The Geography of Connection

An observational project examining how belonging is signaled, structured, and recognized across everyday environments.

After writing The Purpose of Getting Lost, I found myself wondering what the elements I had been circling—freedom, acceptance, confidence, risk, adventure, community—look like outside my own story. Not as ideas, but as lived moments. Not only in travel, but in the ordinary rhythms of daily life.

The Geography of Connection is an ongoing practice of noticing connections: between people, between a person and a place, between the roles we inhabit and the selves we carry within them, and between the objects we hold and the memories they contain. Sometimes that noticing happens in marketplaces or classrooms, kitchens or city streets. Other times it appears at home, at work, in passing conversations, or in moments that almost go unnoticed.

Each moment becomes a small point on the map.

I’m sharing this work in a few forms:

A Year of Connection — short notes drawn from everyday moments and travel.

Scenes of Connection — scene-based essays centered on shared moments and the people I encounter.

Scenes of Self — essays where the tension lives inside my own experience.

The Souvenir Shelf — object-anchored stories about memory, meaning, and what we carry.

Field Notes — sketches and observations that may remain fragments or later gather into essays.

Together, these pieces form a body of work tracing how belonging takes shape across time and place—and how it is signaled, structured, and recognized in everyday life.