Photography for me is about capturing fleeting moments of beauty. I have a profound love of nature and this love transferred so directly to being able to keep moments that I experience there. Visual arts of various kinds always called to me. I don’t have any talent for drawing or painting so that medium was not an option and others found their way into my life in my teens. Collage and batik were two mediums I enjoyed a great deal, but then I discovered photography and it came to take center stage in my creative expression.

I always loved taking snapshots and Polaroids as a kid. My family took vacations in a travel trailer each summer during my youth, all over the U.S. and Canada. Through these trips and many other camping trips in my home state of Minnesota grew inside me a love for all the incredible sights that North America offered. I feel so blessed that my parents gave me this experience that expanded my world view, and birthed in me a continuous desire to see more. The moods of any given location are sometimes only truly captured by someone who lives in the area and photographs the same things over and over in different ways and every possible condition of the weather. There are not enough years or money for me to explore and photograph everything I would love to capture. I know there are photographers who dedicate their lives to chronicling human events so that we can never forget the history we create as moments pass, and I respect their work, but it is not a genre of photography that I could follow myself. My photography’s purpose is to remind me of the beauty here in this world when I get lost in the wars and horrendous deeds of humans. The detail and complexity in a single flower shows me that no matter what we humans do here on earth there is divine origin to this world. Capturing these things helps me to feel close to the Creator and never lets me take this incredible creation for granted.

I love digital and have combined this rekindled love with several years of working with layout and design for my website. Working with effects on some photos to create what feels like a painting is exciting for someone who always wished she could paint!

The Other Arts

I learned batik at an alternative high school I went to in Seattle.  I had done a lot of sewing previously so working with fabric was a natural thing for me.  I learned a little weaving and basket weaving at the time too but never really pursued those arts. Collage just came naturally to me I loved to work with pictures and words and put them together to say something.

My family got a huge rawhide drum in 1989 that sparked a flame in all of us, and out of that I found myself making drums and rattles as well as shields.  This work is amazingly peaceful as I feel each piece is a spiritual undertaking.  Many people have issues with working with animal parts, but to me the work is honoring animals that have already been killed.  Their energy comes through so strongly and often times dreams come in relation to a certain piece.  I always feel each piece is for a specific person and the totems they have come through to offer their medicine to the person the item is for.

My Poetry

Most of my poetry is about my spiritual journey. Some of it is quite raw dealing with family issues I am processing at the time. I don’t really edit my poems. They come out as they are, and I share them whether I like them or not  I had a whole book full of poems and song lyrics that I burned in 1991. I burned them because of how close to my heart I held them, I didn’t want anyone to ever see them if anything happened to me. It is one of the only things I have done in my life that I actually regret. Included in this book was a whole bunch of poetry that I wrote processing the stillbirth of my only daughter Samantha in 1985. At this point I think there were poems there that may have been healing for other women who experienced a stillbirth, and I wish I could capture them back. Only two poems survived from that time Is Within Me I consciously kept and Glass Rock I found in a bunch of papers a couple years after the burning.

For many years I really didn’t write any poetry. Then I met a most wonderful friend named Martina. She is herself an accomplished poet and when she heard I hadn’t written in years she would have none of that! She tasked me to write again and once I started I never stopped. Now I share all the poems at the request of my spirit guides. They don’t want me to ever hold them so tightly again. Maybe sitting here on the Internet they will rarely or never be read, but the fact that they can be read prevents me from hiding aspects of myself that it is not healthy for me to hide.