graduate degree and we moved back to Minnesota in an effort to be closer to family. We found a nice apartment in the suburbs of Minneapolis, and I landed a job doing speech-language therapy home visits with families and children. Seven years later, I resigned and opened a private practice where I continued to provide therapy in the comfort of families' homes.

For 15 years, I gave my ALL to my patients and their families. It was good work, and I'm honored to have impacted their lives in such meaningful ways. But looking back, I see God at work, molding me and preparing me for my future work as a photographer, writer, and hopeful owner and operator of a photography and wedding venue. Doing home visits taught me how to develop quick rapport and meaningful connections with people I'd never met. Working with families and children with special needs provided me with a hearty dose of reality. Does joy come quick and easy? For some, but not all. Are struggles, pain, and hardships overcome with a snap of the fingers? Most often not. Life is a journey. Our stories are continuously unfolding. We gain wisdom and wake day after day, to begin again. Yes, those 15 years created in me a love of STORY, an ability to enter into peoples' most intimate spaces, understand where they have been, where they want to go, and relate right where they find themselves. 

Over the course of the years I practiced as a therapist, Seth and I had three children. We moved into a house, then another house. Seth worked, worked, and worked some more.

Life was unfolding so perfectly, so precisely. But the truth is, after we landed the jobs, after we moved into the houses, after we had kids, life started unraveling and quickly became complicated.

My dad got laid off from his job as a band director two years before retirement. A propane tank fell on my mom's hand and broke her finger. My sister dealt with years of significant addiction and mental health issues and gave birth to two children, one who had a serious medical problem requiring surgery three days after birth. My brother got in a major accident. My dad had a heart attack. Seth got eye cancer. My dad was diagnosed with a rare lung disease and had a lung transplant. My mother-in-law had a heart attack. I experienced years of chronic bleeding. Our kids had lice four times, and I experienced ten days of panic attacks in 2016 because it was all just too much to handle. Yet, there was more. Seth lost his job due to a massive corporate reorganization, our family made a cross-country move from Minneapolis to Seattle, and just five months later, Seth received a diagnosis of metastatic uveal melanoma with multiple tumors in his liver, leading to his passing at 46 years of age in 2020.

In the middle of the mess, I sensed a call to write for an audience and began dreaming about becoming an author. The call began in 2003 and persisted until I launched my first blog nine years later. I wrote faithfully in that space from 2012 to 2016. During those four years, I left my career to pursue professional photography and writing. In 2017, I launched this website, a place where I can pursue my creative endeavors for the long haul. In 2020, I published my first book, The Apple of My Eye, chronicling our cancer journey. And at the end of 2022, I purchased and closed on a property in Gallatin, Tennessee, and moved across the country to start fresh, to PURSUE peace, hope, love, and maybe, just maybe my dream to open a photography venue and micro wedding venue someday.   

So here we are.

There are a thousand details I neglected to mention in this telling of my story. But I'm pretty sure you understand because you've lived quite the story yourself.

Today I thank God for His story, the story He's writing through and in each one of us. I'm hoping, believing, and trusting that my experiences, my life, MY STORY will help me tell YOUR STORY with more heart, greater authenticity, and deeper understanding.

Thank you for visiting. Thank you for giving me the great honor and opportunity to hear and tell YOUR STORY.

May we leave a legacy. May we listen, be attentive and alert. May we see with eyes bright and clear. May we be truth tellers, never discounting our pain and our past for the sake of putting on a good face. May we live wild and free in the tension of reality and redemption. May we know that our story matters.

Your story matters.

See the significance of your story.

And know - without a doubt in the world - that the best is yet to come.