Travel

"Travel and meditation lead to the same kind of experience by opposite means. When you travel you expose yourself to so much new and unexpected external information that you overwhelm the usual mechanisms of attentional selection and inhibition" (thinkbuddha.org).

Traveling was kind of the precursor to this whole project. The road trip I went on over the summer changed me in more ways than one. Being able to see so many different parts of the country and experience all new things was really life-changing. It changed my perspective and attitude towards life. A lot of the pictures I captured while traveling are things I look back on now and hope to reclaim with this new body of work. When I look back on old pictures I feel a sense of wonder. That's what I would like to capture with my work now. I think by traveling to new places I can capture that same feeling. I like the idea of being lost and not knowing where I am, in a strange place where everything is new to me and I don't know what to expect. Tomorrow I plan on getting lost. I'm going to hop in my car and just drive. Where I end up I don't know. Hopefully I will be able to capture the same feelings of wonder and excitement in the images I shoot.

"When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains" (Solnitt, p 13).

Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: a History of Walking. New York: Viking, 2000. Print.