Know Yourself

I never really saw myself before I started seeing nature through a lense. Always having been a dreamer with deep connection to the unkempt wild, I was surprised to find my own reflection there.

All of a sudden the world slowed down from its fast forward highway; my breathing calmed down and I grew mindful; My every step became momentous as I forged the path I came to call my own. This place was real, real in a sense that for once included me, and in every turn I took, I created me.

I realized I had been in the dark. I had taken my self for granted; I had let the false ideals of the world envelop me and steer me on an unforgiving path, away from a sense of true self.

I didn’t know my own voice from all the voices that had taken over. With eyes blind to the trees that make a forest, they saw me – and reflected in their eyes I saw what they saw: they saw nothing.

All until I learnt to be the forest; I became the soil under which I walked and the world was thus reborn, in every single step I took. More and more often I looked towards the wild, and everytime I saw myself reflected there I connected with a dormant self I had never before known.

This is how I grew to see myself with the same love I had always bestowed upon a marvellous scene. The love grew, and with it my curiosity and mission to capture all the nuances of the elements. I felt a need to explore how closely linked I was to the existance of it all.

For the first time in my life, I had the urge to know myself. And I found love in my search, a love for eternal life and decay, for I found that both coexists within me, as it exists in balance within all things.

Today I want to share this particular photo with you, as it immortalized one of those moments of self-awareness for me. On an early December morning after the first heavy snowfall, the sun’s persistence had tipped the scale and all around me the frozen world perspirated.

It was as if the whole world was elevated in a sigh on a cold window; the mist so thick and radiating with self-love. There was a peculiar heat to this winter sun, rolling the horizon lazily, as is the way of winter days in Norway.

Hugged by this thick fog, (I was physically under duress from the cold) I could still recognize the heat from the light, and how it felt like love. A love for the many, by far colder days, yet to come that season.

Where one might dread the first snow, knowing so well the long, cold darkness it represents, these marshland trees embraced the snow’s duvet like a child might before sleep takes them, knowing the truth in their heart, that the morning would come again.

As would the ever-green trees of ancient lore and praise, wisely remind me of the same cycle.

Thus I borrowed the heat, the love and the trees’ knowledge, and I welcomed winter in a way I had never welcomed the season before.

This particular capture is but one of a numberless scenes I have captured and let myself merge with, and I hope that if I continue to share the beauty in this world, I might open the portal to someone else in need of seeing their own reflection.

I aspire to inspire all to look closer, and to be mindful with their hearts first. Where I have found an endless source of inspiration beyond this door, I wish for everyone to experience and draw upon its power when they need it.

I hope to inspire people to «be the forest» as I have learnt to. For the comfort, the love and the strength found through nature will bind us all together, as one.

I most often express myself through poetry, and would hereby love to conclude this story with one of my own.

Curiously, it dawns on me

How old age sets us free

Growing into my own skin

Remembering who I’ve always been

How it taught me to deeply feel:

Everything I am deem’d real

With age I‘ve grown to love this skin

As a manifest to all I’ve been

And while the rain merge into tears

I am cleansed of all my long-fought fears

Mother Earth’s reassuring call:

Awakening all before the final fall

Slumbering mind remembering

Calming off my fever’d trembling

Surprised, as if I’d always known

How I am not at all alone

For how indeed, can loneliness be

When everything is a part of me?

«Old Age» by Catharina H. Solli