Aspen Meditations

Portraits of the bark and trunk of aspen trees taken during the Winter of 2015 in a grove eighteen miles north of Flagstaff, AZ.

Important Note: three artworks in the series are eight to ten feet tall on the longest edge. Please see description for each. 

Aspen Meditations was originally inspired by The God's Script, Jorge Luis Borge's short story about a Mayan priest who searches for and deciphers a powerful incantation written by a god on the coat of a jaguar. The series became an unconscious projection of personal journeys into spiritual transfiguration while on a sojourn through the American Southwest. 

I should also note that I knew nothing about aspen trees when I first encountered and photographed them during a challenging time in my life in the winter of 2006. I knew nothing about them when I took these portraits in the same grove in the winter of 2015 while traveling through the American South West. I knew nothing of aspen trees this morning when I uploaded the photos in Summer of 2023.

I just found out aspen trees live over a hundred years, while the interwoven root systems under them, all connected to a single parent tree, can live to ten thousand years. The oldest aspen tree colony named Pando has lived eighty-thousand years in Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah. An Aspen colony as old as our species.

I do not know why I was drawn to them. After a decade in New York, I had gone to the desert without knowing why and woke up one morning and had my face full of tears for a full month during my every waking hour when I first met these trees while driving along US-180 in the snow-filled Winter of 2006. Their presence that day and the experience of taking their portraits then sitting lotus-like before them since then continue to invoke in me peacefulness and life-transforming meditative states.