gazing inwards | w[h]m pt.3

Somewhere along the way, the experience of exploring these communities and hearing the stories of the people from them, shifted my gaze inwards and led me to embrace a certain, contemplative solitude in Northwest Arkansas…

Unless I had an event to attend or an interview scheduled, I’d spend most days musing within the confines of my mind, sleeping past noon, going on solo hikes, working with headphones on and head down in a café until close, or sitting alone at an unassuming local bar, as I exchanged glances between my phone screen, the water level in my beer glass and whatever sport was on the TV. Some days, I’d just get into my car and drive, without hesitation or agenda, encountering open mics, natural and historic landmarks, main streets and oddities, before returning to the familiar sound of my great aunt & uncles’ gravel driveway crackling under the pressure of my tires well after dark.

After I had spent enough time without reception on rural backroads, there came a point where I realized that, without my cell phone, there was often little-to-nothing keeping me connected to the rest of the world and the people I knew in it. It was liberating in the sense that I could explore, uninhibited by anyone else’s expectations, only concerned with what I was seeing and experiencing. It was existential in the sense that, if I didn’t make the effort to post on social media or respond to messages from friends and family, my experience wasn’t tangible to anyone, but me. I had been toying with the idea since I returned from my 14 months traveling abroad with Remote Year, but I was truly embracing a sentiment of being “of everywhere and nowhere” all at once by the end of my journey.

When I had originally set out on the trip, my primary intention was to be a conduit between my experiences and insights, the people and communities they came from, and everyone else who did not have either of those first two privileges. The resulting challenge was that I set an expectation that people would consistently hear from me during my journey, but as the experience deepened, more complexity was introduced, and my perspective shifted, it became hard to live up to that. I had loosely promised all of my participants that they would be seeing their interviews soon; that didn’t go as planned. I had set out to publish this weekly newsletter highlighting my experience and showcasing participants’ perspectives; that fell apart a week or two after I arrived in Johnson City.

Quite frankly, the more I saw and experienced, the more I realized how little I knew, how little any person could know about the hyperlocal sociocultural dynamics of American communities without imbedding locally and embodying their values first. With every community leader I met and got to know, this became more and more apparent. As my project progressed and evolved, I ended up mired in the complexity of our society’s seemingly insurmountable challenges and lost in some unbound, existential headspace between intention and impact that persisted for the remainder of my trip.

Rather than producing my interviews, I instead spent my time and capacity trying to wrap my mind around the following questions:

• What was the purpose of this project?

• Who did it serve?

• What gave me the right to capture and share stories, especially ones that centered on other people’s lived experiences?

• If I had any right, how could I do that with integrity, intention and impact?

• Could I actually make a difference through this approach to ecosystem mapping and community narrative change?

Even when I set out on this project, I didn’t really have answers for any of those questions, but I found intention and contentment in consistently asking and iterating on them. The more time I spent on the road, immersed in this evolving world of voyeuristic, vagabonding storytelling, the more I sat with the apparent trendiness and potential banality of my project; the further it felt like I was getting from clearly understanding why I was doing it.

I wasn’t the only do-gooder endeavoring across the country searching for insights and pathways towards societal reconciliation in Trump’s America; this concept didn’t feel all that unique, rather it felt almost desperate and misguided.

But I think what potentially made my effort worthwhile was that with the minimal resources, support and technical skills available to me, I had unmistakably thrown myself head-and-heart-first into this project without having a freaking clue of how it would turn out. I wasn’t representing some national publication, and I didn’t have a book deal waiting for me when I finished. My primary agenda was to engage with these communities, attempt to do right by them and see if there was anything we could bring into the world together; I was fortunate enough to already know that the only way to do this work was to put the community at the center of it.

Furthermore, I was funding this trip with five thousand dollars from my postal-working stepdad’s life insurance, entering every community with little more than a friend or family member to shelter and orient me there, and capturing stories on $60 worth of audio equipment attached to my cell phone. As I was operating from little-to-nothing in so many ways, I challenged myself to let go of ego and ulterior motives beyond the deeply held belief that we could do better by each other by trying to understand how people co-exist and thrive in community together.

During my second week in South Bend, I attended the launch event of an Awesome Foundation grant-funded zine club. Pictured above are the first two pages of the zine I created.

I think I knew from the onset that, even if my brain and heart stood in constant conflict with each other, my feet would guide me on this trip, if I let them - they sure did.