In the late spring, early summer of 2012, my daughter, a member of the UVA-Wise Highland Cavalier Marching Band, is going to Paris. I am blown away by this and plan to give her all the financial help I can so that she will be able to go. On my own, I cannot afford to pay for us both to go. While I have a passport and have had the wanderlust for so long I can no longer remember when it started, I am struggling with the notion that I might not get to go. It isn’t jealousy or envy, for I couldn’t be more happy that our Tay gets to go on such an amazingly incredible adventure. No, it is the photographer in me that wants to see. That needs to see. That longs to see. One of my most constant prayers has been to ask that my photography enable me to travel. That greeting cards would allow me to go places that I’ve only dreamed of and to visit each place, across the globe, where my cards have sold. When I pray, what I see is being able to just jump in my car or on a plane and go wherever, whenever, with only a few changes of clothes, my camera, my phone, my laptop and my tripod … just any old time and for as long as I want. While I believe in my heart that such will happen eventually, as it was God who set me on the path of photography in the first place, and so I feel very strongly that it is He who has put this wanderlust in my heart, I have no doubt that photography will take me where I am meant to go. I am hoping that it will take me to Paris. I have a specific destination, besides Ardmore in County Waterford, Ireland, to pray about. So I am praying specifically this time. I am praying that the money I make on my greeting cards in the last quarter of the year, September through December will take me to Paris. While I wish that hundreds of thousands of people would share this and would talk up Through the Eyes of the Spirit, I leave it to the Father, who already knows how it will end.
To check out the greeting cards, click the photo below to open Through the Eyes of the Spirit in a new window. If you feel led to do so, share the link with friends and family. God is in control, but your support and encouragement is appreciated. While everyone may not understand the need to go and to see, some will. As for me, being accepted, even when I’m not understood, is priceless.
My dad is an avid gardener, farmer and all-around jack-of-all-trades. He has a thumb so green that it makes the grasshoppers sigh with envy. Everything he touches in his garden grows like wildfire. While that is, on most occasions, a good thing, there is one part of it that makes me sorry he even knows what dirt is. That part is bean-picking. I put bean picking right up there with being staked to an anthill.
So while the rest of the country was caught up in the celebration of freedom, I found myself caught up in the lives that live under the beauty of that freedom. I spent the Holiday weekend with a bunch of rough, cigarette smoking, tobacco chewing men, tough, driven women, brave 
kids of varying ages and a myriad of horses, mules and dogs. A small group they were, but nonetheless, an interesting bunch of people who held a common interest. On this particular weekend, they brought their campers, horse trailers, wagons, bridles, saddles, grills, tables and vittles and set up camp. In a flat piece of bottom land in Scott County, VA, what was just a bare place became a starting point for the week ahead. Each day, beginning on Independence Day, the riders planned to mount their horses or mules and the wagon masters to hook their equines to their wagons and take off for the day. There was friendship alongside friendly rivalry, but at the root, there was a love of something that bonded like glue. Photographs can only take me so far and without the intimate knowledge of how a group of people thrive together, the story stops at the image.
fortunate enough to have an invitation to this event and was, after a few hours, accepted as part of the gang. My main goal, secondary to photographing the happenings in and around the camp, was staying out of the way. I asked questions when there was something I didn’t know, and kept my eyes open for anything that could be used to document what these people were about. Though there was plenty of coming and going, I was drawn, not inexplicably, to the lined faces of the older men, the laughing smiles of the children and the
character of the animals. Shadows, shades, contrasts and light have always fascinated me and here, with these people, there was no shortage of real life happening right before my eyes. No one posed for photographs or changed their habits in the event that they might find themselves caught on film. They did what they had come to do and paid little mind to the gal with the camera around her neck. After three days trolling the bottom field in the hot sun, I had a “tog tat” around my neck in the outline of my camera strap and a collage of photographs that reminded 
me, as I developed the RAW files in Lightroom, why it is that I so love being a photographer. In each face, line, smile, grimace, frown and laugh, there was evidence of a Creator who is able to take the same features and make them different millions of times over. I am thankful for the opportunity to, for just a little while in a span of time, be a part of something that previously had been foreign to me. These people work hard, live hard and play hard. They have lives outside of the wagon train, but for this stretch of days, they come together to share what they love.
And this time, I was allowed to be a part of it. So to those who made these images possible by doing what they do and being what they are, I am grateful, for without a subject, be it human, animal or nature, a photographer is just a person with a gadget hanging around their neck. I don’t want to sit by as life happens around me and let lessons that I could have learned pass me by. I don’t want to regret not learning what makes people tick, what makes them laugh or cry and what makes them want to work so hard to accomplish something. I don’t want to let the colors in the world blind me to the brilliance of shadow and light. I want to be more than just a gadget rack.
A Photographer's Heart 