Year Ten on the Beat. Thank You.

Today, a brief post to thank you for reading Under Western Skies.

This week I begin my tenth year of blogging. As I say each year at the anniversary of the first post, the best part of it has been encountering readers from all over the world, and finding fellow travelers, kindred spirits — people who share an interest in literature and the arts, history, architecture and, sometimes, mere whimsy.

That’s not what I expected when I started in November of 2009. My objective was to give myself an incentive to do more writing about subjects that interest me. The blog has certainly been that, but it’s been gratifying to discover thousands of other writers, photographers and travelers with distinctive voices whose work captures my attention.

As a result, my world is both larger and smaller. I have a wider knowledge of places I’ve never traveled and some of the people who live there, literature I’d never read. I’m always delighted when I see I’ve had a visitor from a country that didn’t exist when I studied geography in elementary school or a place that was virtually unreachable, about which one could know almost nothing from here in the U.S.

Those connections have reduced some geographical, political and cultural gaps that tend to isolate us from one another, and make it too easy to rely on stereotypes or unfounded, preconceived notions of what people are like in other places, other cultures.

On we go. The world does lie before us — so various, so beautiful, so new. Thank you for visiting, never hesitate to leave a comment, and who knows what we’ll discover next? I’m pleased to have you along.

Oobop shebam.

© Brad Nixon 2018. Photograph of Brad in the White Mountains of California © M. Vincent 2018, used by kind permission.