Until We Meet Again

Dear Readers,

It has been a long time since I’ve last posted and not without reason.  There are countless blogs which documents the inner workings of their authors, that give you a brief peak inside the soul of another to let you see all the beauty and horror that is a human, but this is not one of those blogs.  I set out to create a blog that would inspire, bringing joy and beauty to those who stumbled upon my little out of the way place.  For that reason I have always spared you that inner turmoil that has been as important an element of my life, as it is a part of nearly every other.

And I will spare you that turmoil here as well!  Let it suffice to say that the last year has been an intense one.  I have both lost and gained much.  Yet for you, my audience, the thing of most relevance is that I have lost the desire to blog.  I thought it might be a temporary thing, some symptom of discontent or malaise that would soon pass.  I know now that it is much more.

No, my travels have not reached their end.  Today I board a plane for East Asia with a one way ticket.  It may be the last stop in my journey, or it may only be the next of many more to follow.  Whatever the case may be, it will be very different for I no longer go out looking for another adventure, but rather to find a place to rest my head and call home.  It will be a different kind of journey and one I have decided I’d rather make privately.

I won’t say I will never return to blogging.  In fact, if I have learned anything of value these last four year it is that I know much less than I previously thought.  I know less than I would like about the world and less than I would like to know about myself.  I am even more woefully unqualified to claim to understand someone else.  Yet, perhaps in this awareness I have at least found a sense of humility.  For this reason, if none other, I can say that perhaps in a month I will return to writing, but perhaps I won’t.

Despite the sadness I feel while writing this, there is still much to be happy for.  I recently received an offer for work as a regular travel writer, perhaps as happy an ending a travel blogger can ever hope to achieve.  I have also recently experienced more success as a photographer.  These two things mean that for the first time I can see a future where I am truly self-sufficient, and while material success is not the bar by which I measure my own or this blog’s success, it is nice to have some outside confirmation that concrete progress has been made.

I thank you all for taking this journey with me and for those of you that wish to do so, I hope you’ll stay in touch.  I like to think of this as a goodbye to my blog, not a goodbye to the many people here I care about.  I would challenge all of you to come find me.  The world still has a lot to offer and I would like nothing more than to discover it together with you.

Tomorrow I will wake up surrounded by new places and new people.  Yet it’s the same world.  A world I still dream about reaching out and changing.  Like most dreams, it may be forever out of reach, but I hope that will never keep me, or any of us, from continuing the chase.

With Love Everlasting,

Jason Nathaniel

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
the rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again,
may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

May our paths cross again someday

Sliding into Something New

It’s been a while everyone, but after a couple of months of time off visiting family back in the US, I’ve been called on to break my silence by the least likely of things – new underwear. It all started off rather normally. I received a message asking me to review a new product. Normally I politely decline or simply ignore requests like this – I stopped saying things I didn’t mean for money when I stopped being a lawyer – but the request I received was a nice one.  Not only that but it gave me a chance to support a bold start-up idea and, perhaps best of all, the product was  just too unusual to ignore – Adventure Underwear.  I wrote back that while I couldn’t promise I’d say anything nice, I would at least take a look.  A week or so later my new underwear had arrived from Australia.  In all honesty I was a bit nervous when they arrived.  I’m not prone to giving fake praise, and the idea of someone sending me a free sample of their brainchild from overseas just for me to say it sucked didn’t leave me feeling warm and fuzzy.  Fortunately, now that I’ve been wearing these bad boys around for a couple of weeks, I can honestly say these are the coolest underwear I’ve ever had.

Check out my package…

So what makes underwear great? Or for that matter

A Nomad’s Life – Education

This will mark the first post in a series about my life as a nomad.  I often receive questions about how I handle this or that situation when I don’t have a permanent home and I’m limited in how much I can carry from place to place. While I don’t think living out of a backpack is a cure-all solution for peoples problems, I certainly think I’ve learned a lot from the experience and hopefully in this series everyone can find a little something of use.

Education on the Road

I have an addiction to universities.  It hasn’t be easy either.  They’ve used up ten years of my life and have cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $400,000 (not that I paid for it all).  If that’s not depressing enough already, I don’t even use a single one of my degrees in daily life.  The good news is that unlike a drug addiction, an addiction to education has some fairly wonderful side effects.  Lucky for me too, because unlike my shopping addiction, I think this is one habit I’ll never really break.

I studied the ancient world for four years before I ever saw my first Roman ruin in person.

So what to do?  Although there are

A Very Good Year

The year is winding to close and WordPress itself was kind enough to give me a little kick-start by sending me the year end review.  It was cool to know that I had visitors from 96 countries stop by!  If you like fun details like that make sure to Click here to see the complete report.

Sunset on Everest, not just a 2012 highlight, but a life highlight.

On a more personal level 2012 was a year to remember.  I made it to 12 countries, but that hardly begins to communicate the excitement of the year.  How can you sum up a year spent…

Photography – Risk and Reward

Photography – it’s not an activity without risks.  When traveling I’m often saddened by the streams of people taking mediocre pictures of great artworks or fantastic panoramas.  That sounds wrong. It’s not the mediocre pictures that bother me; it’s that so many people spend their energy and time looking at a tiny little screen and barely pause to take in the full wonder of where they are.

Sometimes it’s better to just enjoy the sunset…

Here’s a slightly more academic perspective on the problem.  Post-modern critics, like Walter Benjamin