I had a big old twelve-passenger van that I was driving. I put the tripod up on the roof to get the camera high enough. The camera was steady, but I wasn’t. I was trying to catch what it means to move through uncertainty to drive, to look ahead, to keep your hands on the wheel and still let wonder take the lead.

When I look at this photo I see the trace of the road as it curves, which you couldn’t if you were standing on the ground. From up there, the gravel shifts in the near field, and that shifting, that subtle play of texture and line feels like what engages and draws folks in.

The closer I look at this image, there is that sense of being drawn into the future. It’s a simple country road, but it keeps opening, keeps suggesting that there’s more beyond the bend. It served as a frame for thinking about change as I was anticipating what it means to cross from one chapter of life into another, to see where the familiar ends and the unknown begins.

San Luis and County Road keep talking to each other. San Luis is the horizon, the wide field, the stillness, the place where you wait and listen. County Road is the motion that follows, the act of choosing a direction. Between them runs this thread of curiosity: the way seeing becomes feeling, and feeling becomes knowing.

When I was taking those pictures, it felt unconstrained, carrying a great deal of energy. I wasn’t overthinking the composition or the meaning. It was simply a moment of looking, a moment of movement, that opened something in me. 

When I look at County Road now, I don’t just see a stretch of pavement or sky. I see the practice of moving forward of trusting that even an ordinary road, seen from the right height, can reveal where you’ve been and where you might still be going.