Jim Dolan has always found pleasure in "wandering with a camera and capturing nature as I see it." Despite being diagnosis with ALS in 2015, Jim continues to engage in his passion by photographing the beautiful natural environment around his Ohio home.

My parents and I live very far apart, but we visit as often as possible. Earlier in my disease, our reunions were more normal: catching up, visiting favorite restaurants, hanging out at the bookstore. We did the things we have always done when we got together. Now, one year after being diagnosed and two years into this disease, it’s getting harder to forget I am sick.

I put it off as long as I could. I buried myself in friends’ lives, picked at frivolous problems and attended an excessive amount of events. I traveled for three weeks straight. I caught up on every T.V. show I’ve ever enjoyed. I cleaned and organized my entire home. And I sorted through every piece of clothing my children own, which took a full three days in and of itself.

It was almost a year ago that I fell in love with Jane Babin’s poetry. Her son, a former student of mine, had given me her book Pearls in the Pond a few months after she had passed away after an eleven year battle with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). I found myself immersed in her poems, lectures, thoughts on life and mortality, and coping with her disease.