I Am Me.

I am someone who isn’t fond of writing the about me section as you always find yourself pondering the moment you say it out loud. But, what I do know is that I am different now than I was then, and it all started in a small room in a small town wondering what it would be like to venture somewhere so different.

I give many thanks to all of my years living on the beach listening to the water which brought me serenity, calmness, simplicity, and tranquility like I had never known. When I decide to stay in one place, I know it will be on the water!

From my first trip to Costa Rica, then to Thailand, and then several years later living and working in Chile, my inquisitive spirit is always craving to do, learn, and see more. I spend my time exploring the world of people, of places, of cultures. I want a world without cubicles, constraints, crazy schedules, and conformity. I am someone who makes a decision and goes for it! I like stumbling through learning a new language, being lost in translation, connecting with cultures different from my own,  and encouraging others to do the same. I love reading stories of how so many *individuals* are changing the world, and they all encourage me to want to do the same.

I love the moment realization hits and one understands that we really can do whatever causes a revolution in our mind. The moment I encouraged and saw that look in just one person, I made it my personal mission to keep on educating and to keep on encouraging, which led to the creation of Small World Pursuits and my decision to go on my own journey to learn about the world.

Please join me. I love company!

Words That Have Inspired My Pursuits:

The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.”

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” – Mary Oliver

“Listen to the Mustn’ts child, listen to the dont’s, listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the wont’s, listen to the never haves, then listen close to me. Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.” – Shel Silverstein

Wherever you are is the entry point. Jump in…and let your good deeds ripple out.”

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.” ~Eleanor Roosevelt

“You see, I want a lot / Perhaps I want everything: / the darkness that comes with every infinite fall and the shivering blaze of every step up.” - Rainer Marie Rilke

“ There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth, not going all the way, and not starting.” - Buddha

“What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what kind of a person you are.”

“Go to the people: live with them, learn from them, love them, start with what they know, build with what they have. But of the best of leaders, when the job is done, the task is accomplished, the people will say: we have done it ourselves.” – Lao Tzu

“Out of clutter find simplicity; from discord find harmony; in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” ~Albert Einstein

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Liberty of movement is an indispensable condition for the free development of a person.” (United Nations Human Rights Committee)

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of the universe; your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are born to make manifest the glory of all that’s within us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone.

And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others” — Nelson Mandela

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

“Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

“Creativity takes courage.” – Henri Matisse

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt

”If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.”  ~Jim Rohn