Magical encounters on the Winter Solstice

Morgane and Alex moments after they were married, Alex is taking in the marriage certificate while Morgane holds his freshly ringed hand.

It was Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, and magic was in the air. Morgane and Alex had a larger wedding planned in Mexico a few months away, but needed to tie the knot legally before they left. All the stars aligned, their family flew in for the Christmas Holiday and they managed to book a spot at New York City Marriage Bureau just a few short days before Christmas. The love was pouring out of these two. Even knowing they had a bigger celebration to come, the specialness of this moment was lost on no one. We taxied from city hall to an intimate dinner at their favorite restaurant, arriving just as the sun was setting.

Happily signing their marriage license at New York Marriage Bureau

Posing for photos just outside the courthouse.

I’ve always believed in the magic of Christmas. I was the last kid to admit that Santa doesn’t come down the chimney, but in all truth, I never really stopped believing. I still have a deeply rooted sense that miracles, large and small, are real. In recent years, in addition to celebrating Christmas with my family, the solstice has become an important part of my personal celebration of the seasonal arc of the year. I celebrate with dance and song, with ritual and with dream work. My dreaming is strongest when the days are short. I go to bed earlier, wake up later, and luxuriate in the dreaming. I have a visceral sense that my night dreaming bleeds over into the day. A sense that the spirits are living and present. It’s a liminal time of year when anything is possible.

Celebrating with family at their favorite restaurant.

One of the practices I had been working with this year in particular was incorporating the rosary into my meditation practice. I’d had a dream:

Rose Tattoo

I catch sight of my right hand and do a double take, a black and gray shaded rose tattoo covers the top of my hand. There are two lines emerging from the rose that lead to my ring finger. The bottom third of that finger, where you’d wear a ring, is filled by a black band that goes all the way around to the back. I wonder to myself if the ink on the inside of my hand will fade or disappear with time. I look at my left arm and see a line drawing of a smiling face peeking out at me. The same black band is on that ring finger as well. 

When one of my dreaming sisters mirrored the dream back to me she suggested I read the book ‘The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary’ by Clark Strand and Perdita Finn. The rosary provided me with a few things I had been trying to link together at the time. I grew up in the Catholic faith so many of the prayers and traditions are written into my being. I stopped going to Church around the time I got to college and eventually found my way to yoga and other traditions that were embodied and held more of the answers I was seeking, yet I still had a longing to connect to my faith and my ancestors. I quickly found the rosary to be an incredibly simple and effective prayer tool. I already knew the prayers by heart and I could almost hypnotize myself with the mantra and drop into a deep seated place of trance.

I mention all this because this particular solstice blessed me with an unforgettable visit from the Virgin Mother. I had been praying the rosary for about six months at this point. I came home from Morgane and Alex’s wedding buzzing from all the joy and love. I immediately started looking through the photos out of sheer excitement. I was sitting at my desk when I heard it: drums and horns and voices singing outside my window. I live on a rather deserted strip of commercial space. I’m in the very unusual position in NYC of having basically no neighbors, and the few businesses downstairs from me were already closed on this particular evening. I couldn’t tell from up here what was going on downstairs, but I knew in my heart it was something extraordinary. I snatched my camera from my desk and ran downstairs and was greeted thus:

I had nowhere to place this in my realm of experiences. It was some sort of parade or celebration. The group continued marching down the street, I stood paralyzed for a moment, then ran back upstairs, grabbed more gear and coat and ran down the block after them. While most of the group were wearing these incredible oversized masks, one was dressed as a Jaguar with a whip and then there was a group of four unmasked women carrying a statue of the virgin mother on a palanquin.

I later learned the group is called Tecuanes San Rafael of Brooklyn. I reached out to them in every way I could find to try to work with them and photograph them again, but I’ve never received a response. I’ve checked their social pages and looked for schedules of where I can see them again, but all to no avail. All I can really say for sure is that it felt both like a waking dream and like a blessing of the highest order. It remains an experience that lives in the realm of the miraculous.

Learn more about my dreamwork practice and how it shapes my photography and the unexpected journey that led me here.

Dream Weaving and how it Inspires Your Wedding Photography

It was sometime late in 2019, we didn’t know it yet, but lockdown loomed right around the corner. I had been practicing yoga for almost a decade, and teaching for about half that. I had gone deep down the rabbit hole of trying to crack the elusive secrets of enlightenment. I had not succeeded. I knew it had something to do with heightened consciousness. I was reading various mystical texts and comparing notes to see where there was overlap and what it could possibly all mean. At the time I had my own studio on the outskirts of Ridgewood. I lived with the most curious view out my window there, in fact it was what sold me on the space: an iridescent gray wall, slightly lower than my eye-line, covered in ivy for half the year with a strip of sky above. Sometimes the sky was a bright blue and the wall a deep green, other times the leaves were gone and gray wall bled into gray sky. It was like a living Rothko. Sitting thus, staring out the window, a thought shot into my head like a rocket: I need to know more about lucid dreaming.

I quickly searched for a podcast or something to keep me company while I edited a wedding. Lucid dreaming is the experience and practice of being consciously aware that you are having a dream and so lucid to make choices about what to do and what experiences to have in the dream. Anyone can lucid dream. In fact we’re pretty sure everyone does, especially when we’re children. Some lucky dreamers, like my sisters, latch on to the experience and learn quite young how to walk in the dream lands. Others of us, myself included, become briefly aware before slipping immediately back into normal dreaming. Not being a natural lucid dreaming, I applied my obsessive hyper focus to the task. All of this obsession coincided quite beautifully with the start of quarantine. In the deep quiet of lockdown, while my weddings were indefinitely on hiatus, I spent my quarantine learning to fly.

The foundation of all dreamwork is intention paired with a journal. One intends to become lucid then takes obsequious notes. Intention can come in many forms: mantra, writing, repetition. Sometimes it’s as simple as a whispered prayer before bed. For me it meant hours of focused meditation and lots and lots of sleep. Prior to finding lucid dreaming I had spent some time listening to Abraham Hicks (iykyk) whose teachings on manifestation and intention I found seductive, yet questionable. She did drill into me that intention is linked to vibration, to a feeling. Dreamwork, lucid dreaming in particular, will humble you. You quickly learn the difference between saying ‘tonight I will fly in my dreams’ vs ‘tonight I will try to fly’. One has you soaring, the other has you jumping up and down repeatedly on a roof, unable to stay a loft. But more than that, your subconscious is like an ocean, and in order to swim there you need to be able to navigate the waters.

My photography, especially my personal work, has always lived in the realm of magical realism, dreaming & memory, but it wasn’t until I dove into the realm of my dreams that I realized I didn't have firm footing in the language of the subconscious. I would set an intention, and lucid or not, my dreams would respond to me, only none of it made any sense. And worse, as I intended (and often succeeded) more and more to become lucid, I started having nightmares. It became clear that there was material in my subconscious that needed to be examined and excavated before I could fly freely. I realized I needed a new approach.

I read some books on how to interpret dreams and I listened to many more podcasts. Eventually I found my teacher. A woman based on the west coast who teaches a form of dream work with roots in animism and bee shamanism. She taught a technique in which we gather in a circle, close our eyes and in the darkness, allow each other’s dreams to unfold in our mind’s eye. Your dream becomes my dream. I feel it, see it, hear it and then I mirror it back to you. It’s a form of embodied knowing that can only be taught through experience, but once known is yours forever.

I spent hours receiving and mirroring dreams, and having my own mirrored back. It’s deep and profound work that has healed me in ways I’m deeply grateful for. I also started to think about how memory, dreams and ultimately photography are really very similar. Catching dreams is like catching fish, it takes time and patience and they’re easily scared away. When you wake from a dream, you’re lucky to bring back a few complete scenes, more often you come back with fragments of images you can’t fully grasp. We think of photographs as complete memories. A good photograph has the ability to take you immediately back to a place and time, it’s like a key that unlocks door in your mind and the feeling come flood back in. But photographs are recorded in fractions of seconds. When I photograph a scene, no matter how many photos I take, all I’m able to bring back is mere slivers of what was and if I’m lucky I can try to make a little of sense of where I felt called to point the camera.

The goal of lucid dreaming is become more conscious, or perhaps we could say, more present. One of the practices given to beginners, but really to all lucid dreamers is to walk around your waking life and be curious if you’re awake or if you’re dreaming. How do you know? It’s a question that calls you into the present moment, that calls you to feel into your felt body and senses with rapt curiosity. One technique I learned was to take a meditation walk and for the duration of that walk pretend that you’re dreaming and take note of anything unusual. The idea is that when you’re dreaming later that night you might find yourself similarly questioning your environment and find yourself lucidly aware. It’s in this way that we start to walk with one foot in the conscious realm and one foot in the unconscious. A way of bridging the gap between worlds.

Weddings are liminal spaces where time feels like it stands still and for me as the photographer, the invitation is to be fully present to all of it. I’ve bring this meditation practice into my work. I walk around a wedding playfully imagining all of it might be a dream, which in many way, it is. I feel into the surreal and the symbolic from an embodied place and felt space, a deepening of my sense of knowing that goes beyond words. This is an active practice of mine. I faithfully record my dreams every morning and reflect on them throughout the day, and I walk in the waking world with one foot in the dream.

Read more about how dreamwork led me to Turkey for a Sufi ceremony where I photographed an unexpected wedding and shaped the origins of my approach to wedding photography. The winter solstice is another liminal time for deep dreamwork and reflection.

Origins, or, the making of a fine art wedding photographer

Grandma peeling an orange, taken while I was in high school circa 2002

I’m around twelve years when my dad first hands me his camera. I had taken pictures before this, of course, but I have no memory of those. On this day, standing in the back driveway, looking through his viewfinder, I feel something essential shift inside of myself. A feeling I can only describe as ‘ah, let me just show you.’ A feeling that I could finally be understood in a way that prior to this, I didn’t know I had been missing. I had found my instrument.

I remember telling my mother immediately that I was to be a photographer. I can’t say she fully believed how monumental a moment this was for me, but she did enroll me in the first darkroom class that she could find. And, to my complete and utter frustration, art classes followed. Because in my mother’s house if I was going to do something, I was going to do it well. I spent the better part of my free time over the next ten years in the dim red glow of a darkroom.

How can I describe the miracle, witnessed over and over again, of an image emerging from nothingness onto a of piece of paper floating impatiently in a pool of developer?

I was (am) obsessed with photography. When not in the darkroom I spent hours on the floor of the library pouring over photography books. My need to understand how to see was insatiable. I thought about nothing else. These were my college years when I had that luxury, an early exposure to a life dedicated to art and light. Internships in prestigious photography galleries and lowly assistantships in the studios of my idols followed. I took on my first wedding before I even graduated with my photography degree. Can you really capture a memory in light? I needed to know.

Marlee, from my senior thesis circa 2006

I heard the siren song calling to me. Weddings were magic and they were terrifying, each one an epic playground of chaos and joy. They required me to learn how to play my instrument to the best of my ability. I needed an arsenal of techniques to rely on. I needed speed. I needed to be able to feel my way through the music of the day. It was a grueling learning process but I thrived under the onslaught of intensity. The photos were my sweet reward.

And then it all caught up to me. Because while I knew to the tip of my soul how to take a great picture, serving brides, meeting all their expectations as a young woman with no business sense, well that really took it out of me. It would be many more years before I gathered all the skills to handle the emotional weight of a wedding.

Stephanie, 2018

Somewhere in the midst of all this, my mother passed away. I was only twenty eight and I couldn’t make much sense of any of it. My life already felt a bit off track. Or rather, I had lost sight of the track entirely. I was working for an art handling company, trying to get my bearings, but mostly partying and dancing till dawn. I had sworn off weddings entirely. But when I returned to my desk after the funeral everything felt so wrong. I was overwhelmed with the knowing that I couldn’t sit at this desk any longer. There were wounds, old and new, that suddenly felt urgent to heal. With all of the energy and abandon I had previously poured into photography, I started obsessively studying spirituality. I had so many questions; I felt convinced the answers lay hidden in the secrets of enlightenment (grief dressed up as an existential crisis). It was my certification in yoga that brought me back to my calling. I wanted to dedicate my life to meditation and practice, but I needed a career that could support me. Sitting on the beach, staring out at the ocean, I thought to myself: I need to shoot weddings again. The following week I received an email from an old friend asking if I’d document her wedding. The universe was listening.

Self portrait, 2024

In the ten years since that moment on the beach I have received three yoga certifications before turning my attention to studying dreaming and archetypal symbolism such as the tarot. I don’t know what will grab my fixation next, but all of this learning and healing is fuel for my work. I’ve come to see myself as a sort of medium. I open myself to the experience of your wedding. I open myself to the feelings, to the sounds, to the music and rhythm. I open myself to the nerves and the excitement, the joy and the grief. I let myself feel all of it with you, and, through an alchemy I’ll never fully I understand, I channel those feelings into your photos. It is an honor, a blessing to serve as sacred witness for one of life’s most important rites of passage.

You can read more about how dreamwork informs my wedding photography and how it led me to photograph a wedding during a sacred Sufi ceremony in Turkey.

Kiss Your Cameras For Me.

It was the most unexpected surprise. I had traveled all the way to Turkey for a mystical dream come true - to dance five days with the Sufi dervishes. The journey there was one of those arduous treks where nothing flowed quite as smoothly as I wanted. For starters, while dragging my luggage between platforms I watched the A train pull off without me, sentencing me to a twenty minute wait in the five am sweltering heat of July, helplessly sweating into the clothes I would be forced to wear for the next twenty four hours.

I slept in fits and starts. Every time I fell asleep a baby or fellow passenger woke me violently. There was a layover in London, a train to a friend’s, a car back to the airport. Another flight. When I finally touched ground on Turkish soil, I expected relief. Friends of my host were to pick me up and drive me the last leg. I greeted them excitedly, they greeted me indifferently. I had imagined being welcomed with loving arms as an honored guest, sharing notes on how excited we were. Instead, they spoke to each other in Turkish, while I sat silently in the back so tired I could barely string a sentence together in English. Something had been lost in translation, something cultural and beyond my reach. I felt lonely and off center. As omens go, not the best of beginnings.

But of course the journey started long before that. It started two months earlier in a psilocybin ceremony in Brooklyn. It started four months before that at an ecstatic dance retreat in Brazil. It started five years ago when I dove into dreamwork and started letting my dreams be me guides. I guess it really it started ten years ago, still grieving the death of my mother, staring into the ocean on a beach in Ocean City. Where, having just completed a yoga teacher training, in a moment of absolute clarity, I decided the best way to dedicate myself to my spiritual practice was to go back to wedding photography.

What’s important to know is that this trip was not about weddings or wedding photography. I had traveled half way across the world to drop into ecstatic trance, to whirl for hours on end. I didn’t even bring a camera, not really. A friend had gifted me a little toy film camera to play with, so I brought that and two rolls of film. No one here even knew what I did for a living. No one cared. Here, your credentials were based in what kinds of healing art you study and it takes too long to explain how wedding photography qualifies.

The name we use for this ceremony is Sema. Our Sema was to last for five days and nights. The musicians would start playing, they would change every hour, but the music would never cease, and as long as two Semazans were circling, we went on. Sometimes we whirl, sometimes we walk the circle. And always there are people sitting around us in support. When we enter the space, we bow, then we kiss the ground. When we pass the musicians, we bow again.

Sema means many things, but mostly we say it means to listen. So I listened, and I did what I do best as a photographer, I watched. I can’t tell you all of what I witnessed. It’s too sacred. But one thing that caught my heart deeply: each time I watched the musicians pull their beloved instruments from their cases, and each time they put them away, they gave them a little kiss. A gesture of love, so small yet so mighty, imbuing the inanimate with life. As Semazans we bow to the musicians, as musicians we bow to our instruments.

It took me days to settle. Shedding the layers of travel and landing back into myself was a chore. Rather than the bliss I had experienced whirling in Brazil, each time I whirled, I found myself nauseous and shaky. I tried to surrender to the discomfort. I did surrender to it. Slowly I found my rhythm, I walked when I couldn’t whirl.

The energy was intense and indescribable. The music, otherworldly. I could sit and soak in it for hours. I did. Then I would retreat to my room, curl into my pajamas and gush with my roommate about how magical it all was. It was during one of these breaks that we heard a bit of a commotion. We could feel that there was something happening outside of the Sema, but it wasn’t clear what. A passerby asked if we were going to the wedding. What an odd collision of vocation and passion I felt. To be here, so far from the world I know, and suddenly feel compelled to grab my (toy) camera, kiss it and stand in sacred witness. Only in dreams have I photographed a wedding with so little notice. Only in dreams would I show up to a wedding with a toy for a camera. Only in dreams have I photographed a wedding with two brides, and two grooms. Here, where I can’t even understand the words. Yet, where nothing is lost is translation, where I know exactly what to do and where to stand. Here, photographing a wedding, I find myself completely centered and at home.

This journey started with my decision to return to wedding photography as spiritual practice and continues through my dreamwork practice.