In the gap between rationality and human emotion, forces of nature become my metaphor for human experience. Within this metaphor, I’m interested in stories: our stories, my stories, her stories, stories about how we interact with one another and with ourselves. Through stories, we create internal worlds, worlds that help us to make sense of an external reality.  My own external reality involves culture, landscape and place.  I was raised in Utah, a peculiar desert place of Mormons and mountains that has profound effects on me. I am realizing the natural world is my connection to myself. The solitude I find in the outdoors is meditative; I wonder, are we really that separate from nature? Our personal disasters are as sudden and forceful, as devastating and destructive, as insignificant.  They are terrible. They are beautiful.