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

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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 feeling into something we could hear. At the threshold of death, he remained curious about what was yet to come, and we understood our relationship was not ending, but changing. All I ever wanted was to care for him as gently as I could, and in midwifing his spirit as he crossed, I came to know a tenderness and devotion I could hardly have imagined.​

 

This sacred labor became an initiation into grief—for all of us, including Geordie. In helping him release from this world into the next, my heart was broken open. Grieving is hard work—heart work—especially in a culture that gives us little room to grieve deeply, and instead teaches us to fear the shadows grief asks us to enter. Yet photography has long reminded me that it is precisely these gray tones that make our perception of light possible.

 

There is a quiet poetry in how the camera can befriend grief—helping me lean into its shadows and discover how deeply it is braided with love. In softening my fear of grief, I find myself learning a language of the heart widening—becoming spacious enough to hold pain, fragility, sorrow, beauty, love, mystery, and spirit.

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Geordie gave so much, among them the intimacy of listening—of becoming still enough to hear both what is spoken and what remains unsaid—a gift that remains alive in my photography, for I have come to see it as a way of listening through sight.

 

So much of how I have come to understand healing has been shaped by my studies with Dr. John Diamond. He opened my eyes to new ways of seeing, and photography not simply as image-making, but as a practice of moving “beyond the obvious”—intentionally looking for what often goes unnoticed and, in doing so, coming to understand something more of the human heart.

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Love and loss form a ground beneath me, reshaping how I move through life. Within this rupture, I have searched for a kind of medicine: the reminder that love is the truest thing we have—not something lost in death, but something I continue to learn to sense without form—still present, still precious, still quietly companioning me.

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