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It’s been awhile! Between saying goodbye to my mountaineer family, packing up my life into a car, and planning out this next year, I forgot to look at life through my lens for a bit. However I’m home now and things have never felt so right. I’m right where I need to be; my heart does so well in the sun and a jump away from the ocean. Everything is exactly as it should be. It is finally summer and my heart is bursting with a new freedom. The moment you realize you create and cultivate your own happiness and love is a refreshing wave that carries you onto greater things, so here’s to those darlings.
P.S. I received quite a few letters I’ve been terrible at responding to but I shall be doing so shortly, I want to thank you for your kind words, they gave me strength when I needed it most and the amount of gratitude I have for you all cannot be contained, lots of love<3

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It’s been awhile! Between saying goodbye to my mountaineer family, packing up my life into a car, and planning out this next year, I forgot to look at life through my lens for a bit. However I’m home now and things have never felt so right. I’m right where I need to be; my heart does so well in the sun and a jump away from the ocean. Everything is exactly as it should be. It is finally summer and my heart is bursting with a new freedom. The moment you realize you create and cultivate your own happiness and love is a refreshing wave that carries you onto greater things, so here’s to those darlings.

P.S. I received quite a few letters I’ve been terrible at responding to but I shall be doing so shortly, I want to thank you for your kind words, they gave me strength when I needed it most and the amount of gratitude I have for you all cannot be contained, lots of love<3

#wooo for happiness and all the good vibes #life is good
00:20

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Rising with the sun every morning this second half of the semester to catch my yoga class has been one of the best decisions I’ve made of this year, I was just messing around today after class in my room with my lens. I’ve never been this happy and at peace with everything for quite awhile and yoga has begun to give me some sort of direction to pursue after. I’m learning that breathing into poses to open up my body can open up my heart and am truly beginning to embrace the concept of letting an inner light radiate through every thought, word, and action. I am so grateful for everything with all this happiness and this life I’ve been blessed with. Lots of good vibes and love to you all, namaste darlings!

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My heart is aching and goes out to all the souls of Boston tonight. &#8220;You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.&#8221; Let&#8217;s focus our energy on sending love and healing light to the upper east coast. Let go of fear, resentment, or hate. The world needs love, every single moment, and we all can do our part by radiating with loving intentions. Do not let bitterness steal your sweetness, do not let pain make you hate, be soft. I believe with all my heart the world to be a beautiful place so we must stay strong. May the light, goodness, and love forever outshine and persevere through darkness, may our natural kindness and profound compassion within us never cease to overflow. Breathe it all in, love it all out, start now.

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My heart is aching and goes out to all the souls of Boston tonight. “You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” Let’s focus our energy on sending love and healing light to the upper east coast. Let go of fear, resentment, or hate. The world needs love, every single moment, and we all can do our part by radiating with loving intentions. Do not let bitterness steal your sweetness, do not let pain make you hate, be soft. I believe with all my heart the world to be a beautiful place so we must stay strong. May the light, goodness, and love forever outshine and persevere through darkness, may our natural kindness and profound compassion within us never cease to overflow. Breathe it all in, love it all out, start now.

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these folks are the creme de la creme. i&#8217;ve been grateful to have such great role models as parents as well as a good idea of what true love looks like while growing up. they are the definition of soul mates and each other&#8217;s biggest adventures. not to mention they are the hippest; my mom never fails in being fashionably bold &amp; sharp while my dad is a living, breathing indiana jones (plus his vinyl collection is pretty killer), all on top of raising a mountain of five crazy wild kids. it&#8217;s been a great escape visiting with you guys in the heart of the appalachian mountains these past few days, lots more photos to come! lots of love and good vibes!

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these folks are the creme de la creme. i’ve been grateful to have such great role models as parents as well as a good idea of what true love looks like while growing up. they are the definition of soul mates and each other’s biggest adventures. not to mention they are the hippest; my mom never fails in being fashionably bold & sharp while my dad is a living, breathing indiana jones (plus his vinyl collection is pretty killer), all on top of raising a mountain of five crazy wild kids. it’s been a great escape visiting with you guys in the heart of the appalachian mountains these past few days, lots more photos to come! lots of love and good vibes!

23:33

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coffee, goofy siblings, and a whole lot of music jamm’n made the trip up to a cabin in the heart of the mountains quite fun as we passed by some beautiful sights (and yes that’s a van down by the river, if you get the reference, we shall love and welcome you into our family). it is wonderful to see warm colors blooming slowly but surely as spring spills in. a rainstorm had just swept through, the first of the season, and left behind a heaven of clouds to drive through. it was a lovely easter of traveling and collapsing at the end of the day in the middle of such a beautiful place surrounded by family; i could not be more thankful for belly laughter, caffeinated goodness, the beauty of nature, and a mountain of brothers and lovely sister on top.

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you’ve got to follow your essence and most importantly stay true to it despite everything that may come your way. maybe you’re, like me, a storyteller, a collector of memories who likes to shine light to them for others through photographs and film. maybe you like to bring about the laughter, spark a smile on the faces around you. you may be quiet and reserved, a thinker with profound thoughts that i’m sure carry on to many. or a musician who creates a surge of passion in others to dance and sing with voices they weren’t even aware they had. maybe you are kind of crazy, spontaneously dragging in your adventures with you, whether they are welcomed or not, making it one hell of a (but an unforgettable) day. perhaps you simply just like to drink wine, cheers to you. i use to get so overwhelmed by being so content in and determined to capture everything this world holds, but now i simply can’t get enough of it. every morning is a calling for more, one more sea to swim, one more mountain to climb. whatever your calling is, whatever your essence radiates with, embrace it (and my goodness go after it!). our essence is what stays long after in the hearts of the souls we share precious moments of time with, the moments we encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. when our lives collide in this vast universe, that is what stays. our bodies are just vessels, however our lives and what we do in these little parenthesis of eternity is what lives on.
it feels wonderful to get in touch with these truths and waves of peace in the mountains especially surrounded by the people i love most this weekend. there are no words to express how stoked i am for tomorrow&#8217;s adventures. bring it on appalachian.

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you’ve got to follow your essence and most importantly stay true to it despite everything that may come your way. maybe you’re, like me, a storyteller, a collector of memories who likes to shine light to them for others through photographs and film. maybe you like to bring about the laughter, spark a smile on the faces around you. you may be quiet and reserved, a thinker with profound thoughts that i’m sure carry on to many. or a musician who creates a surge of passion in others to dance and sing with voices they weren’t even aware they had. maybe you are kind of crazy, spontaneously dragging in your adventures with you, whether they are welcomed or not, making it one hell of a (but an unforgettable) day. perhaps you simply just like to drink wine, cheers to you. i use to get so overwhelmed by being so content in and determined to capture everything this world holds, but now i simply can’t get enough of it. every morning is a calling for more, one more sea to swim, one more mountain to climb. whatever your calling is, whatever your essence radiates with, embrace it (and my goodness go after it!). our essence is what stays long after in the hearts of the souls we share precious moments of time with, the moments we encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. when our lives collide in this vast universe, that is what stays. our bodies are just vessels, however our lives and what we do in these little parenthesis of eternity is what lives on.

it feels wonderful to get in touch with these truths and waves of peace in the mountains especially surrounded by the people i love most this weekend. there are no words to express how stoked i am for tomorrow’s adventures. bring it on appalachian.

19:11

jamm’n deux.

we embrace not knowing any words. we’re on our way to the cabin through our lovely appalachian mountains for break!

22:32

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for as long as i can remember, i’ve always been an advocate of 1) going with the flow and 2) staying balanced, or at least striving to be balanced. maybe it’s been a little too much jack johnson jamming or growing up near the sea, which i often refer to while writing quite a bit. i often forget that the moments i feel like i’m getting pulled under the currents and tides are in fact part of the flow of everything. i think it’s human nature to try stabilizing situations when times get rough. but by stabilizing things we defeat the point of the experience sometimes. stay with the uncertainty, dive into the unknown, it’s all about the struggle. in the act of balancing, we come alive. our sensations are thrown into a whirlpool, changing moment by moment; sometimes we feel secure and other times we feel precarious. in the long swim, we develop a tolerance for instability (and god knows that life is constantly up and down, high and low). as we come to accept this as a natural part of life, it becomes more familiar rather than frightening. rather than fleeing from the obstacles and the oncoming waves, we grow to love the challenge, to roll and rough it out and seek standing tall on the other side. the sense of being off balance is exhilarating and reminds me of the impermanence and fragility of life and to embrace how good it is to be fully in the moment and alive.

so while i may have a bit too much of the ocean invested in my words and heart, i really believe, like surfers, that we can come to feel the power of the waves, the majesty of the elements, and a sense of our own place in this swirling universe.

23:48
Anonymous: what lens do you use?

I’ve been using a lot of my 50mm lately and of course my fish eye. I love that baby so much.

21:24

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“the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”

a string of words I’ve been humming for the past week constantly more than ever. a song my grandfather and i spent hours sitting in front of the piano, singing and finding the right notes for every word a few years ago. a melody that has now engraved itself in my heart, my fingers reach and ache for those keys as soon as some ivories are in sight.

nat king cole had it right. love and compassion, i cannot stress enough, are the most powerful forces we have in life. it carries strength that defies and rises above all odds. it comes in many ways and many forms; undying and unconditional, big fat and sappy, platonic and friendly, passionately and romantic, confusing and bumpy, open and free, whatever it is, it’s love, and despite how skeptic you are, romantic diehard or not, we are all capable of doing it. it’s human.

it’s something quite hard to describe, to find a home in words, love. it’s hard to describe what is best defined only by itself, only to be explained in terms of it’s own experience. so i will trust that you all at least have had one or two encounters and can grasp of what loveliness it all is. it’s amazing right? that connection between two souls, the thread that ties us together. it makes us write sonnets and symphonies, we dedicate seas of novels to it, we build towers soaring in the sky powered by it. we suddenly want to be someone’s historian upon whom the world will call when they want to know about one of the most extraordinary souls to walk this earth, we want to share our lives fully with them, to make memories, to take part in their joys and hardships, stand side by side, climb by climb.

i cannot speak from my own experience but i can share from what i know from lovely friends and family that marriage is a beautiful thing. it’s a wonderful lifelong commitment to your soul mate, through the ups and downs, good bad and ugly, knowing that when you come home, your heart and love is waiting with open arms. it makes my own heart overflow watching couples grow old together, from taking that first vow, to cherishing every breathing moment, to building homes, to growing families, to living and loving happily, hand in hand, brimming and growing with the beauty of life to the very end.

and while that sends my heart overflowing with happiness, my heart does break when i still turn on the news and see that there are people out there who have to fight for something that is a human right. love is love. it has no gender, it has no boundaries, it’s more vast and full than anything in this universe, laws can not define it, only experiences. to quote another golden voice, sinatra says it perfectly, love and marriage, goes together like a horse and carriage. marriage is intensely personal and simply cannot be defined by anyone else other than the people who are sharing this extraordinary connection and bond together. that’s what true traditional marriage is, lifelong commitment. the fact that there are people still fighting gay marriage baffles me, honestly it’s happening already, it’s been happening for in fact as long as we’ve been pledging ourselves to each other, but tragically we seem to deny gay people the rights to obligations that are associated with their marriages and that simply is discrimination. why deny their right to share a happy and loving life with someone they were lucky enough to experience something amazing with. love is love and love will always be love. i don’t want to live in a world where we discriminate against that.

so to end this ramble short before my hippie colors start flying, i just wanted to say that i stand for love, equality for all goes with that. i have so much hope to wake up in a world that is overflowing with respect and compassion for humanity, for every single person.

long story short: all the world needs is love. we’ve all got hearts. let’s do it.

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