You can find me
on weekends in Aspen, California, Portland, Mexico, Bali & anywhere else good love is being cherished.
There is no way to quantify this moment. It’s too grand. Gentle. Bold. Minute. This day is the conjunction of a series of coincidences that span centuries.
What I mean is that our lives are tapestries, and each thread has been woven into place by someone who taught us how to love. Or how not to be loved. How to laugh, how to dance, fix things, cook that famous dish, hug. In the story of these loaned threads is another person’s discovery of love and loss and joy. These layers and layers of our heritage converge together when we choose the person for whom our soul becomes alive.
All the people who poured love into our tapestries will come to watch this moment, this joining. And all the energy and blessing that exists in that grand convergence will only happen once while we are alive. It will happen again, for sadder reasons, once we are gone.
Love is imperfect. Transient. It folds and unfolds and breathes and exhales, and in the creases of the in-betweens we find the heartbeat of who we are and how we move in this world. How we move, now, together.
I cannot overstate the beauty in that. I cannot simplify it.
Photographs distill those singular moments, expressions, and joys into something that survives long after our wrinkles have settled.
More than pretty, they show the imperfect—the real. Anticipatory grins and nervous hands. Tears for ones who should be there but have left too soon. Quiet breaths as you admit that this man or this woman is the rest of your life. Quiet smiles as you realize how lucky that makes you.
This is you. It is authentic. It is not a space for performance. It is a space to exist. Simply...wholeheartedly...exist. Revel in that. Melt into it, if you can.
about
behind my heart...
I'm forgetting
This is why I'm here.
Some things are still bright in my memory: her laughter when she thought she’d surprised me, endless generosity, flamboyant love for anyone she met. But other things, other things I know and I just can’t see anymore. Like the way her eyes crinkled when she flashed that famous smile. Or that nervous mix of pride and sadness as she hugged me on the day she dropped me off at college—a thousand miles from home.
These are pieces of my mother I will never be able to salvage.
…Except in the faded edges of the few photographs where a brilliant woman who shares my smile grins back.
Keep Reading
The loss of my mom to cancer in my early twenties was one of the most difficult things I’ve experienced. The most cherished possessions of her that I have are images.
They are catalysts of memory.
They remind me of silly jokes. Of beautiful days. Of sad days. Of all of the other days, too. And I will never understand why I waited so long to take more pictures of her.
Weddings are not parties to me. They’re experiences that you carefully develop with the person you love most in the world to share with those who love you most in the world.
Grandma and grandpa get dressed up for the occasion. Your aunts share unsolicited advice. If you’re lucky...so, so lucky...your mom will help you with the final details as you get dressed.
And through it all, you get to inhale the unbelievable beauty of a life that has brought you this far and of the people who have lifted you up on your way.
That is powerful.
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