Meet the Newest Member of the Family

After only two weeks (wow how time flies!), this little fur ball has wiggled her way into my heart and soul! Bella is an 8 week black lab with three loves in life: food, sleep and never being out of our sight. I find myself busting out in laughter (a sound foreign to my ears) as I watch her chasing her own tail, exploring the world and chewing everything she finds to shreds (her favorite item being my dirty socks). She is becoming a diligent hiker (although her favorite hiking position right now is snuggled into Ty's neck) and soon she will be the best running partner around!

 I have been feeling incredibly blessed these past few months and I felt that it's past time to share with everyone. Ty and I are engaged! I get to come home every day to this lovely man who loves and supports me and to the most adorable puppy in the world. If truth be told, Ty popped the question awhile ago, but for all those who know me, I've always been one of those girls who never thought marriage was for her. Ty convinced me otherwise. But pleeaase please please don't come at me asking all sorts of crazy questions using the W and M words, they give me the heegeebeegees (still)! Like everything we do, this whole shambang will be a wee bit unorthodox. That's just how I like it best!

Youth Garden

 
The kiddos filed into the wellness home with their blingy backpacks to a lesson of wildflower planting and no-bake energy bite makin'! They scream at the sight of horse poop (which always makes me laugh), marvel at the wiggly worms we pull from the soil and look at me in awe/horror when I tell them to mix the dough with their bare (washed!) hands.

Oh how nice it is to escape the city! And have a weekend to catch my breath and tell you about it! 
We've now been in California for 3 months and Ty and myself have carved out a little home for ourselves. It may right now just consist of a blow-up bed and a few IKEA night tables, but we have wild dreams of where we will be in a few months. After a long week of work (not to mentioned a bit of stress) I woke him early in the morning and we packed the car for our weekend escape to Death Valley. As we drove up the 395 and 190 the world transformed before our eyes into salt flats and unexpected land formations. We ate lunch atop sparkling dunes and I crawled around following tracks into brush and as they trailed their ways towards their little holes making guesses of what might have made them. We camped -198 feet below sea level in a lagoon of green amidst the white salt flats and flat rocky land. I went and chased the sunrise with my camera for the first time in ages and felt at peace in the silent morning as the sun painted the mountains beautiful colors. Life is good!

Angst (ɑŋkst)

n. a feeling of dread, anxiety, or anguish.

These photos were taken worlds and years apart, however the emotion is one in the same.  (Left) Early one sticky morning in the small village of Humjibre, West Ghana,  I walked out of my cinder block house and followed a dirt trail that lead to the road into town. Halfway up the hill, dodging potholes and speeding taxi cars, is a small community clinic where nurses hold a monthly baby-weighing session for local mothers. Infant mortality is high in the Sefwi-Bibiani Bekwai region and the clinic tracks infant development in the community. I had volunteered to help out the week before and, if truth be told, I was more curious of the baby-weighing visuals than the actual tracking process. It was an hour of angry baby yelps and cries and mothers chuckling as their wriggling bodies were placed into a cloth swing and extend into empty space.

(Right) During my 3rd year studying Photojournalism at WKU, I was exposed for the first time to the joys of high school football. Our assigned was a sports picture story and I began following the Edmonson Co. High School Wildcats, a small high school nestled in the hills of rural Kentucky. I spent afternoons at practices and in stinky locker rooms and Friday evenings football games. The boys first felt like celebrities and approached me like a weird outsider with a camera. Then they either got tired of the effort it took to pay attention to me or got used to my unflagging presence and I became another (strange) member of the team. They finished up their season in style and made their first trip to the semi-finals since 1998. The game was emotional and freezing cold. I remember watching the mist slowly coat the football field as the frenzy paused for half time. The tough seniors reaction to their loss was hugely emotional. I watched as these big, tobacco-chewing boys broke down and cried in each others arms. 

Years later, I was sifting through thousands of images from different continents, cultures and peoples and the similarities of these two images and how I reacted to them caught my eye. My ears may always ring when thinking about that morning filled with crying babies and I may never unhear (and unlearn) the random locker room conversations that took place between those hormonal adolescent boys, but the memories were more than worth it!

This Sunday morning as I sunk into the comfy Panera Bread chairs with my hot cup of coffee and breakfast nibbles, I realized that two weeks have literally flown by. In two weeks I've started a new position as Program Manager at Antelope Valley Partners for Health which I've come to love! I work with an incredible staff who truly appreciate the skills I bring to the table and value my drive to perfect and take things to the next level. I'm learning so much and never bored, always on my toes, which is a feeling I adore. I get to oversee really fun and interesting program like our youth garden which encourages children in high-risks communities to get their hands dirty, learn the process of gardening and be exposed to from-garden-to-table nutritional cooking classes. This process also gives the children a chance to learn life skills and self efficacy. I will soon be continuing our youth development efforts by working with a local middle school on positive discipline and creating a club that explores social, emotional and health issues through writing, photography and media advocacy (to name a few!). These are only only a few of the programs I'm working on, but I'm really excited about where this work is going and the potential for it to develop in the future. I signed the lease on my first US apartment in over 5 years and realized i literally owned NO household items. My apartment initially consisted of a blowup mattress on the living room floor...which means lots and lots of weekend visits to the IKEA store! (Woot! One perk to having lived overseas for so long that you failed to accumulate all those handy and necessary items for your house, e.g a fridge!) More updates to come I swear! I promise to not take as long for the next post as I did for this one! xx

Front porch sitting

with (Left) Susie, Whitesburg Ky. (Right) "Mamma Mo" Northern Thailand.

“The heart of the person before you is a mirror. See there your own form.” 
-Shinto Saying

Over the past year I've made it a goal to sift back through 1000s of photos from the past 7+ years, images that span 3 continents, over 21 countries and countless cultures and people. I began with old assignments from WKU, projects from 3 newspapers, then jumped to South Korea, SE Asia and finally Africa. During this process, I began to recognize images that felt similar to me, the gesture of the hand throw back in a moment of abundant joy is identical in a young American girl as it is in novice Buddhist monk in Thailand. I've sat in silence with wise women watching the world go by from the comfort of their front porch in a remote Karen Hill Tribe in Northern Thailand with Mamma Mo's work roughened hand holding mine and in the Appalachian region of Eastern Kentucky with Aunt Susie silently nodding off. Kind, strong women with the lines of hardship and joy etched into their faces. I also began to see amusing and sometimes disturbing juxtaposition of every day life; jobs, expectations of motherhood and the expression of love. 

Over the next few weeks I'm going to post the best of these, combining images from all over the world into diptychs that begin to contextualize individual lives into a universal tapestry. 

I hope you enjoy! 

(Left) A Young Nepali mother at Boudhanath Stupa, Kathmandu, Nepal.
(Right) Jeane, 2, and her mother, Deanne York prepare for the Cordell Hull Festival Pageant in Byrdstown Tenn.