Patricia Joynes

Photography

My photography is primarily nature oriented because of my intense connectedness to it. I am especially drawn to photographing in the fog in our Blue Ridge Mountains. Cold, foggy days keep visitors away, so the area becomes my personal paradise. The fog becomes a magical mist that transforms into otherworldly features. It hides what is beyond, which makes the immediate my focus. This series contains my photographs taken in foggy conditions.

Being silent in nature is my daily meditation/contemplative practice. It heals, it balances, it restores, it soothes; it removes the outer world of mind clutter and anxiety. In my teenage years, I visited the Smoky Mountains and became enraptured with the explosion of nature in all its glorious surroundings—the cool air, the blooming rhododendrons, the mountain streams, the walking path among and up above the trees. It became my lifelong dream to live in the mountains, so different from my world in the South.

Thirty years ago, we moved to Western North Carolina where I began an unrestricted exploration of my passions—photography and nature. Sitting quietly by a mountain stream or in the stillness of a meditative walk in the forest, I am joined with my Source, and I become part of an ethereal silent world of nature. Only I and the forest exist for those magical moments. In this silence, beauty in the form of perhaps a forming cloud or a particular light may appear, and in gratitude, I am able to capture the moment through photography.

Our home is surrounded by woods. Over the years we created pathways and gardens as well as a trail shelter, where sacred ceremony honored friends who had passed. Our glassed-in sunroom emits the feeling of being in a tree house. It is a place for daily moments of contemplation amid the energy of the trees.

In 1999 I attended the Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia. Removed from all daily responsibilities, residents focus on the exploration of consciousness while listening to a series of binaural beat tapes that bring one quickly into altered state. In the spring of 2020, the pandemic turned everything that we knew upside down, and the world grieved for a life that would be “normal” again. I needed a little extra assistance in order to deal with it and turned to some old friends—my Monroe meditation tapes—and began listening to them on a daily basis, even before getting out of bed. I have continued with this daily practice, as it complements my considerable time spent in nature.

Patricia Joynes lives with her husband in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina. She provided cover shots for books and the inaugural Evening Paper medical journal, as well as a photo in Oct 2015 for National Geographic’s “Inside Access” story. Her photographs have appeared in the 2015-2020 volumes of County Lines Literary Journal (2019 cover), 2016-2018 Official Blue Ridge Parkway Calendars, Oracle Fine Arts Review, San Pedro River Review, THE SUN, Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, DASH, Sunlight Press, Light, Camas, DASH Literary Journal, Blue Mesa Review, Iris Literary Journal, The Closed Eye Open and Brushfire Literary Journal.

More on Patricia Joynes’ work can be found on our Links page.