Wanderlust

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page

Wanderlust doesn't even begin to describe it.

The desire to go out and explore.

The desire to leave behind whatever is troubling you and find peace in another existence.

The idea that there is more than just what we see, what we encounter

That there must be more, as Belle says so lovely in Beauty and the Beast, to this provincial life.

On the road. Charleston, West Virginia

 It creeps up ever so often. The need to just pack a bag and go. Sometime a trip fulfills the adventure for now, but more often then not it leaves me wanting more (and therefore destroys my bank account further). 

Now I'm not the most adventurous or outgoing of individuals in the common concepts of the idea. I'm not the girl who could walk into a bar in a foreign city and make friends with all the locals. I'm not the girl who finds out a strangers life story on the train.

But the adventure comes from going, exploring and absorbing a culture, a people, a place through observation and experience.

I could sit at a cafe in a square in Italy all day with an espresso, a biscotti and a journal, observing the life that passes around me.

I could drive through the middle of Indiana, get stuck in a cornfield, and have an impromptu photo shoot for an hour because I can.

Sunset on the Great  Salt Lake

 Wanderlust is the desire to find out what else is out there, to expand our horizons. As much as I love reading about places and people, it is so much more invigorating to go out and find the information myself, to constantly be the student in the classroom of the world. One can never learn too much or grow too much. There is constant room for the expansion of our minds, to develop opinions and understandings to make ourselves more global citizens responsible for humanity than single solitary beings. We owe it to ourselves to see what the world has to offer us.

San Fran by the Bay

 And in return, we must see what we have to offer the world. 

As Woodrow Wilson once said, "You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget that errand." Wherever the wanderlust takes you, use it to make the world a better place, whether it through a small act of kindness (ala Mother Teresa) or through a larger plan God may have for your life there.

Times Square

In Bloom, Washington, D.C.

Fourth of July, Charles River, Boston, Ma.

Castaway Cay, Eastern Carribbean

Sea Isle, New Jersey