Time to Wake Up

I didn’t set out to make a collection. It just happened the way most meaningful things do, accidentally, over time, without a plan.

 

These are random screenshots from my phone. Black and white images that caught my eye — trees, land, sky, waves at sea.

 

But what stopped me wasn’t the image. It was the time stamped across it in enormous numbers, sometimes filling half the frame, sometimes written right across the sky itself.

 

 

Just the moment I happened to look. No staging, no choosing.

And yet.

If you’re into manifesting or angel numbers you already felt that.

Angel Numbers, Anyone?

For everyone else, 11:11, 2:22, 4:44 etc. are those sequences that shows up when you’re in alignment, when things are coming together, when the universe is basically giving you a thumbs up.

Millions of people see 11:11 and feel something shift. Or the 3:33 vibe?

 

 

Is it confirmation bias? Maybe. Is it something more? Also maybe. I’m not here to convince you either way. I’m just telling you what happened.

I’ve photographed clocks. The iconic one at Grand Central Station, timepieces in museums, sundials in old gardens. Humans are obsessed with marking time, measuring it, pinning it down.

 

We built entire civilizations around it. Great cities like New York. And now? Most of us don’t even wear watches anymore. The phone does it all. Time is everywhere and nowhere, instant and elastic, a notification and a timestamp and a countdown all at once.

 

Remember when you had to wait a week for a letter? When news arrived the next morning folded in paper on your doorstep? When a long distance phone call was an event? That world is gone. Everything is now, now, now. And somehow we feel more pressed for time than ever.

But nature didn’t get that memo.

 

 

There’s a tree on the edge of the Hudson River that I’ve been photographing for years. Every season, every mood, every light.

 

It has no idea I exist and it will be standing long after I’m gone. Ditto the old oak outside my house is over a hundred years old.

 

It was here before me and will be here a hundred years after I’m dead, doing exactly what it’s always done, completely unbothered by whatever the phone says. Every spring its leaves unfurl right one time.

 

 

My favorite cherry blossom tree shows up here too, caught at 11:03, in that brief extravagant moment when it does its annual thing. Two weeks of glory and then it’s over until next year. It doesn’t rush. It doesn’t check the time. It just blooms when it blooms.

 

A cherry blossom doesn’t know it’s 11:03. The old oak in snow has no idea it’s 1:30. The Finnish horizon stretching across that enormous sky has been there for ten thousand years and is completely indifferent to 11:47.

Trees don’t rush. Lakes don’t refresh. The ocean has its own clock and it answers to the moon, not the phone.

There are no clocks in these images. Just nature, and the time my phone decided to stamp across it. Man made time written across the face of something ancient and unhurried.

I find that both funny and profound. Probably because I’m an 11 life path in an 11 year, which means I notice things like this and then can’t stop thinking about them.

Is any number truly random when you’re paying attention?

You decide.

The tree that will outlive you by a century sitting next to the timestamp on your phone? That contrast is worth sitting with.

 

I alternate black-and-white photography with color in my portals and threshold series.