Where We Are Held
(Forest Floor Series — Story Behind the Photograph)
Hiking Bear Mountain in November is a lesson in humility. The day I made this image, the mountain offered nothing willingly. Rain had been falling since dawn; cold, bitter, sharp enough to turn each breath into steam. Fog clung to the forest like a second bark, softening trees into pale silhouettes and muting the entire landscape into a watercolor wash. On days like this, you don’t go out expecting comfort; you go out hoping for revelation.
I was hiking with a close friend that morning, a photographer I’ve admired for years, someone whose eye finds structure in chaos, someone whose compositions have shaped how I think about my own work. He knows this mountain as well as some people know their childhood streets. He’s climbed it in blistering heat, deep snow, and everything in between. And yet that morning, even he found nothing. He had hoped my “fresh eyes” on his familiar terrain would spark something he hadn’t yet seen. But the truth was unavoidable:
We were both fighting the forest.
Anyone who has tried photographing inside densely wooded terrain knows the frustration. The compositions feel too busy, too layered, too inconsistent to hold together in a single frame. In wide-open spaces, I feel at home. The forest interior, though? That’s always been harder. My eyes reach outward—not inward. When everything intersects - branches, brambles, shadows, glistening wet bark- the camera wants simplicity, and the forest rarely cooperates.
After forty-five minutes of climbing toward the summit, the rain intensified enough to drum on our hoods. The fog was mesmerizing, almost transcendent, but the images were not. We stopped. We scanned. We waited. Nothing held long enough to become a photograph.
And this is where years of frustration finally taught me something:
When the scene ahead refuses to speak, look down.
The forest floor has become a refuge for me, a place where overwhelming complexity collapses into clarity. A place where the stories of a landscape settle, gather, and wait with patience. And on that rain-soaked trail, the moment I lowered my gaze, the entire mountain changed.
Resting gently on a bed of moss was a single blue-tinged leaf -no bigger than my palm-held softly by the forest floor beneath it. Moss cradled it like a cushion, almost as if the forest had placed it there deliberately. The surrounding world was wet, tangled, and chaotic, yet this one small scene felt impossibly intimate. Quiet. Tender, even.
It stopped me immediately.
There is a rare kind of calm that exists on the forest floor in late autumn. Everything that once reached upward eventually returns downward, folding back into the earth to begin again. Leaves become shelter. Moss becomes cradle. What falls finds a place to be held.
This image “Where We Are Held” is my attempt to honor that moment.
It’s the kind of scene that reveals itself only when you shift your attention from searching to noticing. From forcing to accepting. From wanting a grand moment to receiving a small one.
The blue leaf, resting gently on the moss, taught me something that morning:
We are all held by something;
a memory, a place, a season, a person,
or the quiet truth that rest is not weakness
but a necessary part of becoming.
In a year marked by uncertainty and transition, this small moment of stillness spoke louder than any sweeping vista ever could. It reminded me that serenity doesn’t always come from the top of the mountain. Sometimes it’s waiting at your feet.
Featured Limited Edition Print “Where We Are Held”
A serene, contemplative work from the Forest Floor Series, celebrating quiet resilience and the gentle spaces that catch us when we fall. Ideal for collectors seeking art that brings peace, grounding, and emotional depth into the home.