Moments Seen, Spirit Felt

My life and work have been shaped by the people I love and learn from—most especially Geordie Gude, my life partner and best friend, who died in 2024.

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Geordie, a musician who lived from a deeply felt place within himself, understood what it meant to fully enfold another person in his heart. His music flowed from this place, shaping what he felt into something we could hear. At the threshold of life and death, he remained curious about what was yet to come, and we understood that our relationship was not ending, but changing—and that my role was, in some quiet yet expansive way, to midwife his spirit as he crossed. 

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This sacred labor was also an initiation into grief—for everyone, including Geordie. In helping him release from this world into the next, I've come to know a transcendent kind of love—one that is as heartbreaking as it is a rare kind of beauty. In its wake, grief revealed its own terrain, and, for me, requires a sensitive attention—a quieter, slower rhythm—in learning how to hold it, while remaining present, neither turning away nor collapsing beneath it.

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Language carries weight for me, and I’ve found that phrases like “moving past,” or even “moving through,” don’t quite describe my experience of grief. It is something I live in relationship with—as I learn to breathe into a life without Geordie here, and to stay in rhythm with what John O’Donohue calls “the eternal breath”— with the hope of translating it into something of value for others experiencing profound loss.

 

Grief is something braided with love, though it is often flattened—rendered solely into shades of grey that, as a culture, we are taught to hold at a distance. Within this constraint, the love within grief can become obscured. For me, photography is not separate from grief work, but a way of seeing the full spectrum of light and experience—helping to reveal the subtle traces of love that remain, so they are not lost within the weight of grief. We are not unlike a camera—reading light through grey tones, reliant on a dark interior to create something beautiful.

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I often return to the work of my late mentor, John Diamond, M.D., whose teachings continue to shape how I understand both healing and perception. He spoke of therapeutic engagement, and of human relationships, as something that moves “beyond the obvious”—an awareness of what cannot always be seen, yet is deeply present. Central to his work was the understanding of life energy as something living and responsive within us—something that can be met, supported, and brought back into balance.

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For me, grief is an expression of life energy, asking to be felt, to be moved with, to be seen in all its hues. As a photographer, I see the poetry in holding grief as both shadow and light—not good nor bad, but simply what is—and in finding a language that can fully hold the aura of love and loss—mind, body, and soul—and to how the spirit reaches toward connection beyond what is physically present.

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