FOR Catherine Arcolio, nature wasn’t always a refuge – but it was to become a genuine life-saver.
“There came a time when I had nothing left but hopelessness and despair,” she recalls on her website Leaf and Twig.
“Each day was an abyss. All the colour, light, purpose and connection had drained out of my life. I’d spent decades self-medicating my depression until eventually, my ‘solution’ became an addiction.
“Together, depression and addiction held me hostage for a number of years and then brutally robbed me of the will to live.”
It took support from her family and friends and a move from the city to a tiny rural community in New Hampshire for Catherine to find the resources that could help with the hard process of managing her depression and recovering from addiction.
“I found comfort in the quiet of the woods and in the peacefulness a lack of cell service imposes,” she says. “Nature asked nothing of me but my respect. I could be exactly as I was. Slow. Speechless. Sparkless. My spirit was in tatters.”
Lying across the river from Vermont and just a few hours from the Canadian border, her chosen place of refuge proved the ideal place to reclaim her life, she reflects.
“It’s a very rural area. Our “town” features a stop sign, post office and tiny market,” she says. Immersed in nature, she was able to get out and about in all weathers, soak up the sunshine and rain and appreciate the particular beauty of each season and the natural processes of birth, ageing and death, savouring the eternal return of spring.
“A model of the whole, complicated, entwined, gloriousness of life,” she says. “That second spring I started to notice colours again. So many shades of green! A sky so blue you could practically splash it on your face.”
After living such a desolate grey monochrome existence for so long, the contrast was dramatic, but the transformation did not happen overnight.
“The healing was happening in infinitesimal increments, too small to notice daily or even monthly,” Catherine explains. “And then suddenly, like in the Wizard of Oz, the world was full of colour once again.”
Darkness wasn’t banished, but there was definite progress. The question was, how to keep moving toward the light?
Trawling the internet, Catherine stumbled across the work of Satya Robyn, an author, Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist who advocated writing short poetic observations or “Small Stones” as a way of engaging with the world in all its beauty.
“I followed her prompt of writing a short observation each day for a month – and then just never stopped,” she recalls. “I decided to take a photograph of what I observed as I communed with nature each day and pair it with my words.
“Later I would learn this pairing is an ancient art form called ekphrastic poetry. All I knew was that it was helping me stay connected, aware, hopeful and grateful.”
Now 62, she started posting on her Leaf and Twig website back in 2011, garnering dozens of “likes” for her short poems and making a “very modest” revenue stream from subscriptions, supplemented by occasional sales of fine art prints and greetings cards through her pixels.com and fineartamerica shops.
The poetry and photographs became something of a daily ritual, she explains: “One day at a time for over a decade I’ve built a foundation for my recovery and a body of work that honours and celebrates the natural world and our human condition.
“It happened organically, not as a grand plan. Just a practice to keep connected, to focus my mind towards gratitude rather than despair. This daily art-making saves me. I’ve been training my eye to always be on the lookout for beauty.”
In a “loud world” that moves faster and faster, she aims to transport viewers into a peaceful and intimate space, an opportunity to “linger in the renewal, nourishment and wonder of the natural world”.
And, like the woods, her website has been a refuge too, a “lovely community” of people who share their views through the comments, she says.
“That has been so healing to me, that the response to my work echoes the spirit in which it is offered.”
The internet can be a mean place, but Catherine’s website has been a sanctuary where supporters have found themselves drawn to her images and words, and the promise of beautiful daily encounters that they offer. And long may that continue.
Catherine’s blog can be found here, and her galleries of images for sale on pixels.com and fineartamerica.com.