The Dailies

I am learning to pause and not to panic. Photography, the capture of digital images, helps me to become centered. I am awake and connected to the path, the shoreline, the beauty of a person’s energy. As I balance camera all that matters is the spin of the earth and how to portray, creation. Where the next paycheck comes from, trivial.

My first discipline is writing, yet when life’s events had me in a state of deep mourning, I found my words too tight. Heavy. I lost faith in my expression. The only thing that helped was the trail, mossy ground under tall spruce, or the blue of Lake Superior on a still day. I let myself breathe into that space, and it caught me as I fell.

I was also picked up by Mike, my Magic Man. His embrace can take away heartache and headache. It was Mike with a camera that led me to look through a camera lense. Now we have twin cameras. Our times together are in search of blossom, waterfall, texture and light. Our dance takes us into the wild.

My first photo exhibit was on the wall at a Mission Gallery inside the old Dead River Coffee. Mike and I met there face-to-face over a cup of coffee after meeting each other online. It was therefore a suitable place for the images of our travels to appear four years later. My photos have appeared at Michigan in Pictures, within the Marquette Food Cooperative Newsletter, and forthcoming at All Things Girl.

I am a graduate of Northern Michigan University where I studied modern poetry and writing. Anne Youngs was my mentor in poetry and while at Northern I received the Phillip Legler Award for Undergraduate Poetry in 1997 for the poem, “I’m bored with the 29 days in February.”

After graduation, I created homeroad.com (1997) for trucking families, formally worked as managing editor of layover.com, and where that seems ages ago, I can say I was widely published in the trucking industry.

Now, as my art grows and words return I find vignettes come forth. Character sketches. Brief scenes. Like a photo. Imagistic. Lyrical. Popping with color and rhythm and hope. The idea of Contours, riding the edge and being on the Verge are themes of possibility emerging in my work.

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Don’t ask yourself what the world needs;
ask yourself what makes you come alive.
And then go and do that. Because what the world
needs is people who have come alive.
- Harold Whitman