adventures

who are these adventurers that I'm talking about, whose adventurers am I capturing with photo + word?  

hey, we're all adventurers.  I struggled with whether to call this blog THESE or "those" ADVENTURERS, but I chose THESE because the word "these" is plural for "this", and the word "those" is plural for "that".  #grammarnerd  and so, if I had called my blog "those adventurers", I felt almost as if I were sidelining myself + yourself from those great adventurers, when in reality, I'm an adventurer, and you are too.

so I remember reading those great stories as a child (still do), where those great adventurers would brave ice + mountain + fire + danger + dragons + the white witch + sauron + so many other terrible things, to be able to fight for that one thing, be it freedom (#FREEEEDOMMMMM), goodness (there's good in the world and it's worth fightin' for), beauty (beauty will save the world), or kindliness, truth, or any other beautiful virtue.  the true adventurer always has a motive behind his adventure.  and I remember reading stories like that, and feeling my heart kind of shudder, then grow brave, and want to burst, and falling completely in love with the bravery of those who became the pioneers.  those who saw the world as a beautiful place, and determined to keep it so.  those who looked at their lives with different eyes, who wanted to show the people how great the world was - the poets, the painters, the photographers, the story-tellers.  and even though I was frightened, the smaller, yet more powerful, part of me wanted to be like them... I wanted to be a little bit like lucy pevensie + aragorn + other-people-who-were-brave-who-I-forget-cause-I-just-really-like-aragorn.  maybe, even, like those real-life soldiers who went against terrible odds in the adventures of their lifetime - the boys, just my age, who climbed the pointe du hoc on june 6, 1944.  maybe corrie ten boom + irena sendler.  I kind of want to be as brave as they were.

but the beauty (yes, and terror) of it all is, we are those adventurers.  sometimes we wander, because it's beautiful.  and other times, our feet pound the ground as we hasten to fight for our cause.  life is an adventure.  even better, saint john paul II wrote that "life with CHRIST is a WONDERFUL adventure".  we don't have to do great things to have adventures.  little adventurers, truly, are just as powerful, and even more so, than grand explorations (though, heaven knows, I LOVE those grand explorations).  life is a wonderful adventure, and I want my photographs + my words to proclaim it.  and I want this blog to be, in an even deeper sense, a journal of my adventures + a diary of the glory of being human.

but what about the call to travel home to heaven?  where has that all gone?  what about the sehnsucht, the desire for another world, the striving for our heavenly homeland?  you know, it hasn't gone anywhere.  the ancient greeks would sing the glories of their heroes, who returned home after strife and exploration, in a word, adventure, as they sat by the flickering hearth.  life is this adventure.  your heart should burn with the sheer glory of being human as you contemplate this great life (not always beautiful, not always pretty, but GREAT).  and it's kind of comforting, even though we know nothing about Heaven, but if we think about all the great stories about the saints - hey, don't tell me that the saints aren't going to swap stories when they're there.  at the very least, I mean to hunt down (in the most normal way possible) many of my favorite saints and just talk.  so, at any rate, we're not just traveling home anymore, are we.  we're adventuring home.  c'mon.   cause it's one wonderful life, time is short, and the world is waiting.  

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“to this day the vision of the world which comes most naturally to me is one in which “we two” or “we few” (and in a sense “we happy few”) stand together against something stronger and larger.” || cs lewis