My eyes and ears and fingers are everywhere when I wander the woods or my urban yard, and my photography is one way I look closely, seeking to honor and illuminate the essential in the mundane, the vastness in the minuscule, and the infinite ways in which textures, colors, and lifeforms touch. 

I photograph moments of relationship—liminal moments and also everyday configurations: moment before water droplet departs velvety tongue of petal (lush, wet, tense); moment of late-blooming autumn leaf racked with color beside compost bin before snow (bedraggled, spectacular); moment when two seeds remain of a dandelion seed head (fragile, powerful). My hands shake; I attempt to steady them, contorting and curling closer to my subjects, hugging myself, holding them tenderly. The macro lens is unforgiving of movement. 

I approach each photo with all the commitment my body and equipment can muster to capture the scene—capture not in the sense of owning but in that of offering to some future time and viewer as much of the essence as possible: the clash of color, the shock of refracted light, the impossible beauty of water's adhesion, the excruciating anticipation of resin teardrops and the dance of their spice in my nose—can you feel it? I fall to my knees.

It is no accident that the precious, endangered substance that sustains all life—water—is prominent in my photos. In addition to making everything on this planet possible, water is a powerful enhancer, heightening the beauty of the rest of us. 

I often feature beings whom before, I saw daily without seeing, to whom dominant US culture dedicates massive quantities of chemicals, fossil fuel, policy, and human energy to suppressing. Dandelions and goldenrods growing from my sidewalk are beloved neighbors. The fly on the pickerelweed is spectacularly constructed; have you ever seen such eyes? Winter buds, side by side, magnified, whisper their distinct maple identities in the absence of leaves. Fruit is just glorious. 

Hours in my ragged yard peering at spiderwebs and the mosses on the butternut do not suffice for me to comprehend the scale of life. Yet I wander, eyes in turn drawn up to the singing canopy and down to the infinitely interwoven ground, adoring the wildflowers and others making this expanse livable for each other.

Each seed contains generations; each moss is a world; each bee sustains multitudes; the soil beneath our feet is multifaceted and nothing short of miraculous. Mary Oliver wrote, "Attention is the beginning of devotion." The converse also feels true: to the extent that beings are invisibilized, they are more vulnerable to marginalization, violence, and destruction. I see danger in excessive focus on individuals if it means discounting the power of systems of dominance, which dictate so much of what is possible / who it is possible for, and which incentivize devastation on far vaster scales. Also, each being in the backyard has life, teaching to offer, and is invaluable to their ecosystem.

My photos, I suppose, are love notes, or better, open love letters.