What's most vital is right in front of me, by Stephen Wilkes

This episode explores the transformative power of photography and its ability to ground us in the present moment, as shared through the personal and poignant experiences of photographer Stephen Wilkes.

1. Photography can serve as a profound tool for mindfulness and presence.
2. Personal history and trauma can deeply influence one's creative expression.
3. Engaging deeply with one’s surroundings can alleviate mental noise and distraction.
4. Creative pursuits can help manage and reinterpret personal and familial struggles.
5. Artistic expression allows for a unique perspective on the past and present, bridging personal history with broader historical contexts.

1: Early Life and Challenges

Stephen recounts his early challenges with school and family life, emphasizing the impact of his mother's past on his upbringing. "Stephen Wilkes: When I take a picture, I am completely immersed in the moment."

2: Discovery of Photography

Photography becomes a transformative tool for Stephen, helping him manage his challenges and focus on the present. "Stephen Wilkes: I engage with the world so completely as to mute whatever story I'm otherwise telling myself."

3: Ellis Island

Stephen's project on Ellis Island connects his photographic work with his family history, particularly his mother's experiences as an immigrant. "Stephen Wilkes: Ellis Island still plays an outsized role in the mythology of my family story."

1. Use photography or another form of art to stay present and reduce stress.
2. Explore your personal history through creative expression to gain new perspectives.
3. Engage deeply with your environment to quiet mental chatter.
4. Seek creative outlets that allow for emotional expression and healing.
5. Consider how your personal experiences can inform and enrich your creative work.

Stephen Wilkes has a unique approach to photography that requires a sustained focus to capture subtle changes in light and perspective. The same could be said of the way he cared for his mother, whose resilience and love belied the trauma she experienced as a refugee from the second world war. Though it often falls on young Stephen to manage her spells, he is able to transcend his family’s haunted past by turning his gaze outward when the darkness threatens to consume him, transforming it into art.
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Each episode of Meditative Story combines the emotional pull of first-person storytelling with immersive music and gentle mindfulness prompts. Read the transcript for this story: meditativestory.com

People

Stephen Wilkes

Content Warnings:

None

Anya Profumo
Hi listeners. I'm Anya Profumo, a member of the meditative story team. Over the next several weeks, we are going to run some of your favorite episodes from the meditative story library. This is an opportunity for us to share the content you've told us you love as we rest, recharge, and plan for the future. Please enjoy.

Now onto the show.

Stephen Wilkes
Taking photographs demands attention, keeps me in the moment. When I take a picture, I'm completely immersed in the moment. I don't just look, I see.

I engage with the world so completely as to mute whatever story I'm otherwise telling myself. But if I listen to the voice in my head, the voice that tells me I'm less than strange or incapable, I'll miss something vital and magical right in front of me.

Rohan Gunaratna
Photographer Stephen Wilkes is perhaps best known for creating evocative composite images that capture the passage of time within a single frame, a unique approach that requires patient, sustained observation and a sensitivity to subtle changes in light and perspective. Stephen's early passion for photography unlocks something in him, helping him transcend the ghosts of his family's past by teaching him to turn his gaze outward when powerful emotions threaten to consume him. In this series, we combine immersive first person stories and breathtaking music with the science backed benefits of mindfulness practice from wait, what and thrive global this is meditative story.

I'm Rohan and I'll be your guide.

The body relaxed, the body breathing.

Your senses open, your mind open. Meeting the world.

Stephen Wilkes
I tilt my head up to take a look at a grand brick building.

Huge columns tower above me. No one's explained anything to us or prepared us for what's about to happen. It's the first day of kindergarten. My brother Donald and I are identical twins. The school isn't quite sure what to do with us, so we're kept together.

Coming into the classroom, I see huge windows. Light is filtering through the large shades that hang from each window.

Maps cover one wall, letters of the Alphabet on another. The desks and chairs are wooden. They're worn and heavy. I feel the grain against my fingers. Everything here feels so old.

I feel like everyone here knows something that I don't.

What are the rules so I don't get into trouble? I see my teacher's mouth move, but I don't hear her. It's like the room's gone quiet and all the noise is coming from inside my head. I feel better. At playtime.

I notice colored blocks in bright, lifesaver colors beneath the table. I crawl under and begin to arrange them into different patterns, like a puzzle. As I play with these blocks, the noise in my head quiets down.

I dont notice that the floor underneath me is cold and hard, or that my legs are getting stiff. The act of moving these blocks around, mixing the colors, rearranging the order. Blue, yellow, green, green, red and blue. It soothes me.

My brother and I know mom's story by heart, but even so, I find it chilling to picture. It's 1939.

She's nine years old, four years older than we are now. She waits for hours on a bench. She's in the Great hall on Ellis island in New York harbor, awaiting her aunt and uncle to come and collect her. Everything she owns is sewn into a teddy bear. She doesn't speak English, though she's surrounded by refugees like herself.

She's very much alone. Even now, as mom sits beside us at the kitchen table, I can sense that a part of her still remains on Ellis island. Her body is here, but her spirit is elsewhere. Sometimes Donald and I come home from school to discover she's been hospitalized again. Between spells, though, she is our emotional anchor, a model of what it means to be empathetic, loving, and above all, she is tough.

Mom is a survivor. She's incredibly resilient. Warm weather tends to trigger Mom's episodes. The brighter it gets outside, the darker she becomes. I'm always on the edge of my seat in the spring and the summer, knowing she could have another major spell.

When she has an event, she suddenly clutches her pocketbook like a teddy bear, protecting it, refusing to put it down. I sit with her at the table and talk, remind her I'm here, that everything's okay.

Dad travels a lot for work and often leaves town just when mom's episodes begin. So from an early age, it falls on us to manage mom's illness. Each time he returns, I can see the hope on his face as he walks through the door. Hope that something might be different this time, that mom will be better.

The disappointment is hard for him to handle. It's the same as it is for us. Dad's childhood was also difficult. When he was nine, he lost his older sister to appendicitis. He has difficulty expressing his love to us.

He doesn't express affection. No hugs, no kisses. There's a tension in the house. Dad wants mom to come back, to be here, to be present for us and for him. He raises his voice and all his pent up anger fills the air, but it doesn't help.

It only makes my mother go further into darkness. At night, I put a pillow over my head to fall asleep, but the noise in my head gets even louder. Mom finds solace in music.

In opera.

She studied voice at juilliard, left music behind when she started a family. When she sings, it's as if she's transported to another place, another time, somewhere deep in her past where she feels safe.

Puccini's madame Butterfly is her favorite. When she steps into the living room to perform for us, she's in full costume, totally embodying this character. Her voice is pitch perfect, so powerful my brother believes she can shatter glass. And when she sings, her sadness, her illness, and the pressures of home drop away.

I find it difficult to focus at school. My brother is the same way. Teachers lose patience with us. Our minds drift, and we're easily distracted. We're a challenge.

Hyperactive, they say we're put on Ritalin. Held back in third grade as identical twins, we're conspicuous in the schoolyard. Our classmates think there's something wrong with us, and they call us names. We're made to feel less than one bright autumn morning on my walk to school, I'm suddenly struck by the way the sun comes through the leaves. Rays of golden light reaching out to me like fingers.

I feel the wind caress my face. I become engaged with the dappled shadows and the patterns on the ground. I see my surroundings in a totally different way, clearer and more beautiful than I can remember. There's something magical and new about this moment of seeing. It's vivid and alive.

All that pain and anxiety I carry with me from the house disappears.

Rohan Gunaratna
Sometimes the simple act of noticing is all it takes to soften the volume. In our heads.

Letting your senses engage, absorb into everything around you. The dance of movement and light, the temperature of the space you're in right now.

No room for commentary, just this.

Stephen Wilkes
There's a photograph of my brother and me at our bar mitzvah. I can't stop looking at.

My face is on one side of the image.

My brother's on the other.

His left side and my right mirror each other. Perfect reflections. The only light in the picture comes from the faint orange glow of the candles between us. Our features look identical, yet through our eyes, our facial expression, I can see our individuality shine through. I've never been able to quite articulate how I experience the world as a twin.

The photo so perfectly captures our essence. Something deep and specific. I want to be seen as I see myself.

I beg mom for a camera and lessons. Rene, the photographer who took our bar mitzvah photographs, invites me to assist him on shoots, weddings, bar mitzvahs, confirmations. I learn to tell visual stories, and Renee becomes my first mentor. Taking photographs demands attention, keeps me in the moment. When I take a picture, I am completely immersed in the moment.

I don't just look. I see. I engage with the world so completely as to mute whatever story I'm otherwise telling myself. But if I listen to the voice in my head, the voice that tells me I'm less than strange or incapable, I'll miss something vital and magical right in front of me. I become more and more confident in my ability to capture the essence of people and places through photographs.

For the first time in my life, I feel capable. My mom calls me her poet with a camera. It's not that the distracting thoughts in my head don't matter. They just don't matter. Now when I take pictures, I give myself permission to leave all of that alone for a while.

The act of photographing makes everything go away.

One day, I asked my mother to sit for me. I've just learned about double exposure, layering. Two images, one on top of the other.

I take a shot of this beautiful bouquet of tulips, and then I double expose mom over them, because that's what she is to me. An extravagant, gorgeous bouquet bursting with life, with creativity, with beauty. I want mom to see herself like I see her, to feel as I feel that her beauty is a living thing. It's like an invitation to mom to meet herself right now as she truly is this person she cannot see. And I want others to see her like I do, too, to express what I see to others so that they can experience the world the way I do and see what I see.

Rohan Gunaratna
I love these words. An invitation to meet me in the present moment, to make feelings visible, to experience the world the way another feels it. Let's take up that invitation.

Stephen Wilkes
Some years later, through a fortuitous assignment, I begin documenting Ellis island. This place still plays an outsized role in the mythology of my family story. I'm on the south side of the island, in a rusted, vine covered building that once served as a hospital for patients with infectious disease. The Statue of Liberty looms over my shoulder, yet I feel no less an archaeologist than those who had ventured into the first mayan tombs.

And as I meander through these empty corridors, I find lost shoes of immigrants, long forgotten shards of mirrors, a surreal sculpture of vines, leaves, and moss mingled with shattered plaster, curling paint, rusted iron. The architecture is 50% the work of man, 50% the triumph of nature.

Inside, it's damp and cold, suffused with darkness. But for the few wisps of light that poke in through the windows, virtually no one's been here since it closed in 1954. It feels as if I'm stepping back in time.

The decaying lead paint produces discordant, gorgeous colors and textures on the walls that stand in contrast to the air of suffering here. A kind of dangerous beauty. I want to capture it with my camera, use the image to tell a story about time, about history, about my mother. A park ranger accompanies me and my assistant as we walk through corridor nine, the so called spinal cord of the hospital. The corridor is aglow with white light on the right side, yet everything growing from the windows appears dead.

On the left side is darkness, yet everything on that side appears alive. Vines burst through broken windows, windowpanes pouring downward towards the cement floor below. It feels like an apt metaphor for what happened here on this island. Life and death. From where we stand, the corridor looks a half mile long.

The last of the afternoon sunlight illuminates a doorway at the far end, where the walls seem to converge, surrounding it with a radiant orange glow unlike anything I've ever seen. It lasts only a moment, but I shoot a few frames to capture it.

The next morning, my assistant and I return to the hospital. I go for a walk alone, thinking about what I would like to photograph for the day. I leave my assistant in the ward just off corridor nine as he's focused on setting up my equipment. When I returned to the ward, I find my assistant on his knees. He tells me he's just had the strangest feeling that someone was in the room, staring at him from the corner.

I take in the room. The ranger informs us that this was a measles ward. Hundreds and hundreds of children died here. This hospital ward was the closest they ever got to America. The windows are boarded up behind thick black curtains.

Dust swirls in the pockets of light, visible through the tears in the tattered fabric.

Imagining mom in this room, I feel an old chill I haven't felt since childhood, and I suddenly understand something about her, the painful past she's carried around since she arrived on this island. Little Ruthie, who doesn't speak English, who fled a war, left an entire world on the other side of the ocean, who sits alone on a bench, waiting to be saved. I brought an old pinhole Polaroid camera with me. A turn of the century lens with no shutter, just a lens cap to take on and off. To control the shutter, I removed the COVID by hand.

And I count 2 seconds and then I cover the lens just the way the earliest photographers would have worked. I take one photo and I pull the paper through the rollers and that begins to process the Polaroid. While waiting 1 minute, I nervously rub the print with my hands hoping to speed up the process. I'm anxious to capture this feeling and energy within this moment. Finally, I peel the Polaroid to see the finished image.

I first see only a shaft of light in the photo. But as the Polaroid continues to develop, I can almost make out the shape of a child. A girl standing in light. The bow neck of a nightgown, hands outstretched, open.

I imagine mom being in a room very much like this. At that moment I begin to understand her suffering in a way that she was never able to articulate to me.

Mom could never escape from 1939. She carried the trauma with her every day of her life. Mom's retreat into the past was very painful for me and my brother. While she was functional, loving and supporting of us, her episodes created a sense of helplessness in our lives. When darkness would fall upon mom, she would turn inward, leading her to this dark place again and again.

For me, and perhaps for millions of us, there's a great deal of unresolved energy in these rooms on Ellis Island.

I believe there's history in the light that I photograph here echoes from a moment in time that I've captured with my camera. Children separated from their parents, tremendous pain, fear.

But in these rooms I also see hope for a new life, for a second chance and for love.

Through photography I've learned to orient my gaze outward, to create metaphors that reframe my experiences, allowing me to view them with compassion rather than be absorbed by them. Like mom was looking outward, I quiet my anxiety instead of turning inward and feeding it. I heal the trauma of my history and I free myself to create a future of my own.

Rohan Gunaratna
Thank you Stephen. In just a moment I'll guide you through a closing meditation here at meditative story. We've had the enormous fortune to host a few photographers as our storytellers. And what they offer is so great. Maybe it's because as photographers, they know so much about attention, about being present, about ways of seeing.

So for our closing meditation together, here's one inspired by the time when Stephen was learning the technique of double exposure, of layering two different images into one image in the story its the portrait of his mother combined with a bouquet of flowers, one thing laid over another leading to greater meaning. So thats what? Well, a double exposure meditation and starting with the body. Not this time, dropping our attention into anywhere in particular. Instead, letting your awareness rest with the sense of the whole body, the whole sense of the body, the whole physical sense, all of it, all sensations held within this frame.

Take a moment to give that a try. If it doesn't come so naturally, no need to get caught up in any particular sensation or any one part of the body. Instead making the whole the most important thing.

This is the first image. It's also the frame.

So while staying present with this sense of touch, while keeping part of your awareness with this frame, bring to mind the image from Steven's story, which you remember the most. It could be one from the challenges of his early school life and dealing with his mothers health issues. Or that magical moment when being so present with the world around him made all his pain drop away.

It could be that time taking the portrait of his mother, which hed go on to combine with the tulips. Seeing his mother in a way that no one else did. All that extraordinary adventure through the abandoned facility on Ellis island.

Whatever it is, one of those, or something else entirely, hold it in your mind.

Bringing that moment, that image to mind, however, works for you, while at the same time resting in the overall awareness of the body, grounding you to the present.

Past and present united Stephen's story and your experience right now, noticing the connection between them. Not one, not two.

Your sense of body. An image from Stephen's story.

Not one, not two.

Okay, so as we wrap up, let's set an intention together, either for the rest of the day or for tomorrow. If it's late already. Let's see if we can bring some photographer energy, some photographer mind, bright awareness, a wide frame, but also a sense for detail. A way of looking that brings it all to life.

Thank you, Stephen. And thank you.

On behalf of the team at meditative story. Thank you for spending time with us today. We love creating the show for you, and if the show serves you in a meaningful way, we'd love to hear from you. Would you take a minute right now to write us a review in your podcast app? When you leave a review, it really inspires our team.

And we're a group who derive so much energy from understanding how meditative story impacts you. It's also a way for you to pay it forward by helping others discover the show. So if leaving a review speaks to you today, we'd really appreciate it.

E
Meditative story is a way to art. Originally in partnership with Thrive Global, the show is produced at the studio Inside Sy Partners in New York. Our executive producers are Darren Triff, June Cohen, Arianna Huffington, and Dan Katz. Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi. Our curator is Carrie Goldstein.

Original music and sound design is by the Holiday brothers, mixing and mastering by Brian Pugh. Special thanks to Anne Sachs, Julianna Stone, Summer Matais, Monica Lee, Lindsey Benoit O'Connell, Libby Duke, Smithy Sinha, Stephanie Gonzalez, and Sarah Sandman. And I'm Rohan Gonadjilica, creator of the Buddhafi meditation app and your host.

Visit meditativestory.com to find the transcript for this episode.