The Motherbox: 2017 - 2020

Music by April Camlin and Bana Haffar – Recorded at The Cabbage School, Leicester, NC, February 19, 2021. Special thanks to Jessica Green.

 
 

Out with my cousin Audrey in a forest in southern Pennsylvania, I find a piece of language. The word foraging. Foraging for photographs. Not capturing, not taking, not shooting. I don’t know what I’m looking for. But it is something like food. Something that nourishes. Something essential. Nuts, seeds, mushrooms and berries. Alignment. Beauty, treasure, communion.

Alignment in the feral world. A way to hold and be held. I sit perched on a rock in a frozen wood watching the full moon rise orange through the cold blue dusk. I breathe in deeply and click the shutter release held at my heart’s eye view. The trees wave and the river waves and the animals I can not see all wave as they call out to us all “we’re here for you, we’re here for you.” 

Audrey tells me when you’re foraging for mushrooms you use a basket, a container with holes. With mushrooms the carrier-bag must be porous, so that as you traipse about feeling awe at the world around you, you sprinkles spores along the forest floor. And I think there is something there. A way to be a part. A way to be human.