Beauty and gratitude are my weapons of choice and I’m passionate about wrestling with the 90% that’s below the top 10% of surface-level living and the real people who want to go there with me, singing car-aoke with a hairbrush microphone, sparkly things, cool seed pods, and giving sincere compliments. Thanks for being here.

Who am I?

I am blessed with the best marriage and am wife to my best friend Derrick, mom to two very active and charismatic sons, and a teenage daughter who is an incredibly talented artist. I also spend a lot of time chasing down our rescue dog, Louis Armstrong, pulling chewed-up paper towels that he snuck out of the trash or Pokemon cards out of his mouth. We recently moved from the Atlanta area to North Carolina and expect to take full advantage of living between the coast and the mountains now.

I am a maker, a creative, a lover of beauty. I live to create and create to live. From a very young age, I was creating my own elaborate games and clubs for my friends, all kinds of various art, commercials for my favorite products, and making up songs with my hairbrush microphones in my mirror. I wrote and mailed letters in cursive on floral stationery to my grandparents in another state. With a thread and a needle and my very rudimentary sewing skills, I’d repair the holes in his beloved Mr. Bear for my big brother because I could contribute to making something better and bringing happiness to another through my creativity. Creating helped me connect to the world, to others, myself and later it would help me connect to God.

I’ve always had a very strong sense of self and identity and one of my favorite memories supporting this is when I was in an elementary school Christmas performance and all of the second grade was asked to dress in their Christmas finest, velvet reds and Christmas plaids, with their shiny black patent mary janes and lacy socks. I had convinced my mom to allow me to wear my favorite purple outfit and purple boots with fur. To this day, I’m not sure how she felt comfortable doing that, but as a mother, I can understand “picking and choosing your battles”. I had a solo that night and stood out like a sore thumb on the stage but I remember feeling pretty awesome in my power color, purple.

For a few decades of my life, I stepped away from art and pursued business. The Lord brought me back to art during a season of long-suffering. He knew I would be able to meet him there on some of my darkest nights. Now, some of this pain shows up in my writing and visual art as I process a lot of the suffering, pain, and loss through poetry, psalms, and writing on my Substack Becoming. Immersing myself back into art brought a rich and magical awakening to all of the beauty the Lord surrounds us with. Beauty became a powerful tool for me to combat darkness and suffering and a very real ‘sustaining grace’ that has comforted me smack dab in the middle of my pain and trauma that our family has experienced over these last seven years. I have learned to not shy away from the pain and suffering and in fact, it’s the very thing that brought me into a more intimate and sweet relationship with the Lord. I now can thank God for these past seven years of pain. He is in the business of making beauty from ashes and he wastes nothing. I want to waste nothing, also.

“When people cease to be surrounded by beauty, they cease to hope.” N.T. Wright

I can’t mention beauty as a big part of my life without including nature. I am a master naturalist and our family is always collecting nature treasures to add to our extensive, museum-level collection of nature objects, which I affectionately call our ‘cabinet of curiosities’. It is not unusual to find dead insects lying around in containers waiting to be pinned, including two brown boxes currently in our refrigerator with several dead butterfly specimens that I received from the natural history museum. In 2024, I will begin teaching and leading the Young Naturalists Club for the Wake County Audubon.

I love collecting books, and reading some of them. I am almost always reading at least 5 books at a time, including the Bible, a collection of poetry and a book on spiritual development. I don’t read much fiction but I love reading and collecting quotes! I am an avid journaler and write ‘morning pages’ every morning.

Our family lived through an unimaginable experience and truly knows what it feels like to lose everything. This is a part of my suffering story. We lost our family’s dream home, our health, our dogs’ lives, our jobs, my art studio, all of our belongings, and all of our money in a very short time frame when our family discovered hidden toxic mold in our home. I am more familiar with mystery chronic illness than I care to be, and have become a huge PANS/PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Strep Infections) advocate through our family’s tumultuous journey with it. I feel anytime God gives you an experience like that, He calls you to help and encourage others who are also walking through similar challenges.

I grew up in church. My grandparents were both pastors, but we didn’t have a super religious home. I did all the things good little girls who ‘believed in God’ did. I went to church, prayed, blessed my food and loved others. I knew the Sunday-school Jesus loved me, but it was an abstract love - not a personal “for me” love.

I was an adult when I accepted Jesus as my personal savior. It’s been over a decade and I’m STILL LEARNING how to fully receive his love and understand what that looks like. A huge part of that process has been learning how important our own healing is in order to give and to receive God’s love fully. My healing journey is another theme in my art, poetry and writing.

Moving from ‘believing in God’ to becoming a ‘disciple of Christ’ was one of my greatest joys in life. The more I know him, the more I trust him and the more I trust him, the more I love him and the more I love him, the more I feel seen/known/loved in return and want to keep knowing, trusting, and loving him. It’s exciting to know I have the opportunity to constantly grow here. It’s exciting to see the world with ‘new creation’ eyes, where beauty abounds and beauty heals and redeems, and sustains, and provides.

In all of this, in everything on this entire website, I pray that all I share with others, everything I have to offer, points to Jesus and who he is and how much he loves us. I’ll be real about it and it won’t always be pretty. And I’ll be vulnerable because I know that’s where true connection and healing happen.

Thanks for being here.