Poetry and Photography

Swimming With Trout began as most of my photographic images with a dream of transformation. These particular dream experiences have quite literally taken me around the world to sacred places like the Rosario monarch sanctuary in Michoacan, Mexico, the Greek Orthodox monasteries of Meteora in Thessaly, and to the Celtic bee-hive huts on the monastic island of Skelig Michael in West Kerry, Ireland.

"As long as a drop is falling from the heavens it may be called a drop, but when it drops into the Ocean it is no more a drop, it is an Ocean". From the Sufi text: The Naqshbandi Way.

The dream which inspired this photographic sequence occurred last winter following a long drought in which sleep was dreamless and troubled. That period of dryness ended when aspects of the dream--as if drops emerging out of the Ocean and then returning--flowed round the figures of women performing ritual expressions of creative energy.

A woman in her eighth month of pregnancy shares a luminous globe of knowledge (The Conception Rock) with the maiden dreamer. The dreamer is then initiated into the sea for creative nurturing and insight. While swimming she experiences the collective energy and movement of a school of trout. Her fingers become extensions of the school and she is no longer separate from fish. She is no longer a single consciousness in water and experiences the awe and glory of oneness with god, moving through the ever present Ocean of Divine Unity toward spiritual enlightenment.

Karmen Dreaming represents the creative potential of all humanity, the poems and the visions waiting to bring forth grace and light. These images were taken three days before Karmen's birth.

It was the dream that brought me these images and led me back to the sea myself, where I swim now almost daily. I believe dreams are like salt water and can heal if we allow ourselves to be initiated into them and swim as one with the creatures that accompany us on our life's journey.

Gallery >>