From the archives: on progress

Originally published January 21, 2019

I have arrived.

Sometimes that egotistical little thought pops in my head. It’s far from the truth, but I’m also really proud of the work that I’m putting out there that’s so different from the work I was putting out there not long ago. I had a 10+10 board (10 of my favorite images that I’ve procured, next to 10 images that inspire me. Again, if you haven’t purchased the goodness that is Yan Palmer’s Teethkiss Workshop, you really should!) that was so completely far from what I wanted my work to look like, it felt hopeless. I’ve been in business for 7 years now, and for some reason I could never catch up. What I wanted my work to look like didn’t match what I was creating.

I switched to film last year, and as soon as I dove in, there was no going back! I’m procuring art that makes me feel, photographs that I love. My work is where I want it to be!

For now.

You know that old over-used saying that it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey? I cringe at cliches as much as the next girl, but this one happens to be true. Our whole lives are about growth, learning, bettering. What’s good to me now may not resonate with me in the future. The art we create speaks differently to each of us at different points in our lives.

It’s frustrating sometimes. The evolution. Sometimes I just wish I could stay content, always be satisfied. And yet, once I outgrow this cocoon, what lies ahead is sure to be beautiful! I never want my work to grow stagnant. I always want to be true to what makes me feel, even if it requires a lot of work and learning and sometimes uncomfortable growth.

From the archives: creativity/spirituality

Originally published January 11, 2019

Before moving to Long Beach, I had PRAYED that Heavenly Father would prepare a friend for me.

After all, I was leaving a tight-knit community in Tehachapi and surely lightning wouldn’t hit this lightning rod twice.

BUT HE DID.

A dear friend that I had met at Yeah Field Trip earlier this year was the welcome wagon for me in the first week of being the new kid in town. While we were together, she asked if I had seen a post on Yan Palmer’s private Teethkiss group that we’re both part of (as fellow Yan-Fans) by a girl with kids who had just moved into OC and was looking to make friends.

I contacted her immediately, after seeing we BOTH love Yan and BOTH belong to the same church and BOTH have little girls. Basically a recipe for instant friends.

I showed up at her house and it felt like I had paraded in on a friend whom I had known for years. Christina is kind, she is light, she is good, she is talented, she is MOVING AWAY (cue all the sad face emojis).

I feel like Heavenly Father dealt me a hand that was TOO GOOD and He was like, let me adjust that a little bit, and swapped some cards around and is seeing how I handle it now.

I’ve always had a love of film. I’ve been toting around a camera since I was a kid, burning through film my parents would send to a cheap lab and have made into 4x6s. I relearned that love when I met my best friend who had gone to school for photography, and I relearned to love it again when my dad bought me a used Canon EOS 3 off of ebay for Christmas last year. And it sat collecting dust in a cupboard, because I was too scared to use it and fail. Too scared to burn too much money and put my family in financial ruin too, but that’s another story for another day (ha!)

Christina rekindled a fire that is burning through me (and all of my film!) and I am forever grateful. She helped me, she inspired me, she provided me with a sounding board, and yummy food.

She taught me that for her, creativity goes hand in hand with spirituality. It is the same. I don’t think I will EVER forget this, because it’s one of those powerful truths that gets etched on your heart forever and resounds in my head every time I pick up my scriptures or pick up my camera.

I’m really sad she’s leaving.

But my loss is your gain (Sacramento and surrounding areas!). If you haven’t checked out her website, PLEASE do. She really is such a trailblazing talent.

From the archives: only one

Originally published January 4, 2019

This post has been a looooong time coming. I’ve hesitated.

No. Don’t put your heart out there like that.

No, do it! You should say something.

But what about the repercussions?

So on and so forth. You get the idea. But if you’re reading this, then you can probably guess that the angel (or devil) on my shoulder spoke loudest.

I have an only child.

I get a LOT of feedback on that, almost daily. It’s gotten better in the past year or so, but it used to be that I couldn’t go to my mailbox without my neighbor asking me, “So when are you gonna give her a baby brother?”

Or hearing people chime in and say “But she needs a sibling!” or “Well you’ll want to hurry before there’s too big of an age gap” or my personal favorite, that “Only children end up dysfunctional”.

My life story is far from being fully written, but to anyone who might be concerned: I absolutely CAN have an only child! And so can you.

Who wrote the rulebook anyway? One is too few. Three, (definitely more) is too many. So two children is apparently the socially acceptable, normal number of children allowed to be had or else the world will cease to turn on its axis the way it’s supposed to.

Aside from the fact that this is absurd, and coming from a well-functioning person who was raised as an only child myself (with the exception of my half sister who is 18 years older than me), it’s extremely hurtful.

I know some people only truly care. I know they ask, comment, suggest out of love. But at the end of the day, it STILL hurts. What if I were someone who was struggling with infertility? What if I were someone who had other causes, stories happening behind the scenes that you weren’t aware of that did not allow me to have any more children? What if all I could think about all day, every day, all my heart yearned for was to have another child? To give my only a sibling? I have been all of these things at some point or another, but whenever I heard a tip from an unknowing passersby (or family member. or friend. or church member. etc etc) it felt like salt pouring into a wound.

Aside from that, what if I were someone who only CHOSE to have one child? What if I did something so crazy as to ask to not be fit in a box? I belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I am married. I do not have a big family. Those things can all coexist peacefully. I don’t fit into a box, and nobody else should feel they have to, either!

This post is also out of love, a call to awareness, a voice reaching out into the abyss hoping to reach an ear who may need to hear it. I am with you. You are not alone. It really, truly is okay to have only one child. It’s also okay to have many children. Or none. So long as you take care of those God-given babies, who am I to judge?

Below is my best friend (muse) and her family, who have chosen to have more than one child and I love them in spite of it ;)

From the archives: Long Beach

Originally published December 11, 2018

My first ever blog post on my grown-up, real website is about Long Beach, which should tell you that this city means a great deal to me. But I’m kind of embarrassed to say it wasn’t my first choice.

Not even close.

Our family made the big trek from Michigan out to California four and a half years ago, unwillingly. We always said we would move ANYWHERE except California.

Then I thought I was going to have to leave California, and I realized then just how much I love it. (Why is it that with most things in life we only realize how much we love it if we’re going to have to lose it?)

We had some choices to make about school and work and what our next move was going to be. Long Beach has always been a contender, hypothetically, but it was never my choice. Then it was my only choice.

My heart has changed SO much in the handful of months since that decision was made, but everything fell into place for us in such a way that I know we are meant to be here. We came down to house hunt with only 3 weeks until we needed to find a place, and we only had two prospective homes available to see. We expected that the Los Angeles housing market would be pretty competitive, and I went into it feeling a little hopeless.

We were instantly accepted at the first place. Then the second. The decision was easy once we met our landlords, who are like surrogate parents/grandparents to us (we went with the second home).

I have adopted this city as my own instantly. It’s diverse, colorful, green, sunny, friendly, and close to the beach. Why would we ever leave?

My childhood best friend

I don’t know how I’d connect with someone I didn’t know in real life on AIM back in 2003, but I did, and her name was Sara. She went to the same small middle school as me, but she was in 6th grade and I was in 7th. As we started talking, she invited me over to stay the night right away. I’d like to say the rest was history, we remained the best of friends forever, but no story is ever so simple, and neither is this one. It was that simple in the beginning, though. 

Weekends were spent at Sara’s spacious house adorned with natural wood floors and banisters. On Friday nights after their band practiced, her older brother Steve would bring home Little Caesars pizzas and we’d sneak away with whatever was left over. (The same was true somehow of Steve’s clothes, too). Saturday mornings were early wake-ups, where Sara’s dad would make us pancakes at the breakfast bar on a griddle and Sara’s mom would pack a cooler of diet sodas and sandwiches for us to eat wherever we would end up for Sara’s older brother Dave’s wrestling meets. Sara’s mom would teach us a secret language she and her best friend made up called ibi jibi and we’d spend our Saturdays in some deserted high school hallway mastering it.

We’d decorate white tank tops with puffy paint for concerts, walk the puppy Sara was training to be a service dog, listen to sappy country music, sneak out her window to hang out on the vantage point of the garage’s rooftop, curl our hair for bedroom photo sessions. Sara got a pet bunny then that became my heart’s desire, which inspired adopting the two bunnies we have now. I went to Florida with her whole family for spring break which was a monumental milestone for someone like me who didn’t travel much. I was also around when her parents divorced, when we started doing split weekends over at her mom’s apartment across the state. Her mom became such a powerful influence to me, I listed her as one of the “little wild mothers” in episode 8 of my podcast, Soul Over the Bones. It seems like all of my best memories during that time were with her and her family. I secretly hoped Sara and I would remain best friends like her mom and her mom’s best friend Dorothy who introduced us to my still favorite movie to this day, When Harry Met Sally. 

While logically I understand that moving to high school and leaving my best friend behind in middle school is an awkward transition for anyone, how we ever ended up drifting apart is still a wonder to me. It’s a friendship that was so pivotal to me that I still make references to things that we said and did, like mile markers of time passed, to this day. 

Thankfully that wouldn’t be the last time Sara and I connected. I showed up to support her at her boyfriend’s funeral just after high school, curled her hair to go to a dance after that. She visited me and my family in California as she and her husband made the drive to move out there, when my kid was only 3. We’ve texted sporadically as she moved back to Michigan, then I did. When Sara saw my baby, 8 years after the first time, she cried.

Three years since moving back, after watching her own beautiful family grow, I finally had the opportunity to meet back up in person and take photos of them in-home. Though it was as completely different people, who have lived many different lives since the beach days, the singing backstreet boys in the car at the top of our lungs days, the matching floral mini skirts days, the NO AD sunscreen days, still it feels like we know each other just the same now. I showed up to her house and saw kettlebells sitting in the driveway, and while I couldn’t find the house number, I knew because I know Sara, that that was where she lived.

It didn’t take long for her, her beautiful children, and their puppy to roll out their welcome, spilling down the front porch, clamoring to see me. I allowed some stories in my head about all the time that’s passed to make me feel a little nervous before I arrived, but was relieved to have them dissipate as soon as Sara wrapped me up in a hug. I followed her oldest around, doing as the oldest so often does, giving me a tour around the house, the backyard, the basement, the neighborhood. We left no stone unturned. She showed me her doll named Ruby, and I told her that when I was almost my own kid’s age, her mom and I would play with dolls and I would call mine Gracie because that’s what I wanted to name my daughter one day. Her second oldest did as the second oldest so often does and hid away from the camera, favoring play, exploration and casting me furtive glances with a mischievous grin. Her third, the baby, did as the third, the baby so often does and was completely angelic and played to the camera the entire time. He was effortless, irresistible to photograph. Sara was as mothers like Sara so often are and was beautiful, powerful, nurturing, and warm, and it showed both in front of my camera and in the resulting images. I left that in-home session feeling like I always do when leaving a photoshoot, an out-of-body transcendence that makes me remember without a doubt that this is what I’m meant to do. 

You don’t ever stop caring for the person you sang along to Hanson (at far beyond their prime) with. Mae Martin once said on the Handsome podcast, “Old friends remind you who you are, it’s very grounding because you reconnect with old versions of yourself.” The fact that someone as good as Sara could love someone as troubled as I was in middle school makes me find it in my heart to forgive and love that version of myself, too. 

When the Nurturer is Nourished

After interviewing Carmela Fleury and Karryn Miller of Mother Wild for an episode on my podcast, Soul Over the Bones (still to this date the only episode I’ve ever cried during), Carmela asked if I’d be the official photographer for their Magical Eclipse Mama Gathering at Kate Sorokas’s farm in Oberlin, Ohio. I’ve been saying this a lot lately but the way everything came together was what I describe as a “cosmic, kismet convergence”. This is an auspicious example.

Kate, a member of the Mother Wild community, spoke a dream aloud to have women gather on her homestead under the grand Mother Oak and after much effort, it was finally coming to fruition. Rachel Larsen Weaver recommended Carmela to me as a podcast guest and I happened to be asked to be the official photographer for this event. Oberlin is only a 4 hour drive from my home, where the path of totality for this energetically supercharged eclipse, a historical event, would be taking place.

Leading up to the event, I was given total freedom to capture whatever I would like. I went into the event as a journalist might: with an open mind, open eyes, and open heart (and perhaps a few expectations ore preconceived notions). The questions I kept asking myself in preparation were: what story do I want to tell? Why is it important for mothers to be wild and gather together? Mostly I knew the answer would lie in just observing. I myself participated in the event and in doing so, fully understood what story I was telling because it became my own.

We gathered in a circle under Mother Oak, drew cards, shared dreams, intuitively moved and intentionally breathed. Slowly, the moon made her way past the sun and slowly, we observed how a perfectly clear, sunny 75 degree day turned cold. Women gradually grabbed blankets and added layers of clothing. The birds went quiet. The livestock took shelter. It was neither dawn nor dusk, but something I’ve never experienced before. Total darkness eventually covered us and we danced. Nothing could have prepared me for the surreality and all my priorities and perspectives have shifted since.

Around a fire, we laughed and shared stories until midnight. Little was said about our children, this was an opportunity for us to be something other than mothers. Carmela did as Carmela always does and shared some little known fact that none of us had ever heard of before. This time it was the word Tirtha, a sacred space. This was it. This is the answer to my question, why I’m here, what story I’m telling, what I’ve been meant to capture. A space for mothers to be mothered, to return to the spiritual Underworld, to be in community with a group full of women eager to share your name in a room of opportunities.

There was no artificial explanation given of what Mother Wild is, no script of their mission or why we were there. There didn’t need to be. It was said in everything we experienced.

Microseasons: Summer

I live in Michigan now, for now, and to make the most of our experience, we’re living as the locals do: by the season. Clarissa Pinkola Estes cites her version of micro seasons in Women Who Run With the Wolves: “When I was a child in the north woods, before I learned there were four seasons to a year, I thought there were dozens: the time of night-time thunderstorms, heat lightning time, bonfires-in-the-woods time, blood-on-the-snow time, the times of ice trees, bowing trees, crying trees, shimmering trees, breaded trees, waving-at-the-tops-only tress, and trees-drop-their-babies time. I loved the seasons of diamond snow, steaming snow, squeaking snow, and even dirty snow and stone snow, for these meant the time of flower blossoms on the river was coming.

These seasons were like important and holy visitors and each sent its harbingers: pine cones open, pine cones closed, the smell of leaf rot, the smell of rain coming, crackling hair, lank hair, bushy hair, doors loose, doors tight, doors that won’t shut at all, windowpanes covered with ice-hair, windowpanes covered with wet petals, windowpanes covered with yellow pollen, windowpanes pecked with sap gum. And our own skin had its cycles too: parched, sweaty, gritty, sunburned, soft.”

This last calendar season was replete with black eyed susans growing wild near the driveway season, coneflowers growing like wildfire in the ditches season, queen anne’s lace adorning the roadside season, and daisies burnt up too quick in the sun season. It was parched grass peppered with chickory, fireflies dotting the night like stars, toes in clear sun-sparkled water off the dock on the lake, sparklers and smell of sulfur while the mosquitos nibbled our toes season. It was flower crowns of clover and grounding toes in sand wherever possible. It was rambling roses climbing up the walls season and hiding in the shade of dappled light trees season. It was kids on shoulders picking mulberries from high branches and eating more blueberries than we put in the buckets and cold dips in lakes that look like oceans.

Roadside corn stands and fields exploding with sunflowers while the evening orange sunny haze hangs low over them. It was double rainbows stamped vividly against gray skies after a thunderstorm season, basketfuls of flowers collected and brought inside, monarchs in the purple bush, early morning light, and road trips to dunes. It was trail walking in the heart of forests, concerts, fireworks, and earth under my fingernails. The smell of wood fire, a charcoal grill, the sound of cicadas (that I always thought was the sound heat makes when I was young, like the way heat waves look on the sunny pavement).

When I think back on my life, it’s sometimes hard to remember. The seasons blur. I can’t tell you what summer 2017 was like, and that scares me. I don’t want to forget. This log is an effort to commit the details to memory, to recall through my senses what it felt like to be alive here, now.

Microseasons: Spring

We’ve observed the great melt that sent icebergs to the riverbanks as they rose over their beds. This is the time that spiles are plugged into the sides of maples, metal buckets hanging to collect the clear, sweet liquid that will soon be taken to the sugarhouse to boil. The wind bites, moves through any uninsulated crack in the house, yet there’s a change in the air too. It looks like fall at times, muted colors and leftover leaves scattered and swirling as the fresh air gives the feeling of coming change. We're on one end of the sun pendulum, not the other, but there are remarkable similarities. The dirty snow piles soon melt to muddy puddles that prevent trail hikes. There is the onslaught of rain that replaces snow (though flakes do still make an appearance here and there).

The robin and the red wing black bird appear to announce the coming of warmer weather better than any old groundhog ever could. I’d sooner trust the tulips popping up beneath the soft, still cold ground. The aurora is apparently covering us like a blanket nearly every night and I never know it, but it gives me the feeling of celebrity by association, anyway. There is a constant parade of new things bursting into life: first of all, the purple crocus. Next come the yellow daffodils, followed shortly by the pink tulips. Then pop up the wild strawberries flowering in the grass, the bleeding hearts, the fragrant lilacs, the wild violets, the dandelions.

There is the spring/summer cusp that soaks everything in an effervescent green, pouring in through the windows on warm evenings in a neon glow. The peonies and wild daisies bloom ahead of the summer rambling roses, and there’s an invisible threshold crossed where one calendar season blurs into the next.

Microseasons: Autumn

There is the micro season where it is still fall, as evidenced by the heaps of discolored leaves in street gutters. It can be warm and dry as a summer’s day and also invite flurries of snow that make us feel as though we’re in a sepia snow globe. It is very interesting to experience seasons in a place I once spent all my seasons but paid no attention to, left for eight formative years, and am now returning on my Mary Oliver/Clarissa Pinkola Estes tenure of my life to study the family of things in nature.

Years ago I posted on Instagram about deep autumn and find it interesting how different my experiences in a year round summerland like Long Beach differ so vastly to this bog that experiences everything and feels so deeply. How similarly I paradoxically feel about it, and yet, how complicated and unsimple it is to categorize winter and summer, bad and good, when there are beautiful and meaningful things everywhere, always, constantly. There’s also a sure and enduring ache that we carry with us throughout these days. They coexist.

I looked out my bathroom window, unencumbered by things such as curtains or blinds and was struck by the sudden realization that the wind had in fact blown so hard that it had taken the once vivacious leaves with it. Now all that remains are stark marshmallow sticks attached to a bulky trunk. This part used to scare me, because when I didn’t feel safe, my world didn’t feel safe either. Instead of barren trees, I saw lack of hope. The cold and stark shapes contrasted against the sky felt ominous. Now that I am safe, my world is safe too. The tree has lost her leaves and it means nothing at all. It means that this is good, it was meant to be this way. We walk through this time, too and see beautiful things still, and love it and love tomorrow too when perhaps we will (one day) see a green bud sing hope to spring. 

There is the frost on the grass in the mornings season. It is also the cicadas buzzing in the trees in the afternoons season, there is an overlap. You can still hear frogs and crickets through open bedroom windows at night. 

You can still hear the song of the black capped chickadees (a spring sound!) as well as the cawing of crows in the same day in this season. I am learning the sounds of the birds and trying to better understand what they're trying to say, that's an inner season I am experiencing personally. Caring about more than enjoying birdsong for my selfish delight, but trying harder to understand.

You’ll certainly hear geese overhead as they make their way south. Every single time I see or hear them, without fail, I think of Mary Oliver and one of my favorite poems.

So what is this all for, then? Hm. Look out into the dark night sky when it is cold, yes, but also clear and see the magic that is stars and know it’s just for you and hide it up like a treasure because you know that no photograph could ever truly do it justice anyway. You get to keep it and it only ever happened just for you anyway, a special gift from the universe and let that make you stay up late scrawling random yet poignant poetry about life and seasons and share it with some people you think might want to hear it. 

I'm doing as the natives do and living fully within each season here which changes almost daily. This is beyond human-made calendar seasons, these are love notes from the earth that act as messengers and guides, like a compass, letting us know where we are in the timeline of things. 

Microseasons: Winter

My mind is presently residing in the here and now of things, the what's right in front of my face and what I can do about it, rather than focusing too much on what the future holds or ruminating on the past. This means fully experiencing what the mundane little pockets of midwestern life on this corner plot of land have to offer me. Mostly it's been seasonal delights, the slightest changes. I make note of their beauty, appreciating them, translating them into a tender poetry I can store up for myself when I need a little treat.

This is the red berries hanging from bare branches micro season. The slippery ice patches and slushy, barely cleared walkways. The icy lung micro season. The blowing air out to see your breath season. The scraping ice fractals off car windows season. Crunch of snow beneath buried shoes season. Cardinal and chickadee and blue jay and house sparrow season. It's the glitter of sun refracting off of untouched snow. The crisp morning frosted grass. Windows crusted with side blowing snow drifts. Of Canadian geese somehow still making their voyages this way or that. Icebergs making landfall after the river thaw. Wet snow perfect for packing into snow people. Twisted, barren trees casting shadows onto flat white surfaces. Of sliding down slick hills on sleds, finding our thrills where we can. The willow still slowly shedding her leaves. 

Mostly, it's been the season of deeply craving ritual and routine. I want to sink more fully into myself, ground myself, root myself. I want to be fully tethered, anchored, secure. I am positively starving for nature, for being out directly next to the heartbeat of everything. 

While in these last weeks of dedicated restoration, I notice how easily what I need flows to me because I can more aptly listen in the quiet. Inspiration flows through me like a lightning rod and I have about a dozen different projects I'm fully invested in.

There’s routine. Every morning, we bundled ourselves up against the icy winter mornings. The sun peeks up over the trees into our living room windows in dappled shapes that dance against the wall while I prepare breakfast and lunch. We steel ourselves as we swing wide the screen door and throw ourselves out into the world.

There’s nighttime winter solstice events in what has become one of my favorite places in the world. When I lived here before, I had used this location for photo shoots or the occasional wandering but never to fully know it like I do now. Since moving back, we've fully immersed ourselves in its foresty trails throughout the seasons. We crafted Yule logs, arranged evergreen wreaths and rolled beeswax candles. We walked a lantern lit trail through the dark woods while being dusted with steady snowfall to sit by a fire and tell stories before we tossed in our Yule logs and thereby our wishes for the coming year.

Everything in my life revolves around meaning making. Since finishing Jung - The Key Ideas, I have to believe it's my unconsciousness' way of trying to be known to my aware Self. This season, and all seasons, are no exception. It used to be a time of tradition regarding religious beliefs pertaining to particular holidays, and while those are good and we definitely observe those too, I'm also digging up the roots. I don't accept anything at face value anymore, my traditions must have meaning. Observing the solstice honors this love of nature while also making sense of how I can best enjoy the growing darkness and harness it for growth.

What I'm interpreting from the winter season is this: it's essential, and perhaps even unavoidable, to honor our cycles. We must accept new beginnings, change, transformation as it comes and gently guides us up to higher ground. We are invited to go inward during the winter solstice, both physically and somatically. We're given opportunity to dream, to burn down, to rebuild, to create spark, to fortify, to reflect.

The work I intend to do is grounded in cycles and seasons, always. I will remain intentional about the ways I tell the stories, the ones that will perhaps be told someday around a campfire in the middle of the woods while snow gently falls. 

In the winter calendar season, nearly to the spring equinox, the cumulative winter weather of an entire season sometimes waits until the last two weeks to completely bury us in snow as we get storms postmarked California and Texas. Being inundated with snow days, carrying shovels in our vehicles in case we need to excavate ourselves, and being forced to stay home, turn inward, slow down, rest.