The Geography of Connection

It follows the question of what belonging looks like across places, communities, and everyday life.

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:

Field Notes — the journals that document the moments that I later write about

Scenes of Connection — micro moments set against the larger histories, cultures, and structures that shape a place.

Scenes of Self — micro moments set against the larger histories, relationships, and experiences that shape a life.

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

Together, these pieces form a body of work that explores what belonging looks like —and how it is shaped by environment and place.