Mine swept me up in a blaze of glory.

I fell in love, let that love go, cried my eyes out, danced my ass off, made some of my favorite work, lived in my bathing suit, participated in spontaneous/sacred ritual, started a new photo project, saw as many sunrises and sunsets as possible, spent as much time in the elements and with beloved friends as I could, wrote a bunch of poems, gave even less shits about what anyone thought about my anything, discovered new music + once again recommitted to this body, this world and art as my true love.

When I’m so in the moment, I’m not even thinking about writing it down or making a photograph, I feel like I’m doing something right. Now, I’m ready to chill out and lock in for fall…..although I may still have a few magic tricks up my sleeve and down my pants (Did y’all see I’m coming to NYC in September?).

In the mean time….

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS:

BAD NEWS FIRST:

I will never teach Teethkiss the Class again. Teethkiss, my original online workshop, has helped hundreds of photographers find their voice and way in this wild internet west. It been the most successful thing I’ve ever done and I’m ready to let it go in beauty.

To those of you who learned with me thru the years: I love you forever and Thank You. Take it from Ted Lasso and me: BELIEVE. Believe your work matters. If you are still struggling some, remember that its never too late to start keeping those creative contracts and promises you made yourself.

To those of you who saw TK the class offered and thought, “next time.” Sadly, there wll be no next time.

GOOD NEWS SECOND:

You can still get TK the original content. The original content is the online workshop that TK the class was based on.

And its ON SALE now for $444.

(normally priced at $1200)

eethkiss is the photography class that refuses to teach you how to be like me and instead, insists you create like YOU.

Liberate yourself from asking what other people want, or what will sell.

Why? Because work like that is a dime a dozen.

Creating from your own gut truth is the only way to beat the trends and make something REAL.

BUY THE ORIGINAL TEETHKISS if you are:

a photographer, wannabe photographer, or seasoned yet sick of your own bullshit photographer and you want the ORIGINAL CONTENT that launched a thousand photography ships.

(seriously, do you know how many photographers you admire who took this class, then applied its principles to build businesses and practies way bigger than I ever could due to my extremely poor executive functioning skills????

I’m not gonna name any names because that’s weird. Plus, each artist deserves all the credit for where they took themselves. But I AM gonna share some testimonials as well as some recent work below.

Grab teethkiss if you are ready to make showtopping photos that mean something. Its BEYOND time to put down your fear and pick up your soul as the boss of your art.

*all images made on film by yours truly. almost all processed by Indie Film Lab*

OKAY, I NEED IT. (CLICK HERE)

OKAY, I NEED IT. (CLICK HERE)

OKAY, I NEED IT. (CLICK HERE)

xx,

Yan

Where have I been all the month of May and beyond? I’d tell you if I could. I’m working on it. Let’s just say that for Mother’s Day and Mental Health Awareness month I was up to my eyeballs in a mothering and mental health crisis. It was like those tv dramas about emergency rooms (ER, Grey’s Anatomy, Pitt) we’re all so obsessed with – total triage.

I used to think the chaos in my life was all my fault. But then for years I tried harder and harder and harder to grow up and responsibly manage every little bit of my life and not only did shit still hit the fan, arguably that shit got worse.

It splattered everywhere.

This pattern kept repeating until I had to acknowledge that trying harder wasn’t the solution. Surrender was.

I gave everything I had to learn this: ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE, but I’m not actually in control of much. Except for how I perceive, relate and respond to it all. Somewhere in there is true creation.

So there I was he day before Mother’s Day - knee deep in the afore mentioned crisis. I’d just come back from Provo Canyon where I went to ground myself. That’s when I realized the photo shoot I’d been excited about for weeks started in twenty minutes.

I texted my client that I was on my way.

A poet mother. An artist father. Four children in the home they grew up in but were about to move away from.

Mom had given me a heads up about her youngest son. There were eyes all over his bedroom. He was infatuated with an Arcade Fire Album, simply because it had a giant eyeball on its cover. I saw it propped on his desk - holographic, almost psychedelic.

Finally, someone as obsessed with perception as I am, I thought.

Strange that he was only six years old.

At one point during the shoot, knowing he would appreciate it more than most, I held my medium format camera up to his eyes. I showed him how to use the manual focus. His wiggled with excitement. When the focus locked, he gasped.

I laughed like our souls had an inside joke.

Later, his mom told me the first thing he does each morning is draw the *mountain he sees outside his window.

Every

Morning.

As I write this, I touch the tiny gold mountain necklace around my neck - an amulet from a good friend. She knows I’ve walked with the *mountain each day - for years now. Most of you reading this do too. You know I used to live in what I called my mountain house. It held me better than any lover, spilling me out onto trails each day and showing me the sunset over the valley each night through its huge window eyes.

I used to dance for hours in the living room of that gorgeous mountain home. High beamed ceilings above me that literally sparkled like stars— all alone except for the city lights below.

Now, I live in a basement. I have a single window and almost no personal space. A trade I’ve made for many reasons, but most importantly - to be close to my teenagers before they leave home.

Did I mention this basement is a studio apartment in the home of my ex husband, his current wife, and their two, small children? Or that the house has been under major construction for the entire two+ years that I’ve lived here?

Talk about chaos.

Its been as harrowing as its been healing. But all in all - miraculous. As you might imagine, mountain time is more sacred than ever.

Back to my photo shoot, which was filled with all kinds of laughter and magic. At the end, the youngest boy walked over, shy and pulled on my pant leg. His eyes were big. His body almost trembled as if trying to contain the huge currents of consciousness moving through him.

“I think you are a mountain,” he whispered.

I was stunned. I thought I’d seen him, but he’d seen me even better.

His sight stayed with me through the rest of the May’s madness. The steadiness I have worked so hard to build - as witnessed by a true lover of mountains.

Speaking of witnessing…

I don’t book a ton of photo sessions anymore. Its not because I love them any less. but that I’ve learned to be extremely careful with my time, my attention and what I agree to hold. When I do take them I’m looking for something very specific: a real encounter.

I photograph families, artists, couples and lovers playfully, intuitively and with intention that doesn’t rush toward an outcome. What I”m really interested in is the moment someone becomes more themselves in front of me, even for a moment.

If that’s something you’re looking for, please reach out and I’ll send you more details.I accept sessions in Utah, as well as in the following locations on the dates listed below. I only take a small number of sessions and I keep them simple on purpose. I prioritize creating something together that feels like creative presence, instead of performance or perfection.

If you want that kind of seeing, I’d be glad to work with you.

P.S. if you already know you’re ready to go for it, you can book directly by following these links:

Book A Two Hour Session in your city.

Book a Three Hour session in your city.

Payment plans available upon request.

Xx,

Yan

**We acknowledge that we gather on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded homelands of the Timpanogos Nation, the original name-keepers and stewards of Mount Timpanogos, Provo Canyon, and Utah Valley. We also recognize the Shoshone, Ute, Goshute, and Paiute peoples who have historically traveled and gathered throughout these mountain ranges.

Book A Two Hour Session in your city.

Book a Three Hour session in your city.

Payment plans available upon request.

Hello, out there.

Thank you so much for dropping in.

Don’t you just love the thrill of a single voice sent into the either? I do. Internet noise be damned. I don’t mean the constant echo. I don’t mean the trends or dopamine dispensers. I mean the singular voice that is true. Sincere. Wholehearted. Confident but uncertain - Reaching.

I still love the lonely faith of speaking without the certainty of ears or faces on the other end. Is it not a distinctly human effort to making contact with the beyond? Is not that beyond, most often, the inner star systems of each other?

The human alien in me presses a palm to the human alien in you.

How fun it is to look out and wonder -

Exactly who will the pressing palm touch? Who will respond to the call? Who will resonate with this frequency? My personal radio station, the hz of which’I don’t know how to name - but I do recognize as vibrating through my body;

an awed reverence for the mystery. A wild laugh riding on the wind of the impossible. A familiar anger for all that is still misunderstood, compressed and causing harm. A tender knowing of the unspeakable that holds it all together. Who will my words tremble to this time?

Not knowing is half the fun. What I do know is this. We are in a bit of a push over here. I’ve got one girl graduating high school and another doing her best to stabilize in a city and mental health downturn hundreds of miles away. I’ve got a boy I’m trying to help become a man in a world that is very confused about what we need and expect men to be. Loving him as a single mother without projecting upon him every male inflicted pain I’ve ever known or making him pay for the weight of the world is a remarkable threshold to cross together.

But that’s not the threshold I want to share with you today. I want to share instead a moment between a mother and a daughter. The moment when a daughter stands beside her mother, not as a student of life, but as an equal in life’s expression.

That’s what happened on our spring break trip to the Oregon coast. A bonus of the trip was visiting Myra at college at Portland State, but the real reason for taking the trip in the first place was Wren.

Somtetimes, Wren grabs my face in her two hands to hold it still. She then looks forcefully at me with her huge, baby animal eyes, and tries to hypnotize me. Her methods of hypnosis are simple. Just a few words at a time alongside her steely grip. “TAKE ME TO THE OCEAN,” she says ominously. As if I don’t know she’s implanting the intention into my brain. Stitching its command into my psyche so securely that I cannot disobey the order.

Speaking strictly financially, another drive to the Oregon coast wasn’t the best idea. But Wren wasn’t the only voice in my ear. I kept hearing the same order - Take Wren to the ocean - spoken by whatever beings use the wind to deliver their most important messages. How could I not listen? How could I not trust? So we committed to the trip. Soon the money followed.

Wren wanted the rain, the mist, the wooded waterfalls and her favorite foods at the coast. But at the top of her senior in high school priority list? Was her senior photos. She’d been dreaming them up for a year. Collecting inspiration. Brainwashing me. Creating playlists. All in the name of her vision.

I’d never felt so much pressure to live up to something. I said a Hail Mary and dropped into the bodily instinct I’ve been writing about. What was most important here? Not showing Wren what I could do. Not taking over to make sure I got the photos I saw in my mind’s eye and most wanted to make. No. The most important thing was empowering my daughter to experience her own ability to execute the exact photos she had in her own mind’s eye.

To achieve this I would have to do something very challenging for me. I would have to completely give up control. I would have to surrender. That bleepin’ S word again-showing up everywhere in my life. It wasn’t easy. But bless the rebellious resilience of my children. Every time I tried to insert even just a little bit of creative direction, on a pose, a face, a movement - all life force would drain from Wren’s face instantly. It was impossible to move forward when I tried to steer even for a second. She needed this to be her way. All or nothing.

Inwardly, I struggled at first. As a parent, I still wasn’t sure if this was one of those moment’s I needed to override my daughter’s judgment in order to ensure the best result. Was I supposed to demand that she trust me now so she could thank me later? But that was my mind talking. My gut told me to let go. My gut told me that the best way to teach trust is not to demand it but to become it.

So that’s what I did. And as soon as I was fully committed to trusting Wren, She took off. She took off like she had actual wings. She took off like a woman on fire. Like an artist who knows exactly what she wants as well as when and where she wants it. Wren emanated total self trust. She was dripping with an almost primal creative instinct.

In full surrender, what I thought was going to be the hardest shoot of my life became the easiest. With Wren literally calling all the shots, there was nothing left for me to do but enjoy myself. Giddy, I raced to keep up with her; along river banks, over the tops of rocks, straight into the sea spray. I couldn’t help but laugh. I always laugh with sheer delight when a creature is so alive and true.

When I say I was only a button pusher, I mean I WAS SERIOUSLY ONLY A BUTTON PUSHER. Wren composed every shot with my Contax 645 and then bossed me to stand exactly where she stood, as she held the camera frozen in place where her eye had just been. Then she placed herself in the frame.

“You are such a diva,” I teased her. “Your memoir is going to read, “Although my mother had been a world-traveling ,professional photographer for 18 years, I decided to take my own senior photos…”

Wren laughed back, undeterred. Half soaked and having a blast. She was fully living the moment she’d spent the past year planning out to a T. She was letting me see who she really is. Not who she is as defined by my sight or as my daughter, but who she is as herself alone.

Nothing could have made me more honored or proud. I was high on this kid’s supply for weeks afterward.

Here are some of the photos:

see Wren’s presentation of her images via her ig here.

*all images shot on film and processed by my favorites, Indie Film Lab

Warmly from the ether,

Yan

A few housekeeping items before we begin!

1. For the last two weeks I have been running my annual spring sale on my anti posing photo guide for photographers. The Art of the Fall Apart Posing Guide is more than a guide, its a philosophy that teaches you how to make the most authentic photos you can make that feel true to both you and your clients. Its a 200+ page pdf and its packed and I’d be surprised if you haven’t already bought it but if that’s the case you should buy it NOW FOR $88. Since I was on the road all last week, I’ve decided to extend the sale ONE MORE WEEK for you stragglers out there. Please pass along this sale to any photog you know because the content is QUALITY.

2. Its in the header and footer of every newsletter, but just in case you skip those like I probably would, just know I’m currently accepting bookings for photo sessions in:

Boise, ID Aug 6-8

Washington DC area Sep 11-12

Colorado Springs Sep 25-27

SoCal (LA and surrounding areas) Oct 22-24

NoCal (SF and surrounding areas) Oct 25-28

I am also opening the following weekends for personal

•I am also available to be personally flown in for a weekend, but you’ll have to jump to the end of this message to peep what those dates of availability are. Those of you who have messaged me about specific dates, time to lock in!

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…NOT. Regularly scheduled would have been friday.

But

A) I’ve discovered Friday is actually the worst time to publish for your convenience

B) My Spring Break spanned two fridays in a row, so here we are on Monday. C’est Lavie.

As soon as I start trying to prove who I am, I lose my rhythm.

If I begin to doubt my worth for even a moment, my timing goes way off.

I used to want nothing more in the world than to be the first woman in the NBA. Can you believe that? This was before the WNBA existed. I was in elementary school.

I spent hours upon hours dribbling a ball in the driveway of the home I grew up in. Perfecting its bounce. How I handled it in my fingertips. The lightest touch. The ball guiding me as much as I directed it. But confident too. Sure of my direction. Determined to meet my goal.

Which was to get to 100 bounces in a row of that ball through my legs as I stepped with it.

I got there. I got to 101 bounces and beyond. In junior high I was a free throw champion. I played in an advanced basketball league for girls my age. I was the point guard. I could handle the ball. I could see the play needed. I could set the whole thing in motion. I could make the pass to assist the score.

I wasn’t as big as the other players. I was scrawny and self conscious of it. But I was also fast. I had incredible court awareness. I loved three pointers, interceptions and stealing the ball. It was so easy to predict the passes the other team was most likely to make. So easy to sneak my hand in the blindspot of whoever was handling the ball.

They called me defense Diana. Diana is my given name. This context is the only time that name ever felt right.

By sophomore year I was determined to make varsity. On my first try. Which was something that only happened once in a blue moon for the very best players. You could say I’d gotten a little cocky. There was just one problem. The universe started running interference. The summer before sophomore year, I got my first serious boyfriend.

Instead of spending hours and hours practicing in my driveway, I started to spend hours and hours making out in my boyfriend’s basement. When basketball tryouts came around, not only did I not make Varsity, I didn’t even make Jr. Varsity. I got invited to practice with them from time to time as a potential sub, but that was it.

My confidence waned. My game started to suffer. I was spending more time thinking about earning and keeping my boyfriend’s approval rather than my personal passion and it showed. I’d lost my focus.

At the time it felt like bad juju. Like it was all a mind game. In a way, it was. I’d lost my belief. Suddenly, I was missing free throws. When I stole the ball, and raced down the court for a simple layup, I’d miss. Even though not a soul was in my way to guard or block me.

I was humiliated. I got in my head more and more about it. But I couldn’t understand what was happening, I couldn’t figure out why I kept missing.

So I stopped taking the shot. I started waiting for everyone to catch up, so I could pass to my teammates instead. I finished out that season, unremarkably. I quit playing basketball after that year.

I don’t think anyone has ever once looked at me and thought, “Yup. Now, there’s an athlete.”

But I’ve ruminated on how I lost my game ever since. I’ve never stopped trying to figure it out. And I’ve never stopped missing basketball. Longing for the lost instinct that carved my potential. Craving the thoughtless ease I once felt in my body, skill and speed.

Lately, life is teaching me (again) that I can’t solve a problem with the same thing that started it. I can’t think my way out of getting stuck in my head about basketball. I can’t reclaim my worth for bodily instinct, by shaming myself for losing focus – or by feeling bad that I placed that instinct in a basement where I was trying to appease a boy and my own hormones, instead of keeping my instinct alive on the court where my passion had always been.

Its a hard lesson. I can see so clearly how the moment I made physical connection in relationship my priority, coincides with the moment I lost my innate sense of rhythm and timing in my sport. It would be so easy to claim that one clearly caused the other. But something tells me the lesson is deeper, and possibly more simple than even that.

Something tells me the lesson is about belief in inherent capacity and how bodily instinct relies on this belief.

Something tells me that however badly our minds want to maintain control and figure it out; our bodily instinct is only recoverable though practicing bodily instinct.

That practice is born from belief.

The way I believed all my time practicing in my driveway would take me to 101 bounces.

Up until now, I have always considered my ability to understand as one of my greatest gifts. I use my life experience; my (often foolish) courage to take risks as well as my willingness to look pretty damn stupid as I make MANY mistakes. All in the name of gathering wisdom.

I then use heart fueled reasoning and intellect to sort through it all so I can come to a deeper understanding. I should also mention that I use the same skills Defense Diana used to get a feel for the court; a zoomed out perspective that helps me see all the possibilities, plus the strengths and weaknesses of myself and others so I can make the prediction and either run the play, protect myself or steal the ball.

This has all felt very natural and right to me. Loving even. In fact, my favorite definition of love has long beenThich Nhat Hanh’s:

“Understanding is love’s other’s name.”

Yet, this is where the cosmic joke starts to come in.

Because at this stage of my life, none of these skills are particularly useful to me. In fact, I don’t mean to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but the more I force myself to rely on these skills, the more they keep backfiring. Instead, I am being called to a skill both old and new. I am being called to recover my bodily instinct NOT by understanding the big picture, but by simply practicing bodily instinct.

waiting for Myra at the elevator of her PSU dorm

The kids were not buying my talk of instinct with this parking job. But c’monnnnnnn, I’m back baby!

And in order to practice, I am being asked to consciously embrace:

simple

unshakable

basic

childlike

BELIEF.

Wren, Myra and Shiloh after dinner on our first night all back together in Portland.

Belief in a kind of love, trust, and intelligence that comes, not necessarily at the cost of but definitely before intellectual understanding.

This kind of intelligence speaks through the body. And lives in the soul.

Yesterday, I got home from Spring Break on the Oregon Coast with my kids. It was an incredible trip. It was a trip that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to go on to my mind or bank account, but that every bodily and soul instinct screamed I must take.

“Get Wren to the ocean,” was the whisper on the wind that would not leave me.

So I did.

I wish I could make the print smaller as I tell you that I thought this gorgeous photo was of Wren at the ocean, but when I put it here, I zoomed in and its….not. It’s actually a stranger. Whoopsadaisy.

Nearly seven years ago I made a similar trip. That time, with Myra in mind. The kids were so much smaller then. I rented a jeep for the drive that had a pop up tent attached to the top. We slept on the side of the road, matching our dreams and breath to the ocean’s lullaby.

Except for me. I couldn’t sleep. I was worried. About everything. About the world, work, my kids, love and most of all- my place in it all. While I was full of excitement for our adventure, my heart was also twisted in loneliness and confusion. That first night sleeping by the sea, Myra who was 14 at the time, sat up straight as a divining rod and shouted while still asleep,”

“It will all make sense in the end!”

She immediately flopped back down and slept through the rest of the night. I cried. My oldest. My oracle. I reached for peace and leaned in.

But I still could not UNDERSTAND why every hard thing that was happening to us and around us was happening. I hated that.

Here are some iPhone snaps of that pic and a few film captures at the end:

Years later, tho it’s not the end, it never is, I can now report just how right Myra was. It’s all starting to make sense. Only, it’s not the sense I thought it would make. Things are not making sense to my rational mind or defense mechanisms. No. They are finding a deeper, more ancient and tangible comprehension than that.

Things are starting to feel right in my body again. My sense of timing, my rhythm, my trust and ease in my body- the same ease that I have not felt fully since my days as a basketball player has finally, finally returned.

Even my digestion is finding a more relaxed flow, which if you know me intimately, you know that’s saying A LOT.

It all shifted the moment I stopped trying to understand, and decided to try forgiving first. I thought it had to be the other way around. I thought I could only forgive if I understood. Turns out I could only forgive if I accepted those and the world around me just the way they appeared to be. Without trying to make sense of it all

Once I did that, the decision to forgive –not only others, but especially MYSELF, worked like a secret code. This code unlocked wave after wave of understanding that crashed way beyond where my rational mind could reach.

The waves are still crashing now. Lullaby after lullaby.

And you know what?

During this last Spring Break trip to the Oregon coast with my kids – I felt like I was playing the best basketball game of my life. Mojo was at a maximum. Every move and turn was sweet and in flow. Every pivot and pass unlocked a greater play in the mystery.

All my shots, metaphorically speaking, started sinking again.

Where did the secret code of acceptance + forgiveness unlock greater intelligence? In my body. How did I listen to this bodily intelligence? Without thought. Without problem solving or prediction or defenses. Without needing anyone, not even you, the internet – to see me or approve.

I chose instead to fully trust my instinct.

I let that full trust feel good.

I let myself believe it could and it should.

And holy hell, it does and it DID.

More about our trip with more pics soon.

xx,

Yan

Happy Spring Equinox!

I guess its a big one. The astrological new year for some, a zero point reset for others.

I feel it all like fire in my bones. Transforming me, I hope. Its like that 2026 Chinese Zodiac firehorse everyone keeps talking about has multiplied itself into ten thousand tiny fire horses who are tap dancing all up in my molecular business.

It kinda hurts, honestly.

One minute I’m dissolving into bliss – feeling my soul huge and billowing like a sail outside of me – both holding and steering my body as cap’n.

The next minute I’m all kinds of contracted and enflamed. Bones crunched and hunched. Like all the old psychological and generational wiring in me is trying to keep its place as the despairing, traumatized boss.

I keep having to remind my heart to press ahead of my scrunchy shoulders, like a bird. I’m sure I’ve told you this, because its one of my favorite facts to redistribute – but did you know birds HAVE to hold their hearts ahead of all the rest of them in order to fly?

SPEAKING of birds they are absolutely LIT right now. I walked out of yoga yesterday to a symphony. I commanded everyone around me to listen. And they….humored me. Birds sing like they know something we forgot we know. Birds sing like they don’t know about ongoing wars + threats of nuclear war and are simply not gonna buy into the fear + divide + overwhelm with information tactics that are being used against us more and more aggressively every day!

Birds sing like they lead with their heart no matter what.

Because they have to.

A few times in the last few days, a bird has swooped down across my path and come so close to my body that when it passed by me, time stood still long enough for me to feel my heart the way a bird must feel theirs, at my very center, solid but light. The bird heart whooshed by as utterly vulnerable strength–and in that hovering infinity, my DNA remembered flight.

I want to fly.

Which is to say.

I want my heart to return to what it knew before the agendas of those I cannot name spun the spell intended to make my heart – all our hearts – forget.

I’m starting a list.

Its a little awesome and everywhere. Chaosmos just like me.

Maybe you can help me lengthen it? Because-

I keep remembering heart things but not things that fit easily in words. These rememberings fit better in my body with the tiny, tap-dancing firehorses.

And yet, giddy-up. (I didn’t realize I was so much like kramer from Seinfield until RIGHT NOW)

Heart Rememberings.

Body Rememberings.

But Officially titled:

Things I used to know Before the World Broke My Heart So Many Damn Times, Forcing Me To Learn These Same Things Even More Deeply + Actually Consciously This time Which Was Very Annoying But Also Beautiful to Experience:

•I am - You are- extraordinarily special…..AND not actually more special than anyone else.

•Despite all evidence to the contrary, the mysterious balance always holds. From one person to another, we are equal vessels. Vessels of pleasure and pain. Vessels of strength and weakness. Vessels of gifts and challenges. Vessels of light and shadow. So don’t be a jackass and go judging all the time.

Root for the Underdog.

The body is not our enemy. It is not meant to be overcome. Or oppressed. Or held to any metrics but its own.

The body is meant to be trusted.

The body is meant to be cherished.

The body is meant to be felt.

The body is meant as your oracle.

The body is the whole world quite literally at–or rather–as- our fingertips.

The body is meant to receive full aliveness. Every sense is an access point. But the senses are most enlivened from the inside out.

•How foolishly we’ve limited ourselves by binding a body’s measure to the single sense of sight. To how it looks from the outside. The ways in which it performs. A better question might be, how does a body sense from within?

•Life is not a test for passing, its a school for learning. We’re not all here to learn the same lessons at the same times. Let your lessons be yours. Let others have their own.

•You can’t protect anyone from their lessons.

•True love isn’t just a story, its real. Yes, love stories help us remember. But not even they can fully convey the depths of what true love really is.

•But you can. Because you’re love. As you are. I promise. But you probably gotta, as Rumi says, remove all the barriers you have built against it.

•God is real (I’m not kidding this time. God is actually real. Shout out to Cameron Winters who I get to see play live this weekend with his band, GEESE!)

•God experiences godself through each of us. So enjoy. If you can say yes to your pain as much as your pleasure you will know bliss.

•People can change in an instant. We usually give the people the credit for that. Because they lay the groundwork and we are egomaniacs. But the actual change is beyond our control. The credit for change belongs to grace.

•Friendship is the sacred place to practice total acceptance of another.

•Nothing is too dark to find humor in. In fact, Laughter is the most precise method for making horror bearable.

•Be serious enough to try, but never take yourself too seriously.

•The same sacred pattern of energy runs through all living beings. Look for it.

•Every, every, every opportunity you have was made possible by those who went before you - not to mention the dark legacies too. It didn’t start with you. And it won’t end with you. But the inevitable ascension to freedom, to beauty, to flight - belongs to all of us together.

•Belief is a choice. One that gives you power to move toward what you believe in.

•There actually IS a shared, universal truth. Underneath our fighting. Underneath our fear. It’s not a dogma. It’s not a religion. Its not a tidy binary. It’s our humanity. It’s our soul’s inescapable encounter with this humanity. Do we have the courage to look our humanity in the eye?

•Our imperfections and weakness are as - or sometimes even more - important than our strengths. They point you to your innate rhythm. A rhythm that if you honor, will align you with the power of heaven and earth.

That’s all for now.

Unless you have anything to add?

I hope you do.

I hope you try.

With Maximum Spring Dirt and Blossoms,

Yan

Rachel and her sons, plus Abuela. Photographed on film at the Art House In Joshua Tree in 2024. I shared some of these on ig this week. I share more of them at the end of this essay.

Ohhhh, the strength required to get out of our own way and do the thing we are called to do is tremendous.

Truly.

Tremendous.

A few months ago I was driving through my little town and happened to pass by some workers to my left. They had long ropes tied to a very tall, beautiful tree. It took me a moment to realize what was happening. But they appeared to be pulling the tree down. I looked at the ‘workers,’ more closely. They looked like boys. I realized they must be college students. Their faces were so young – so plain and open and untouched yet by the burdens and harsh realities of the world.

Some ancient maternal grief broke inside of me. A damn I hadn’t realized I’d constructed to hold back an old current. Undetected, this current’s force had grown stronger and stronger. At that very moment its pressure was so great, it overpowered every protection I’d built and was ready to force its way forward from my depths.

I started trembling without knowing I was trembling. I heard an animal like howling, then realized it was coming from my throat. I pulled my car over. Water poured from my eyes in great waves. These were not the small, stingy tears that sometimes sneak their way down my face in stolen moments. These tears were waves that broke with relief from not having to hold the ache I’d been holding tight in my body anymore.

(I can’t be the only one breaking down into animal sounds in her car, these days can I?)

After awhile, the realization of what I was grieving broke over the top of my head like a cracked egg.

Innocence.

The yellow yolk of it rolling down.

The innocence of the tree being pulled out by the root, no doubt to make room for more buildings on the college campus I was driving past.

The innocent of the young men given the task - no doubt because of their strength- to tear down an innocent tree.

How long have we been delegating the task of violence to earnest young men without considering its cost on them?

It wasn’t the innocence I was grieving. It was the loss of innocence.

How quickly and thoughtlessly it happens in the name of progress and profit until we forget who we really are and how we belong together.

Once, I was hiking with my children in the Hoh rainforest in Washington. The girls were charging forward down the trail. But Shiloh. My sweet, small, slower than slow son, Shiloh. He stopped at each fallen tree. His eyes filled with tears. He wanted to help them. He couldn’t bare not being able to help them. He knelt by the fallen trees, on the slightly damp, soft brown earth and wailed.

This was really annoying to those of us who just wanted to make it on down the trail. But this is my son. Who he has always been. This is the tenderness of his heart.

When Shiloh’s dad, Marty and I first got divorced, he was two years old. We had split, custody. 50/50. We made the kid trade on Sunday nights. I remember standing in the doorway of my little house as Marty attempted to hand little toddler Shiloh over to me to me for the week.

Shiloh would start to reach out for me while also sneakily keeping one arm and leg securely clinging to his father. With his small toddler arm he would then try to hook around my kneck so that half of him was wrapped around his mother while half of him was wrapped around his father. Then, with the kind of strength and willpower only a toddler heart can wield, he would try to force our bodies back together.

He did not want us to be two. Two homes, two lives, Two worlds. He wanted us to be one again.

But we could not. Not in that way, at least. And Shiloh had to grow up. He’s fifteen now and I’m looking everywhere for a space in our culture for a boy like Shiloh to exist. A space where a boy is not made to tear down trees, but is taught to honor the space inside himself that weeps for them.

I haven’t found that space yet.

But after a long period of grief, I refuse to despair.

I have decided to create that space in my own heart. My own reality. My art. To reach for and remind each of us of our innocence. Not so that we trap ourselves in some infantilized never, never land existence. But so that somehow we recover our belief in together.

So that we liberate ourselves from the endless cages of shame this world and our psyches construct as we encounter the wounds of the world. Not just the harms done to us but also the hurt we’ve brought to others – the many, inescapable ways we’ve each fucked up.

Like bad 80’s cartoons, there is so much quicksand all around us. There are infinite arguments devised to convince us to cover up. To hide our humanity. Our sensitivity. Our flaws. Our nakedness.

Maybe the whole reason for growing up isn’t to appear perfect or to conform to a construct of ‘good,’ or to leave our innocence behind, but to meet the full spectrum of our own human nature so fully – so satisfyingly— that we create the capacity within and find the strength to choose and protect innocence again.

This will not be achieved by knowing everything. This will only be achieved by not needing to know what we haven’t seen yet, in order to believe it is possible.

And of course, as ever — the courage to feel it all.

The courage to cry for the trees.

That day on the trail, we ended up getting Shiloh to keep going by explaining to him that the fallen trees become nurse logs. Nurse logs are the healers of the forest. As they decay, they offer seedlings shade, nourishment, water and protection.

What would happen if we each understood all we thought we had lost not as gone for good but as part of our growth and nourishment - part of who we get to become now?

Would we feel our innocence again–the sense of freeness, play and open hearted mobility it tends to come with?

I’d take that over manufactured fear and defense. I’d take that over the way I feel my body instinctively tensing to shield itself from the rushing river of life, then death, then life again and again.

I choose life again,

Yan

P.S. You may have noticed I’m making the effort to share more of my photo work here. If you are hoping to make photos with me in 2026, here are the locations and dates of where i’ll be. Also taking sessions in my home state of Utah. Reach out:

Boise, ID Aug 6-8

Washington DC area Sep 11-12

Colorado Springs Sep 25-27

SoCal (LA and surrounding areas) Oct 22-24

NoCal (SF and surrounding areas) Oct 25-28

Some people believe survival is based in money, security, and power.

I believe survival is based in our connection to our heart.

In our age of information, every day, the abyss from my head to my heart is the one I must cross.

Every day, my head tries to take over and run the ship.

Every day, the slippery slides I try not to fall down are: overthinking, over analysis and trying to ‘figure it all out.’

More than any source outside of ourselves, the heart already knows.

I’m still working on a piece about the beauty and pain of keeping an open heart no matter what.

In the mean time, here are ten sources helping me escape my mind and placing me back in my heart:

1. This interview with artist Tracey Emin THEMES: why be afraid, believing it will all work out, great art makes you want to make art…

2. This other interview with artist Tracey Emin THEMES: same as above, as well as alchemizing pain into beauty. Basically she’s just brilliant and so alive and all must listen.

3. This interview with Marina Abramovic THEMES: passion, courage, encountering the mystery, how the body knows

4. This interview with poets Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith THEMES: Two of the greatest poets of our lifetimes chatting with one of the best interviewers of our lifetime…

5. This (kinda awkward, honestly, but Marie was phenomenal) interview with poet Marie Howe THEMES: The business of the isness. Presence. Zen. Poetry to ground us

6. Which lead me to this book, The Creative Act by Adam Moss

7. Which lead me to this panel discussion with Marie Howe, Adam Moss and Michael Cunningham (auther of the hours) THEMES: Its tender to see world class, established artists reassure each other. Marie schools the men in not needing the creative act to be a pained process of conquer.

8. This interview with Andrea Gibson which I dug up after watching this documentary THEMES: How confronting death kicks fear to the curb and liberates the soul.

9. This memoir, The Tale of the Rose written by the widow of The author of The Little Prince THEMES: Her side of the love story that inspired The Little Prince.

10. This comprehensive list of the 40 rules of love, send to me by Mukasha who recommended this book to me by the same name by Elif Shafak (The author and I share a birthday), THEMES: Its in the title. And its what I personally believe the world needs most.

What connects you to your heart? I’d love to hear from you.

xx,

Yan

I’m writing this hoping you’ve melted into your weekend and won’t know the difference between Saturday and Friday, which is the day I am supposed to write here.

We are getting ready for Wren’s 18th birthday party. She planned a princess party as a homage to her little girl self and… well…

Wren can’t do a single thing in her life without making her mother cry.

photo by Wren’s cousin, Paia.

(Including shopping for her party at Michael’s, which had terrible, very CRUEL fluorescent lights that made me die an actual death.)

Wren is a force field of fire and heart. To me, she is still that little baby who would punch and fight her way out of her swaddled blanket to reach her chubby fist up to my cheek because she wanted to hold my face and gaze into my eyes as she nursed.

A few nights ago, she yanked my phone out of my hands and spent an hour going DEEP into the archives, looking at photos and videos of herself and her brother and sister. She giggled and adored and awed over every small, quirky expression.

She kept zooming in on her older sister’s face, saying,

“Who looks like that? No one. Only Myra. Myra is so, so beautiful.”

My three kids when they were 3, 5, and 7. They are now 15, 18, and 20.

Wren is a lover. Wren appreciates idiosyncrasy. Wren spends more time taking care of her younger siblings than herself sometimes.

Some of you may also know that Wren is intimidating. She won’t take anyone’s shit.

Wren playing the ukulele on one of our many roadtrips to the Oregon Coast

Last year her room was under construction for at least six months—maybe more; I’m bad with time—and Wren and I had to cohabitate in my small basement space. We took turns swapping the bed and couch to sleep on. Sometimes I gave her my bed two or three nights in a row, claiming that the couch was a magical-spaceship-dream couch. It kinda was, but mostly it’s my favorite thing to make Wren feel like she’s getting special treatment.

The best part of cohabitating, even though it was cramped and messy and rather obnoxious, is that Wren and I had to breathe the same air SO MUCH OF THE TIME. I don’t know what your teenagers are like, but mine throw up walls like ninja warriors when I try to dig into who the hell they are.

Wren and I at a hot springs in Iceland

But shared space, however? Shared space provides this amazing kind of osmosis way of knowing and understanding each other. We don’t have to speak. We vibe. We laugh at the air. We make faces at each other. We throw things. We grunt. We scurry. We become nonverbal, primal versions of ourselves, and this binds and bonds us in unspeakable, ancient ways.

During this time, Wren decided to let me hug her again, which is something she started to dodge around age 14. At the time, this was a behavior that worried + bugged the hell out of me. Yet I sensed it was deeply necessary for me to respect. During her intro to adolescence, my cuddly, chubby, face-holding baby bird had to shelter and nest in just herself for a time.

The first film photo I ever took of my baby bird.

Although sharing a room with her mother was probably the worst nightmare ever for a 16-year-old girl in Provo, Utah—for me it was the most mysteriously healing gift. And one I would have never known to ask for.

Why?

Because, like too many others, I became a mother before I had any business or sense to be one. I became a mother when, inside, I was still a very frightened child.

Growing myself up to the task of motherhood took an immense + dedicated effort.

It has been the greatest work of my life.

It took a divorce.

It took rewilding.

It took reparenting myself.

It took the seemingly insurmountable task of confronting the bottomless scream inside of my mind—the one constantly shouting:

NOT HERE, NOT THIS—RUN, RUN, RUN, ESCAPE, ESCAPE, ESCAPE

And learning instead how to come into my body, even and especially when I very literally want to crawl out of my skin—

It took learning to stay. It took learning that all we have is now. It took learning that everything I thought I was chasing after or waiting for was already right in front of me.

Wren and I in Paris right after I first launched Teethkiss.

It also took putting my art first, as an individuation of sorts, so I could learn who I actually was. I had to love her first. So that I could then love my children not as a resentful ghost or biological requirement, but as myself—love that was both my sincere want and choice.

Because what do we really have to give in this world but ourselves? And how can we give ourselves if we do not know who we actually are?

When I realized some years ago, rather suddenly, how much of that work I had achieved—a bittersweet realization, because it did not arrive apart from the devastatingly painful reckoning with how much I had missed—

It was Wren’s face I saw. A shimmering apparition in my heart. Her eyes of infinity. Her deep, abiding, faithful love. Her hope. Her belief. Her patience for my full arrival.

How long had she gazed at me?

In the moments I could not inhabit myself?

How long had she waited, not even knowing she was doing so—innocent and wholehearted and trusting as she was?

I wept and wept and wept with grief for the moments my eyes had been trained on the horizon instead of on the girl holding eternity right in front of me. All the beauty I had been seeking, had been right here all along in our own imperfect lives and selves.

5 year old Wren and I on the porch of the first house we lived in after my divorce.

So when anyone asks me now if I believe people can really change or can learn to see, I say yes. Absolutely. If they want to. (And they have to really want to, believe me).

Because I did.

Because I have.

And it was love that took me there.

Love of myself.

Love of my children.

Which is all to say —- When Wren tells me she is going to make her 18th birthday party a princess party to pay homage to her little girl self, I think, yes, baby. Let’s do it. Because nothing could be more perfect. And no one deserves it more

.

xx,

Yan

9 year old wren in Iceland.

The picture Wren texted me when I asked her for a recent one I could share.

“You think I’m kidding,” she said.

Sometimes it seems like you can’t win. Until the moment breaks into something new and all the sudden you do.

I’m obsessed with that moment. When we glimpse the infinite. When all that was heavy becomes light, but—-

Do we really get the credit for it?

Everywhere I look people are moving in loops. Me too. I sit down to paint and all I can paint is loops. Trauma loops. Pattern loops. Karmic loops. We go round and round our circles and I wanna shout, “You could get outta there, you could get free! Just go left instead of right next time. Its that simple!”

Then I wonder, do we break ourselves out of the loops? Or does grace? I think we do our best to open ourselves to grace. To set the table. Make the bed. Prepare the food. Hold our chests open wide so grace won’t miss our hearts as her landing place.

But ultimately she’s the one who comes for us and as bad as we want to, the moment when grace arrives is not something we control.

Grace is when the incessantly tight part of your body finally relaxes.

Grace is you and your parter finally laughing at an inside joke after being grumpy for hours.

Grace is hair you didn’t brush that looks better than all the times you did.

Grace is the light suddenly on my cheek as I write this

Grace is hearing one of your favorite songs right when you need it.

Grace is when you take a breath and instead of feeling like you’re sipping through a straw your lungs become parachutes and you’re floating.

Timing, I’ve been told. Its all about timing.

Pfffftttt. past me woulda said. I make my own timing.

Present me says Shoot, I think they may be onto something.

I’m someone with a helluva lotta willpower. I’m strong. And I’m determined. I’ve tried to dominate the shit out of a lotta things. No one gave me a map so I made my own. It worked for a little while. Until it didn’t. Until the universe was like, “oh you THINK you’ve got it figured out? Lemme show you the next level of surrender ya cute lil’ babykid….”

I’ve learned that the more I force something, the more I chase it away.

I think the only thing we get credit for is our try. How do you show up knowing there’s not actually a thing you can do to make the “win,” CERTAIN? Can you give yourself to the moment? Can you show up for the love of the game? Can you show up willing to totally fail? With a level of faith that says, well, if I failed then there’s something I’m supposed to learn here, I guess.

Giving up control and certainty in order to give into presence with the mystery makes most people pretty uncomfortable. But isn’t it about time for that?

All I know is it seems pretty important to not be lugging around any amount of shame for the place we are at. I can’t see the good that does anyone, except to keep us stuck longer.

I’m having a good time believing the astrologers who are saying the cosmos are aligned just so for a major world reset. Talk about timing. Saturn and Neptune conjunctat 0 degrees Aries. Google it. Reminds me of the clogging team I danced on with three of my siblings back in Idaho. Our team name was Zero gravity. We were pretty good. Even won a competition once. Laughable and also, I still see that hovering infinity in every photo I take.

I see the place in you where all that is heavy is also light. I see the place you’re not rising, or falling —- you just are.

To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep

To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose, under heaven

A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together

To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven

A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace
A time to refrain from embracing

To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven

A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time for love, a time for hate
A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late

Photo of me in the middle by Natalie Gildersleeve. All other photos by me.

Xoxo,

Yan

All of my life, I’ve been obsessed with the question,

What is love?

When I was 29, I left my marriage and the faith I was born into, to live my life and art as an attempt to answer.

Five years following my divorce, in 2017, I even started a podcast called the Love Love Love. Each episode was meant to ask the question:

What is Love?

I wanted all kinds of love stories to provide all kinds of answers.

My first interview? My ex husband. That poorly produced, perfectly raw episode sparked something in the collective. It brought me more email than I’ve ever received. Praise and resonance. Projection and judgement.

My ex husband’s kind, sweet voice paired with my seemingly ruthless need to devote to my truth and claim my desire + freedom both moved and triggered the shit out of people.

I don’t blame them. It triggered me too. I broke out in a full body rash the same day of the interview. My rash lasted for months.

This podcast mysteriously brought me many photo clients. One of them I met for the first time last Friday.

Let me rewind—-

I promised I would post here every Friday.

But last Friday, I did not.

It was the Friday before Valentine’s Day.

It was the final Friday of the year of the snake.

And instead of writing here—-

Instead of planning some kind of Romantic date (with who?), or cozy night in, or ‘galentines,’ (even I cringe at the word valentines) I found myself driving to photograph a family living intimately with death.

The thing about living with death as the unnamed, invisible, yet ever-present member of your family, is that it has potential to make you more alive than you’ve ever been.

That is, if you choose to encounter and welcome death directly rather than fight or deny it.

Which this family —stripped down as they were by their reality — standing so starkly naked as their soul selves that they may as well have not been wearing clothes either— absolutely were.

They were stunning. The atmosphere of their home was strange for Utah culture - it seemed immune to shame, perfectionism and performance of any kind.

On their kitchen counter was a huge, colorful bouquet of flowers. On their kitchen table, another.

I was told one of the bouquets was for me. I clutched my heart.

Shouldn’t I be the one offering flowers? I thought.

To call this family ‘authentic,’ doesn’t do them justice.

What they were was surrendered to death. And while they were not unmarked by its terror and heaviness, neither were they afraid.

A few weeks prior, the mother of the family had emailed about a session. She told me her 13 year old son had a terminal cancer diagnosis. She wanted one last photo of her family with all four of their children—together. She knew I was the one to do it.

In her email, she shared that she’d done a ceremony in which her son’s soul asked her to be his death doula. She accepted. She also asked to know what it was like to die. What she experienced as an answer is her story to tell, but I can tell you that she was shown there was nothing to fear. She was told that is exactly what she must keep showing her son over and over:

Death is nothing to be afraid of.

This Mama was doing her job. I watched her in awe. Soothing coughs, offering popsicles, making bouquets of flowers, laying down for cuddles. It all sounds mundane, but I could see her moving on the front lines between life and death - hovering in the liminal space between worlds - letting what most would find unbearable make her an even more present and true version of herself.

Dad was no slouch either. Steady in his body. Emotionally available to his wife and children. Simple, direct and true.

“Is this what it’s like to be around a grounded masculine?” I joked.

He blushed. I clicked the camera shutter as quick as I could.

I couldn’t look at his face without laughing. There was so much glimmer there. A sense of play and tenderness not even death could touch. Or maybe death had. Maybe death teased and he teased right back.

I noticed he had the graceful hands of an artist but I didn’t say so. Just smiled to myself quietly when they told me later he was a potter.

They also told me they went back lifetimes. When they laughed together, I believed them.

After we finished making photos, I asked if it was okay to stay and talk awhile. I had about 7,000 questions, and maybe even more compliments to give.

At some point, my old podcast came up, and that’s when we realized I was practically interviewing them. Collecting their love story along with their tales of woe. Finding out what they were made of, and trying to trace how they’d figured out how to use every dark bit of it to shine their truth.

I should have brought my recording equipment.

They sent me home with the flowers AND chocolate.

I didn’t even have to ask them my trademark question.

“What is love?”

Obviously, they’d already shown me.

So I REALLY hope I didn’t blow the photos.

I kid. I kid.

You hear me death?

I made you look good.

See you again on Friday,

Yan

P.S. Been trying for some years to “manifest,” an investor who wants to pay me to bring back the Love Love Love podcast plus hire a production and marketing team. Too tall an order you say? I mean, maybe, but why not? Send any leads my way.

You were born for this-

You were born to feel more fear than you knew was possible, more than a body should ever have to hold, then to choose love anyway.

You were born to cultivate an *inner authority louder than any external force. To harmonize it with the pulse of the poets, the elements, the truth tellers, and the misfits.

You were born to give up on the plan and give into what the moment asks of you like a prayer, like a dance, like a mystic.

You were born not to improve yourself, but to embrace yourself; radically, completely, imperfectly, tenderly.

You were born to forgive. Especially those you aren't sure how to yet. You were born to recognize forgiveness as the only true power left.

You were born to let it get dark. Because you've met the dark before many times. And she taught you things. She taught you what was yours and what was not. She taught you how to give up the bottomless hunger and take up the enough that is already here.

You were born to begin again. To become the dawn so many times you race out your front door now to shout at it- crying. Barefoot. Nearly dumb with the inevitability of grace.

You were born not to know, but to step anyway. To let your steps add up to the rhythm of wisdom. And to laugh when you realize it because each one felt not like that but like a question you could not keep yourself from asking.

You were born to tell love stories. You were born to wiggle and weed love stories out of others even when they didn't know that's what they were telling you until they heard themselves say it out loud. And you were born to laugh with them when they realize it because suddenly they love themselves a little more and you love them too. So much.

You were born to live your life as a love story. So many chapters. So many pages long. Each saying the same thing but in different, new ways.

You were born to face your shadow. You were born to confront every unknown  place inside of you. So that you could become safe for others. So that when you saw the shadows of the world, you would not be afraid.

You were born to lose your mind so you could keep your soul. You were born to let logic break down in its endless labyrinth of contradictions because that would be the only thing to force you back to the simplest truths; beauty. presence. heart.

You were born to love children. You were born to carry their song in you like a North Star. A star you would use to guide yourself and so many others back to their most pure place. The place that cannot be stolen by anyone; not even monsters. Not even death.

You were born to get it wrong. To make a lot of mistakes. To let them see you make those mistakes. So they could see themselves in you. And believe their bag of flaws was a weird treasure map to purpose too.

You were born to understand each darkness you saw in another, is something you are capable of too. So that judging wouldn't trap  you. So that you'd accept responsibility for the only thing you have control over; your own darkness. Your own light.

You were born to be so brave. To breathe when you forget to breathe. To have no idea what's going on and no ability to say what you truly want to say, but to try anyway.

You were born to have your heart broken. You were born to break it so many times it just finally stayed open one day like a door someone forgot to close. And because they forgot love poured through like rain. Everywhere. On every one. Not even you could stop it by then.

You were born to understand your chaos as creation. To surrender to its mess. To never hide, or lie, or pretend.

You were born to give up shame. To know it well enough first to call it by its name. Well enough to recognize it as the food evil feeds off of.

You were born to read the clouds like tea leaves. To touch the mountain as an oracle. To hear the wind as your favorite song. To tell jokes with the guardians, the trees.

You were born for uncertainty. To move like mist between worlds, between birth and death, between dark and light.

You were born to give yourself to beauty. To take her calls each morning and every night. To return to her infinite waves- like a wild river to the sea.

How do I know?

Because you're here.

Love,

Yan

p.s. I wrote this quick and dirty (almost like a trademark move) in order to keep my Friday posting promise. ❤️‍🔥👁️

*inner authority is a term credited to the artist Mukasha Dadajonova

It was Maya Angelou, at a protest. She was standing in front of a policeman on a horse. She stood like a god. I believe she was.

She stood like someone who’s countenance beamed:

I know who you are.

And I know who I am.

We are brother and sister.

Equal.

And holy.

And free.

But in this moment,

You have forgotten who we are. And I have not. You will not pass me or touch me as I hold this remembering for us.

And then the policeman did not pass.

Because my brain is fried from over use + over processing of information, I didn’t trust my memory of this image. I went searching for its source: the documentary Maya Angelou; And Still I Rise. Which I first watched in 2020, shivers coursing without ceasing down my spine….

…..only to go on a wild goose chase that took me over an hour. And was ultimately a dead end, because -

this documentary is not streaming anywhere

In the U S of shaking in our boots A -

At All.

Coincidence?

Maybe. Maybe its a coincidence that we cannot even pay to access the voice of a god -one who’s embodied dignity, compassion, and sense of justice just might be the exact frequency we need most to succeed in our resistance.

I believe that Dr. Maya Angelou understood something most don’t. Not because they do not want to. But because they are blinded by habit, ignorance and pain:

Oppression is not simply a system. Or a regime. Or a willfully mad, traumatized, man-child weaponizing the alienation, fear and ignorance of a brute force to do the dirty work they can’t even wholly grasp as dirty as they execute it - so desperate are they for daddy, for the bully to finally grant the belonging + power that they believe will end their pain—-

Oppression is a pattern.

Oppression is a force.

Oppression is a sickness.

And we have each been exposed. We are all susceptible to its possession of our will.

Subscribe now

Oppression is also a lie. But the lie only succeeds if we believe it.

Believe what?

That some are better. That others are worse.

That some deserve. That others don’t.

That there is one right. So all else must be wrong.

That there is not enough to go around. So we must build walls to ensure that we, at least get ours.

And some will say, well that’s the way the world works. That’s the way the world has ALWAYS worked.

But I would say, has it? Or has history been shaped and told primarily by those who are desperate to keep it working that way?

(Look into the origin story of the Fertile Crescent. The bits that came before patriarchy settled in).

Also-

Has it really been working?

Or has our inability to imagine another way kept the same pattern in circulation, while simply moving around the players from time to time?

As we resist, which we must — which I do. Resistance efforts that move me more than I can say —I would ask that we do so with an invitation in our hearts:

A whisper that says, join us in remembering who we really are. Join the dream of another way that makes room for all as equals, all at once.

We have to stand up and say NO, while at the same time holding a love and compassion in our bodies that is so fierce, it has the power to burn each and every illusion of separateness away.

Until we learn to subsume the pattern of oppression rather than fight the people who play out the pattern, we will only ever succeed in helping it repeat.

And even more powerful than fighting or attempting to control the pattern of oppression in another, we must take responsibility for where that pattern of oppression still lives within ourselves.

This week, I was searching on my phone for something and some old images leapt out and hit me like cold water in my face. I had a dejavu in a dejavu in a dejavu.

I had made them with green painting tape in a frustrated creative flurry in 2020. I had been watching Dr. Maya Angelou. I had been thinking much of the same thoughts I’ve tried to share here, not knowing how to speak them the way she did so so well.

“When I decided to speak….” Dr. Maya said with the self possession of a true and timeless queen. I replay her tone over and over and over in my head….

While I still don’t know how queen on command, the time has long passed to wait to try.

More honestly, more vulnerably, I gotta tell you that when I was accosted by these images that I thought I had successfully tucked away in a folder called “Part of the Pattern 2020,” I saw both my sameness and my growth.

Subscribe now

Because they portray a stark rendering of my body, that at the time I was still holding with some amount of self oppression and shame. But now, when I gaze at them, I feel gentle admiration. Even pride. I feel a tenderness that blooms and holds me when arms of another and a culture cannot.

xx,

Yan

I’m talking to the feminine.

I’m talking to women.

I’m talking to men.

I’m talking to mothers.

I’m talking to warriors.

I’m talking to you.

(I’m talking to me).

There is a part of ourselves that we miss.

There is a part of ourselves we long to touch, make and move from.

There is a part of ourselves, we did not forget, no, but we were not safe enough, held enough, resourced enough to touch. Trusted enough to reveal.

Its our softest place.

And yet, we were not abandoned.

From the beginning of time, the flowers made us a promise.

That they would hold our shared essence.

Until we are brave enough to return.

Its time.

xx,

Yan

made a lot of images like this on a gif app that went away and that I can’t remember the name of. Somewhere, I’m glitching in the cloud(s).

claimed solidarity with Bert and Ernie. I think this was posted to snapchat before ig stories was a thing.

was madly in love with this mad genius. we loved the shit out of each other and hurt each other a bunch too. But overall, our relationship was a great, big expansive container that I would not be the same without. Plus, all our friends were photographers so we have a lot of photos. These are by Nate Kaiser of The Image Is Found. (Love you, Whittles)

pulled over to the side of the the road to cry about this. I was sad about the tree. not the house.

drove the Buick Roadmaster station wagon of my dreams. She was like walking on the moon. People smiled at us nostalgically wherever we went. Once, a guy even followed me home. Which was creepy. Here we are at a photo shoot in the middle of the desert with Wyn Wiley. aka Pattiegonia.

was teaching the yan fam way workshop all over and speaking at conferences. photo by wyn from afore mentioned photo shoot.

None of that has to do with what I’ve written below. But I’ve found the older one gets the more likely one is to participate in internet trends since they are obviously an excuse to ponder if you were better looking or possibly more interesting when you were younger. And to seduce your little mind into ruminating on how everything always changes so DAMN FAST.

Here’s a recent, fabulously feral picture of me from this fall so that you may judge fairly.

I think I might have dirt in my bathing suit? pebbles? But they kiiiiind of look like a third and possibly fourth nipples. image by Natalie Gildersleeve.

Anyway. Please enjoy reading the following, which I started writing on Sunday but only finished just now:

I’ve just spent the day cleaning this small, basement space that I live in.

I swept.

I mopped.

I dusted.

I opened the single window to let the winter sun in - softer this time of year and warmer than any year before it.

Once, when I was a teenager, my dad cut a heart out of white wicker and attached to a tree stump in our backyard. His white wicker heart was about 3X5 ft. I remember him, sweating thru the white tshirt he always wore backwards so the collar would cover his “scrawny chicken neck.” His face beamed. He wanted to show off his heart.

I thought it was so stupid. Not worth my time. I had real dreams. I was going to be a real artist.

But my dad was so damn proud. I’ve never been able to get the memory of him standing there out of my head, gesturing toward his heart; a pure offering, albeit small and wicker white. Pathetic to my teenage gaze.

I look around my basement home. Simple and crowded and full of messy color, but clean, clean, clean – smelling like the lemon pine-sol I just mopped with. And I feel that same kind of pride my memory holds of my father. I see a scene I know to many might seem pathetic, but which moves through my body in quiet dignity. The dignity of attention. The dignity of care. And I think we all need something to be proud of. I think if there’s one thing I want to be proud of, its my heart. I think of how much I’m like my father. How he is the person I’ve judged more than any other in the world.

And then, I try to stop thinking.

Last week I:

-Started teaching TEETHKISS with an incredible and intimidating group of 40 people.

-Started my son in an outpatient therapy program for OCD and anxiety. M-F, 3 hours, five days a week. Joined him for the first two days. Wondered if it was really his mind that needed assistance, or if we just needed to make room in our culture to be proud of his particularly tender heart.

-Had dinner at Sundance with two new friends who feel like old friends

-Made a promise to another friend recently diagnosed with cancer to post to Yanland on the same days she has her weekly chemo (Friday).

-Immediately broke that promise (I’m sorry. You know who you are. I’ll fix it from here on out)

-Was inspired into laughter and tears by my teethkiss students at least a dozen times. Swung like a pendulum between sheer excitement + boldness/ imposter syndrome +anxiety

-Screamed in my car three times

-Listened to Fiona Apple’s album The Idler Wheel is Wiser Than the Driver of The Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, also three times

Lyric Interlude:

My heart’s made of parts of all that surround me

And that’s why the devil just can’t get around me

Every single night’s alright, every single night’s a fight

And every single fight’s alright with my brain

…I just want to feel everything

--Pondered in equal measure the feminine urge to dress monochromaticslly in harmony and the feminine miscast as hysterical when they are brave enough to embody the full rainbow spectrum of human emotion.

-Tried not to spend much time on the internet

-Failed in order to watch the people of Minnesota stand the EFF UP TO ICE AND FASCISM

-Checked in with my friends who actually live in Minneapolis and was told that as bad and inspiring as it looks in Minneapolis, in real life it’s both more terrifying AND more beautiful. They say this podcast is a really accurate depiction of what they are living through there: How To Survive The End of the World; An Emergency Dispatch From Occupied Minneapolis

-Smiled from ear to ear and nodded and snapped probably too many times as I listened to another artist I admire, Mukasha D guest teach in tk about our innate Inner Authority.

-Raced with my dog, Tuesday toward sunrise and imagined what letters from the Dawn might say to us all now.

-Felt how much those who abuse power want to make us forget how much power we hold.

Because:

They want us to shut our bodies down in confusion and fear.

They want us to lose ourselves in doom scrolls, divergent + divisive realities, endless looping arguments and chat gpt until we forget we have bodies and sovereignty at all.

They want our anger to drive us to madness so unbearably loud it makes us willing to pull a trigger instead of using our fire to burn our illusions as we forge a new and better world.

During the recent solstice, I felt the earth hovering. The air hung strange. The light was soft yet flat. Everything seemed both still and urgent, like a baby just born, but before taking breath it’s first breath.

Did you feel it too?

Do you feel it now?

A new world is coming. I believe that with my entire being, And even though I cannot tell you just when or how, I invite you to live “AS IF,” the world you believe in is already here with me. To embody that belief in each choice we make, in the small and large ways we move our bodies, in how we hang and wear our smiles. May we allow them to break like the dawn across our faces. May we understand we are big enough to do so without losing our primal snarl.

For now?

Resistance.

For now?

Laughter + small fires everywhere.

For now?

Embodying and reflecting hope.

For now?

Tiny rebellions. However you know how. Listen for your own “how.” Take your kid to therapy. Teach a class to artists on how to hear their true inner voice. Pray that they’ll understand what you’re really trying to teach them is how to hear, how to hold, how to make with that which can never be bought, sold or stolen. Cuz they’re gonna need it.

Love,

Yan

P.S. True to the promise I made my friend, I will now be posting here every friday. My own version of my white, wicker, 3x5 ft heart. As AI evolves and the stakes get higher and higher, holding out my imperfect human self feels move vital than ever before. Thanks for holding yours out with me. Thanks for being here and for reading along.

Like what even IS THIS beautiful, toxic, wild, connective, violent dumpster fire of a Wild West?

NO BODY KNOWS. I repeat, NO BODY KNOWS. Not the experts. Not the scientists Not the influencers. Not the billionaires profiting from the commodification of our attention. Not the armchair experts, or the spiritual teachers. Not even the conspiracy theorists, tho Lord knows I get a kick out of listening to them.

All we really know for CERTAIN?

Is that NONE OF US CAN LOOK AWAY.

As ever, we are human beings; proud of ourselves for making it, yet standing way too close to the fire.

Did I say stand? I meant we hold the fire in our palms. We gaze down, down, down equally horrified and entranced by the power before us. And even tho it’s right in our hands now, we still feel more powerless than ever.

So what do we do?

We play. We experiment. We create. We theorize. We fight. We blame. We buy. We sell. We try to find some holy prophet who has the answers. We love that prophet for a time before their inevitable crucifixtion.

I know it sounds like I am, but I’m not even trying to figure it out anymore. I’m so done trying to figure it out. I’m riding waves now instead of analyzing them.

I will say tho- I was pretty good at the internet for awhile. I used to have an instinctive way of slicing my life into impactful, evocative, digestible pieces.

They called me authentic. They called me real. They called me brave. But any of us who kinda believe we managed to be those things a time or two, know very well that if you keep *trying* to be THE THING you inevitably become a performance of that thing.

The internet is a place for those best at performing authenticity.

That’s why I love the line in Cameron Winter’s song, Drinking age. “Everything is lyyyyyingggggg.”

And yet. Here’s me. Same ole desire I ever. I want to make people feel the way great art makes me feel; Honest. Beautiful. Human. Free.

It took me a long time to know what I was about. To really know. I think I always kind of knew in the primal, non verbal, ball of energy hurling forward with its karmic inertia sort of way. I sometimes think what I made had more power then– when I was blind and lead by my subconscious.

But something happens when you create and let it be seen. Something happens when you utter any kind of “I AM,” hands trembling, voice shaking.

This world comes at you. Huge invisible hands hell bent on programming disbelief. Sick systems, wounded parents, the safety you never got, the contract of fear + conformity anybody who’s selling something whether it’s religion or a house is trying to get you to sign.

The contract reads:

I agree to not be myself.

In return you are promised - not in writing exactly, it’s just heavily implied:

Belonging

Acceptance

Safety

Security

Love

And even though almost all of us have seen the little mermaid (IT WON’T COST MUCH, JUST YOUR VOICE) or have heard the same story told a million different ways,

We still find ourselves in a desperate moment, willing to make the trade.

So anyway, I thought I knew what I was about. I thought I’d outsmart the world with my will. I thought creator-ship and expression would be easy. In a lot of ways they were.

For awhile.

But the world kept coming. Kept moving toward me with its scalpels and shaping tools. It found my insecurities, the ones I’d tried to bury, and pulled them up and into the light.

Are you sure you know who you are?

Are you sure you’re walking in that knowing?

And even though these inquiries burned and hurt me. I learned to let the pain serve me too. False identity after false identity melted away. Death and rebirth cycled on repeat. Some I chose, some that chose me.

I wasn’t out to proove anything, only to breathe as my essence, only to laugh and cry as my truth.

I learned that to lie was to feel less alive.I learned the cost of shrinking was clarity. I felt how each and every effort to please lessened the strength in my stride and the light in my eyes.

They go so fast.

Yet to be humbled is to be empowered if you let the rock bottoms do their proper work on you.

When I say I remembered who I am, I mean that I remembered I’m nobody. And the power that gives to me to be with everything is difficult to explain.

I have looked long and hard at the world. Its beauty. Its promise. Its suffering. I’ve asked it my part.

The world said, “Don’t save me. Love me.”

The world said “I am you.”

The world told me love was action.

Love was embrace, embodiment. Love was mess and staying with the mess.

My path turns out to be the same as it ever was; the path of the soul remembering itself. I am of most service when I bring every strand of my strange humanity to this remembering. When I weave those strands and dance with them and let you see them as an offering of beauty.

I’ve offered with words.

I’ve offered with photographs.

I’ve offered with classes.

I’ve offered with listening.

I won’t stop offering.

This is the kind of artist I am.

“I came to sing the song.”

With or without the internet (Have you seen what’s going on in Iran?)

As I write this, my daughter, Wren- 17, almost 18 now- plays the piano and sings at the top of her lungs. She won’t let me record.

I couldn’t be more proud,

Yan

P.S. You have less than 36 hours to register for the last time I EVER teach TEETHKISS the class. ITS ALL ABOUT YOU AND YOUR VOICE.

We got room for just ONE more Fab Four seat.

We got room for a few more live seats.

Silent seats are also available because they have no cap AND they are the best bang for your buck.

READ MORE ABOUT TEETHKISS THE CLASS HERE

Please give if you can. Full info below.

To compensate, my other parent over-functioned.

When her body got so full of pain it only half worked, did she stop?

Nope.

She just kept going. Kept working. Kept doing everything for everyone. Somebody had to, she told herself. And who could argue with her?

Somebody did.

As my parents’ daughter, I watched. I have always been a watcher. I watched, and with the hubris of a child, I determined to not make the mistakes of my parents.

Except — I was a lot like my parents. I had the same wiring in my nature that made my one parent underfunction. As well as the wire that made my other parent over-function.

Oh dear.

What would my solution be?

To override my nature, obviously.

With what?

My WILL.

I decided to MAKE MYSELF rather than be myself.

I believed wholeheartedly in the adage that growth only happens outside of our comfort zone.

So I robbed myself of comfort. When I saw it coming for me, I went the other way. What was the other way?

ACHIEVEMENT. Constant achievement.

Honor roll, cheerleading, student council, sports, clogging, art, varsity choir, best drama student, best smile, Junior Miss Boise, Junior Miss Idaho second runner-up (I fell over on stage. It knocked me down a coupla notches), marathon, another marathon, natural child birth, essay contests…

And don’t even get me started on pretty, thin, kind, intelligent, funny, wanted, desired…

I’d do everything. I’d be everything. Impossibly. Impressively.

When I decided to become a photographer, I told my mom in the first week I’d be one of the best. Mediocre was never an option for my ambition. Mediocre was for people who never made it out of whatever pile of dirt they were born into.

Meanwhile, my nervous system screamed. I mean that literally. I woke up with the word Noooooooo tearing through me for years and years and years.

After I ‘got’ a lot of things I thought I wanted and there was still a gaping hole of dissatisfaction in me, I wised up a little. I graduated from the idea of I HAVE TO ACHIEVE to I HAVE TO GIVE and paired that with I HAVE TO SURVIVE.

Enter a wholly entirely boring phase of MARTYRDOM. In which I became all the parts of my overfunctioning parent I swore to never become.

Somewhere in the last 7 years I decided that the idea of always existing outside of your comfort zone was made up by INSANE WHITE MEN who happened to also be destroying the planet with their incessant need to achieve. (Takes one to know one.)

Like — you guys, the lack of comfort is built-in here. We don’t have to go find it. It’s unavoidable. We could do the opposite. We could work together with all this wildness and beauty and build zones of harmony and gentleness and support instead of, I don’t know — constant STRUGGLE, COMPETITION AND CONQUER? That might look pretty cool?

But noooooo, someone, (I’m looking at you, Columbus) had to find a way to sail across an ocean and steal someone else’s stuff just so he could say, “SEE?! I did it. The super hard thing no one else could do. Yeah, I figured it out. That was me. I recommend naming a bad Monday holiday after me.”

Long story short, I’ve actually been trying to get back in my comfort zone. That means instead of overriding a million bodily clues begging me to chill the fuq out, like IBS, anxiety, depression, migraines, chronic fatigue, rashes, etc, I rest a lot now. I try not to do anything my body tells me not to do.

I listen to my body. Closely. Inwardly.

I trust her rhythm. Her pace. This feels like… integrity. This feels like going slower than almost everyone I know.

Before this, I had gotten so accustomed to putting myself in “uncomfortable situations” that they escalated into dangerous situations. Which my mind by then recognized as familiar and said “green light, all systems go” even when my body was making siren sounds like a pretend cop trying to get my attention.

So the comfort zone is feeling pretty damn good. There’s something here I recognize…omg, it’s FLOW. And by god, I didn’t have to initiate it with risk or chaos, or the story of “if I don’t make myself do the thing I desperately don’t want to do, my children will starve”. Instead of a high stakes, adrenaline-fueled entrance, flow just sort of gently unfurled herself. As if she was here all along and all the times I thought I was controlling her were an egoic illusion.

This summer I had a dream I was catching a wave. I was in the ocean. First I chased the wave. And she throttled me. Then I tried to wait for the wave, but I waited too long. Throttled again.

Then, I stopped trying. I didn’t chase. I didn’t wait. I just was. Without trying, I became the wave. And as one we rose.

When I say it’s my last year teaching TEETHKISS it’s because my body is telling me that TEETHKISS is a wave ready to return to the sea. It’s time to let it go so I can join the next wave on its way to me.

TEETHKISS is not a class that teaches you to achieve, compete, or be anything other than what you are. Though you may find yourself caught up in those waters now.

Instead, TEETHKISS the class assists and refines your ability to listen to your innermost, true self. Where does that self want to take you? Can you trust yourself to join your wave?

We got room for just ONE more Fab Four seat.

We got room for a few more live seats.

Silent seats are also available because they have no cap AND they are the best bang for your buck.

Register for Teethkiss

As in — the only you there will ever, ever be,

I’ll keep this short and sweet.

I’m mockingly mopey and tender.

I’ve just driven 808 miles straight from Portland, Oregon to Provo, Utah. I’ve just left a literal part of my body and soul to live there and fly free at this place you may have heard of called COLLEGE.

Yup. My Myra. She’s gone. Or rather, she’s her own, she never belonged to me, she was always a gift, she will always be a gift wherever she goes and she’s home now. Her own home. Although, it does look a lot like a dorm/prison cell depending on the generosity of your perspective…

But I digress.

More on that “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken” story later.

Maybe.

Maybe when my eyes aren’t so tired from crying while squinting at the faithful moon, who unlike my treacherous child, was kind enough to follow me the whole 808 miles back here. (I’m joking. About my bitterness. I just hope it’s super obvious that I’m joking. AI is making us all dumber so I can’t be sure.)

Did I say this would be short?

Down to business:

1. My ego has been a real pain in my sweet ass lately. At least when it comes to creating anything. My ego keeps going on and on about how nothing is ever good enough nor will it ever be. Talk about a buzzkill. This kind of constant criticism nonsense is death to creative flow. So it’s time to shake shit up. Plus,

2. This week is the final countdown to my annual run of TEETHKISS THE CLASS. Class begins on Jan 12th. And there’s all this stuff I HAVEN’T EVEN TOLD YOU ABOUT IT. Like —

3. This is the very last year I will be teaching TEETHKISS. This is not a trick. This is not a trap. Is it? Nah, this is a truth and tough choice I’ve thought long and hard about. And it feels cussing GREAT.

To tell you more about the whys and hows and hearts and what’s nexts of it all + break me out of my creative rut I’ve committed to writing you a little somethin’ every day for the next five days. I hope you read along because I think it’ll be real nice for us all.

There’s just two more things before I go to bed and try to relive Myra’s entire childhood in the dream realm, minus my screw-ups:

4. If you’ve ever wanted to be part of TEETHKISS, this is your last chance, man. You can sign up right here.

We got room for Fab Four seats.

We got room for a few more live seats.

Silent seats are also available because they have no cap AND they are the best bang for your buck. WE HAVE SO MANY SILENT SEATS THIS YEAR. Which means we’re going to have an excellent community.

Register for Teethkiss Now

ALSO DID YOU KNOW THAT IF YOU’VE TAKEN TEETHKISS BEFORE YOU CAN GET A DISCOUNT CODE TO BE A SILENT SEAT FOR ONLY $150 DWOLLAHS??? That’s bananas 🍌. And that’s a lot of you. Get after it. Check your email from December if you’re an alum, or reply here if you don’t see it!

5. Last but not least, (DAMN, if I don’t have a bad habit of burying the lede):

I went ahead and MADE TEETHKISS AWESOME THIS YEAR + DIFFERENT THAN IT’S EVER BEEN.

How?

By inviting four personally inspiring guest teachers for your maximum learning pleasure.

Peep the list below, then get hella excited and then go tella your friends. That’s right. I brought back hella then had the audacity to rhyme it with tella which is NOT even a word and I don’t even regret it.

Can you guess it’s late? Can you guess which guest teachers are TEETHKISS alums?

That’s it folx. That’s all she wrote. I’ve felt more emotions and awe and peace and cherishing in the last 4 days than well, ever, I guess. Yessirree, and I’ve also been humbled — tossed around more times than the clothes we all keep forgetting we left in the washing machine — what with this ego giving me constant noogies like an old-school bully.

Point being, I hope you come back tomorrow so I can tell you more about all the DRAMA of this tired and thankful MAMA.

Yours Truly or Else,

Yan

Hello you creative, brave human.

I know you don’t always feel that way, but if you’ve found your way to my Substack, I think I know what you’re made of.

As most of you know, after more than a decade of travel, I now only offer a limited number of photo sessions each year. I basically trickled them out in 2025 and 2024, but this year I wanted to run a good old fashioned sale.

So here we are. Official. Live. Ready. Announcing…

✨ THE 2026 SECOND SIGHT SALE ✨

Save $150 on ANY 2026 session with code: YAN2026
Plus: Introducing a brand-new 2-hour session option for $2000.

This offer ends Dec 15, 2025.
If you’re someone who acts on instincts…it’s time.

👉 Already know what you want? Jump straight to booking.

Book your session now

WHERE AM I GOING?

CANADA—Vancouver/Salt Spring/Seattle area: July 15–21, 2026

Boise, ID: August 6–9, 2026

Washington, DC: September 11–14, 2026

California (various cities): October 22–27, 2026

NYC: TBD

Don’t see your city listed?

Reply to this email! I do accept requests where it’s possible to accommodate you.

THE SESSIONS

Option 1: Second Sight Session — 3 Hours

Use code YAN2026 to save $150.

My signature, full-experience session.
Perfect if you want time, space, multiple locations, and creative flow.

Includes:
• A creative consult call to plan your vision and explore inspirations,
• 3 hours of shooting (option to split into two sessions if you wish; for example, you and your kids in the morning for 1.5 hours for intimate photos, then meet the whole family together later in the day at golden hour to photograph everyone together),
• All images shot on film and delivered to you as high-res digital files for you to print and share as much as you want.

Full sessions are ideal for multiple locations, if you want to go on an adventure AND have intimate photos at home, or if you think you or your loved ones might need a break with downtime in order to keep the creative juices and good spirits flowing.

PRICE + PAYMENT PLAN:
Pay in Full - $3000

OR

Payment Plan ($3300)
Deposit: $1000
30 days after first payment: $1000
60 days after first payment: $1300

Pay in full and save $300

Book the full session

Option 2: NEW — 2-Hour Session

Use code YAN2026 to save $150.

Shorter, simpler, but still soulful and creative.
Perfect if you want the art but need to save time or budget.

Includes:
• A creative consult call to plan your vision and explore inspirations,
• 2 hours of consecutive shooting (no splitting),
• All images shot on film and delivered to you as high-res digital files for you to print and share as much as you want.

This option is best suited for those who want to save a little time and money, but who still want a meaningful creative experience and artful photos.

PRICE + PAYMENT PLAN:
Pay in Full - $2000

OR

Payment Plan ($2200)
Deposit: $1000
30 days after 1st payment - $700
60 days after 1st payment - $500

Pay in full and save $200

Book a 2-hour session

How do I book?

Step 1: Make sure the date range works for when I’m in your city!
(If you need a specific day, email me!)

Step 2: Choose a full 3-hour session or the new 2-hour session.

Step 3: Decide if you want to save money by paying in full OR give yourself a little time between payments with a payment plan.

Then…BOOK!

(And don’t forget to use code YAN2026 for $150 off!)

BOOK NOW

Don’t see your city listed?

Reply to this email!

I might not be scheduled to visit your area…yet.
If you can cover travel (flight/gas + a place to stay—guest rooms welcome 😉), I’ll consider adding your city for a 2026 weekend session. Even better if you’ve got a friend or two who also want to book a session! Email me :)

Thank you so much for taking the time to plan creating with me in 2026! I can’t wait to make meaningful work with you and those you love.

xx,
Yan

*all photos in this essay by my friend, Natalie Gildersleeve. Although I turned some of them black and white.

The sun is starting to set on 2025. While we’re in her golden hour, I want to tell you about the sweetest personal moment of my year.

But before I do, a confession:

I haven’t always connected to nature. I actually came into this world feeling the opposite—raised, like so many, on what was processed rather than natural. Fed frozen chimichangas and sugar cereal for nourishment; fed performance and consumerism for connection.

You ever shrug when people talk about their love of “the outdoors”?
Ever get a text inviting you on a hike and feel yourself squirm, unsure what to say?
Ever stare at a sunset—the same colors everyone raves about—and feel…pretty much nothing?

If so, you’re not alone. That was me for most of my young life. Why go outside when I could watch movies, wander malls, or flop around indoors in my own discontent? Outside was uncomfortable. Inconvenient. Itchy.

I’d love to tell you I entered this world full of wonder, knowing instinctively I was one with rivers and rocks and trees. But that would be a lie. I was born into the Idaho dirt and mostly found myself unimpressed with its piles.

So when did that change?
When did I become the peaceful lady who walks the mountain trail near her house every day during golden hour, taking more pictures of trees than any person logically should?

Slowly.

The change rose as the antidote to a lifetime of harrowing psychic pain I didn’t even know I was lugging around. A racing mind. A body full of wabi-sabi imperfections trying to hold what it could not hold. I went searching for sanity, for an anchor, for a center.

As a lifelong romantic, I thought relationships would save me. Turns out, it was beauty. Always beauty.

Beauty’s arms caught me in the violent aftermath of divorce.
Her hands soothed my wounds of grief and shame.
She lured me into a career in photography, teasing me with light and shadow as I tried the impossible—translating the essence of people into something still enough to hold.

When my pain rose shapeless and ugly from depressive episodes, it was beauty’s language that shushed my howls. A poem, a perfect song, late afternoon light dancing on a wall—these things caught my hurting pieces and held them suspended and weightless for occasional moments of stunning relief. Not just relief - resonance. Understanding.

And so I went looking for beauty everywhere. In people. In trash. In baked beets bleeding across a baking pan. In a sunset reflecting off the side of a semi-truck in slow traffic.

I didn’t know to seek her as medicine, but beauty came looking for me anyway.

Eventually, I knew I owed her. Bigtime.

So I created a contract. I’d been operating under one unconsciously as an artist, but it was always about what beauty could do for me. On one particularly gray, numbing day, that shifted.

I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t feel enough to cry. But I dragged myself out the door and up the mountain path across the street. One moment I was deflated with despair, and in the next, something in the air snapped to crystalline clarity. I looked out over my neighborhood and the movement below—construction workers like tiny ants on a roof, traffic, everyday bustle—suddenly appeared rhythmic as if choreographed. What would have felt hollow and chaotic had I been up close, revealed it self instead as an absurdly perfect pattern of harmony from my mountain perspective.

I somehow knew that everything fit. Even my pain. Even my numbness. I laughed. Then cried. Then collapsed to my knees in a prayer of thanks.

Not to G-d, exactly.
To beauty.
Who may be one and the same.

There, on the dirt that once bored me, I asked beauty to let me be her translator. I didn’t expect an answer. The asking alone felt like privilege.

From that day, I knew my calling.
And I knew honoring it would take work. Courage. Silliness. Pilgrimages to art and poetry and mountains. Not to commodify beauty, but to know her.

And that is how I went from chimichangas and shopping malls to pulling over to the side of the road to lose myself in the indescribable yellow of weeping willows in late fall.

I suspect that the ways we have both attempted and/or been forced to separate ourselves from beauty and her primary home - nature — are responsible for so much of our psychic pain in the first place.

Yet no matter how hard we try, we are never separate. Beauty comes for us because she is us. And we are simultaneously beauty’s witness.

She came for me. She comes for you. Will we open ourselves to receive her?

My relationship with beauty deepens each day. I give beauty as much of myself as I can—and unlike many relationships before, beauty’s mystery is a container that can hold the full pour of me.

Which brings me back to the setting sun of 2025.

Back to my sweetest moment with beauty.

A sun-slanted summer afternoon on the banks of the Oregon Molalla River. Pain had taken over my body—my bones were trying to grip what they could not hold, and worse-they could not accept that they could not hold it. They threatened to grind themselves to dust with grasping.

I was surrounded by friends: my oldest friend of nearly forty years, and newer ones with heartsight and curiosity. A teen daughter and her friend, mirroring the boldness we once had. The whole group humming with memory and transformation.

Natalie knew a secret river spot. We piled into her van with snacks and books, bumping down a long road as she kept promising the spot was “not much further.”

The wait was worth it. I’d never seen such an emerald green river or a yielding, wide, gray stone shore. The water was clearer and slower than any I’d known in Utah or Idaho.

When I plunged in, I stayed under as long as I could. Gold. thread-like sine waves rippled behind my eyelids. I felt the river pulling at me—not consuming, but joining — transmuting. Threads again, but these were the threads of my pain leaving my bones and dissolving into the cold green.

The relief was so immediate I swam to the bank, away from everyone, and wept into my arms.

I couldn’t believe this Oregon river would care for me so generously. So precisely. She returned the rivers of my own blood to a current as free as her own. I hadn’t even known my need until she met it.

My tears were the overwhelmed thank you our culture does not teach us to say, but that nature knows how to hear.

That’s not quite true is it? There are those who have tried to tell us from the beginning. Stewards of the land. Indigenous cultures and people who have been tending and dwelling in beauty long before European colonizers arrived with their own agendas of commodification and “progress.”

Before those who look like me arrived to that Oregon river, there were the Molala people. I honor them for the homes they made of the part of the earth that spoke straight to my spirit that day. I wonder what mysteries beauty whispered to them as they lived out their lives there.

How did they define beauty?

How do I?

The Diné tradition speaks of beauty as a balance between inner and outer life.

My self appointed teacher and lover of Celtic spirituality, John O’Donohue wrote one of my favorite books as a definition of beauty, and describes beauty as a rounded, substantial becoming.

To me – at least for today– beauty is the place in us where nature meets spirit. This place - sometimes in form, sometimes in feeling, reveals our shared essence.

Beauty does not exclude imperfection, but uses it as the tender entry point to our human hearts.

Today in an excellent Fresh Air interview with Ethan Hawke, I heard him say “Beauty is as beauty does.”

And this is what I want to leave you with. I want you to know I wish to do as beauty does. I share my inner most places and experiences because I wish to alchemize pain, to reveal the pattern sitting just beneath chaos, to restore those I come into contact with to a revitalized sense of their own souls– both in that soul’s uniqueness AND how it connects and weaves each of us into inescapable belonging.

Aint that some shit? The nerve. How could I believe myself capable? How could I not try?

Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for giving me enough of your attention to attempt all that with you.

I feel the beauty you bring.

xx,

Yan