The trail to Mt. San Jacinto

From the front porch of my house in Point Loma Mt. San Jacinto looms as the highest, most distant mountain.  It is notable only for the snow cap it still bears in April. Sitting by the pool in Desert Hot Springs, I look between the buildings and past the palm trees to that same mountain, and reflect.  

Twelve years ago, I came to California for the first time to visit my sister who was living in Palo Alto.  I traveled from Northern to Southern California.  Along the coast all the way back to Palo Alto and San Fransisco again.  On that trip I visited Palm Springs and took the aerial tram up to the Mountain Station of Mt. San Jacinto. I climbed the remaining 2300 feet to the peak, scrambling the final quarter mile over rock to finally peer down into the valley below, Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Desert Hot Springs, and behind me to the west, all the way to San Diego and the Pacific Ocean. Beautiful.  An inspiring view of a land I knew little about.   

When I climbed Mt. San Jacinto twelve years ago I was hobbling through my last few requirements towards my degree in photography.  I would later put down my camera and leave photography entirely.  It would then take me five years to come back; to rediscover my love for documenting life, mine and others with a camera.  I spent five years building a successful photography business on the East Coast in Maryland only to leave it all behind to begin my life anew in San Diego, California.  Through these past twelve years I had successes and failures, love and heartache, times of complete clarity and utter lack of direction.

From here by the pool I lay in the shadow of that same mountain in the same location taking the most circuitous of routes to find myself here again.  There was no beacon, no lighthouse guiding my way from then to now.  No meridian can be drawn to show the straight course of my travels.  The winding trail to the peak of San Jacinto, with its switch-backs, ascents and descents was a clearer better marked path than the one that led me to this pool, to this moment when twelve years later I am here again. This time as a resident, preparing to photograph my first wedding in Southern California and wondering what is yet to come. 

I am a bit awed and overwhelmed by what lies ahead of me.  Knowing the work, the great possibility of failure, all, again, with no clear path.  The rules have changed and I am again making it up as I go.  There’s no saying what the next twelve months will bring let alone the next twelve years.  The path before me is as unmarked and untraveled as any in the wildest of woods, still I continue to place one foot in front of the other, hoping to find purchase with each step.  There are connections that have led me from then to now, some that I see and many that I don’t.  Yet given the choice between knowing the path that I’m on and seeing the road before me, or being on a journey with no understood course, I will again, choose the latter.

I am thankful for the people that have and those that continue to walk with me.  Not to guide me but to walk beside me, stabilize me, to pick me up when I stumble, and encourage me always. And I am hopeful that the path I do travel leads to someplace half as wonderful as the path that has led me back here.