By the time I left New York,
I knew I was ready
My daughter was 10 hours away.
700 plus miles away in North Carolina.
And New York,
New York was...
full of people,
and noise and traffic.
And after twenty-seven years
it was too much
I wanted more trees than people
I wanted silence.
I wanted...
...peace
And peace,
was where ever,
my daughter was.
So many of my first
in North Carolina and due to my daughter
Daddy Daughter dance...
...winning a plushy at the arcade...
even driving around in a go kart
together for the first time
This brilliant,
funny,
goofy, little girl
is the antidote for all the chaos
that I would leave behind
In North Carolina.
time slowed
and I was alive again.
So being here was as much for my peace
as it was to be a father
to such a precocious,
intelligent, young girl
Today was the day that I decided
that was going to get lost under
a canopy of trees
with my daughter.
I've always imagined myself
walking deep into words that I know
intimately
familiar with every tree,
every rock
every branch and blade of grass
Sharing these sacred moments
with my daughter
allowed me to witness something beautiful.
The mountain
through her eyes,
how these experiences connected with her
and how her eyes would process
and see every detail
of every moment
for the first time.
These moments landing somewhere in her brain,
lodging themselves in corners and places
where they're forgotten,
but always there,
waiting to be found again.
One of the jobs as a father,
is to make sure that my daughter has a
collection of beautiful memories.
And yet,
for all the memories she and I have created,
I didn't imagine that
the woods and mountains
of North Carolina
would be the backdrop
to some of our stories
As a child,
I would often lose myself in
the wilderness of my own imagination.
Finding myself in far away lands,
I imagine,
look like the trails I've walked through
with my daughter Maxwell-Rose
in these moments
with her
I’m brought back to my own childhood.
Places like this were my escape,
my impossible quest.
As a father,
I want her to believe
all things are possible
when you go places
others are unwilling to go,
you'll see things that
that are impossible for them to see
And just
because it has to be done yet,
doesn’t mean you can’t be the first.
I pray,
In her quiet moments,
she remembers these adventures.
And then she looks at me as her wizard,
guiding her through the forests
of undiscovered and unseen lands
with untold wonders
and creates more first of her very own,
long
after I'm gone...