From the Ordinary to the Sacred: A Diver’s Lesson on What We Take for Granted
Essence – What Lies Beneath
A Continuation of Awakening
Awaken was born the day I finally slowed down enough to really see. A single kelp bladder, something I had overlooked a thousand times, suddenly appeared luminous, essential, and full of quiet strength.
But that was only the first lesson.
The more I returned to the kelp forests of California, the more I realized that awakening is not a one-time event, it’s a practice. It’s choosing again and again to look at the familiar with fresh eyes, to find the sacred in what has become ordinary.
That practice led me here to: Essence- What Lies Beneath.
A Cathedral Beneath the Waves
Swimming through a kelp forest is like entering another world. As soon as I go under the surface, everything above disappears. The noise, the rush, the weight of it all... gone. In its place is silence, a calm that wraps around me like a hug from the ocean.
The kelp rises from the ocean floor in tall columns, their fronds moving slowly with the current like ribbons in a slow dance. Light filters down in golden rays, catching the water’s tiny particles making it feel like I’m swimming through a field of stars. Fish dart around the leaves, sea lions spin and twirl with ease, and all around me, the forest sways back and forth, breathing in time with the sea.
I’ve swum this scene countless times along the California coast. It’s beautiful, yes, but also familiar. It’s so familiar that after a while, I stopped really noticing. The forests became backdrops instead of wonders. After many dives, I began to take them for granted.
The Restlessness of the Familiar
There is a restlessness that stirs in all of us, a desire for what is novel. Yet in chasing the new, we can forget the wonder waiting quietly in the familiar.
On my next dive after capturing Awaken, instead of going back to chasing the wide-angle views of the kelp beds, I decided to keep looking closer. I asked myself, ‘What else haven’t I truly seen yet? What other details am I missing?’
It’s easy to assume that the magic is in the vastness. In the towering canopies, the endless pillars, the sheer scale. But what if there was more wonder tucked into the small?
That question became a challenge for me. Not just as a diver, but as a human being.
Illumination in the Details
With that shift in intention, the kelp revealed itself to me differently.
This time, it wasn’t only the small air bladders that caught my attention. It was the fronds themselves. Under the strobes of my camera, their edges glowed with a luminous clarity, every curve and serration etched in light.
What I had once seen as simple blades of seaweed, those slimy leaves that catch your feet on the beach, transformed into something far more striking: ribbons of form and flow, layered in a dance of shadow and brilliance.
I positioned my camera’s lights behind the fronds, rather than their normal positioning off to the side. Backlit in this way, the kelp fronds shed their identity as plants and became something altogether unexpected.
Sculptural. Abstraction. Art. Their surfaces carried a rhythm, their textures spoke of both strength and delicacy, and their shapes revealed a sculptural grace hidden to the naked eye.
It struck me again, just as it had with Awaken. How eye-opening it can be to look at the same subject in a new way. By reframing what I thought I knew, I had rediscovered the forest I had grown too familiar with.
The ordinary became sacred once again.
The Sacred Hidden in Plain Sight
This is what Essence: What Lies Beneath is truly about. Not just kelp. Not even just the ocean. But the practice of seeing differently.
Because learning to shift perspective is the very essence of awakening.
We each need to ask ourselves, how many things in our daily lives have we stopped noticing? The way sunlight spills across the same kitchen counter each morning. The pattern of leaves outside the window that barely change with the seasons. The familiar sound of a door closing at the end of the day. The quiet presence of those we share our lives with, so constant we sometimes forget to notice.
But when we pause and choose to look again, the special parts of those familiar things open themselves to us. They reveal their hidden beauty, their quiet strength, and their deeper meaning.
This photographic journey made me begin realizing what I had not yet come to truly understand. That perspective is a superpower. I understood that what you choose to see or not see shapes the way you experience the world. But now, for the first time, I was beginning to understand that most importantly, you can choose to change your perspective at any time.
Essence – What Lies Beneath
This piece continues the journey I began with Awaken, a practice of mindfulness, of learning to see with intention, of finding gratitude in the details that so often go unnoticed. Each dive, each photograph, has been part of that awakening.
And now, Essence: What Lies Beneath is my way of extending that invitation to you. To join me in this practice of seeing differently. Let this artwork become a reminder in your own space. An anchor to pause, to reframe, and to notice the quiet beauty and strength that surrounds you every day.
An Invitation to See Anew
Essence: What Lies Beneath is available as a limited edition fine art print, created to bring this sense of reverence and tranquility into your home.
For the thoughtful collector, this artwork is more than an image. It’s a reminder to remember to see the familiar with fresh eyes and to turn the ordinary into the sacred.
