Wander.
Notice.
Reflect.

The first half of 2026 was the darkest period of my life. A painful divorce unraveled the future I thought I was building. Friendships disappeared. More than eight hundred job applications ended in rejection. I struggled financially, experienced a mental health crisis, lost my home, and eventually found myself living out of my car with three dogs.

To make things worse, surviving my weakest moment didn’t suddenly make everything better like I’d been told. Rock bottom, I discovered, absolutely had a basement.

I began spending my days in parks and on trails throughout Northern Virginia. At first, it was simply somewhere to go—a place to walk the dogs, move my body, and escape the noise for a while. But out there, the world slowed down. I wasn’t rushing toward anything or trying to outrun what was behind me. I could simply be present where I was.

That was when I started noticing the little moments.

A flower growing beside the trail. A fox appearing between the trees. A dragonfly resting long enough to be seen. I began photographing them with my phone because I wanted to carry some of that stillness with me. Then I pulled out my old Canon Rebel T3, and something changed. Looking through that lens felt like magic. For a few moments, nothing existed except what was directly in front of me and the attempt to capture it.

Eventually, I understood how close I had come to missing all of it.

For the first 38 years of my life, I followed the script I was given: graduate high school, join the Marine Corps, earn the college degrees, build the résumé, and keep moving toward someone else’s definition of success. I worked in some career-defining places like the Pentagon, Department of Labor, and even Capitol Hill, but none of it ever felt entirely like me. Beneath all those expectations, I had always been more curious, more free-spirited, and more alive when the road ahead was unwritten.

Wander Found is the life growing from that realization. It’s not separate from me. It’s me learning to live on my own terms—finding myself through wandering and preserving the small moments I meet along the way.

These photographs are more than beautiful things I encountered. They’re reminders that life continues beyond the problems we can’t see past. There’s always something outside the frame of our pain: another trail, another morning, another astonishing little moment waiting to be had.