About Michelle & Nature’s Emotions

I create written resources and photographic art of Nature for creative, sensitive children — and for the adults who care for them, teach them, love them, or used to be them.

My work is about emotional literacy, empathy, imagination, and creativity and combining them to inspire the kind of meaningful conversations that help kids feel seen, heard, understood, valued, respected, and loved.

In other words: I aim to turn homes and relationships into havens.

Not the Pinterest or everything-is-perfect version. The heart-felt kind where emotions aren’t confused with behavior, sensitivity isn’t treated like weakness, and creativity isn’t something a child has to use in order to survive being ignored or misunderstood.

My work is rooted in two things I know in my bones:

The emotional intelligence we learn — or don’t learn — in childhood, shapes the quality of our adult relationships and life.

Nature, animals, art, and story can help us talk about feelings in ways that are gentler and safer while evoking more honesty than direct conversation alone.

Sometimes a horse, a tree, a pond, a bird, or a reflection can help find words for a feeling hiding under the surface.

That is where Nature’s Emotions begins.

Why this work matters to me.

As a child, I was imaginative, creative, sensitive, and curious. I envied Pippi Longstocking’s independence and whimsical life, and dreamed of a life filled with my own horse, close friends, warmth, creativity, and possibility.

My parents were professional, well-intentioned, physically present, dutiful, and religious. They provided for my brother’s and my physical and educational needs wonderfully but interacted with us more like benevolent employers training us for an important mission, rather than as nurturing parents eager to find out who we were inside and wanted to become.

Growing up, it was safest to bury what I was feeling because emotional expression was too easily confused with behavior — and behavior was punishable.

I concentrated on what was expected and rewarded: skills, good grades, being responsible, church involvement, and “making good choices.”

Thankfully, home offered a reliable place to eat and sleep but it was never a haven.

My sense of haven was only felt on vacation, without demands, riding a horse or playing along a stream in a forest. Nature was my nurturing Mother.

I did okay inside our authoritarian belief-and-behavior-control family system until my teens. Then came the anger. A lot of it. Even surprised me. Mostly at my mother, with her honed, curt yet churchy-nice tone that simply ignored what I’d just said out loud.

Nothing rattled her.

To this furious teenage girl — desperate to be met emotionally — it was maddening. I was going for any emotion! Just please show me who you are on the inside!

I had no idea there was a name for what was missing. I only knew I wanted out.

Lucky break.

My chance to start a new life came two years earlier than usual, in a college two states away.

Homesick girls in my dorm — crying on the phone to their moms — baffled me.

My sudden freedom and self-reliance felt like I’d just discovered oxygen.

But as it turned out, freedom and self-reliance have nothing on emotional intelligence and maturity.

My great new life even included marrying the guy in hottest pursuit at the time. I was 20. 

I dutifully made sure we shared interests, attraction, a basic values checklist, and a spoken commitment in front of friends and family — all the stuff I thought automagically turned red flags green.

Three years in, he was gone every weekend, all weekend, to train or race in his favorite sport: Bicycling, mountain climbing, cross country skiing. “Distractions” not invited.

I thought it was just a phase. But no. He’d moved on, failed to mention it, and waited five more years for me to figure it out. Just sharing a bed during the week worked for him.

Childhood emotional neglect can be unquestioning and clueless that way.

The horse. Finally.

A couple of decades later, I married again, thinking I just needed to “make better choices.”

And honestly, round two looked pretty good for a while.

He even suggested I rescue the skinny, neglected two-year-old orphan Paint horse on our road so I could stop crying every time I drove by him.

I was on it. Found a trainer with a barn to do the deal with the owners and renamed their “Chief” as my “Artful Dodger,” after Dickens’ cheeky orphan.

No more “chiefs” in my life.

But.

What I didn’t yet understand was that this young horse, like myself, had missed the nervous system regulation education of his species.

Raised in isolation from other horses, Dodger missed the lessons that a mare and a herd normally teach a foal: personal space, safety, energy regulation, appropriate boundaries, and how not to be a menace around the food source.

Dodger’s prey-animal nervous system had not developed in the usual way. Isolation in a dinky containment area hadn’t allowed running from what scared him. He was wired to resist and fight. 

Like me, he’d been wired for self-reliance.

Also, like me, his wiring was not conducive for relationship building.

“Respect” meant domination.

The standard training method at the time used a system of pressure and perfectly-timed release of it. It included desensitizing a horse’s natural flight response by intentionally scaring them with objects with no way to leave, then releasing the pressure the second they relax or give a correct response. 

Success was all in the timing of the release.

Its mantra was “make the right thing easy (touch the scary object or move a certain way), and the wrong thing (run or resist) difficult.”

When a sentient being (horse, child,) is motivated to perform a behavior in order to avoid the threat/pressure if it doesn’t, it’s called negative reinforcement.

Let that sink in. I’m not just talking about horses here.

Dodger’s unusual fight response required much more pressure before he’d finally give up and offer minimal compliance, disappearing completely inside himself.

I hated watching the whole process — the fear, the reactivity, the resistance, the insistence, the lights going out of his eyes during his eventual minimal compliance and his understandable, growing distrust of humans.

I was told I was too soft. To demand his respect. To get bigger.

In other words, to dominate a frightened animal that I loved, 10x heavier and infinitely stronger than me, and that made sense to them.

No. Just no.

While I didn’t have the confidence in this foreign horse world to ditch its ever popular “Natural Horsemanship” method, I wanted to believe I could find “kinder/gentler” trainers using it.

There were, but it was a bust. His minimal compliance and lights out continued.

I finally gave up. I never saw him as a recreational vehicle that had to learn/perform an acceptable “use” and for sure, neither of us were horse show material.

The Better Way

Eventually I found softer “rogue” relational training methods that gave Dodger a voice, not only in what we did together but how we did it. 

I had to become fluent in his body language, his energy, his thresholds, his curiosity, his “yes,” his “not now,” and his “don’t even think about it.”

I had to notice what he noticed.

Offer choices.

Not confuse compliance with trust.

Pay attention to what he showed me it was like to be around me.

None of this came naturally to me.

I was better at being alone, dutiful, competent, independent, in charge and secretly overwhelmed.

But Dodger kept being willing to show me how to reach him.

And when I paid attention, the lights in his eyes stayed bright.

His interest and trust became my reward as I learned something I’ll never forget:

The feeling of aliveness comes from having a sense of agency and a voice that’s understood — for all sentient beings.

Back to Humaning.

Here’s the humbling part.

Sadly, it never occurred to me that the level of awareness, curiosity, patience, regulation, and presence I was learning to offer my horse, might also be helpful in my marriage.

I thought those skills were horse-specific. Useful in a barn. Optional in a kitchen.

And eventually, our two human trauma-wired nervous systems did what trauma-wired nervous systems often do in marriages when they don’t know how to repair:

One seeks greener grass until the other finds the clues.

Again.

Divorce was closely followed by pandemic isolation with its no-other-options invitation to sit still, look inward and learn how life got this way while staring at a screen all day.

Esther Perel’s prompt started me down my path:

“Tell me how you were loved and I’ll tell you how you love.”

Ouch.

The more I learned, the more fascinated I became.

Multiple psychotherapy courses later about childhood emotional neglect, emotional intelligence, attachment styles, family systems, nervous system regulation, trauma, rupture and repair…I knew what I wanted to do.

Not become a therapist.

I wanted to create the emotional awareness tools that would’ve helped me when I was a kid, growing up in a home in the an emotional intelligence desert.

What I believe now.

I believe many children are taught how to behave long before they’re taught how to understand what they feel.

I believe many sensitive, creative children learn to survive by becoming capable, funny, independent, agreeable, invisible, invulnerable, impressive, rebellious, or “fine.”

I believe many adults are trying to build intimate relationships with their “shields up” and they don’t know it.

And I believe this matters far beyond individual families.

When emotional intelligence is missing, people don’t simply “grow out of it.” They grow around it.

They build marriages, classrooms, communities, belief systems, and cultures around unexamined fear, shame, control, avoidance, anxiety, blame, and disconnection.

It all sounds dramatic until you look around. Then it sounds like Tuesday.

This is why I create.

Not because I’ve mastered all of this. But because I’ve lived the cost of not understanding its impact and importance.

And way down deep in my artist’s heart, I believe beauty, metaphor, Nature, animals, story, and curiosity open emotional doors softly without having to kick them in.

Lastly, for you TL;DRers...

Nature’s Emotions is where my photography, writing, love of animals, emotional learning, and hard-won relational insight come together.

My work includes:

Nature-inspired photographic art
Images titled through emotional qualities viewers often feel in them — qualities like calm, courage, curiosity, compassion, confidence, patience, perspective, playfulness, and connectedness. These pieces are created for homes, classrooms, therapy spaces, and healing environments where art is asked to do more than decorate.

The Emotional Discovery Journal
A free reflective resource for adults, or adults and children together, designed to offer a gentle taste of emotional literacy and meaningful conversation.

The Artful Dodger: The Way He Sees His World
My children’s book, written in Dodger’s voice, was created to invite empathy, perspective-taking, and compassion.

A creative writing project for students
A middle school English Language Arts project for which The Artful Dodger book can serve as an example, using animal point of view, imagination, writing, photographs (or drawings), and emotional perspective to help students grow both craft and empathy.

My work supports:

• Creativity

• Imagination

• Emotional literacy

• Nervous system regulation

• Reflection and presence

• Thoughtful conversation

• Deeper family connections

My images are meant to live in homes, therapy spaces, classrooms, and anywhere people are learning to relate more gently to themselves and one another—creating a sense of haven.

Who it’s for:

Nature’s Emotions is for thoughtful adults who care about the emotional lives of children:

• Parents

• Grandparents

• Educators

• Therapists

• Healing professionals

• Adults recovering from childhood emotional neglect.

• Anyone who has ever thought, “I don’t want to pass on what I experienced, but I don’t know where to start.”

It is especially for those who care for sensitive, creative children — the ones who feel deeply, notice everything, imagine wildly, and may not always have the words for what is happening inside them.

It is also for the adults who recognize themselves in those children.

Presence matters more than perfection here.

You don’t need to be “doing it right” to get involved.

You just need to care.

The World I’m Inviting You Into

I’m interested in a world where children are guided into emotional connection rather than molded into the appearance of emotional correctness.

• A world where sensitivity is not mocked.

• Where creativity is not dismissed.

• Where repair matters more than blame.

• Where adults stay curious about the emotions behind a child’s behavior.

• Where homes become havens, not because they’re conflict-free, but because the people living in them know how to come back to each other.

If you’re exploring emotional growth, healing, empathy, creativity, or deeper connection in your family, classroom, practice, or your own heart, I hope you find something here that supports you.

If something here sparks a conversation that helps someone feel a little more seen, a little more understood, or a little less alone, that is the highest honor for me.

Above all, stay curious, and please share this with the person/s it made you think of. Thank you.