December, 2024.
There are places I visit once, and there are places that become part of me.
This village of Tacheddirt is one I keep returning to… Especially in autumn and winter. Every visit feels familiar, yet somehow different. The mountain changes with the season, and so do I.
This time, it wasn’t just the landscape I carried home. It was a quiet reminder.
“The mountains call, not to be conquered, but to remind us of our place within something greater.”
We were welcomed into a ceremony celebrating a young man who had completed the memorization of the Qur’an. It was simple, joyful, and deeply humbling. For a little while, surrounded by mountains and people gathered in gratitude, everything felt beautifully in perspective.
I painted the mountain later, knowing the page could never hold all of it.. not just the view, but the feeling of being there.
Maybe that’s why I keep painting these places. Not to preserve them exactly as they are, but to remember how they made me feel.
Carrying places home. ⚓️
October, 2021.
A mountain that found its way into my journal.
Wildflowers pressed into memory.
A Polaroid, a collage, and a quote that somehow stayed with me all these years.
“She wasn’t where she had been.
She wasn’t where she was going.
But she was on her way.”
Looking back, I think that’s what I was trying to capture all along… not just the places I visited, but the person I was becoming while I was there.
My journals have never been perfect records of a trip. They’re little reminders of how a landscape can quietly shape you, long after you’ve left.
Carrying places home. ⚓️
This collage comes from a hike I took in August 2021.
A water trek through the canyon. A page from my travel journal. A Polaroid from the trail. A postcard I wrote to myself before leaving.
When I look at it now, I realize I’ve been carrying places home for much longer than I had the words for.
Every trip found its way onto paper somehow—through watercolor, quick notes, postcards, or little collections of memories that let me return long after I’d left.
Looking back through these pages reminds me that the journey doesn’t end when the trip is over. Sometimes it continues years later, when you open a journal, revisit a painting, or piece together a story like this one.
Carrying places home ⚓️
#digitalcollages #traveljournaling #visualdiary #travelmemories #creativeliving