My Refuge.

I've been writing furiously over the last couple days. (40 pages worth) I'm working first on what will be for lack of a better word, a preface and a prequel to the photographs and stories and anecdotes that will accompany them. It's a story about the last few years of my life. I wanted to tell it to allow the reader to not only understand me and who the author is, but to perhaps have a chance to relate to the kinds of hardships and disappointments we all face in our lives. Admittedly, mine have been excruciating, but they have also been the very reason this means so much to me, and directly responsible for the effort, time, love and passion I have put into it. For the reader to then perhaps be able to feel the thrill along with me at the joy that has come into my life by virtue of the birds, my photography, and that refuge. My refuge.

A short excerpt:

During the last year and a half, I have been making trips out with my cameras to the refuge. I call it my refuge, because in reality it became exactly that. The only place I go could go to feel alive. To feel safe. To see and appreciate the beauty of nature.

When I am there, I forget everything else. I have my cameras, and I am looking for wonderful, funny, beautiful and amazing things to capture. Today when I go there, and ever since she left us, I feel my mother’s presence. I feel closer to her somehow.

To be honest, by the time my mother died, and after I started my hellish job shortly thereafter, I had all but lost hope. I was so close to giving up. To throwing in the towel.

I saw nothing left to live for. I had resigned myself to a life where I’d work at something I hated, live completely alone. Be loved by no one, and pay everything I had to the woman who started this descent into hell, now almost 10 years ago. I was floundering. I had stood up every time, given it my all. I’d tried to find love again and lost. I’d lost every job I held, and now I was being abused by someone on top of it all.

I couldn’t stand it anymore.

The refuge became an obsession for me. I wanted to be there whenever I could. I would make the over 90 mile drive after work to get there while there was still enough light, and enough time to spend an hour or two looking for things to photograph, and to just take in the sights.

Every time I pulled around that corner and saw the marshes come into view, my heart rate slowed and I felt a peace come over me. I’d take a deep breath.

I was home.

In 2009, I would make over 150 trips to this place. I would take tens of thousands of photographs. It became the only place I could go to find joy and peace in my life. I needed this. More than I have ever needed anything in my life.

It saved me. It gave me purpose. It allowed me to develop my skills, use my creativity, and see such amazing things. It let me become closer to God’s incredible creation. I was learning. Enjoying. Developing. I was finding myself, maybe for the first time in my life. I knew what joy felt like again.

What I wasn’t expecting was how my journey and time there would end up allowing me to find new and wonderful friends who shared my passion. One thing would lead to another. By the time 2009 had ended I had a half-dozen new and wonderful friends. We’ go there together and meet up. We’d get incredible shots, together. We’d spend an entire day, laughing, joking, taking wonderful pictures of the birds, and feeling truly ALIVE.

I had come full circle in my life.

When I was a boy I marveled at the wonders of nature and the world around me. My parents stoked that curiosity. I was so privileged to grow up with so much to explore right in my own back yard. An incredible lakeside cabin to visit in the summer. Nature, science, learning. Birds and Butterflies. Fish and Reptiles. Rocks and Minerals and Fossils and Arrowheads. I soaked it all in. I learned and I experienced. I explored. I collected. I read countless books and field guides. A telescope to explore the heavens. When I was 16, I bought my first real camera.

A camera.

Now I could take pictures of the things I had seen. I was in my glory.
Now, decades later, after I had worked and toiled, married and raised a family, and done all the things an adult should do, I was back to being that young child once more. To get here, I had to lose everything I had, everything I love, and watch my dreams and plans for the future… die.

But I would find new dreams to hold onto. I’d learn again what it felt like to thrill at witnessing nature in all her glory.

I’d rediscover.

Me.