New Beginnings

What many do not know about my history as writer and photographer is I created a website for trucking families on my graduation from Northern Michigan University in 1997. The website was homeroad.com and I ran the website from my living room near Gwinn, Michigan. I eventually sold the website to layover.com and came on board as their managing editor. With layover.com, I traveled as a photojournalist taking photos with the ‘company camera’ at truck shows in Dallas, Las Vegas, and Louisville. This was my first experience as a photographer in a professional manner. I knew absolutely nothing, but I was developing an eye for what worked, what drew interest, and fell in love with color, light, and contrasts.

 

Life threw me some curve balls and due to a divorce, I walked away from my life in trucking to work on healing my soul. I worked as an AmeriCorps worker in Gwinn schools, attended massage school, and returned to my interest of nutrition and natural foods. Along with healing, came a new relationship to a man who hiked trails with a camera. On hikes, I would bring along a disposable camera and click carelessly exhausting my 27 images long before the end of hikes. I eventually purchased a digital point and shoot, then a bridge camera, and finally a big girl DSLR. I was discovering a new genre, photography.

 

Love of the trails led to becoming a trail runner. I often ran with a camera. But as I healed my soul, and gained fitness, I also began collapsing after races. Irony, as I healed my soul I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, Celiac Disease. Try as I may to heal my body I was reaching roadblocks. I now had to learn to listen on a deep internal level to the needs of my health. I stepped away from running the trails and back to hiking with my camera.

 

As this autumn approaches, I am feeling the strength of brining my journey to others, to bring words, photos, and story together to help heal others thru my experiences.