Freedom of Religion

And she’s buying the Stairway to Heaven.

When I was growing up, art and music was the religion of our household...

I didn’t grow up with religion. I spent a few summers at Vacation Bible School at a local church in Lenox Hill. And I had school friends who had communion and went to church on Sundays and holidays. I used to try to talk to God by writing little notes on pieces of paper, folding them up, and burying them in the backyard. I figured this was the best way to get a direct line of communication going with God in heaven. But for the most part, I learned about God and the Bible and how to pray through Little House on the Prairie, Michael Landon’s popular TV series, in the 1980s. I learned some of the greatest moral lessons through the experiences of Laura Ingalls. My parents were both non-religious Christians. My mother went to an Irish Catholic School as a child. And my father remembers his father praying to God in a field in Hawaii when they lived there, with the understanding that God isn’t only in a church,

The religion of our household was art and music. My mother introduced me to the I-Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes. This was ancient Chinese text tracing back to at least 500 BC used by seers to give insights into moral decision making. She also showed me tarot and astrology as tools to gain deeper insight into my many questions about life. And as a teenager, I loved to read psychology books. We had every kind of book in our house from music and art to psychology and philosophy and poetry. So I was always trying to decode the spiritual world through all of these avenues. Always searching. When I was 13, it was photography that became my own personal religion. Since I was always interested in other perspectives, getting to know different paradigms of life, I could use my camera as a tool to capture these things. I felt there was something more coming through these portraits.

I’m not sure if it was because they were in black and white, or the dusty negatives I used to print in my own makeshift darkroom in the bathroom, but the pictures sort of breathed, telling a story that was beyond the surface. Like diving into the subconscious. At some point in my early 20s, I called my portraits, ‘Photography of the Subconscious’. And a woman who wrote an article about my photographs in 2000 compared my pictures to Carl Jung’s “shadow,” diving into the sometimes uncomfortable aspects of ourselves.

Over the next two decades, I was swimming in and out of my own ‘shadow’, integrating the lessons from both sides of me. During some of this time, I was a student at the Kabbalah Center, which sort of tied together everything from my childhood. But still, there was something missing. And when I left the Kabbalah Center, I spent years abandoning all spirituality.

And then only in the past few years did I find what I had been looking for all this time. Whether it was photography, or making movies, or writing, the feeling had always been the same, that something more than me was coming through. Every time I let myself free fall into the process, something truly amazing would happen. And I could see that each word, each image, each movie that came through was a direct message from God. The direct line of communication I had always wanted since I was a child, burying those little notes to heaven, was always with me. I just didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know that I never needed to search for it because it was always there in my heart.

And so now when I look at my photographs, my movies, my writings, all I see is the Holy Spirit communicating through them.

The Holy Spirit.

Love, Käla

“There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold. And she’s buying the Stairway to Heaven.”

-Robert Plant