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

Desert Heat

When people learn that I’m a traveler they often ask me what the most beautiful place I’ve been to is. When I reply that it’s the US they often look at me in disbelief, as if thinking “I didn’t expect him to be so nationalistic.” The thing is I’m not nationalistic. It’s simply that the natural splendor of the western US is really unlike anything I’ve seen before.

These past two weeks of biking through the desert have reminded me of just how true that is. Each day as I bike, I think there couldn’t be a more beautiful place to ride and the next day I relive the wonder as the landscape morphs into yet another new, strange and wonderful shape.

To think they change every day…

For those of you who have never been to the area, I can’t recommend it enough. Photos are nice, but the grand scale of panoramas like the one at Dead Horse Point , where the Canyonlands stretch out for a hundred miles 2,000 feet below you, simply cannot be captured by a flimsy two-dimensional image.

Biking adds yet another layer to the appreciation. 50 plus miles of untouched wilderness are passed so easily in a car, but on a bike the amazing scale of unoccupied land reveals its true significance. Of course riding through 100 degree weather isn’t always the easiest on the body, but even that grants a new appreciation to the stories of settlers and native Americans who explored and covered these lands, very often on foot.

Like nowhere else on Earth

We’ll soon be entering the Rocky Mountains, which have a beauty and challenge all their own, but even if the trip were to end right now I’d be grateful for the beauty I’ve been lucky enough to see. What a world…

A nice way to end the day

 

On the Road

Wow, where to begin? After three weeks on the road, this is my first much belated update. There’s already been a cross country drive and two weeks of biking through some of the most scenic places on Earth. In fact, as I write this, I’m sitting under a tree in Zion National Park, another place so blessed with beauty that I lament not only my own skills as a photographer, but the absolute limits of the art, which could never do anything but give a pale imitation of natures capacity for splendor.

I captured this just outside of Yellowstone. To think this was an area they decided wasn’t worth protecting…

So rather than do gross injustice to the places I’ve already visited, I’ll

Patterns

Maybe it’s just I’m just so uncoordinated I need to always be looking at my feet when I walk, but I always seem to find beautiful things right beneath my feet.   I was out enjoying the frigid cold and impressive wind chill when I noticed these patterns in the snow drifts under my skis.

I walked over this patch of snow right after the photo. This is the only record it was ever there.

My first thoughts of becoming a photographer were

Patience and Photography

When your average viewer looks at a great photo, the first instinct is usually to credit the camera.  That, of course, is rather silly given that most of the photos you see in a museum were taken with cameras so primitive you’d be more likely to throw them out than use them.  The slightly more sophisticated viewer is likely to look at other factors, such as the photographer’s skill in composition and perhaps photo editing.  While these factors no doubt place some distance between a professional and the casual snap-shot taker, perhaps the greatest factor separating the average tourist snapping photos off in a park and Ansel Adams is something rarely noted: patience.

This photo is dedicated to a wonderful reader who lamented that my lake photos were too sad. I hope this brings a smile!

Ansel Adams didn’t just take a weekend trip to Yosemite