Imagine a place so wondrous that colorful lights dance their way across the midnight sky. Magical creatures illuminate the depths of the ocean. A place so quiet that you can hear the waves of grain dancing in the wind. A place where your heartbeat disturbs the silence.
If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the crystal-clear mountain stream rushing its way down the mountainside. Can you hear its laughter? Can you hear the winter wind chasing itself through a stand of white pines? The playful calls of a chickadee, a bugle of a bull elk just over the next ridge, or the lonesome cry of a loon? It’s what I like to call “the symphony”.
Our world is a magical place full of beauty and wonder. All too often we are simply too busy or our mind’s too cluttered to see it clearly. I have found that if I simply slow down, calm my mind and listen carefully that God reveals his majesty and calms my mind.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” –Marcel Proust
As I start this blog, it is my sincere hope that as you read the stories and view the photos captured on our journeys around this amazing planet, you can slow down, calm your mind and see the creator behind it all. Without him we are all just Chasing the Wind.
A little about me:
I am a 52-year-old husband and father of two. We live on a small lake in Northern Minnesota where all our adventures begin.
My yearning for adventure started many years ago on my grandparent’s farm near the Minnesota-Canada border where I would spend hours getting lost with the family dog, Spotty, as early as the age of 5, on the 300-acre farm with thousands of acres of public forest nearby.
That love of exploring turned to Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe area when I was a teenager. I can still hear the crackling of those early campfires, the songs of the loons and taste of the walleyes cooked over the campfire with my friends.
Like many, life seemed to interrupt my time spent exploring. A wife, family, job… I have now owned my own engineering firm for over twenty years, and even built our first home (with a lot of my wife’s help). All important things, and I have tried to enjoy the ride. As my children grew, so did our adventures together. I hoped that they may have the same love for exploring and adventure that I do.
Our early trips included wading in rivers along Minnesota’s shore of Lake Superior, camping trips to Voyageurs National Park, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and many more trips closer to home. Following tracks in the snow, searching the shallows along the lake for frogs, building our own pond and filling it with fish we caught off the dock. And then we started to venture a bit farther from home, hiking and exploring in Hawaii, Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, and places throughout the US and Canada. On many of our adventures we brought along some wonderful teenagers (adopted family so to speak) and shared our love for the wilderness with them as well.
We all became certified scuba divers and have spent many hours exploring the ocean depths together in places like Honduras, the Cayman Islands, the Florida Keys, and the Great Barrier reef in Australia.
We have climbed mountains together and spent many hours exploring the wild places throughout the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, gathering photos and memories wherever we have gone. Storing them to be shared on frigid January days when the thermometer doesn’t want to budge above -20o.
We opened a small nature photography gallery in our home town of Bemidji, Minnesota with hopes of spending more time photographing, exploring and writing in the years to come. Some of the images can be seen on our web site and others on our Facebook page (Chasing the Wind Photography).
I hope that this is a different kind of blog. Yes, I will share tips from things I have learned over the years, gear I use, places we stay… But more than that, I want to share a love for the wild places of the world, the subtle sounds and sights to get lost in, and he who created them all.
It’s one thing to travel, another thing entirely to explore and lose yourself in the silences and wonders.
“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” –Helen Keller