated.

Following my last blog, I have reflected to further explore my third theme for 2023: ‘I’ll explore the connection between my photography subjects and my shamanic practice more explicitly, seeking a deeper and more integrated understanding of both…’, which in past months has slowly grown in significance for me in relation to my photography…

This is the first blog I’ve posted since November 2021. Briefly, an underlying health condition diagnosed four years ago reappeared that month giving me symptoms not unlike long Covid - easily fatigued, breathless and not able to walk more than about 2km and experiencing what I can only describe as “brain fog” – difficulty in concentrating for any length off time. This is not ideal for pursuing a creative past-time requiring energy and concentration in the field, and considerable focus while processing in Lightroom! However, the good news is that two planned trips were able to go ahead in February and March which I’ve used as the subject for this blog while “getting back in the saddle”, or photographically “getting back behind the tripod”.

Family was the priority this month as we spent 28 days between June and early July visiting close relatives who we hadn’t seen face-to-face since February 2020. Intentional photographic opportunities were therefore few and far between. However, I managed three two-hour sessions when I was able to get out and be creative.

Despite lockdowns coming to an end, we’ve been experiencing one of the wettest and coldest Mays on record! While I’m not a fair-weather photogapher, these conditions can affect one’s motivation on certain days - and they did! However, I have been out a few times relatively locally, re-estabishing my practice and the necessary planning that goes with that.

It’s over three months since my last Blog and I’ve been acutely aware of this first break in my monthly posting since its inception in January 2020. There are two reasons for this, reflected in its title:

Last month’s theme of “Isolation…” became the challenge I thought it might. While some images came naturally, others felt more “forced”, and overall I was less happy with the collection than previous blogs. My main learning is that for a subject like this, given the number of trips I make in a month, it would be better to work up such a complex theme to do it justice over a longer period of time. So, this month I decided not have a theme - hence the title “Unfettered…”. I felt liberated, and it was one of my best months photographically, technically, compositionally and motivationally:

I knew this month’s theme of Isolation, prompted by the onset of a second Covid wave, would be challenging! Even though I embraced its meaning as positive (solitude, privacy etc), neutral (remoteness, withdrawal etc) as well as negative (confinement, desolation etc), it’s a complex concept to portray in a two-dimensional image. While I searched for relevant compositions, I sometimes felt I was “forcing the issue” or manufacturing a scene that stretched the meaning of the concept…

Most of my blogs and past projects have been centred around places or news. This month I wanted a different challenge: to evoke emotion in myself and anyone viewing these images. The theme of “Mysterious” emerged, variously defined as having an atmosphere of strangeness/secrecy; enigmatic; mystical; exciting curiosity, amazement or awe. These 6 images were selected from 21 taken during the month:

We sadly had to cancel our annual June pilgramage to Loggos in Paxos, so I set the intention to revisit selected images taken in the past two years and reprocess the RAW files in a different way. The objectives of this were to a) use my latest Lightroom skills to portray a new perspective on each image, experimenting with less conventional processes, and b) provide a small collection of images that give some sense of what this place means to me.

This delayed blog was planned to be about our recent trip to South Wales to explore its walks and photographic possibilities. However, the escalating world-wide pandemic and our temporarily changed way of life increasingly made me feel uneasy about posting another set of images as if nothing was happening around us all. It’s too big to ignore!