reflections of home

I had lunch with a friend of mine yesterday that reminded me of an Emerson quote that really fits the intentions of this website.

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Once I believed that the world would show me the identity this city sometimes sheds away from you in times of darkness. Now it can only be believed and seen that this world is a very small place and so are we. Inside of ourselves is a tiny world that unless held in some righteous and self respecting place, no physical world will ever seem beautiful or inspiring. As I walked through the city this week in the sweet air the autumn brings, I am reminded what a manifestation of these ideas New York City really is. 

It is one's world in constant battle with concrete and noise and existence. This battle however is an inspiration and it is justified when one person comes to this understanding and finds themselves within these boarders. Coming to New York as a naive 18-year-old, your own identity is shattered, desperately lost between the cracks in the cement walkways in which every kind of person in human existence seems to come across in one way or another.

There you are trying to survive and watching others lose themselves in their own demise or leaving to avoid it. I believed that leaving this city to discover the one inside my heart would give me the piece of mind I desired more than anything. However the greatest concept of my own existence that I found on my travels was the love I had for the city that I identify with the most, New York.

Diversity, excitement, change, rain, life. It found me while I was away and I came back to find myself.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there besides me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson