In the shade of warm evening light

In the shade of a soaring oak tree overlooking the ancient Catskill Mountains, Step Into Stillness calls on the viewer to consider their relationship with Nature.

“Approaching the installation, I want visitors to become aware of the distress we are causing Nature and to share vicariously in its suffering, its agony. I want them to hear its cries for help - cries we ignore at our peril. Then, in the stillness of the inner circle - a place where they are both with and within Nature - I hope they sense the mystery at the heart of it all." David McIntyre

Located within walking distance of Hudson, NY, in the heart of the 700-acre Greenport Conservation Area, the installation comprises twelve rectangular archways arranged in a nineteen-foot diameter circle. Ten of the arches contain a 48 x 32-inch panel with images on either side. The remaining two arches, arranged along an east-west axis, form the entrance and exit. (They will also frame the setting sun on the autumnal equinox; the day the installation closes.)

On the periphery of the installation, facing outwards, the images are darker, challenging, even provocative. Perhaps they are gargoyles protecting the inner sanctum or reflections of how Nature sees humanity. While within the circle, the images are brighter, more contemplative, even hopeful. Collectively they illustrate a fairytale, where children - the innocent - are lost in a forest. To survive, they must learn to trust their intuition - Nature's voice - which will show them the path to safety. Rejection of Nature's help will lead only to the dark stillness of eternity.

Visitors at the Step Into Stillness installation.

Step Into Stillness viewed from under a nearby oak tree. 

Installation program hangs from neighboring oak tree.

Step into a forest wilderness. Wind your way to a secluded place, absent even the merest semblance of human experience. Close your eyes. Breathe in the air. Quiet yourself and just listen to the nature that surrounds you.

Now, try to imagine this world without you in it. A world without humankind. You may be alarmed by what you feel in this environment. You may even feel afraid, alien, unmoored to the world you have come to know as reality. But the fact is that this world: every leaf, every twig, every blade of grass, every ageless grain, is your inheritance. And your legacy.

This is not just some banal bit of whimsy. This holistic reality is intrinsic. Your entire being is made up of cells. And at that cellular level you bear little or no difference to a common mushroom. Far from being apart from the natural world, humanity is, every bit, a part of it: part plant and part animal.

The ice sheets didn’t recede at the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago to reveal our thoroughly modern civilization, replete with single-family homes, two-car garages and crisscrossing superhighways. Four billion years of evolution has made this human moment, this hare’s breath of time, possible. Our distant ancestors burst forth in a eukaryotic explosion two and half billion years ago, spreading like wildfire, enveloping the planet. Scenes not unlike this are very probably unfolding on an unimaginable scale in carbon-rich regions across the known Universe.

What you are hearing in your quiet forest clearing is the echo of eternal awakening.

Somehow, as if by some miracle, we find ourselves perched here on this fragile layer, between the absurdity of space and the habitable worlds beyond the beyond, and the massive churning cauldron within constantly subsuming its surface, impelling it inward toward its core.

Gloriously, we are not only afforded the opportunity to coexist here, but we are also given the tools to record it and to reimagine it, as we play our part in its incredibly majestic tapestry, its sumptuous fecundity.

Of the countless species that have existed on Earth, humanity is the first and only one, either flora or fauna, with the gift of self-expression. We have the ability to express not only ourselves but the world we live in and shape it in a multitude of ways.

Utilizing this gift, we’ve created civilization and filled it to brimming with distractions. We have even created our own creators. We build monuments to our memory of them, to each other and the events we share. The spirit of these memories in some cases transcends the ordinary human lifespan – which, incredibly, we have managed to increase more than twofold - by centuries or even millennia. The entire human spirit is bound by and reflected in our common dilemma. That spirit haunts the Earth flirting with oblivion.

Can we find our way back to our common ancestry? Will we once again find peace in the thunderous quietude, the deafening stillness of our natural world, the very womb from which we are borne? Or will we merely descend into the stillness from whence we came? - Ron Voller