Goodbye/Hello
A new year!
Y’all know how I feel about New Year’s. In true optimist, big-picture, enthusiast fashion, I love it. Especially when the last one was, personally, such a good one.
I feel like it’s everyone’s collective hobby on social media to act like the year that’s ending is the worst year there ever was. And on a global scale, there’s probably always reason to believe that’s true. But my life doesn’t take place on a global scale, and neither does yours. I evaluate my years based on the small and the everyday, and 2019 was one of the fullest and best yet. It grew me in a lot of important ways and left me really grateful. Whatever your year was like — and maybe it really did suck, because sometimes years are like that — I hope you take a chance to look at it and review it that way. As your year. Not everybody else’s.
Okay, with that little soapbox out of the way — I decided to do a year-in-photos on the Instagrams over the last few days of December, highlighting some of my favorite images I got to capture month to month. Figured I’d do the same here! (Click right and left to see all of ‘em.)
January
Duck hunting (and some dang good morning light) with the Sowells.
February
The view that will never not make me nostalgic. I don’t know how many photos I’ve taken from this exact spot on the pedestrian bridge in Austin over the years. It’s not home now, but it will always kind of be, you know? (Also, shoutout my girl Linds.)
March
Stood on top of Texas at Guadalupe Peak with Maggie, then spent a few days in Alpine and Marfa. West Texas, it’s about time for me to visit you again…
April
In which I visit Nor’n Ireland with the one and only Nikki McCombe. Narrowing down photos for this was dang near impossible, the country is so beautiful and we had the opportunity to see so much thanks to her sweet family; but great news! I posted literally all of them in their own blog post! Also, could really go for some soda bread right now.
May
All the wildflowers and quick weekend road trips to see good friends. May is one of those months that at first glance didn’t seem like much happened in, and in retrospect was one of the best.
June
I spent more than half the month in Colorado, so yeah, it was a good one.
July
Technically, YoungLife camp ended on June 30. But I spent the first week of July (and then some) recovering from it and following up with the students we had the privilege of pouring into for those nine days. A lot of great conversations with great high schoolers. (I also ate a lot of Whataburger. But let’s not talk about it.)
August
I had the opportunity to shoot a lot of indoor climbing photos for Momentum this month, and loved every second. Fellow artists/makers/doers will be familiar with Ira Glass’s gap theory — the photos I produced from these sessions had almost no gap between what I wanted them to look like and the actual, final product. It was incredibly satisfying — work I’m really proud of and hope to do a lot more of in the future.
September
Dove hunting with my grandad, uncle, and cousin, AJ. We didn’t see many doves, but we did get to spend an entire day hanging outside in the hill country, which is mostly what I’m after in my hunting, anyway.
October
Tour de Utah with my girl Haley. Itching to go back and spend more time there.
November
Once-in-a-lifetime kind of trip to Israel, made extra special by the fact that I got to share it with both my parents and some great friends. More meaningful and beautiful than I could have imagined!
December
My camera had to be shipped to Fuji for repair in November (womp womp), so I was camera-less for the month of December. However! What I did do a lot of in the month of December was climb. Which isn’t new, I know, but I climbed a lot and climbed hard and got out of my comfort zone and made some major progress over the past few weeks that I’m really proud of. I spent the last day of the year projecting an 11a at Reimer’s with some of the people who have helped me get stronger, and so I felt like the photos above represented the month well, even if they were taken earlier in the year.
Something else I did this year was take 1-2 video snippets of 1-3 seconds every day (I used this app!) — an idea I got from Serena, a friend who used to live in Dallas with me. I’ve posted monthly compilations on my Instagram story, but watching the whole, final thing was so much fun and made me real happy. Here’s that! (The quality might kind of suck because I don’t know much about YouTube and am not going to learn I don’t think so potentially sorry in advance.)
I’m not big on broad-strokes resolutions, and I’m thankful that there’s little I would change about my life even if I was. My piorities are my faith, my people, my health, my work, and my words — in that order. And I’ve tried my best to align my life with those accordingly.
I do have a few goals I’m working towards (finishing Kingsland’s student curriculum, a few photography projects, another independent story, and I’m going to try and climb outdoors every month this year just for fun!), but for the most part, I’m just excited for another year of leaning into what I value most and squeezing every drop out of life I can get.
Hope everyone had and has a beautiful year!
