Breath is a lifeline that connect us all, to each other and to a place. Breath brings us back to now.
Breath brings a somatic attention which the mind doesn’t fully comprehend.
Walking the southern stretch of Torrey Pines near my home, past Flat Rock and into the quieter wildness of the preserve, the wind arrives against exposed skin as information. The cliffs fracture in real time. Hoodoos spiral and dissolve. The whole coast is a patient demonstration of what it means for form to continuously give way and give rise.
I kept going back.
My graduate studies in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute introduced me to Goethean science, a practice of sustained, participatory attention in which returning to the same place again and again reveals what a single visit could never disclose.
What belongs to the coastline itself? What belongs to the mood you carried in?
That distinction sharpens and deepens with each return. And what sharpens along with it is the capacity to receive the world as genuinely alive, what Jung and Hillman called anima mundi, the soul of the world, present as structural reality rather than poetic figure.
It arrived through animal encounters that reorganized everything. An osprey’s descent restructured the entire shoreline around vertical force. Peregrine falcons arcing against sandstone dissolved the boundary between rock and air. A sea lion surfacing within arm’s reach shifted the ocean from expanse to intimate, inhabited medium.
Each encounter eventually found its way into the paintings.
I collected sandstone from the site, ground it into pigment, kelp residue, and saltwater drawn into the wash, and carried the elements of the coastline into the studio through their own substance. Then layering: marks applied and covered and reworked, earlier states persisting beneath later ones, faint and present, still alive within what followed. The same principle that the practice had been cultivating in perception, the paintings cultivated in surface.
The field shaped perception. Perception shaped the surface. The surface holds open the possibility of return.
I am still going back to that coastline.
Torrey Pines #1 (2026) — 48 × 33.5 inches
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