It’s been almost two months now since I first got the email, asking if I’d like to chat about my sketches for a story on travel blogging. I was not only ridiculously excited to head to New York for the interview, but also immensely honored.
With my camera stolen, I can’t share photos from my new favorite haunt in Seattle – but what I do have is a sketch from Shi Shi Beach in Olympic National Park, where I spent the weekend camping and falling in love with its misty, tree-lined shores.
Through it all, I’m so grateful for the gift of these last two months – for not only have I been able to be present with my family, but I’ve also had the time to put together and publish my first book of travel sketches, Beneath the Lantern’s Glow.
As summer kicks off, I would love to put together a roundup of your sketches and publish them here – not only to celebrate all the travel-inspired art that has taken place, but to inspire even more people to get sketching.
I want to leave you with this thought – that every interest, every childhood pursuit, every old inkling of a dream, can mean something; that the little pieces of our past can always find their place in the puzzle of our present life.
There was a single round lantern directly above my head, floating over two banana trees. On a night when I’d felt entirely disconnected from the city, I was suddenly right where I needed to be. I was beneath the lantern’s glow.
Meeting Ksyucha, a fellow sketch artist, in the Saigon Central Post Office reminds me that it is such sketching serendipities I have come to live for – no matter how long the actual sketch itself may take to complete.
What else can you do at a place where a million people died? What else can you do but leave something, anything, behind that says we were here, and that we remember?
The many little details of Josh’s life bounce around in my head for long after we say goodbye, reminding me that we never know who we’ll meet, and where. As always, inspiration had been worth waiting for.
Behind my decision to bike to Angkor Wat was a desire to feel a sense of exploration; to try and channel the sublime sense of discovery French explorer Henri Mouhot must have felt in 1860.