About Michelle & Nature’s Emotions
Nature’s Emotions offers fine art Nature photography, stories, journals, essays, and creative resources to help children and adults recognize feelings they may not yet have words for—and make those inner experiences shareable.
Who it’s for
Nature’s Emotions is for parents, grandparents, educators, therapists, and other thoughtful adults who care about children’s inner lives—especially sensitive, imaginative children who feel deeply, notice everything, and struggle to find words for what is happening inside. It’s also for adults who once were those children and want a new way to connect with others.
The heart of my work is simple: Care Me Through It.
We can help children through feelings. With curiosity and visual emotional metaphors to look at together, words can come more easily.
A horse turning to run, a bird poised to fly, an animal weathering a storm or calmly resting its head on the back of another can give form to something we feel or may want to feel instead but cannot yet explain. Nature, beauty, animals, and story open emotional doors more gently than direct questions.
When adults take time to wonder with children about how an image feels inside, emotions become something they can safely explore together. When children learn they do not have to hide what hurts in order to stay connected, homes turns into havens.
The beginning
I grew up imaginative, sensitive, and curious in a family that provided well for my physical and educational needs but had little room for emotional expression. I was taught how to behave: responsibly, competently, and independently. I learned to appear personable, “fine” and capable, just like my mother. Having colic as a baby may have been the reason she never bonded with me, but she did her best to manage me with my father operating as ruler, protector, provider, and dealer of all strict consequences. My older brother kept to himself when our parents were home but found me intensely fun to tease and physically bully while they were away or at work. Home never offered me a sense of haven. I only found that in forests, along streams, and with animals. Pippi Longstocking inspired me to dream of a very different life—with a horse.
The messy, momentous middle
Decades later, I found that horse by rescuing a two-year old orphaned, neglected, unsocialized and mischievous Paint, and named him Artful Dodger. I relied on trainers who used a popular method based on leveraging a horse’s flight response with increasing pressure until compliance, then released. But Dodger’s prey animal flight response had become skewed to more resistance and fight than flight. Not having a mare and herd to grow up around for safety, his nervous system improvised. The amount of pressure he required before offering even minimal compliance only served to snuff the light out of his eyes. “Broke” took on a meaning for him I couldn’t bear to watch.
I felt his look. It was all too familiar. It wasn’t until later I realized it was despair.
I started over with his training—just me and Dodger—at liberty in a pasture with nothing but a chair and a book and just curiosity turned toward him. No pressure. He chose his distance. It often felt like watching paint dry but I was determined to learn his physical nuances and gain his trust without halters or tools.
He is a source of instant energetic biofeedback showing any human what it’s like to be with them, their energy, intention and whatever emotion they walk in with. There’s no faking it. He approaches for laughter, departs from agenda. I wish I’d known then how important energy, intention and capacity to take in new information is to humans as it was to him. Timing. Horses are great teachers like that.
I joined an equine photography group, splurging on the camera gear needed for shooting horses, and became inspired to use the photos of his surroundings to illustrate a children’s book written from his point of view. I showed my images in galleries and wine tasting rooms and learned from visitor comments that I wasn’t the only one who saw the images as metaphors for emotions.
What I didn’t realize was that my marriage was in the process of ending. When Covid hit, I binge-watched online psychology courses all day, every day to make sense of it. My lack of a maternal bond and emotionally mature caretaking in childhood left me with an insecure nervous system just like it had Dodger’s. The life choices I’d made and the red flags I’d missed all began to make sense: I’d never learned how to care myself and others through a relationship.
What I now believe
Many children are taught how to behave long before they are helped to understand what they feel. Children may cope by becoming agreeable, invisible, impressive, hyper vigilant, rebellious, or “fine,” only to grow into adults who try to find balance on an emotional tightrope between vulnerable and walled off—with no idea how to respond to either end.
How we respond to fear, anger, grief, sensitivity, difference, and conflict at home travels with us into marriages, classrooms, communities, and institutions. It takes emotional intelligence to care through it and connect.
Families that stay curious, repair hurt, and care their way back to each other through the friction that naturally happens, create havens.
Presence and caring intent matters more than perfect words.
Families are the soil in which adult relationships and our society grows. Nature’s Emotions offers resources that help turn homes into havens for the benefit of society.
Explore the work
• Nature-inspired art as emotional metaphor that does more than decorate a room: https://naturesemotions.com/
• A free reflective journal to explore alone or with a child: https://naturesemotions.com/gift
• A children’s book inviting empathy through perspective-taking; The Artful Dodger: The Way He Sees His World: https://naturesemotions.com/empathy
• A creative writing project for middle school students to write from an animal’s point-of-view by using empathy (The Artful Dodger book above is a helpful example to use as well.): https://naturesemotions.com/empathy
If an image, story, or question helps you or a child recognize an unnamed feeling that’s cared through, my work has done what I created it to do.
Start with curiosity.
