From my early days at West Point, I can still smell the grass and see my lane up the mountain on the bayonet assault course. When we first started our field training, we would strike tires and dummy enemies with our bayonets, while rendering our battle cries of: “Kill, Kill, Kill!” This didn’t seem out of place at all as a 17-year-old boy, full of ambition, insecurity, and wanting to belong to something. After all, we were at the United States Military Academy. An institution founded by George Washington, where our nation’s warrior leaders have had a chance to learn the profession of arms for more than 200 years.
It’s extremely unnatural for most human beings to intentionally harm or kill someone. Therefore, the military trains incessantly, like a football team practicing plays. Ever wonder what Soldiers are doing while they’re not engaged in a real-world conflict? They train, train, and train some more. They live by axioms like, “the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle” and they are dead right. I lived by these axioms and led my units by them. We trained – and we trained hard.
The training eventually gets deeper and more nuanced over time. It becomes ingrained into a way of thinking, an operating system that serves threat identification and threat neutralization. You become sharper in your training and naturally become aware of threats and engage them at a much faster rate. I specifically remember the axiom, ‘violence of action’. For me, this didn’t stop outside of training and conflict; it permeated my life off the battlefield, outside of the uniform. Some of us remained constantly aware, vigilant, and developed an edge.
All of this is a fantastic operating system for surviving in hostile situations: conflicts, combat, fights, basically anything that requires our Amygdala to fire. The Amygdala is that part of the brain near the base that senses danger and jolts us into a fight or flight response. It’s a wonderful piece of equipment that has protected us and allowed our species to survive and thrive during our time on Earth.
Graduating in June of 2002 and becoming a commissioned officer in an Army at war, this training, hypervigilance, and threat identification served me well. It helped in situations that required emotionless, pragmatic action to protect that which we love from existential threat. Thankfully, in the United States, those situations are few and far between in our daily lives. So, what do we do when the existential threat is no longer present? This question puts some warriors into another tough situation. We’re now at the mercy of our training to harm and “kill, kill, kill” others. Now, we must undo and turn OFF all of that ingrained training – hoping to not be the ‘hammer looking at everything like it’s a nail’ or a Solider looking at everything and everyone like it’s a threat – and reacting as such.
I remember returning home from combat with many, many feelings I had never felt before; among them, an odd sense that nothing really mattered, and nothing was important. The danger was gone, and the stakes were now low, lower than I could imagine. Go get groceries, head over to Home Depot on a Saturday, watch a football game, attend a baby shower? How am I supposed to get excited about that? Are you kidding me? These were some of the new thoughts that occupied my headspace.
When it was tough to find solace in living each day, many of us looked for that danger and that lust again. To describe the feelings of combat without including lust would be irresponsible on my part; there was a lot of lust for excitement, danger, and experience. I’ve spent many hours considering what this feeling was, and it was lust. There’s nothing like playing for keeps, utilizing every bit of innate and trained skill you have, operating at your peak capacity with nuance, hoping to cheat death again. There’s no drug or stimulus that can compare to this feeling – and for that feeling, I developed a deep lust.
It’s tough to find this feeling or situation in ordinary life in America. Many veterans reached towards the edges of society, where the danger was once again hot and inviting. We drank, took drugs, acted promiscuously, gambled, broke laws, looked for fights, got arrested, and ended up destroying things directly and indirectly because we were now ALIVE again. We could FEEL something. There were consequences and problems (of our own creation) we had to solve again. And there were enemies (of our own creation) we had to fight against.
There were many mistakes made. Mistakes that are still being made by returning veterans, including me. These mistakes continued uninterrupted for years until I began to treat myself like someone that I was responsible for; until I started to truly recognize and care for my inner child. Without the help of positive people around me as well as my willingness to accept that help (tougher than you think), I would have perished alongside so many veterans and friends that have paid the ultimate price after returning home.
During this season of my life, there were many small things I began doing that helped me begin healing and slowly shifting my perspective. I’m a very open-minded person with strong discipline and these two traits coupled together allow me to dive into new endeavors with zeal and commitment. This served me well once I made the decision to start taking care of myself – it allowed me to try things and eventually find peace and love in my heart again. One of the most surprising things that emerged was taking photographs.
Britt (my incredible partner) asked me to go on a hike one day and that wasn’t really appealing to me. My idea of a hike was painting my face, strapping on a heavy pack with some weapons, and ‘embracing the suck’ for hours through brutal terrain. And so, my initial thoughts were, “nope, done with that part of my life – I’m not hiking anywhere.” Slowly, Britt got me to come on a few hikes and I began to realize that my relationship to hiking and walking was skewed by experience. Hiking was a beautiful way to free my mind, relax, and get reacquainted with nature, which is what we’re all a part of; something that hadn’t truly occurred to me until about 10 years ago.
Once I began spending time outdoors hiking, my heart opened slightly, and I began to experience awe. The infinite organizing power of nature took my breath away. The rocks, leaves, trees, lichen, fungi, mountains, rivers, oceans, tidepools, and all the beautiful animals that coexist in this heaven we find ourselves living in began to inspire me. They were part of me; me, part of them.
A short poem I wrote on 2/24/2016:
Ecstasy when I can see
And touch the land, a part of me
In these leaves, and in these peaks
I’m all of it, it’s all of me
At the time, mobile phones were producing pictures with comparable quality to expensive cameras. It was a perfect season to begin capturing some of that beauty I was experiencing in nature and sharing this new feeling and perspective with the world. I’ve always had deep love for the interplay and colors of abstract painting, which allows me to paint what I feel inside rather than what I see outside. I took this approach as I began learning the basics of photography editing.
Photography was a new medium for me to experiment with and begin sharing both the beauty I saw outside and the feelings I experienced inside during my time deep in nature. Over the next few years, the dark early mornings were spent out in solitude with the dogs. Many mornings would be spent with Britt; other mornings were spent with whomever I could convince to join me on an early morning adventure. I was searching for beauty, awe, and meaning that I could capture and share with the world.
As this process became more important to me and a bigger part of my life, I reflected on growing up in Brooklyn and getting to use computers in the tech center at Xaverian High School. I grew up in the concrete jungle, one I knew so well. This juxtaposed against my ignorance of anywhere outside of New York City. If it were outside of NYC, like anywhere South of Staten Island or North of The Bronx, it might as well have been another planet. The city was all I knew, however I yearned for something natural. For big skies, vast oceans, towering mountains, solitude, and peace. In the tech center, on those computer screens, I found all of that and more.
I remember scouring the search engine, “Altavista” (pre-google), and the breathtaking displays of natural beauty on the screen. These photographs could take me far away from the issues in my life, the worries in my gut, and the cold, dark streets of a lonely city with an inner sadness I couldn’t escape. Those photographs transported me away from the insecurity; away from the darkness, sadness, and uncertainty that surrounded my life through adolescence. Those photographs were everything. I remember sitting in the tech center for hours, feeling the beauty, power, and peace these places inspired in my heart. How could I ever get there from here?
Fast forward 20 years and I was living on the West Coast, going out hiking every day, and capturing beautiful scenery. I was poetically on the other side of the screens that 16-year-old kid escaped through, if only for a few brief minutes and hours in the tech center. Had I made it? Had I escaped all that life was? The fear, uncertainty, and sadness I felt? It was an alarming reflection; how good my life had become. How much peace, love, and awe were available to me in nature, in life.
I was now able to provide joy, love, and awe to both myself and others through exploration, art, and ultimately, searching for the good. Actively searching for the good in nature was a NEW form of training.
It took a few years to realize, in hindsight, how this foray into photography ultimately reshaped my connection to life and experience. It’s quite clear looking back at the process now. It involved being intentional and disciplined about my work. I was considering equipment and scheduling, waking up extremely early and going out into the dark, scary forest alone. I was searching for and finding beauty, experiencing the unexpected moment and the sheer awe that’s available to us on this incredible Earth. Pictures are transcendent. They force us to stop and be in a moment, something most of us don’t do enough.
This intentional process of exploration in the service of beauty started to permeate my entire life. It shifted my outlook toward experience, happiness, and the goodness in life. Internally, the positive aspects of life became the focus as opposed to the negative aspects. This internal shift began to manifest externally in the world around me. My behavior and outlook changed, and I began to appreciate, care for, and attend to the relationships in my life more deeply. This outlook extended to the people I would meet and begin new relationships with over time. I was no longer looking for reasons to disqualify people or things, rather I was looking for the inherent beauty in all aspects of life.
This gratitude for the beauty in the world grew out of the process of photography; going out with the intention to find beauty in this world and share it with others. I became more grateful for life in general. Gratitude showed up in my daily life consistently and it was an incredible gift and powerful force for goodness. Inspired by this power and wanting to sustain it, I began doing more to cultivate this state over the last few years with an intentional, daily gratitude practice. Sitting down to my journal each morning after meditation, I write a short paragraph about something in my life for which I am grateful. This maintains my outlook and focus on what I have rather than what I do not.
What we search for will eventually arise.
We can seek love and beauty.
And we can choose to focus on the good in this very moment.