soft

For me it feels better, calmer, to be soft.

I was sitting on the beach this evening talking with extended family. This mom of a beautiful daughter mentioned she had worked for a long time and was hard, but since recently deciding to stop working, she has become soft. Then she said something that felt powerful to me, “And, I don’t know, I think I prefer soft.”

I have felt a similar shift in my attitude - I ran from my family for so long that now that my mind and body have healed I feel myself being pulled into them like a magnet! As I walked into the airport headed for Seattle last week Kate blew kisses to me with my every step farther and farther away. I blew kisses back and wondered, “What am I doing?! Do I really want to leave this?!” So these days I wonder, what does photography have in store for me? Does it bring me closer to the ones I crave most? Sometime it doesn’t and I can finally accept and admit that.

I am praying and working and setting goals to give my greatest attention to the ones who deserve it most, at this time in our lives.

This weekend is general conference. Saturday and Sunday will be spent being soft, being open, listening to communication from heaven (because I know deeply that when I listen it comes.) I will choose soft. My mind, heart, and spirit will be one. In turn I will feel at one with my loves, my friends, my family, the world.

It’s funny how that works - soft can be interpreted as weak, but I will be soft - at one - and I will feel whole, complete, and strong.

Portra 800 forever. And to all of the families who embrace my chaos - I love you. Thank you for making images with me that feel beyond perfect in every regard. xo, Christina

Who I Truly Am

"I may always feel subject to the forces of echolocation, moving to and from experience and reflecting back again, but like the bat I can determine outcome. I do this in every thought and in every action. Every day I have to inventory the messaging. Edit and rewrite. At times there may be a little retrofitting to get the landscape to better reflect my desired outcome, but I have to do it again and again until it is true. Until all of the messages rattling around in the sound chambers of my mind are reflective of who I truly am. Simply charming, vastly likeable, perfectly self-deprecating and absolutely wonderful! As for now I am happy to be a work in progress."

Maran Hanley, Echolocation of the Soul: A New Perspective on Identity

I love her words. The complete article can be found here. Here she is, enveloped in the eyes and hands and love of those who are lucky to call her wife and mom.

Cotaberts Family

Has your heart ever felt so full, so happy, wanting to explode with joy and excitement, so about to burst that it makes the world seem light as a feather - that you're floating along as if to have not a care in the world? I am there right now. I haven't felt this way over the last little while though, more the opposite: pressure, barely hanging on, unreachable expectations, drowning, heavy. For reasons I know and now recognize, but which I am learning to let waft past me. I now know how to recognize those hard moments and mentally and spiritually step aside so they flutter by hardly with my noticing them. I have a long blog post in my mind that I will write soon, but for now this family and the photos of them remind me of lightness, floating, free, acceptance, peace, progression, overcoming, and most importantly becoming.