In 2023, I walked from Imperial Beach, CA to Lubec, ME - from a wall to a lighthouse - from the Pacific to the Atlantic - from west to east, winter to summer, Mexico to Canada.

SELECT YOUR SOUNDTRACK (tracks from nest and flight on spotify and apple music):

Wistful, grieving, yearning

Playful, grateful, exploring

Loving, leaving, releasing

THE

let’s be specific

GREGARIOUS

joyful, curious, connecting

CONDOR

ASCENDING

The condor soars, searching for decay to feed tomorrow’s flight

The bard receives, translating stories, wisdom, possibilities

The country inhales and exhales - tightening, releasing

The present becomes the future, each step rippling through the body

Approximate route. Click through the image for the full Google Map.

“Something of our relationship to the earth is determined by the particular place we stand at a given time. If you stand still long enough to observe carefully the things around you, you will find beauty, and you will know wonder. If you see a leaf carried along on the flow of a river, you might ponder its journey. Where did it begin, and where will it end? What will be the story of its passage? You will discover a thousand ways in which the leaf is connected to the water, the banks, the near and farther distances, the sky and the sun. Your mind, your spirit will be nourished and grow. You will become one with what you see. Consider what is to be seen.”

(N. Scott Momaday)

CREATIVE EXPRESSION IS

transmuting the murky intangible inner experience of emotion, memory, process, presence, into a form, felt, embodied, or held in the flow of time.

“How little we still commit ourselves to living. We should grow like a tree that likewise does not know its law. We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life. We believe that we can illuminate the darkness with an intention, and in that way aim past the light. How can we presume to want to know in advance, from where the light will come to us?”

(Carl Jung)

Below: I interview a tree - reflecting on time, movement, community - the video itself an unfolding relationship with footage filmed while hiking the John Muir Trail.

Improvising music with my cello, often immersed in nature, is one of my favorite ways to translate.

The process is the product.

Below: questioning everything in Wilson Lake, Kansas, on a solo cross country road trip to my hometown in New Jersey.

“N. Scott Momaday has referred to woven experiences of imagination, language, and place -- and the relationships born of them -- as ‘reciprocal appropriation.’ To invest oneself in the land while incorporating the land into one’s ‘own most fundamental experience.’ Place-making is both a way of ‘doing human history,’ Basso offers, as well as ‘a way of constructing social traditions and, in the process, personal and social identities. We are, in a sense, the place-worlds we imagine.’”

(Lauret Savoy)

INNER - OUTER

PRIVATE - PUBLIC

ME - YOU

Below: a bibliography for this present.

Not pictured but very important: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy.

My work - art, education, and the general praxis of my daily life - has a lot to do with strangers. Connecting with people I don’t already know. Bridging. Seeing. Listening. Surprising.

On June 15, 2010, the first day of filming American Bear: An Adventure in the Kindness of Strangers, our first kind-stranger-host Joe told us: “You’re gonna be directed and you’re gonna be guided to people that will effect you in the most profound ways.” That sense of serendipity - fate - divine guidance - has been playing out ever since (and ever before, and ever on).

Connecting with strangers is a way I stay present - open - surprised - curious - learning - expressing.

I am downright thrilled to meet everyone on my journey in 2023.

Below: Secrets and Seeds, a short film of creative nonfiction in which strangers are invited to “release a statement to the wind.”

In 2022 my partner of thirteen years and I decided to no longer be together. I’ve never experienced anxiety or grief in the way I did this year. Following my intuition was one of the guiding lights towards feeling grounded and optimistic about my path again — that intuition included driving from Los Angeles to New Jersey to re-ground myself in the people that have known me the longest; it included improvising music; it included leaning deeper into my facilitating and teaching in film education, in community and personal storytelling; it included asking myself “what would I do just for myself — if my future is no longer written the way I understood it to be, what would I do, freely, for me?” The answer was walking across the country.

PAST

memories embedded in soil to bloom today’s flower

PRESENT

now now now now all we have is now now now now

FUTURE

dreams, fears, paths, inevitable 

Water is the only truth of water. Water is water’s completed virtue.

(Dogen, quoted by Gretel Ehrlich)

COMPOST

condor - carrion - consume - create

forage - found - FUEL - forward

The inner child

patterns with the reflective adult

TO play, to ponder, to inquire, to answer, to connect.

ORDER

trying to make sense and/or exert control

sometimes over other beings/forces, sometimes for our own peace of mind

CHAOS

the order of things

PEACE OF MIND

the knowing beneath the knowing 

“Disorder and meaninglessness are the mother of order and meaning. Order and meaning are things that have already become and are no longer becoming. You open the gate of the soul to let the dark flood of chaos flow into your order and meaning. If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.”

(Carl Jung)

Dichotomies - Spectrums

Desert - Forest

West - East

In - Out

I - Thou

Eye - Ear

Hand - Land

Wall - Lighthouse

Mexico - Canada

Winter - Summer

Darkness - Light

Individual - Communal

Private - Public

Play - Purpose

Below: Visualizing the border-to-border walk, from a wall to a lighthouse.

This piece was made during a small group session of the DIY PhD program with the School for the Ecocene, reimagining a map I’ve had for ten years, adding layers including a spice mix ground by hand and placed in the east, south, west, and north directions of the map.

Below: the route.

WALKING

experiencing the change of time

through the change of space

“The human body is like so much plant life -- green in its wanderings, [...] the way ideas are pressed upward to the tip of the brain stalk, pushing out of the skull like an inflorescence; the way these things are cut down.”

(Gretel Ehrlich)

CHANNELING

Is all communication a mediating of ego and intuition, channeling something within to share without? When I channel improvised music, story, poetry, visual art, am I communicating from within my self, and/or an energy within and beyond my self? Is a flow state an embodying of a divine energy that has something to offer, to teach, to feel into — and must there be a purpose, a meaning to it, or can that divine energy simply be? Nature is abundant, and to impose purpose or intention is to limit, to put a capitalist value system on being, being, being, present tense be.

Receiving energy within and without; finding patterns in the rhythms, finding symbols in the surroundings, wondering if metaphor manifests or reflection pulls the ego into forms beyond this body. Divinity is within us, within all entities in nature — elements, plants, fungi, animals, bodies on the surface of earth, within earth, and in the celestial infinite. Guidance is receiving these feelings and ideas as invitations, paths, patterns to tap into. I pulled a card from the Amulet Friends oracle deck on 1/1/22 and that card said “Divine Guidance.” That opened up a door to ideas that percolated — what is divinity, where does guidance come from, if from within then divinity is indeed within all of us. And why divinity, why give this word, this status? It seems to me to suggest a profound connection, a beyond-my-self shape to things, to all things.

DIVINE GUIDANCE

Below: a video self-portrait from Spring 2022 that began as a stream-of-consciousness voiceover recorded in a phone voice memo; then, a musical phrase on the cello that came to me in a meditation; next I filmed myself doing an interpretive dance to the soundtrack, in front of Strawberry Peak, which I’ve named Swell through my own relationship to them; finally, in editing the video, I found that shapes and time brought forth their own possibilities and purpose.

The creature gazes into openness with all

its eyes. But our eyes are

as if they were reversed, and surround it,

everywhere, like barriers against its free passage.

We know what is outside us from the animal’s

face alone: since we already turn

the young child round and make it look

backwards at what is settled, not that openness

that is so deep in the animal’s vision. Free from death.

We alone see that: the free creature

has its progress always behind it,

and God before it, and when it moves, it moves

in eternity, as streams do.

(From the Eighth Duino Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke)

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

(Martha Graham)

Logo by Ian Hanesworth.