Since I was a child, I have always been drawn to storytelling.
It began with the old stories, the kind that feel less like they were written and more like they were carried, passed from one set of hands to another across time. Grimm's Fairy Tales and Aesop's Fables were not just tales on a page but quiet invitations, opening small doors into worlds that seemed to stretch far beyond the edges of childhood. Before long, those doors led elsewhere. Maps unfolded across tables, history stirred to life, and even dinosaurs and distant ages felt somehow within reach. Figures like Indiana Jones stood at the edge of it all, not merely as heroes, but as reminders that there was always something more to be found just beyond the horizon.
A few years after high school, that horizon drew closer when I joined the United States Air Force. The maps I had studied became something tangible, no longer lines and colors but places with texture, distance, and weight. I found myself standing in locations I had once only imagined, surrounded by stories that did not live in books but in the land itself and in the people who called it home.
Later still, a season of travel carried me across the country in a different way, slower and quieter, without uniform or formation. The roads stretched long, the towns came and went, and each stop offered something new. Conversations unfolded where I did not expect them. Ordinary places revealed deeper layers if you lingered long enough.
Through it all, one truth kept returning, gentle but certain. Stories are never far away. They rest in the soil, in the passing of strangers, in the spaces between where we begin and where we end. All they ask is that we notice, and perhaps, if we are willing, carry them a little farther down the road.