After a year long sabbatical from client work, I took a couple of motherhood sessions this fall. They were glorious. I remembered how much I love working with mothers and their kids, but I also felt a strange unease. Something has shifted and I no longer want to shoot with the formula that I think plagues commercial family photography in central Alberta.

I love this session. I love this family. And I feel an absence of something that hasn’t fully taken shape in my mind, an entantiodromia sneaking its way into the foreground of consciousness. Come sweet slithering friend – take shape and show me who you are.

Depth Psychology mirrors Art’s ‘unintentional’ exclusion of mothers; all of the founding women scholars of Jungian psychology were childless; Marion Woodman, Toni Wolff, Marie Louise Von Franz, Hannah Barbara, Aniela Jaffe, Esther Harding, just to name a few. Many of these women contributed to the Jungian theory concept of the Mother Archetype, while, like the men of Jungian theory, lacking any embodied experience (the expectations, limitations, and dichotomies) of mothering children.

The picture becomes a tangible symbol of a shared quality – expressed differently in him than in me – that connects us. In this light, the photograph becomes an alchemical artifact that bridges mind and matter.

I know my tastes and the ways they like to evolve and they are chthonic tastes, wild tastes, the tastes of dirt and sweat and growls at the back of the throat. My taste is eruption, climactic, lightning bolts that paralyzes me while I lay in ecstatic elation. They are weeds and vines that block the view, mystery and madness and wild cackling in the wind.

Eco-sexuality – it’s a thing. Google defines it as a movement of rejecting the idea of Earth as Mother as patriarchal, and embracing Earth as lover deserving devotion and respect. My definition? The elementality of Landscape turns me on. I don’t think about people when I’m having sex, I think about the Rain. I think about soaked landscapes. I think about running water over my skin. I didn’t even know there was a word for this until I read Sophie Strand’s The Body is a Doorway and realized that I’m not the only one that thinks water is hot.

A project has been born. It’s a documentation of our yearly pilgrimage into the wild, a longing for a life long past; my desire to return, in a more intentional and healed way, to the ferality and simplicity that marked my childhood.

April-June is when we get consistent, specifically lit, puffy clouds. I would hardly call this a project, it’s more like an observation. A form specific seasonal light study.

The quality of your output is reflected in what you consume. Fast often and eat only what you want to shit.

A Hot and Heavy Review of James Hillman’s The Dream and the Underworld