Spoiler alert: I made a thing! Keep reading for more information/backstory, but if you’d rather just have the link up front, here it is:

Embracing Mystery

For a brief stretch of time, I hated mystery.

Cliffhangers? No thank you. Suspense? Hard pass. I am not kidding, there was a time in my life where I needed to know the entire plot of a novel before I could read the first page.

I’m almost positive this phase began when I became a mother.

As a new mom, I did not want to surrender to the unknown. I wanted to know—all of the things—with certainty. So I read books and hundreds of Internet forums and Googled every possible question about every possible thing, like whether it was normal for my nipples to bleed while breastfeeding (yes1) or whether it was normal for my baby to not poop for six days (yes) or whether it was normal to swing from very very very happy to very very very sad within the span of the same hour (also yes).

This desire to know, know, know became an obsession. I stockpiled knowledge and memorized talking points from as many parenting books as I could. All of that information—tips, tricks, and so much advice—traveled through my eyeballs into my brain and worked its way back out through my writing.

As I processed my life as a new mother, I unabashedly wrote like a woman with answers. I wrote, bless my heart, like an expert—as if motherhood itself was something a person could not just figure out, but actually master (especially if they were as dedicated to Google as I was).

At the time, mystery had no place in my life, and certainly no place in my writing. I wrote clearly and definitively about all the things I knew (which were, to be clear, so many things). I wrapped up every essay with a tidy little bow, always ending with a direct takeaway and a glass-half-full perspective. I left no room for questions, for wonder, for nuance or curiosity or bewilderment of any kind.

Luckily for me, humility is a wonderful teacher.

It’s taken a lot of falling down—and by that I mean a lot of being wrong—to finally admit: the older I get, the less I know. Once upon a time, that sentence would have frightened me. Today, that sentence feels like freedom.

Embracing mystery has been a gradual process, one I am still very much in the middle of. But where I used to write with answers, I now try to ask more questions. Where I used to tell my readers exactly what to think, I now invite them to come to their own conclusions.

I guess you could say I am learning the beauty of leaving some things unsaid.

My photography has seen a similar transformation over the years. Once upon a time, I only knew one way to photograph people, and that was by pointing a camera straight at their face and yelling, SMILE!

I captured smiles, and a lot of them. Genuine smiles and forced smiles and natural smiles and awkward smiles. Every picture I took looked identical: one head, two eyes, one nose, and a mouth stretched up into a curve, either willingly or begrudgingly.

In other words—my photos did not contain an ounce of magic, wonder, or mystery.

From the very beginning of my motherhood, though, I felt desperate to capture my children differently. I wanted pictures of them smiling, of course, but I also wanted pictures of them in all of their messy, wild, remarkable glory. I wanted to take photographs that reflected their nuances, their personalities, their hopes and fears and dreams. I wanted pictures of them laughing, crying, screaming, peacefully sitting in a high chair with yogurt all over their face. I wanted to capture my children in a way that transcended SAY CHEESE! I wanted to photograph my children in a way that felt like … making art.

Just as I’ve learned to embrace mystery in my writing over the years, my photography has seen a similar transformation. I now know there are a hundred ways to photograph a person, and only a few of those ways involve direct eye contact and a smile.

Enter: this guide.

Embracing Mystery is a 65-page PDF featuring nine prompts to help you see your children, and your motherhood, in a whole new light. Before the imposter syndrome sets in, let me state on the record: this is not a guide for photographers. This is a guide for memory-keepers, or anyone who enjoys taking pictures. I intentionally made this guide with mothers in mind.

You could follow every single one of these prompts with an iPhone and nothing more; no fancy camera equipment needed. If you do have a fancy camera, I have included a couple of tips throughout the guide where you could push yourself, skill-wise. My hope is that the general concepts and sample images will serve primarily as inspiration.2

Robert Frank, a critically acclaimed photographer and documentary filmmaker, famously said, “When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”

If I had to sum up the heart behind this guide, that’s it. I want to help you make photographs that feel like poetry: emotional, creative, imaginative, and even whimsical at times. I want to help you see your whole, ordinary life as a mysterious, beautiful work of art.

Grab the Guide

Any questions? Let me know in the comments! And hey, if you end up buying and loving Embracing Mystery, I’d be so grateful if you could share this post with a friend.

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