Present
Present is a collaborative piece that I created with my daughter, Haidyn, when she was 18 months old. It is about being present in a moment, which is something that having children has taught me.
So often we live the moments of our lives without really being present. In our minds, we are planning for the future, anticipating the next moment, making lists of what we have to do, or remembering, referring to, or trying to forget, the past. While these are all valuable cognitive processes, they tend to prevent us from truly experiencing the moment we are in. Are we really aware of the person speaking to us, hearing their tone, comprehending the nuance in their message? Are we really seeing our surroundings, noticing the light, smelling the air, feeling the weight of the atmosphere, observing the amazing details around us?
Even at a very young age, Haidyn would sometimes take photos with our digital camera. I couldn’t help but notice that the ones she took were the ones that seemed to represent being present the most. She would capture the treetops and the sky, or a close-up of the way the grass meets the ground, or where the floor meets a wall, or backs or feet of people around her, or the corner of a canopy overhead. They seem to be more observant, more poetic.
So, in this composition, Haidyn’s photos are the clear images in the center/foreground, and the outer/background texture is made from overlaps of almost all the photos I had taken in the months prior to creating this piece. These symbolize the way that, when I take photos, I am often somewhat removed from the experience of the present, focused on preserving the moment for the future, a record of the past.
Words that refer to the past and the future are woven into this area outside of the present: planning, preparing, anticipating, expecting, rehearsing, documenting, reviewing, recollecting, remembering, forgetting...
The large blue space in the center is a photo of the sky that Haidyn took, and it represents the purity of the present, open and uncluttered by the distracting complexity of the past and future.
Haidyn has always loved to draw, and at that age had been working on circles and loops, so I used them (digitally changed to white) to represent a sort of active, energized force-field that clears out a space for the present. The beaded loop is a rosary, also symbolizing a sort of protective force-field, because of the way prayer works to clear a space to focus our attention on something important in our lives.
Haidyn—and now her brother, Spencer, too—teach me the real meaning of being present. They inspire (and require) a level of attention and focus that so often returns me to the present moment: their present to me.
I imagined a conversation with Haidyn where I, over-thinking as usual, asked: “What of the moments that were the present in the past, and those that will be the present in the future, and isn't thinking of other times now still the present?”
“This is present,”she says, simply. Every time.
Present was composed in Adobe Photoshop, using hundreds of digital photos, as well as many scans of hand-drawn circles and loops, and a scan of my rosary.