I have spent much of my adult life moving.

For years, work carried me across America—through cities, small towns, industrial places, highways, airports, hotel rooms, and stretches of country most people have little reason to visit. Eventually I began traveling farther, beyond the familiar, looking for places and experiences that might show me something I hadn't seen before.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I had been collecting more than miles.

I collected photographs. Conversations. People. Mistakes. Strange little observations. Places I still think about years later. Questions I couldn't answer when they first occurred to me. I've lived through beautiful seasons and darker ones, and I've learned that sometimes we don't understand what a moment meant until we're far enough away to look back at it.

For most of my life, I kept much of that to myself.

Nomad Was Here grew from a desire to stop doing that.

This isn't really a travel blog, although there will be stories from the road. It isn't a journal in the traditional sense, although pieces of my life will inevitably find their way into it. And it isn't an attempt to teach anyone how to live.

It's simply a place to tell stories.

Stories about memory, place, love, loss, fear, regret, wonder, ordinary days, and the strange experience of trying to understand yourself while you're still becoming yourself. Sometimes through an essay. Sometimes through a photograph. Sometimes through nothing more than an observation that felt worth writing down.

I've spent a lot of my life moving forward. Lately, I've become interested in occasionally stopping long enough to notice where I've been.

Maybe that's what this place is.

A collection of evidence.

That I noticed.

That I wondered.

That I felt something.

That, for a little while anyway,

I was here.