!Empower!

Around this time, I start looking back on the year i've had and take inventory on everything that's happened. I can't really look anymore at years as bad or good, cause I guess enough's happened in life for me to just say it's all comes with the territory of walking and journeying on your own personal path. Yeah, i'm one of those it all happens for a reason people, but i truly believe it, and i think accepting that opens up more of the universe and it's possibilites to me.

But i am without a doubt thankful for everything: Thankful for dad's battle, and the chance its given me to have to come home be more responsible and tie up loose ends i needed to have peace with, and the chance it gave me to really value my family, before i hit the road again. I'm endlessly thankful for Roadtrip Nation and New Zealand, the knowledge, inspiration, clarity, self belief, and power it has given me is far beyond anything I could have conceived or tried to make myself believe without that experience. I'm thankful for the different friendships/relationships that came, that went, that reconnected, and that took detours for a minute till we meet down the road again. I know that all those people are living life with a purpose and are striving for something meaningful, so i have no doubt we'll all be working together in the future again.

Everything i guess that happens whether or not we give them a connotation of positive or negative is just a small patchwork that pieces together to truly give you your identity, and show you more of yourself, and the older i get, the more i see that, and the more I can't help but be thankful for it.

I found the AP Year End World Photos, and man this are some powerful, rivetting images, and it reminds me again how much of a world is out there, beyond what we know and experience. It shows me once again, how much I can take life for granted here in the states, and how it makes me complacent to a certain point. It makes you humble, but at the same time fills me with a sense that i need to get out to the rest of the world, and have some effect on other lives out there, and wanna be able to give people the ability to have hope. Hopefully this new year and the opportunities of it, will allow me to.

Check em out here's the link, I posted a few of the 211 total images.
AP Year End World Photos

In this Sept. 16, 2008 file photo, He Pingping from Inner Mongolia, China's autonomous region, the world's smallest man sits underneath Svetlana Pankratova from Russia, the Queen of Longest Legs, as they pose at Trafalgar Square in London. (AP Photo/Sang Tan/FILE)
In this Oct. 8, 2008 file photo, an Indonesian trader reacts on the trading floor of the Indonesia Stock Exchange in Jakarta, Indonesia. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim/FILE)
In this Nov. 2, 2008 file photo, Pakistani Sunni Muslims devotees return back to their homes on a packed train after attending annual religious congregation in Multan, Pakistan. (AP Photo/Khalid Tanveer/FILE)
In this Aug. 3, 2008 file photo, U.S. Army Capt. Charles Ford plays a video game with seven-year-old Wa'ad, who lost an arm and a leg to an improvised bomb, during a visit to the child's home near Muqdadiyah, about 90 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad in Iraq's volatile Diyala province. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo/FILE)
In this May 31, 2008 file photo, earthquake survivor boys have a shower at a temporary bathroom in a refugee camp in Jiangyou town, southwestern Sichuan province, China . (AP Photo/Oded Balilty/FILE)
In this Nov. 13, 2008 file photo, motherless orphans and lost children rest at the Don Bosco Ngangi center in Goma, eastern Congo. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay/FILE)

In this Sept. 12, 2008 file photo, a Palestinian man crawls from a sewage pipe as he tries to avoid detection by Israeli troops on his way to the Al Aqsa Mosque during the holy fasting month of Ramadan, as he crosses from the West Bank on the outskirts of Jerusalem. (AP Photo/Dan Balilty/FILE)
In this July 24, 2008 file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., waves as he arrives at the Victory Column in Berlin. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong/FILE)
In this Nov. 6, 2008 file photo, Protegee, carrying her sibling on her back, cries as she looks for her parents through the village of Kiwanja, 90 kms north of Goma, eastern Congo. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay/FILE)
In this March 5, 2008 file photo, Pakistani women struggle as they try to order food outside of a subsidized food store on the outskirts of Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Basic food and fuel prices have soared in Pakistan over the last months, causing many to depend on government subsidies to simply get by. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti/FILE)