Some Personal Thoughts

I've missed sharing personal work on my blog and so I made a promise to myself at the beginning of the year that I would start doing it again.  Well, it’s August. Better late than never right?

Something happened when we west for the first time.  The Frank and Amber who set off on their first epic cross-country journey so many years ago never came back. Something in us changed, something in us awoke – and it was the greatest thing that’s ever happened to either of us. 

It’s easy to loose yourself to the rituals and ceremonies of daily life.  Our lives seem so big to us, so important: we build temples to our irrelevant crap on a daily basis.  Somewhere along the path from youth to adult we loose our ability to believe in the power of our dreams.  We stop playing make-believe.  Fantasies and childhood imagination slowly gives way to our trumped up lives.  Daydreams of exploring lost kingdoms give way to granite counter-tops and redecorating.  Children inherently know that they are small and the world is big but we loose that. We tell ourselves that “this”, this is the most important thing.  And then tomorrow the most important thing becomes something else entirely.

The best thing that the road ever taught us was that we are still small and that the world is still big.   It’s hard to focus on the trivial stuff of life when you’re staring at mountains that have weathered millennia or when you marvel at the pure night sky, unsullied by our city lights.  Above us every night the heavens glow in spectacular glory and we can’t see them because we push the darkness away with our lights to feel big – we have conquered nature.

But something magical happens to you when you feel that smallness. You suddenly realize what’s truly important.  You begin to dream again and the endless possibility of the “what-ifs” that children deal in on a daily basis comes back to you. 

Suddenly anything becomes possible and all the stuff that we put between us and the deep longing of our heart gets swept aside.  We can see clearly what’s important to us; and if we have the courage, we can chase after it.   If it weren’t for the west, I wouldn’t be a photographer.  I wouldn’t have had the courage to believe that it was possible – I would have ignored the cries in my soul to create and instead focused on the pragmatic.  I would have put my energy toward a career I loathed, toward filling my life with shit that was unimportant.  I would have buried that smallest part of myself that could still wonder and dream like a child.

Lake Erie is really the only place in Ohio where you can stare off for miles uninterrupted.  It is a beautiful reminder that no matter how big our lives might feel, we’re really just little flashes of light – bright for a moment and then gone the next.  Sometimes, we like to find a quiet little corner of some beach and watch the sunset dance upon the water.  In the lulling rhythm of the waves we find ourselves small again and it is a blessed feeling.