Aspen Meditations
This series showcases my photography portraits of the bark and trunk of aspen trees in a grove eighteen miles north of Flagstaff, AZ, captured during the Winter of 2015.
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.
Series Title: Aspen Meditations
Medium: Photography
Media: Pigment Print
(Artist's proof not available for sale)
Email: marco@ma9.co
Tel: 347.772.9370 in New York City