Spirit Tokens, a project of Anima Press, draws inspiration from decades of consulting the Ling Qi Jing, where the act of casting coins becomes a quiet dialogue between intention and the unseen. Over time, that ritual has expanded into photography—less something performed, more something encountered.

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Walking the island’s beaches, camera in hand, observing the subtle negotiations between tide and terrain: the way water withdraws and returns, touching sky as much as leaving behind its fleeting decisions in sand, stone, and sky. I often feel as though the sea itself has taken up the role of caster. Its movements scatter, gather, and arrange the world with a logic at once spontaneous and precise, like an answer waiting to be read.

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In these moments, authorship dissolves. The hand that once cast coins is replaced by the rhythm of waves; the question lingers, but the response is embedded in texture, light, and form. Each configuration—whether a line of kelp tracing a curve in the sand, or a cluster of stones held briefly in balance—appears as a kind of fleeting notation by wind, gravity, and tide. The camera does not take so much as receive, bearing witness to these ephemeral inscriptions before they are erased and rewritten.

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These photographs are drawn from such encounters—instances where the world seems to speak in the language of pattern and pause, holding open the possibility that our loved ones, too, leave signs and symbols for us. Each image can be approached as a token: not fixed in meaning, but open, suggestive, and relational.

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Like the Ling Qi Jing, they are numbered, but left without description—an intentional withholding that opens rather than closes meaning.

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As with the tides, the images ebb and flow—emerging into the collection, receding from it, and returning again in altered constellations. In place of fixed interpretation, nothing here is final or complete. The work remains in motion, shaped by time, attention, and the same quiet forces that formed the images in the first place