A year after returning home to Montreal, I was developing a craft business, having been inspired by artisans in every country along the way, and was thinking about moving back to Nova Scotia.

Some of the momentum generated by the trip seemed to get lost as other life events took over. But now in putting my letters into this format, I feel the energy of the journey working on me again. I don’t know where it will take me, but it feels like soul work. My son’s response to these thoughts was to quote Viktor Frankl:

“Having been is the surest form of being.”

That led me to something that Nietzsche wrote:

“The truth is that, in the process by which the human being, in thinking, reflecting, comparing, separating, and combining . . . inside that surrounding misty cloud a bright gleaming beam of light arises, only then, through the power of using the past for living and making history out of what has happened, does a person first become a person.”

Photos

I took a lot of photos on the trip, but lost most of them in a fire some years later. I’m lucky to have pictures from Nicaragua because my father had a set of my slides for making presentations, as well as his own photos and the films I sent back to Canada with him. Any photos without a credit were taken by me or my late father, Flemming Holm.

Other photos were sourced online, mostly on Flickr, and are under a Creative Commons license. I have tried to choose photos that I might have taken myself.