Ruth D. Stallard

When wonder has faded and we believe life is a nasty business, we may consider quitting early or dropping out of the game. But wait! This book will teach you how to see the world from the grand perspective first. Traveling into the Patagonian Wind: A  Solo Journey to Joy illustrates how to grow a fresh awareness of the joys and delights of life you lost somewhere between childhood and today. Travel is the agency of this metamorphosis. A journey through a foreign country enlightens and refocuses us. Traveling allows the mysteries, the awes, and the beauties to break through the shells our small lives construct around us. Then we can see the wondrous and the delightful. Feeling and expressing joy is foundational to a healthy life. Wonder and joy intersect when we re-orient our lives to see the world fr­om a larger scale. When we tak­e ourselves to a place far from our environs, where we can look u­p to see life from the grand perspective, the big story begins to define our small story. Standing in a place of wonder, vast beyond our comprehension, allows us to take the focus off the circumstances that mire us in the pain and the minutia of our daily lives. Joy fills our souls and our lives become more meaningful. Life becomes more than fantastic. When we treasure and ponder the majesty of creation in our hearts, whether embodied by a human or slab of granite, we begin to live on the margin of the impossible. We transcend to a place bigger than our little lives. We find renewed reasons to cling to our tiny scrap of existence with tenacity. The sense of impossibilities sharpens our senses to what we are doing and where we are going. Travel is the agency that lifts us from the tangle of our flawed lives to enable us to see the vast, immense beauty of the world we live in and that changes our lives.