Journeys into the Landscape:

Experiences & Lessons in Drawing, Nature & Personal Growth

A few years back I went out into the landscape to draw from life. It was a mild spring day and fortunately the leaf-bedded ground was dry enough to sit down upon comfortably.

As I moved through the trees in this wooded area I enjoyed the experience of moving through the changing configurations of light and form. There was a sense of command as I actively moved around and near trees, the twisting extensions of vines and an intriguing variety of leaf textures, lichens and weathered limestone.

Eventually, I selected a place to pause and to choose a point of focus from which I would create my drawing. As I sat upon the ground, I realized how different was this manner of relating to the wooded landscape in comparison with that of moving through the total environment as one journeying over and through the landscape. No longer was I taking in my surroundings as an active agent—as a body moving over the ground at will—through the spatial dimension.

My experience of this same environment shifted when I sat down and encountered these same trees, stones and layered textures of growth and decay from a state of relative physical passivity. As I sat poised on the edge of my stillness I felt humbled by my surroundings. Yet, though a developing state of attentive, body-centered awareness the wooded landscape seemed to manifest itself as an active entanglement of chaotic energy that surrounded me in my silence.

Initially, I couldn’t draw at all—for there was such a sense of fullness and complexity of natural life springing up and stretching out all around me—that I didn’t know how to begin. Or in other words, I didn’t know how to translate what I was seeing and this state of experiencing nature as being an active agent that was surrounding me as a living force.

But I stayed with this experience. I allowed myself to be wholly present in the unbounded flow of time. Thus, I entered into this experience of the landscape through the dimension of time—or as one being still and aware within the continuum of time as it unfolded around me.

And then, to my astonishment, what I had perceived initially to be a confused tangle of limbs, vines, foliage and larger intersections of tree and lithic forms began to transform within the field of my perception. I began to see and to appreciate the beautiful inter-connecting rhythms of line and form. Where I once saw only chaos, I began to see and to understand the harmony and cooperative patterns of growth and accommodation amongst the varied manifestations of flora and stone mingled with patterns of light and shadow.

With a new clarity of understanding—from a position of being within this experience born of contemplative discovery, I lifted my pencil and began to draw. And my drawing emerged from my being within the center of this experience—as one remembered—or reconnected to the natural ground of generative life.

And I saw deeper into the living woods on that day that I had ever seen before.And from that revelatory moment and forward, my manner of being in the world, and my art, were transformed.