Imagine for a second you are a strong and able puller of a plow. You comb the field with your plow, or even the beach, tirelessly, but your plow has a magical ability.

As a young teen in the UK, I found a photo in a magazine. I cut it out and stuck it to the wall of my tiny bedroom and gazed at it every day. It was of the Twin Towers in Manhattan. I drew an arrow toward the very top of one of the towers. It was meant to depict where I’d stand one day, overlooking the entire world, arms out, free as a bird. That was 1993.

The images and stories and songs I yearn for are somewhere between beauty and dream. They don’t need to be coherent, in the same way dreams don’t need to be. Ever try to tell someone your dream? Yawn. Even if you’re a damned good storyteller, you’ll induce some snoozes. The thing that compels you to tell someone your dreams is the feelingyou’re left with when you open your eyes. It’s the emotion that grips you, but that's attached to an ineffective or half-baked story. That emotion is hard to put into words. But could it be done through music, sound, or pictures?

Two years ago, I walked away from academia. After pursuing it relentlessly and devotedly for some seventeen years (if you count my undergraduate degree), I walked away.

It wasn’t a dramatic, flailing arms and hair-pulling act...

Midway through the month, I threw out my back. It might have had something to do with the 15-hour wedding I shot two days prior to that, or with my TERRIBLE posture when editing photographs. Or with the fact that I'm getting old. So old... :D

While you’re imagining all those other families have more glamorous lives than you, they’re just making dinner and having quiet conversation. They’re tired from a long day at work - just like you - and they, too, are looking to reconnect with loved ones.

So fall for your life. Fall in love with real.

Have you ever wished you could have an authentic, all-encompassing photographic story of your family’s life?

Not a last-minute portrait session before the holidays, or a mad scramble to don matching outfits and smiles in front of a curtain, but a real, honest-to-goodness portrayal of the crazy, quiet, cozy, obnoxious, loving, warm, or plain inexplicable moments your family burns through in a single year?

I’m not worried about what lies above,

I am concerned with what emerges.

How meaning comes to be.

How lines and dots and shadow

come to resemble memories

that fade

and are extinguished once you’re gone.

Maybe it's ironic that toward the end of my academic career, I was fighting tooth and nail to dismiss with subjective rating scales of parenting quality, and focus on the moment-to-moment behaviours, without judgments or messages. Or maybe it's telling.

When it was time to end the journey, we had a similarly limitless amount of possibilities to come home to. Canada, the vast. 

We chose a place close to my family. A place we could pursue another dream: living on the land, having sheep and chickens and all the rest, and green fields for the kids to thread their bare feet through. There was never really much of a question. Even if it meant walking away from academia.