White Shoal Lighthouse
We're onto our last two lighthouses of our Mackinaw City trip! Phew, are you guys sick of these yet? To be honest, I'm kind of ready to move on. Ha! I told Eric last week that when we go visit lighthouses... it needs to be a few scattered throughout the year. Don't get me wrong. I love traveling to visit lighthouses, but I think I went a little overboard in August. Haha! We recently took photos with an amazing photographer in Grand Rapids, and we also shot some photos for a Free People collaboration that feel very fall and I'm excited to post new stuff!
But anyway, before I get too far off the lighthouse path... this is White Shoal Lighthouse. We visited it during our trip on Shepler's Lighthouse Cruise: West. I wanted to separate this post from the others because of a few reasons. First... because I bought this dress. Of course. Secondly though, it didn't really hit me until I saw it for the first time, but I got major tears in my eyes the second I saw it. It's way out in Lake Michigan; all you can see is blue water and all of a sudden... there it is. It's such a hidden beauty and not many people can say they've seen this place.
I read that lighthouses have the symbolic meaning of a beacon beckoning people back home. Lighthouses were meant to guide sailors back into the harbor, back to their home. So, in a way, lighthouses represent optimism and the return of life back on shore, back home. Exploring lighthouses has gotten me through some really hard times, or rough storms if I want to be super cheesy. But they've given me something to plan for, to look forward to, to be excited about. And I feel like they brought me "back home", back to feeling like myself again. I get a lot of emails from people who wonder how I'm so happy after such a hard life event. It's not that I'm happy all the time, it's not a matter of flipping a "happy" switch. Life isn't that easy. But if you continue to do the things you love, and fight for what you want, life has an oddly funny way of working itself out.