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.
