I have always been a writer but I daylighted as a Social Worker. I am passionate about travel and I love new adventures from cities to food to people. I also love cooking, gardening, my rescue cats and my nieces and nephews. I am a modern day flaneur. I love the anonymity of a crowd and feel most comfortable alone in a sea of strangers. Throw in a dash of mystery and I am purring in overdrive. I am crazy for sushi and sunsets, sunflowers and island cats.
Travel keeps my synapses crackling, it is accelerated living. Change strikes away comfort zones. It strips away the arrogance of comfortable routines and brings humility. Remember when you were a kid and your favorite thing was to go “exploring”? For me it was the woods and railroad tracks near my house. Every day we were going to go a little bit further and surely see a hobo or discover a famous fossil or maybe even see an Indian teepee! This excitement of adventure, insatiable curiosity and discovery has always been my inspiration for travel. Travelling anywhere breaks you out of your routine and refreshes you but travelling off the beaten path and immersing yourself in a different culture forces you to put aside your assumptions about other people thereby allowing you to know the person you are destined to live with forever–yourself!
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, Listening to others, considering well what they say, Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, Gently, but with undeniable will divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.
— Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
–Ranier Maria Rilke