The BaMbuti people of the Ituri Rain Forest love their forest. They often shook their heads while making fast clicking sounds to express their astonishment that an outsider such as myself could share the beauty of it. To say that the BaMbuti are one with the forest implies that they could be separate---in their view, they are the forest.

I asked this young man to kneel in the light, close his eyes, and create gestures that evoke a sense of waking up in the morning. In doing so, he appears to emerge from the forest floor, just as the tree behind him. "Man in Bloom" suggests that reflection inward, and downward is necessary to understand that we are all similarly connected to the earth.

---from the journals of Elisabeth Sunday, 1989, Zaire