Peace Corps Week 2026

by | Mar 1, 2026 | ASKing the World, Beekeeping, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Potpourri, USA

Peace Corps Week always brings me back to where so much of this journey began.

In 1997, I arrived in Paraguay as a beekeeping volunteer. I thought I was going to teach a skill. Instead, I learned how little I understood about place, community, and what it means to belong somewhere not my own.

Beekeeping taught me patience. It taught me to pay attention to systems I couldn’t control. It taught me that every hive is a community—fragile, interdependent, and shaped by forces far beyond what we can see.

But the deeper lesson wasn’t about bees.  It was about listening.

It was about sitting with people, sharing tereré, and realizing that knowledge doesn’t arrive from the outside—it grows from within relationships. It was about understanding that development, like ecology, is not something you impose. It’s something you participate in.

Looking back, I can see how much of my work today traces back to that experience.

The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute.  The World as a Village of 100 People.  Global citizenship, human geography, civic imagination.  And a love for daily walking!

All of it, in some way, began there—in a place where I first learned to see the world not as a map to understand, but as a community to be in relationship with.

Peace Corps didn’t just shape what I do. It shaped how I see.  And maybe that’s the real work:  Not to “help” the world.  But to learn how to belong to it more responsibly.

To all those serving, those who have served, and to those who support(ed) us—thank you for being part of that ongoing lesson.

#PeaceCorpsWeek #GlobalCitizenship #Beekeeping #Interdependence #Service #GeographicalImagination

What Does It Take to Fund Imagination?

by | Dec 17, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Mapping, Pedagogy, Potpourri, Public Geography, The CAMINANTE Project

Proposal: What Does It Take to Fund Imagination?

Applicant: A practitioner walking an unfinished road

Caminante, no hay camino — se hace camino al andar.
Traveler, there is no road. The road is made by walking.

1. Problem Statement 

Across the social impact landscape, there exist hundreds—likely thousands—of thoughtful, careful, deeply committed proposals that never receive serious consideration. Not because they lack merit, but because they aim to do work that is difficult to quantify with our current tools. They seek to shift mindsets, relationships, narratives, and cultures—the very conditions from which lasting transformation arises.

We operate within a funding ecosystem designed for projects rather than people, for predictable outputs rather than emergent learning, and for short-term proof rather than long-term transformation. In this ecosystem, imagination is praised rhetorically but rarely resourced materially.

We fund activities, but not the inner work that makes them meaningful.
We fund outputs, but not the worldview shifts that sustain change.
We fund what is visible, but overlook what is necessary.

As a result, practitioners are often asked to compress complex, relational, imaginative work into forms that favor certainty over curiosity and speed over depth. The work is reshaped to fit the metrics, rather than the metrics evolving to meet the work. Much is lost in this translation—especially proposals that seek to cultivate possibility rather than guarantee outcomes.

At the center of this problem lies a quiet truth that is widely shared but rarely spoken:

If practitioners had a living wage and long-term stability, much of this work could actually unfold.

2. Proposed Solution

This proposal is not for a single program or initiative. It is an invitation to rethink what we fund—and how.

If imagination is essential for navigating social, ecological, and cultural complexity, then imagination itself must be resourced. This requires funding approaches that behave less like transactions and more like companionship.

What this means in practice is support that offers:

  • Multi-year commitments that provide stability rather than perpetual precarity
  • Trust-based relationships grounded in shared learning
  • Space for emergence instead of predetermined certainty
  • Funding for practitioners, not only for deliverables
  • Accountability rooted in reflection and adaptation rather than prediction

When funding honors the slow, relational, meaning-making dimensions of change, practitioners are able to remain in the work long enough for transformation to take root. The result is not less rigor, but deeper integrity.

3. Project Activities

If imagination were taken seriously as a driver of transformation, the core “activities” might look different from what most proposals describe.

They might include time to think—still a radical act in a culture of constant productivity. Time to develop shared language for work that does not yet have a common vocabulary and/or lexicon. Slow cultivation of relationships with communities, not as pipelines or beneficiaries, but as collaborators in meaning-making.

They would include iterative prototyping that is allowed to be nonlinear and unfinished, sensemaking with peers navigating similar uncertainty, and reflection and storytelling treated as central practices rather than optional add-ons.

This is the work behind the work. It is often invisible, rarely funded, and yet indispensable for any change that hopes to last.

4. Budget Overview

A humane budget for imagination-centered practice acknowledges that imagination is labor.

Such a budget includes a living wage that allows a practitioner to remain in the work without chronic financial anxiety. It includes healthcare, stability, and protected time. It recognizes the contributions of collaborators and community partners through stipends rather than extraction.

It supports travel to the places where learning actually happens—not only to where the work is presented. It allocates resources for reflection, design iteration, and documentation. It protects time for reading, wandering, listening, and synthesis—the incubation periods from which insight emerges.

This logic has guided my work for years, including the development of The CAMINANTE Project: the recognition that sustainability for the practitioner is not indulgence. It is infrastructure.

5. Monitoring and Evaluation

Traditional monitoring and evaluation frameworks struggle to capture emergent, relational work. Yet imagination leaves traces, even if it cannot be reduced to a single metric.

Meaningful indicators include the quality and durability of relationships formed, shifts in language or framing within a community, changes in how people understand their agency, and early signs of cultural momentum. Practitioner sustainability—financial, emotional, relational—is itself a critical indicator.

Other signals may appear indirectly: unexpected invitations, new collaborations, stories that begin to circulate, experiments that open doors even when they “fail.”

Imagination cannot be neatly quantified, but it can be followed—like footprints across soft ground.

6. Expected Outcomes

If imagination were resourced with patience and trust, we would expect to see work with deeper ethical roots and longer lifespans. Practitioners would no longer need to contort their vision to fit short funding cycles. Funding ecosystems would begin to align more closely with human and ecological rhythms.

We would see cultural narratives shift slowly but perceptibly. We would see more proposals that do not promise certainty, but offer honesty. And we would see a growing number of CAMINANTES—walkers, seekers, wayfinders—creating paths that do not yet exist.

This is not idealism. It is simply what becomes possible when funding aligns with how transformation actually unfolds.

7. Vision Statement

A future in which those doing slow, relational, imaginative work are not surviving on the margins, but are supported with the time, trust, and stability their contributions require. A future in which imagination is recognized as essential civic infrastructure. A future built not through speed or spectacle, but through steadiness—through roads made by walking.

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Carrying Light Together

by | Dec 12, 2025 | Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Hagiography, Mapping, Potpourri, The CAMINANTE Project

St. Lucia Day has always felt like a soft interruption in December—a small lantern held up against the long night. But this year, I find myself thinking about the day not just as a celebration of light, but as an invitation to rethink the structures that shape the darkness.

The stories of Lucia are full of quiet defiance: choosing generosity over scarcity, service over status, courage over compliance. They aren’t just moral tales; they hint at the possibility that ordinary people can resist the logic of systems that normalize exhaustion, inequity, and the dimming of our collective imagination.

If anything, the world doesn’t lack light—it lacks the conditions that allow light to travel. We live within arrangements that reward speed, extraction, and individualism, while sidelining care, rest, and interdependence. Yet on December 13, this feast day quietly insists that illumination is not a solitary act. Lucia doesn’t walk alone; the procession follows. The light moves because many carry it.

I’m trying to sit with that truth: that the worlds we inhabit are neither inevitable nor fixed. They are constructed—often without our consent, but never beyond our ability to reshape. Celebrations like today remind me that imagining alternatives is not naïve; it’s necessary. The future is not something delivered to us from on high. It’s something we co-create, choice by choice, gesture by gesture.

So I’m marking St. Lucia Day with a kind of hopeful scrutiny. What are the systems that dim our capacity to care for each other? Where can we intervene with a small, steady light? And what happens when many of us decide that the light we carry is not for ornament, but for orientation—toward a world that honors dignity, gentleness, and shared responsibility?

And maybe there’s something grounding in marking this together, quietly, across time zones and borders. So on December 13, I invite you to light a candle at 9 p.m. local time (wherever you are)—not as a symbolic fix, not as a performance, but as a reminder that illumination grows in community. A reminder that even scattered across the globe, our small flames can echo one another.

Imagine what could be and act—however modestly—in alignment with that vision. Light does not banish the night, but it helps us walk together toward a dawn of our own making. That feels like a celebration worth returning to every year.

​

A Winter Reflection on Ghosts, Doubles, and the Self

by | Dec 12, 2025 | book review, Film Review, Geographical Imaginations, Potpourri

Every December, literature seems to return—almost ritually—to the scene of a man encountering himself. Perhaps this is why so many of us begin the season with Dickens. His tale of a cold-hearted clerk startled into self-recognition by the ghosts of Christmas past and future has long made the holiday into a time for temporal disturbance, when the boundaries between then and now, self and shadow, grow permeable. Scrooge’s journeys are encounters not with spirits alone but with the versions of himself he once was and the versions he fears becoming. Few stories remind us so strongly that one lifetime can contain multiple selves.

But once you open the door Dickens built, other visitors begin arriving.

A solitary bureaucrat in nineteenth-century Russia, for instance, finds himself haunted by a man who looks exactly like him, though more confident, more capable—a double who seems intent on rewriting his life. In another century and another city, a young aristocrat discovers that a second self shadows him everywhere, whispering warnings he refuses to heed. These doubles do not come wrapped in chains or dressed in Dickensian robes; they come instead as rivals, consciences, or inescapable mirrors.

Elsewhere, in the misty borderlands of German Romanticism, travelers report glimpsing their likenesses at dusk—uncanny figures who step out of dreams or reflections, as if the world briefly permits a rift in identity. And in the pages of early modernist fiction, men begin to suspect that they are composed of more selves than they can recognize, their identities scattered like fragments of glass.

Still further along the literary path, time itself loosens. A war-shaken man becomes unstuck from chronology, slipping from childhood to old age and back again, meeting himself in flashes like a traveler glimpsing his own cabin window from the train. Philosophers and novelists stage debates within the self: one man discovers that he exists differently in the mind of every person he meets, while another journeys inward to find that his “double” is less an intruder than an intimate companion.

Yet no author orchestrates this chorus of selves as quietly—or as astonishingly—as the one who waits at the center of this winter constellation.

On a bench beside a river, an elderly man meets a young stranger who turns out to be himself. Each believes he sits in a different city, a different year; each is certain of his own reality. Their conversation is gentle, speculative, edged with melancholy. One speaks from experience, the other from expectation. Neither can fully convince the other of the world he inhabits. What they share, tenuously, is the idea that identity might stretch across time like a bridge dreamed into being, holding two versions of the same life in momentary equilibrium.

When they part, neither is sure what has happened. Perhaps it was a dream. Perhaps it was memory. Perhaps, as so many winter tales suggest, the season itself allows encounters that ordinary chronology forbids.

And returning to Dickens, one begins to realize: the ghosts he invented are but one form of a much older visitation. Literature is full of these meetings—with doubles, with shadows, with earlier or later selves—each offering a chance to consider what it means to change, or to remain, or simply to be.

A story read in December reminds us: we are never entirely alone. Somewhere, the self we once were is waiting on a bench by a river. Somewhere else, the self we might yet become is pausing, turning, listening.

Reading List: Ghosts, Doubles, and the Many Selves

Charles Dickens — A Christmas Carol (1843)

Fyodor Dostoevsky — The Double (1846)

Edgar Allan Poe — “William Wilson” (1839)

E.T.A. Hoffmann — “The Doppelgänger” / “The Doubles” (early 19th century)

Kurt Vonnegut — Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Luigi Pirandello — One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (1926)

Hermann Hesse — Steppenwolf (1927)

Jorge Luis Borges — “The Other” (1972)

Jorge Luis Borges — “Borges and I” (1960)

Jorge Luis Borges — “The Other Death” (1949)

Italo Calvino — If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979)

Walking the Labyrinth

by | Sep 30, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Language, Mapping, Pedagogy, Potpourri, Public Geography

A Framework for Designing Inquiry-Based Expeditions

When we imagine planning an expedition, a project, or even a career step, it’s tempting to picture the path as a straight line: define the goal, create a plan, execute. But anyone who has actually walked such a journey knows it’s rarely so direct.

That’s why I turn to the metaphor of the labyrinth. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth isn’t about dead ends or wrong turns. There is only one path, and though it winds outward and inward, you always move toward the center. The gift of the labyrinth is that it reminds us: progress doesn’t mean walking straight ahead. Progress can mean circling back, pausing, or picking up new tools along the way.

For anyone embarking on an inquiry-driven expedition — whether it’s a research project, a service-learning program, or a self-designed summer of exploration — the labyrinth can serve as both metaphor and method.

Step 1: Glimpse the Center

Every journey starts with a vision, even if it’s fleeting. Write one sentence that captures your central purpose. For example:
 “If my expedition does one thing well, it is…”

This is your north star, your “center.” Don’t worry if it feels fuzzy — clarity comes later.

Step 2: The Turn Outward

The labyrinth doesn’t take you straight to the middle; it pushes you outward first. That’s the part of the journey where doubt, unknowns, and questions surface. Ask yourself:

  • What don’t I know yet?
  • What feels unclear or intimidating?

Naming these uncertainties is not weakness — it’s the work. By acknowledging what’s missing, you create space to learn.

Step 3: Gather Your Tools

We rarely walk alone. Along the path, you’ll need tools — intellectual, relational, and practical — to carry inward. I like to divide them into four categories:

  • Conversations: mentors, peers, or communities to learn from
  • Concepts/Values: the principles that keep you aligned
  • Methods: research, mapping, storytelling, or observation techniques
  • Practices: reflection, rest, journaling, creative rituals that sustain you

Choose three to five. These will be your companions.

Step 4: Twists and Crossroads

No journey unfolds without barriers. Some are practical (time, funding, logistics). Others are external expectations — from family, institutions, or even society’s ideas about what you “should” do.

The regenerative approach isn’t to push through at all costs but to prepare alternate routes that still honor your purpose. Write a few if/then scenarios:

  • If not this location, then that one.
  • If not formal internship, then independent research or service.

Flexibility builds resilience.

Step 5: Return to the Center

Finally, revisit your original vision. With your tools, your unknowns, and your alternate paths in mind, rewrite it. Make it sharper, more grounded, more alive. You’re not back where you started — you’re back with new eyes.

Why the Labyrinth Matters

The labyrinth exercise is not about perfection. It’s about alignment. In regenerative leadership, we learn that when our values and our actions line up, our work nourishes us instead of depleting us. The labyrinth is a reminder that the path is rarely straight — but it is always meaningful.

So the next time you begin planning your inquiry-based expedition, don’t draw a checklist. Draw a labyrinth. Glimpse your center, name your unknowns, gather your tools, prepare your alternate routes, and walk with curiosity.

Because the truth is, the twists are not distractions from the journey — the twists are the journey.

For a short film exploring the labyrinth as guide, click here.

Roots in the Sky: Returning to The Fountain in Granada

by | Jul 20, 2025 | ASKing the World, Film Review, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Hagiography, Potpourri, Spain

There are films you return to not for plot, but for weather—for their atmosphere, their gravity, their pull on your interior tides. Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is one of those films for me. I’ve seen it at least ten times. Each time, I enter its spiral a little differently. Each time, it offers something else.

This time, I watched it in Granada.

Not in a theater—just me, a screen, and the layered hum of a city that refuses to stay in one time–unless, of course, you ignore that palimpsest. I’ve walked through the Albaicín, traced the patterned shadows in the Alhambra, listened to church bells echo through streets once shaped by mosques. Granada is a city that doesn’t forget. It blurs. It folds time inward. And so does The Fountain.

Watching it here, something shifted.

Where You Are Shapes What You See

I’ve always believed that place changes how we experience a film. There are movies that resonate because of when you see them—but others because of where.

Watch Talk to Her in Madrid and it becomes a meditation on distance.
Watch Pan’s Labyrinth in Segovia and the stones seem to whisper Franco’s afterlife.
Watch The Spirit of the Beehive in Castilla and the earth itself feels hollowed out by silence.

And watching The Fountain in Granada?

It felt inevitable. Not like discovering something new, but like opening a letter I’d kept folded for years.

A Familiar Spiral, Seen from a New Angle

I know this film. I know its cuts, its rhythms, its grief. I know the way Izzi smiles in the snow, the way Tom trembles with denial, the way the star—Xibalba—burns with something more than light.

But here in Granada, surrounded by centuries of conquest, devotion, beauty, and erasure, the film felt different. It didn’t just move through time—it held it. It mirrored this place where empires once chased permanence and instead found decay. Where a civilization imagined itself eternal, and was turned into ornament.

The film’s refusal to separate love from death, empire from myth, felt at home here.

Izzi and Isabel

There’s a detail I’d noticed before, but never felt quite as sharply: the Queen in Izzi’s novel-in-progress shares her name—Isabel. In the film, she’s regal, serene, sending her conquistador to find the Tree of Life in Yucatán. In real history, Queen Isabel of Castile sent explorers westward for her own tree: legacy, salvation, dominion.

And Izzi—Rachel Weisz’s Izzi—is dying, but she’s the only one at peace. She understands that death is not the enemy. It is her partner who can’t accept it, who rages and clings and unravels.

Two Izzis. Two Isabellas. One seeks transcendence through conquest. The other, through surrender.

Granada, once ruled by Isabel the Queen, becomes a strange echo chamber for this film. The question lingers: What is the cost of trying to outrun death?

The Tree, the Star, the Stone

The Tree of Life sits at the center of all three timelines in the film—rooted in the past, glowing in the future, decaying in the present. It offers healing. It demands sacrifice. It transcends.

Here in Granada, trees hold history too. The olive, the cypress, the orange blossom. They survive regimes. They outlast architecture. In the gardens of the Generalife, they feel like quiet gods.

And then there’s stone. The stones that built this city, that carry verses and scars. The kind of stones that outlive their makers, but not their meanings.

The film asks: can you live forever through what you build, what you love, what you plant?  Granada doesn’t answer. But it gestures. It points to the ruins, and then to the sky.

Death Is the Road to Awe

There’s a line I’ve always carried from The Fountain:  “Death is the road to awe.”

In Granada, that line stops being metaphor.

Here, we might think of everything as awe. The light on tiled walls. The curve of an arch built for vanished prayers. The hush of twilight in a square where languages once braided together.

But everything is death, too. Not as absence, but as transformation. This city isn’t preserved—it’s composted. Its beauty is rooted in what it’s lost, what it’s blended, what it’s become.

This time, I didn’t watch The Fountain to understand it.  I watched it to stand inside it. And Granada made that possible.

 

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After ten viewings, I thought I knew The Fountain. But Granada taught me otherwise.

Some films are just films.  Others become companions—haunting you, changing with you, asking new questions as your surroundings shift.  Here, The Fountain wasn’t about escaping death.  It was about learning to carry time—in your breath, in your grief, in the trees you plant knowing they’ll outlive you.  

And in that, it felt like a conversation with this city.  One rooted in the soil. One burning in the stars.