Happy Thanksgiving y’all. For all of my American friends and followers, I hope you are somewhere warm and welcoming with friends and family around you, or at the very least somewhere where you are comfortable and can find some joy in the day. For my international friends and followers, I wish you a happy Thursday, but hope wherever you are you can find some time today to count your blessings and realize how much you have to be thankful for. This is something I am trying to start incorporating into my everyday routine, not something I reserve for one day in November.
For those of you who have to work today, believe me - I’ve been there. I’ve spent many years working in restaurants on the holidays. It was never a bad thing, but I was always a little surprised that people didn’t tip more on the holidays. If you find a restaurant open, remember that someone has had to give up their holiday to take care of you and you should be sure you take care of them. In my career as a guide, I also spent many years on the road during the holidays. I’ve celebrated Thanksgiving on the beach in Key Largo, in the snow in Stowe, Vermont, at Grand Canyon, in San Diego and probably plenty of other places I’ve now forgotten about. I enjoyed having groups to share the day with and sometimes cooked a traditional American Thanksgiving Day feast if the facilities were available. Cooking that kind of a meal for 14 people is quite the challenge - and if you only have a camp stove and an open fire even more-so. It’ s nice to be able to share your culture with people from abroad though, and Thanksgiving is one of the best days to do that in America.
This year, I’m very thankful to be home with my friends and family and to be able to celebrate the holiday with the people I care most about. I’m also thankful to have some time and internet access to get some work done while I’m here. I’ve been enjoying playing a lot of catch-up these last few weeks, trying to get this site in order, complete some projects that are long overdue and start to plan for the future. One of the things I’ve really been working on is my Gallery pages. I’ve been able to clean up, organize and add to three of my photo galleries over the last week or so, and I’d love it if you wanted to pop over and have a look. Here are the links where you can find them:
I hope to get to the other seven states I have visited over the next few weeks so that all of my galleries are up to date. Remember, all of my photos are for sale and some would make great holiday gifts for those people who seem impossible to buy for.
Also this week I was able to finish the long awaited Episode 19 of my podcast American Anthology. In it I tell you stories from North Louisiana.If you listen, you’ll hear the stories of Tim McGraw, Leadbelly, Solomon Northup, Eddie Robinson and L.D. “None of the Above” Knox. It also features music from my friend Joe Sims who I met at the 3rd Street Songwriters Festival in Baton Rouge. It makes great listening for those long holiday drives. You can listen or download it here, or by searching American Anthology wherever you get your podcasts.
I’m hoping to get two more episodes out before the New Year, both from my time in Alabama, so I’m all caught up moving forward. I really enjoy putting my podcast together, but I must admit it’s incredibly time consuming. Over the next few months I’m going to promote the heck out of it and see if I can pick up some more listeners and make it a better investment of time moving forward. If you know anyone who likes American history and may enjoy hearing some cool historic vignettes from the places I have visited, I would really appreciate if you’d ask them to give it a shot. I’ve also created both an Instagram and a Facebook page for the podcast, and you can find both @AmericanAnthology.
Also this week I’ve finally started to outline my book. I’ve had a solid look back at the first month of this journey which was happening right about now, two years ago. Since that was before I began my regular This Week on the Road posts, there was a lot more work involved in recreating where I was and when.. Between the notes I took and the chronology of my photos, I think I’ve been able to do pretty well with it though. Last weekend, my folks and I went out to Thomas, West Virginia for the night to celebrate my mom’s birthday. It was awesome to be back there, somewhere I visited and really enjoyed just a week into this trip. It also brought back memories of those first few weeks of cold weather, short days and trying to figure out what this was all going to be. They weren’t easy days, but they were good ones, and it was a time when I felt very much alive. I hope to start writing this book, the story of my first year and a half on the road, sometime soon. The first month will be the hardest as I was dealing not only with the cold and dark and uncertainty, but also the loss of my grandmother and the realization that the relationship I thought I was in wasn’t going to work out. It’s a story about life - my life - and everything that led me to this point. It hasn’t all been easy, but I’m very thankful for it today.
I’m actually thankful for so many things today and thought I’d share a few of them with you. First and foremost I’m thankful for my health. So many of us take for granted every day the ability to get out of bed, to walk to the kitchen or down the street. I’ve had some health issues this year which I never had to worry about before, but I’m grateful to know about them and to be able to work towards a better and healthier me. While I feel the aches and pains of getting older, I know that there are so many people who deal with real and chronic pain, sickness and disease. Even the ability to type this post, or your ability to read it, are something neither of us should take for granted.
I’m also incredibly thankful for my friends and family. I’m so grateful to have a loving and supportive family who has stuck by me through thick and thin and allowed me to grow into who I am today. I know they often shake their heads at the ideas that pop into my head, but they’re always willing to hear it out and usually will come to understand that it’s probably something I have actually put a lot of time and consideration into. I’m also very thankful for all of my friends around the country and around the world. Having just recently celebrated a birthday, I always think it’s amazing how many people take a moment from their busy days to send me a quick greeting. It usually starts sometime around mid-afternoon the day before my birthday. My friend Barry in Australia has been the first to wish me a Happy Birthday for many years now. Then I will hear from other friends in Australia and New Zealand - either people I met when I was Down Under, people I’ve met elsewhere on my travels or people who have come on my tours with me over the years. Next I’ll hear from my friends in Japan, where I spent two years in my mid-thirties. As my birthday rolls across Asia, Europe and Africa, my heart swells at how many people take the time to let me know they’re thinking of me, even if it’s just a brief note. Next I hear from my friends in the Caribbean and across North and South America and finally a last few trickle in from Hawaii and Alaska, usually long after I’ve gone to bed for the day. It’s a very special day and it makes me very happy to hear from so many friends from so many different episodes in my life. I’m thankful for them all.
I’ve had to lean on my friends a lot over the last couple of years. Many people have opened their doors and their hearts to me and helped me work through some really hard days along the way. Last month I was staying with my friends Bethany and Josh in Savannah, and I apologized for how morose and emotionally needy I had been when I had stayed with them last year. They didn’t even miss a beat in telling me not to worry about it. Josh told me “that’s the good stuff. That’s what being friends is all about. It’s not just the good times, it’s the tough times and coming out the other end together”. I know he’s right, and I’ve spent many a late night on the phone myself with friends who just need someone to talk to. Like most people I’ve always been so hesitant to share my problems, to expose my weaknesses to others. A lot of people have always seen me as a rock, not the vulnerable, fragile human being that I actually am (and that we all are). Often I will try and work through things on my own, and usually succeed on some level. But these last two years have been tough ones, and I really just needed people to talk some things through with. Whether I needed a woman’s point of view, an ear to bend while I got things off my chest, or a literal shoulder to cry on, I’ve always had the right person show up at the right time. For that, I know how fortunate I am and I am and will be forever thankful for my friends.
I’m also thankful today for you, faithful follower. I wouldn’t be where I am today without y’all following along. What good are photos nobody sees or stories nobody reads or listens to? I know some of y’all have been following along since day one. Some of you may have just found me last week. Either way, I’m incredibly thankful you’re here. I hope my photos or my words have brought some joy into your life or given you a different perspective or at the very least provided you with a needed distraction from time to time. This journey was never just supposed to be my journey, but our journey - one we would go on together. I’m so thankful you’ve decided to come along for the ride.
I’m also very thankful for the opportunities I’ve been afforded simply because of the location of my birth. This is something else that so many of us often take for granted. Having been born in the United States, I have access to clean water, immunizations, health care, food, shelter and so many other things that don’t just happen everywhere in the world. Every night we can go to sleep in a warm, dry bed and not have our bellies scream at us from hunger, we should be grateful. Even though I’ve spent more nights sleeping in than out of my van these last two years, I always feel pretty safe in there and I know I’m warm and fed. I’ve spent a lot of my life traveling to some pretty remote corners of the planet where simply surviving through each day is a win for many of the people who live there. Those people don’t take their food, water, doctors or warm beds for granted - they are grateful for those things every single day. Although many people on this planet don’t know where their next meal is coming from, so many of those same people will offer you half of what they have or their last cigarette. Some trust that God will provide, others that the universe will help them find what they need, but many simply don’t know. They charge forward anyway because what choice do they have? It’s often been in communities like those that I’ve felt the most love, laughed the hardest and felt my own worries dissipate. In the U.S., as in other developed countries in the world, it’s too easy to focus on what you don’t have or get down because you are comparing what you do have to what others have and feeling cheated or inferior or wanting or covetous. I’ve been there too often in this life myself. When I can stop and think for a minute though, I’m incredibly thankful for all I have. As far as possessions or clothes or electronics or any of those material things - even as a pretty minimalist person compared to many I still have far more than I could ever possibly need. I’m going to try to remember all of this going forward and try and wake up every morning grateful for air in my lungs and shoes on my feet, fuel in my tank and the day full of opportunity that stretches out ahead of me.
One of my biggest struggles in life has always been trying to find this elusive thing called “happiness”. I’ve always been able to find beauty, and am fortunate to be able to see it in places others might not. I’m blessed to occasionally be able to capture it through my lens and share it with others. It’s one of my greatest gifts and one I’m pretty proud of. I also know joy. I feel joy when someone smiles at me, or when I’m petting a puppy or playing with a child. I find joy in a tasty treat, in a good workout or a beautiful sunset. Joy shows its face in a song that makes me want to dance or in seeing a friend for the first time in a while or in witnessing an intensely human moment between people or a beautiful one between others of God’s creatures. Sometimes it’s fleeting and sometimes it lasts through the day, but always at some point I feel it slipping away. I try and hold onto it, but then it’s gone and there I am alone again. Experiencing this joy is a wonderful thing, it’s what keeps me going, but I want more - I want to be happy.
I’m actually grateful in that I know that happiness isn’t about material wealth or possessions. I know as long as you have those basic necessities I discussed above, and they truly are pretty minimal, everything else is just “stuff”. I’ve also learned that happiness can’t be found in someone else. Joy can. Love can. Sorrow and sadness too. But happiness? Happiness has to come from within. It has to be something you work towards and pursue every minute of every day. It’s looking for the good in others and in the world around us. It’s being grateful for every breath, every meal, every hug, every ray of sunshine in our lives. It’s also knowing that the challenges are there to help us appreciate things more. After all what good is a warm fire without a cold day? How great is it to have an umbrella when it’s raining and how useless is one without rain? How much better is a meal when you’re hungry or a seat when you’re tired or a hug when you’re lonely? And yes, you generally only get to see the rainbow after experiencing the rain.
All great art comes from pain. Or love. Or often some combination of the two. I know my writing, my photography and my storytelling are all better because of these things. But I also know that the reality on the ground is that most of the pain or loneliness or hurt I’ve felt in my life are also things that exist only in my own head. Except when I got my wisdom teeth pulled. That shit hurt.
From now on, as best as I can, I’m choosing happiness. I’m done taking any of the little things that make my life so easy for granted. I’m going to try to look at the plentiful things I have instead of the few things I don’t. I’m going to continue to strive to be as good a friend to others as others have been to me, or better. I’m ready to banish the gloom. I’m choosing to see the rainbow through the rain.
So today of all days, but not just today, I’m thankful for that.