I love photographing people in general, and nature, and all the beautiful things 'cause you get to show your perspective.

You get to see if you can capture some emotion.

Normally, you're not just taking a picture from one perspective.

You're walking around and trying to get various viewpoints.

And I like doing that to walk around something and see its depth.

My spiritual awakening was a combination of losing trust in the world.

After the political heat in 2017, accompanied with maybe my kids growing older, not needing me, accompanied with my marriage feeling a little less than it used to, you know?

And just in general, starting to kind of lose my faith in the world, lose my trust in the world, I guess.

And that was became like a fork in the road.

That became just a moment where I had a choice.

I can continue feeling bad about everything or I can throw everything into a different direction.

So I started searching.

I started searching for anything that was like a good representation of a better way to be.

I went through different churches, I went through different spiritual modalities, and I started going to different groups.

And I started watching what I listened to, watching what I watched on TV.

We consume a lot of negativity accidentally, so I started really curating all the things that I listened to.

And I was really surprised at how it started to make a difference.

And I found Lisa McCourt's JOY School Group.

And I wasn't really a group person.

I was kind of a loner, I'm kind of like, "I do my own thing."

I love people, but I was just never one to talk in a group.

I'm kind of an introvert, but she made me feel really comfortable.

And everybody in the group was really raw.

Not at first.

Like, it took us all a while to get warm.

And I can see...

I've never been in any kind of group healing dynamic, but I can see why they work.

And when some people are vulnerable, everybody else listens and really pays attention, and everybody else kind of can feel it, and those emotions start to bubble in themselves, too.

So it was a process of learning to do things differently, learning to meditate, learning to pause before I reacted to things, which is what meditation teaches me.

It was learning to own my own stuff.

Because if I wanted to trust the world again, I needed to find truth.

And if I needed to find truth, I needed to find truth in myself first.

So I needed to be very mindful of my thoughts, because at the end of the day, I really wanna see people fully.

I want all the perspective, like, in a photograph.

And doing that really expanded, expanded like everything.

I have so much more peace and so much more joy now.

It wasn't always comfortable.

I didn't like all the things that I found out about myself.

It was eye-opening because I feel like I was just kind of an average person, and now I have above-average peace.

I'm still an average person and I'm still a work in progress, but I have this above-average peace.

Even when things go wrong, even when things go terribly wrong, I can handle them completely different.

I don't go to my old emotional reactions.

I pause and I kind of try to see the whole perspective and I try to see it from the other person's view.

It didn't happen overnight for me.

I'd like to be like, "Oh, yeah, I took this group and it was great, and in like six weeks, I was amazing."

Or, "I read this book and it was perfect.

And I went to this church, and I saw this service, and I was saved."

And it was work, it was work.

It was like an exercise routine, or changing your diet, or anything like that.

It was just like... My goal was to be out of anxiety and to be in a more peaceful place that I knew existed.

I've felt love before, I've felt peace before, I knew those things existed.

So it was just me working towards that.

A lot of these principles of looking within, and being mindful, and changing your own habits, and seeing the light and the love in each person, even if it's buried by their story and by their past, these are principles that are not new, right?

These are principles that are kind of like the cornerstone of almost every spiritual teaching, right?

They are not really rules, they are just suggestions.

If you want more peace and you want more love, these are kind of steps.

And you don't have to do the steps.

It might take you longer to get there.

When I first fell in love with photography, it was long walks of nature that had me hooked, that I could show people the way the sunlight was on the tree or coming through the moss, and also have that moment, see the beauty in it.

And so I started, once again, going for these long walks that I hadn't gone for for quite some time.

Therefore, falling more in love with nature than I've ever fallen before.

My goal in the future is to do some sort of nature charity.

I've been curating a bunch of nature prints and cards, and I'd love to do something where a proceed of it, like 20% or something, goes back to some sort of conservation.

That's the other reason I photograph nature a lot and throw it up when I can on my social media.

It's not like, "Wow, look at me, I'm amazing."

I just want people to fall in love with it more.

I really want them to look at it and go, "Wow, I haven't picked up my camera in a while.

Like, maybe I should get out and fall in love with it again."

And, "Cool, like, I wanna inspire that.

Let's do that."

'Cause to be honest, I'm probably never gonna be a millionaire as a nature photographer, but maybe I can inspire some people to get out and love it.

And they will start to think differently about maybe some of the things that they are buying or consuming or the way they're moving in the world and to value nature more.

And I feel like that would be a beautiful chain reaction right there.