Behind the Scenes of Turning Prism
A Personal Perspective

 

Every story has a beginning and every beginning has a birthplace of its own.
Turning Prism was born of my own need to change perspective and the unexpected miracle that happened amidst a life challenging illness and time.

 

 

With a healing gift from my husband, I dragged my new Nikon and my weary body into a kayak to embark on what was to be the most profound journey of my life.

 

 

The kayak made an artful incision through the opaque water, separating me from the unimportant. Weighty things that filled my former days, words like plate’s full, staff meeting, hectic commute and board meeting rode the v-shaped swells beside me - then were effortlessly swept away in the unseen wake behind.

 

 

I paralleled my life from that kayak for two years - juggling the oar, the boat, the camera - losing so many dramatic shots to the wake of a passing boat or the fleeting images along the shore.

 

 

The symbolic lessons were not lost on me! While shooting a moving target from a moving target with no tripod to steady me, the waterfowl laughed back and the water scenes on Maryland's Chesapeake Bay eluded me.

 

 

There my long neglected lifelong love of the creative and nature turned the prism of my life’s perspective around —

 

 

and I celebrated my freedom from the “supposed to.”

 

 

With the very first click of my camera, from that unstable boat, amazingly, I captured the protection of a male swan with his mate at sunset and I knew just what I wanted – to be present for a hundred thousand more instants just like this.

 

 

I had no idea that this seemingly simple single photo was just a tease that the universe provided to lure me down the path to such profound change.

Impossibilities became possible.

 

 

Slowly, I recaptured my sense of cosmic humor and I succumbed to the gentleness of a single floating feather

 

 

or the reflection of the late sun on still water.

 

 

It was my hour upon hour of silent connection to these fascinating new feathered friends and the soul-soothing Bay that compelled me to embrace a new work direction.

 

 

Somehow, I had forgotten we are a part of something bigger - something we may never think to use on our way to a beautiful new beginning - the present moment with nature.

 

 

In time, I had settled down enough in my own rough waters to catch an unfamiliar underwater canvas back duck surface in surprise just in time

 

 

or to spend the hours to catch the uncommon emotion on the face of a common gull who rewarded my patience by letting me drift so near.

 

 

I stayed long enough to understand a mother osprey’s calls and to speak a language I had long ignored.

 

 

Time and again my trained response to return to “serious business” melted in the molten lava of the setting sun or the eye to eye chance meeting with a snowy heron who truly seemed to wave me through.

 

 

Turning Prism was born not of a business deal or anything that smacked of my usual logic, but from the experience of watching a single floating feather, a personal journey to myself and the intense desire to share this experience with others in a creative and personal way.

 

 

The universal magic happened when a friend who was at a loss for words for a son who was in prison, asked if I could create a book of my photographs to help her to connect with him—

 

 

and somewhere a young incarcerated man turned the pages of a new connection to his mother and himself, ran his hand over his own name on the cover and I too began a journey.

 

 

My husband and I changed our lives and moved to San Francisco’s East Bay, where I continue my vision with the same passion for creating with the single purpose of touching someone at a poignant time in their lives, through personalized books of my nature photographs and verse.

 

 

Now years later, my books and cards have reached people in countless places as far away as Greece, Morocco and Pakistan and closer by in Florida, Michigan, California and beyond.

 

 

Their owners tell me stories of finding their book tucked under the arm of an elderly mother who could barely see, cherishing it because a dying wife’s hands had held it, protecting it from the sticky hands of a 3 year old wanting to hear just one more time how his parents met, or proudly displaying it on the mantle of the newlyweds first apartment.

 

 

The ripples continue to expand as their visitors read the book and are also touched. Funny, how we all love to see our name in print and a validation of our “meant to be.”

 

 

I feel profoundly grateful to see the magic that happens when you are in concert with yourself and for those perfect lessons that nature quietly places right in front of us all.

 

 

I hope that in one of my books you too, will find some need fulfilled - watch a smile cross a worried face, find the power in a single silent moment spent with nature and someone you love, bridge the all too awkward gaps that too often separate us,

 

 

or capture a day of joy in someone’s life to share again a hundred thousand times.

 

 

With gratitude,

Kathleen L. Martens
Photographer, Author
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Kathleen Martens brings to her work a B.A. in English and Social Anthropology, M.A. in Educational Psychology, study at the Maryland College of Art and Design, intercultural communications consulting in Indonesia and Thailand, Certificate in Family Mediation, International Business Development in Southeast Asia, marketing and development for a professional children’s theatre - and most importantly a higher degree in hard learned lessons from Mother Nature, herself, as a daughter, wife, mother, stepmother, friend and survivor .