Traveling Stranger

Photographs taken of Ogden, Utah on March 6th of 2019

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I always believed my life to be whole nd to have made proper sense but as I grow older the more I am faced with the realization that one is never fully whole until they have retraced their steps and found meaning from their travels.

At the age of three my mother and I traveled from the home of my birth, Ogden, to Minnesota and on a rigidly cold March morning I traveled southwest in the hopes of reclaiming my roots and finding meaning in all that can be found happening around me. Equipped with a vehicle of snacks and two of the greatest people I have been blessed to have met, we journeyed from the snow covered flatlands of the home I knew to the one I had trouble remembering.

I wish I could say I made the journey in vain, to find myself in the snow capped mountains recognizable from only my subconscious memory, but this trip was made for the father I had never been given the opportunity to have met. While I will not bore you with the details of our lives, despite not knowing my father as more than a questionable absence, he remains in a state needing compassion, understanding, care and more difficult for me to comprehend, forgiveness.

While I never minded not having a father, I simultaneously urged to know more about him. While I wait in the parking lot of the nursing home he resides I realize that perhaps not knowing him may have been a misunderstanding after all, for I know myself and happen to be a fan of his work.

For now I wait for all that is to come and am grateful for the answers I had previously accepted I would never recieve, and in this moment find myself not needing to ask any questions at all. I am blessed for the life I have been given and the man who gave this life to me, for it was better than any card I could have ever received.

Now comes the time to wait. Regardless of the life you were given, you have been blessed with all the tools needed to build more by simply having yourself. There is no absence that could ever steal your potential from you. While you have today, forgive. Appreciate the people around you. Enjoy your own presence and lose yourself in your own later, because a moment spent on a memory cannot be sold for cheap. Our time here is shakey and unpromised, love without fear or expectation. Get lost in the world around you.