It felt weird writing 31/31, and timely, too. As I reflected on this past month, there were so many sentiments I wanted to talk about. My personal growth, which was tremendous. The amount I learned about my craft. The amount of new skills I acquired. The amount of spider webs I walked into, and so on. What stood out most, though, was the word commitment. I kept coming back to it. Sure, the commitment is obvious: I committed to 31…
We arrived in Thailand late at night and quickly crawled into our hotel beds and went to sleep. When morning came, my excitement was bursting to get out of that hotel, despite how lovely and welcoming it was. All I wanted was to get in the van that would take us to the elephants. At 8:00am on the dot the van pulled up and we gathered into the back rows, settling for our 90 minute ride to the Elephant Nature…
When you’re at the bottom of a mountain and you look up, you can’t see every rock and stone or path. You see the peak, how distant it looks, and very often, an insurmountable task ahead. It may not be immediately obvious how to start climbing. It may be that you see people at the top and project your insecurities onto them, thinking about how great they must be, and how small you must look to them. What we can’t…
There is a certain song that we sing, sometimes without realizing that our voice escapes our clenched throat, that vibrates through the air, noiseless, until it beats against the place it was meant to find. The lyrics are without words yet speak to a place inside where the voiceless booming of magnetic poetry carves itself in deep. Words are not necessary in this song. It is a pounding mystery. The ocean beating rocks against one another, or the crack of…
I awoke at 4:50am to prepare for the morning ahead. I was finally warm in my sleeping bag inside my little tent, but it was time to move. The first blue morning light was creeping in, though it was still dark enough that my eyes needed to adjust to be able to pack up my campsite. Within ten minutes we were ready to hit the road, and so we began driving to the lake that I had picked out the…