unwritten maps: walking toward a future woven together

Change is the only constant, an old truth that feels newly urgent as I lace my shoes and set out, step by step, into my new surroundings. My environment has shifted; the cityscape has altered, the soundscape is unfamiliar, and I find myself, once again, in the midst of becoming.

This morning, as I walked—ten miles, a ritual reclaimed—I remembered that it was the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in my birthplace of Louisiana. Two decades ago, a city drowned and did not drown. New Orleans—affectionately referred to as NOLA—battered and battered again by wind and water, became a living testament to what it means to rebuild an entity when the world seems intent on its erasure. I was not there, but the images, the stories, the scattered voices—these have been stitched into the patchwork of my own understanding of place and survival. Katrina was not just a storm; it was an unveiling. It revealed the fault lines of history, the unequal distribution of safety and risk, the quiet currents that have always shaped whose dreams are deferred and whose are amplified.

Now, as I walk across streets and through parks that are not mine by birth but may yet become mine by presence, I feel the echoes of that moment reverberate into the present. Displacement is not a single event. It is a series of ripples—some seismic, some almost imperceptible—that alter us, force us to ask what we carry and what we will set down. I have landed, not in the place I left, but in a liminal field where memory and imagination intertwine. The language here is unfamiliar—the rhythm of daily life, the way dusk settles, the rain patterns.

During my graduation speech to the class of 2025 at CU Boulder back in May, I shared “We are in times of dreams deferred, uncertainty, and a reshaping of our surrounding landscapes. Yet, at the same time, we are in times of dreams amplified, milestones, and fierce builders for expanding the sense of belonging.” I have referenced this excerpt many times including in my last blog Illuminating Hope and Possibility: Art as a Beacon of Change. This time around, I lean into it again because the world feels, at this juncture, as if it is holding its breath—poised between what was and what might be. There are currents that threaten to pull us apart, to convince us that the chasms between us are unbridgeable. Sometimes, I find myself living in a moment that feels borrowed from the pages of history, where shifts ripple outward in ways I once believed belonged solely to past generations. The faith I once held— that some doors, those of division, of forgetting, of closing off—would never again swing open, now seems less assured.

It is tempting, in such times, to retreat. To surround ourselves with the relics of the known. To seek comfort in certainty, in the repetition of what has always been. But my walking practice—especially taken up in a new place—allows me to resist such enclosure. The walk is more than exercise; it is meditation, an embodied reminder that movement is both a leaving and a coming toward. With every step, I am reminded that we are not meant to stand still, nor to walk alone. We are travelers and builders, always seeking, always sewing the fabric of shared experience—one unfamiliar step at a time.

As I move, I see smiles and small gestures of welcome. Threading a new quilt of belonging, I am reminded that a sense of home is not simply found, but made—stitched together from moments of connection, however slight. Even the concept of home becomes fluid in this context. Is it a fixed geography, a spot on a map, or a quilt woven from the threads of experience, connection, and longing?

And yet, displacement carries shadows, too: the ache for what is gone, the sense of being an outsider in a narrative already in progress. It is easy to believe, in such moments, that the world is narrowing, that the horizon is receding. We are living through a period when the very foundations of shared culture—art, education, the stories we tell ourselves and each other—are under attack. There are those who would rather silence than listen, erase rather than remember, divide rather than bind together. I have watched, with a mixture of disbelief and resignation, as books are banned, as histories are rewritten or denied, as creative expression becomes a battleground rather than a bridge.

And yet. And yet. Here, too, I resolve to find hope. For every door that closes, another is carved free from stubborn will and collective imagination. I think often of my most recent meditation practice that is part of The Conversation Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-Body Belonging. We can do more together than we can do apart. I also think about how the image of a quilt—pieced together from fragments of many lives, many journeys—invites a soft curiosity, an awareness that each patch, each voice, draws its color from a different history, a different longing. Together, those patches become something greater, an offering to the future and a testament to the fact that indeed we can do more together than we can do apart.

My walk, then, is not just a return to ritual. It is a practice of re-inhabiting the world, of moving with intention through uncertainty. There is discomfort, yes, but also a peculiar liberation in recognizing that expectations can be set aside, that possibility lives in the uncharted. I have no map but curiosity, no compass but hope. Each day, I learn how to inhabit these shifting contours, to greet the unknown as a co-conspirator in the ongoing act of becoming.

As I walk, I find myself reflecting on how this moment sits at the intersection of the 20-year anniversary of Katrina, a rapidly shifting country—one that, in ways I’d only read about in history books, now asks questions I believed had been answered. The old stories—the ones where progress is inevitable, where cruelty and division are relics of the past—no longer suffice. We need new stories, new maps, new language for what it means to belong in a place and to each other.

Buddhist practices remind me: suffering is real, but so is the possibility of transformation. Change is not always chosen, but it is always formative. We are, each of us, both wounded and wondrous, marked by both loss and the capacity for renewal. In my meditation, I return to the vision of a geopolitical quilt—an intricate, beautiful mess of color and line, stitched from the pieces of many lives, many journeys. The practice calls me to move beyond isolation, to see my neighbor’s thread not as competition, but as complement.

This is the antidote to the present moment’s pressures—this willingness to begin again, to walk together even if our paces differ. To find ourselves in what is unfamiliar not by erasing what makes us separate and distinct but by recognizing that the journey itself binds us in spite of our differences. There are times when the path to connection is not wide or smooth; sometimes it is a narrow lane, running alongside uncertainty and risk. But the invitation, always, is to keep walking. To resist enclosure. To remain open to the possibility of being changed by those we meet along the way.

As I reflect on the milestone of Katrina’s anniversary, I am drawn back to the city’s musicians, artists, teachers, and neighbors—those who rebuilt not just structures but also the possibility and necessity of community. Their work was not just hammering and hauling, but the insistence that art and education are not luxuries, but lifelines. These are the forces—creative, intellectual, communal—that allow us to stitch resilience into our shared fabric. When we are told that some voices must be silenced, some stories set aside, we answer by amplifying those voices, by telling those stories in every way we know how.

The horizon is open, not in spite of displacement, but because of it. The world’s uncertainty is not a verdict, but an invitation. Each step I take, each mile behind me, is a reminder that belonging is not a state, but a practice—a willingness to keep showing up, to keep seeking, to keep building, to keep dreaming and actively doing. The threads of my story are now woven with those I meet along the way, forming a quilt that is at once unplanned and deeply intentional.

We are in an era of deferred dreams, but also of dreams fiercely pursued, of milestones marked not in solitude but in company. The attacks on art and education, the efforts to divide us, these are not new—and they are not insurmountable. History tells us that walls can be breached, that quilts will be mended, that communities will be reimagined. We do more together than we can do apart, and it is in our willingness to listen, to walk, to stitch our stories together, that we find our greatest strength.

In the end, perhaps that is the lesson of change. We are not meant to stand still, nor to walk alone. We are travelers and builders, always seeking, always sewing the fabric of shared experience—one unfamiliar step at a time. I remain tethered to hope, and to the different futures that beckon from the horizon: futures anchored not in divisiveness and cruelty, but in the ongoing, unfinished work of belonging, of building, of becoming. My walk has taught me this: the way forward is not always certain, but it is always possible.

And so, I keep going—curiosity my map, hope my compass, the open horizon ahead.