Whether you’re celebrating Thanksgiving today or not, I hope you find a bit of time to say your own prayer of gratitude. For life’s many crazy blessings, for new cities to explore, for the gift of home, and of course, for pumpkin pie.
Travel is funny like that sometimes, isn’t it? Giving us these oddly scheduled arrivals and strange pockets of time in which to explore a new country; in-between places that will pass through us as quickly as we pass through them.
And so it was that I decided to return to Iž, to circle back to who I was the last time I was here. I wanted to sketch the island again – and to honor the crazy journeys that life delights in sending us on. As I sketched, all I could think was: thank you.
You have to do this every now and then, don’t you? Give your wonder a chance to breathe and marvel at where life has brought you: to Bosnia, to a family’s back garden, to a table beneath a pomegranate tree.
I could not be more grateful to have stumbled into this corner of the world. Mostar has reminded me that when we travel – and, more importantly, live – with open hearts and minds, connections happen.
Travel is always doing this to you, isn’t it? Sending you off in search of one thing – the máta, for instance – only to give you something altogether different to discover. And for this, you will leave Hortobágy grateful.
While “From Prague to Petra” will unfortunately not meet its fitting end in the Wadi Rum desert, I hope you’ll understand the redirections and keep following along this journey. Thank you as always for reading!
Seeking the holy in the everyday is what has kept me in Vienna longer than I expected to be: lingering in café after café, feeding my new addiction to Wiener melanges, and reveling in routines made reverent.
Although i’s hard to believe that six weeks have officially passed since the launch of Beneath the Lantern’s Glow, I still want to take a moment and say thank you to everyone who has ordered it – it’s thrilling to now see the book in your hands!
It has been a summer of discovering new landscapes – the ethereal Shi Shi Beach of Olympic National Park, the desert canyons of Yakima River Valley in central Washington, and now I can add Desolation Wilderness to that list, too.