Its a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon and I'm sitting in a coffee shop tracking down the exotic locales of my friends!
One of the essential traits of a photographer is curiosity followed closely with a deep sense of controlled fearlessness. As I'm searching my friends blogs and facebook pages, I see that many of them are trapesing around the globe in places that many only dream of visiting. Indonesia for months of surfing and site seeing, Abu Dhabi, Ghana, Nepal, Patagonia, Pakistan, and on and on.
And those of us at home are daydreaming of the next destination--the next story we're going to tackle. Once the travel bug bites and the adventurer within awakens from its restless slumber, its host must satisfy the urges until the funds arrive for the next airline ticket. Maps are posted on the walls, the lonely planet forums consume us, our travel agents are put on notice for the upcoming journey and we begin to plot and plan our next adventure.
Those of you afflicted with this "ailment" understand the need to satisfy this drive for new locations, the need to become immersed in a culture that is unknown and in stark contrast of your own, the necessity of putting your entire life on hold for months at a time to go seek that which lives beyond your normal daily life.
So, to all the friends abroad- good luck on your journeys! To all those planning the next adventure- keep me posted! And to all those wanting to take on a big adventure, but unsure of how to start, shoot me an email or visit the lonely planet and start daydreaming! The daydream will soon become reality if you dream often! a great place to start... http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/index.jspa
So, to close, here's one of my favorite quotes that I stumbled upon many years ago, and its been a small mantra ever since...
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you --- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls."
Edward Abbey
