First Light

Through tender relationships between three siblings and their farm animals, this series celebrates innocence, and a non-transactional bond between children and animals, showing how at first light of birth, we are at our purest.

This photo series is a gaze on how at first light of birth, we mirror the essence of nature - unspoiled, without motive or intent - every act coming out of pure instinct, rather than reason. As children, we are in our purest form, at Shunya (emptiness). This echo of spirit between animals and children is what threads these photos together.

The photos depict three siblings - Maisie, Clara, and Rupert - living on a small farm with their parents in southern England. Their family raise animals for their sustenance and livelihood, a way of the world I struggle with. For all that, Clara and Rupert are full of wonder and curiosity around the animals, sharing a playful, non-transactional bond with them. The ego that creates separateness and boundaries is barely present. They’re yet to grow up and have that innocence replaced by bias, fears, and worldly desires. They remind me of my seven year old self at boarding school. On most Sundays I’d be flat on my belly next to a murky pond waiting for “Papa Frog” to appear with a big splash. When the great amphibian emerged from the depths, I was ecstatic. The animals and I were part of One.

Yet there was another plane of consciousness and an even deeper purity I found in seven-year-old Maisie, the eldest child. She has a rare genetic disorder - Wiedemann Steiner syndrome - resulting in development delay and intellectual disability. Maisie reflects the animals further, as she’s full of sounds and expressions but is unable to speak. I see her as a human incarnation of nature, with no identification with the Self, fully present, and possessed of an unmediated wisdom that lies dormant in most adults. This was clear to me when Maisie held a lamb in her arms and Clara asked her mother, “Mum, why isn’t Maisie scared of the mummy sheep?” Unlike her siblings, Maisie was unaware a mother ewe might perceive her as a threat to the lamb. The ewe knew instinctively the lamb was safe with the child. Child and animal were reflections to each other - clean, like clear water, a part of the grand interconnected web of life, and wonderful teachers of kinship. Her younger siblings were evolving out of childhood, but Maisie was at zero, a true child of nature. For the world, she might have a disability, but for me she was the Buddha.

These photos are motifs of shared innocence between animals and children, and a prayer for us to return in spirit to where we began. When we touch nature with the purity of that first light, when we merge into oneness with it, we are nurtured in response, not as a transaction but as natural symbiosis, as naturally unfolding phenomena.