A Somewhat Brief Introduction of Me.

I am a passionate, feisty, excited, emotional, intense, serious, compassionate lover of life.  I feel.  I express.  I am moved by learning new things and having new experiences.  If I could be a professional student, sign me up.

I graduated high school a year early, bored and ready for the next step.  Initially, my plan was to immediately attend college.  This was interrupted by a change of view in the fallacies behind the institution.  This lack of trust instead drove me toward an experience of 'freedom'.  At that time, my 17 year old mind thought that moving away to a new place and taking care of myself was freedom.  I drove into Santa Barbara, CA, leaving from the small town in Boyne City, MI where I mostly grew up.  I literally closed my eyes and pointed to a town on the atlas.  After only a couple of hours of being in this beautiful town that rested on the ocean with an incredible backdrop of mountains I found a job and a place to live.  With only a couple hundred dollars to my name, this was reassuring.

My perspective was drastically changed and I dove into painting and surfing.  Only a couple years later I found myself engaged, with a marketing company and pregnant with my son.  I got extremely exhausted with the business world and sold the company to move to the jungle on the east side of Maui.  I wanted to get back to the 'root's'.  I shed the 'keeping up with the Jones's' mentality prevalent in southern California.

I spent three years near Hana, HI starting up a sustainable farm (that was the goal).  This was intense work and had a long way to be complete.  The opportunity to live off the land reframed my thoughts on what really matters in life.  The bare essentials of love, food, merriness, and intentional living.  I spent a remarkable season after this in the middle of nowhere Maine.  I became a whitewater guide and lived among a beautiful river community.  This then led me, as the season died off, to Big Sky, MT.

These ten years of webbing into different communities, I found a similarity, yet drastic difference between each place.  I finally realized that my passion and drive in life is to continue experiencing human behavior by living in different places and becoming apart of the community socially and environmentally (learning what the area has to offer).  Which has now led me to college. After ten years, I know that writing and photography are my tools, my artistic outlet, my hobbies and my determined way to make a living.  To be a documentarian.  So here I am, double majoring in photography and writing studies, in my junior year at Montana State University.