I have spent two years trying to get aerial photographs of dolphins that meet my standards. Two years of early mornings, dead ends, and days when the ocean offers nothing but its indifference. For this series, I flew from Montauk to Southampton over four days — 42 hours of driving, flying, and searching, 31 beach stops, 33 drone batteries, and not one school of menhaden. I spotted sharks and rays, but too far below the surface. Then a pod of dolphins came into view, and I had two and a half minutes.

The conditions were perfect. I was blessed.

What I found in those minutes was not what I had been looking for. I had been looking for dolphins. What I found was a mother and her calf, moving together through the Atlantic off Long Island, close enough to the surface that the aerial perspective collapsed the distance between us — between the watching world above and the world below.

In the stillest image of the series, the two bodies are horizontal, parallel, the calf tucked beneath the mother's belly. They are barely distinguishable as two separate creatures. The calf's shadow falls across the mother's lower body, precisely where it once resided. I noticed this only in the edit, fifteen hours in, when the series had already become something more personal than I had expected.

I am a single mother of two young men. I know what it is to protect, guide, nourish, and teach — and to know that teaching also means letting go enough for failure to do its work. Life is so much about the obstacles we are asked to rise above. The mother in this image carries that knowledge in her body. Her pectoral fin angles toward the calf, not gripping, just orienting. The eye is open. She is watching.

What moved me most, and what I could not have planned, is the shadow. It marks the place where one life was carried inside another — and it falls there still, in light, from the outside now. That is not metaphor. That is what the camera saw.

I wanted to quit at least eight times that day. Something kept calling me back to the water. I have learned, over years of this work, to trust that pull. The rewards, when they come, are beyond anything I could have imagined or arranged.

This is my way of life. Show up. Trust your instincts. The rest belongs to the ocean.