Prism of the Valley

Anchorage Alaska, 2022.

A woman stands in snow above a valley filled with city lights. The sky, rich in the colors of dusk, mirrors the pattern and hue of the lights below. The woman is blindfolded, yet is still looking down at her phone, which illuminates her face softly. She holds an orb in her left hand.

When you look over the edge of a mountain, and notice where the sea meets the shore and the mountain tops meet the sky, do you also notice where the streets end and the trees begin? Where the hand ends and the phone begins?

We are prisms, reflecting and refracting everything around us, projecting into the world impressions of ourselves. We transfigure bits of lived experience into the scars on our skin or sorrow in our eyes. Into laugh lines, coffee stained teeth and freckles from the sun. Light moving through a prism does not end, it transforms. We too are prisms, shape shifters through time, storytellers and alchemists, taking this vastness around us and folding it into worlds we hold in the palm of our hand.