Waconia, Minnesota

To date, I have visited more countries than I have states. In fact, I’ve lived in more countries around the world than cities in the United States. A passionate traveler and an aspiring social change agent, I thrive when I’m in a new country, learning about a unique culture and assimilating into a different lifestyle. With a career in international education policy, I adapt easily and in no time wherever I am is home. From a rural village in Malawi to an earthquake-sensitive apartment in bustling Dhaka, Bangladesh, I’ve lived in all kinds of settings with a plethora of communities.

No matter where I am or have lived, the U.S. will always be my home. A born and raised Midwesterner, I spent my adolescent years planning my escape to bigger and better places. When I turned 18, I packed my bags for college, and haven’t moved back to Missouri for more than short stay since. Now, after a year or so in the U.S., I get the itch to go abroad and, within a month or two, I’m overseas once again.

I recently became engaged to a wonderful man. As we plan our wedding and next life chapter, I am in search of a more balanced lifestyle. I’ll never tire of traveling or immersing myself into new cultures. I know that. But I am ready to make the U.S. my home for the next several years and am prepared to calm my inner jetsetter’s itch and just ‘be’ in the States. I want to start our family at least somewhat near my own and establish some roots, regardless of where we go in the future.

Lately, I have also longed for exploration back in the Midwest. After living in exciting, albeit fast-paced New York on and off for the last five years, I miss the kind people and Midwestern charm. There are many States in America’s middle that I have yet to see.

So, in an effort to find my personal balance, I would love to visit Waconia, Minnesota and take a rock balancing class with artist Peter Juhl at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. Rock balancing is an undiscovered and underrated artistic hobby that I am eager to learn and practice, at least until I find my physical balance.

Emily
Harlem, NY

Effigy Mounds National Monument, IA

Over a period of 5000 years, a diverse and mysterious group of people lived in the Mississippi river valley. Everywhere they settled, they created earthen mounds. These range from small lumps to the grand Monk’s Mound in the pre-Columbian city of Cahokia, across from St. Louis, which contained 120 mounds. Many of these earthworks are flat-topped pyramids; others are spherical, conical, rectangular. All had a ceremonial purpose. But the most interesting of the mounds are the effigies, built in the likeness of mammals, birds, or reptiles.

There are 2 famous effigies in southern Ohio, the Great Serpent Mound and Alligator Mound. However, the greatest concentration is at Effigy Mounds National Park in Iowa. There are ~200 mounds, 31 of which are effigies, preserved here. I would love to visit this park, and the surrounding area, to connect with a vanished people who had a relationship with the natural world that is unknown in America today.

Brian
Tarrytown, NY
 

Hard to Choose

Nature of Culture? To experience humility. Hmmm... Appalachia for the music and to see a different way of life? The South for outsider architecture! Route 66 to feel really “American” in a Beat Generation kind of way. That would be vastness and culture and humbling. General Sherman tree, to see the oldest tree on earth, a tree that holds such history, longevity and grandeur, to see what kind of energy or humility? The Grand Canyon or Wyoming or Montana to see the vastness of this country... I think Marfa, Texas... for vastness and culture. Hard to choose just one but the purpose would be to feel humbled and awed and get a dose of culture all at once...

Anonymous
New York

Montgomery, Alabama

I always wanted to visit Montgomery, Alabama because my name is Montgomery and I thought there would be plenty of photo opportunities for me to take pictures with my name. I wonder what it would be like to say “I’m in Montgomery.”

Ken
New York City

Near Taos, New Mexico

Hot spring, no light, no sound. I want to be suspended in warm waters, birthed into a blackness punctured only by million year old light and a quiet of the earth breathing, slowly soughing. Worms and beetles will munch leaves and grass below us and when we are tired of looking into the world as it was when it all began, we will turn over and watch the patch of earth between us. In the gloaming, we will read Wordsworth, Tennyson, Neruda and Oliver. We’ll sleep until the birds wake us and have oatmeal and raisins and nuts. We will not catch fish. We’ll eat with our hands and drink tea with sage honey.

We will walk, hands behind our backs, hand in hand, look, Ma, no hands, no direction declared or known, though we’ll mark our passage with crumbs and hope to miss the witch that lives in all wood and the warlock that enchants any stream. Sometimes we’ll sing off or on key, sometimes we’ll howl, the pain of a lifetime, sometimes cry the joy of our species. We’ll sit quietly and look into each other’s eyes and see what we may find and occasionally we’ll ride on the other’s dream and cast our fortune to the wind and watch the great world spin.

We will immerse ourselves daily in the healing waters, hourly if need be; if need be until we are pruned and the remedy begins to take. Let’s heap our healing on healing and remember what solace there is in solitude, together and what pleasure in togetherness alone, out where the coyote howl, the blue moon rises and we sleep the dream of our being.

Ansell
New York, NY

Union, West Virginia

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Several years ago after seeing Kara Walker’s show at the Whitney, “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” and its address to the complications of the familial history between afro and euro americans, I came back to my mother’s apartment to find an accordion folder belonging to my recently deceased grandmother containing the will of Hugh Elmwood Caperton where slaves were listed as property he bequeathed to his children. Until that time, though I knew my mother’s family to be from Maryland and Virginia, I did not consider that my heritage included enslavers. I had been sensitive to and even obsessed with issues of race since I was a young child but did not really understand why.

A year after finding the will I found, again accidentally and not something accounted for, an old marbled book that contained pressed flowers sewn into it with written entries such as, “Gotten, May 12th, 1861 Sunday evening at the Deaf Dumb and Blind Institute;” “Given me by Aunt Emily my ‘Black Mamy’ as a token of ‘Especial Regard’ June 19th, 1861 Wednesday evening.” For probably another year, I dismissed it as the diary of some relative who had been a frivolous, southern girl.

In my studio, I had two coffee table books I had bought at Goodwill for unrelated source material, a Ken Burns book of images from the Civil War and a book on plants and gardening. It was seeing these books out, putting together family names I had hastily listed in my sketch book, and looking at the dates of the diary again, that I realized this was the diary of my great, great grandmother when she was 16 and this was the first year of the Civil War.

I suppose that my interest in the relationship between afro and euro americans comes from memes that I saw in my grandparents and that, as a child, I conflated them with what I saw as afro American culture; and, that the genes and memes from the historical period of several hundred years based in the social and economic institution of slavery, are deeply unresolved in many families. I am ambivalent about caring about the particulars of my own family and yet I think using the particulars to get to the larger issues that feel urgent right now, in this year of an election, may be the way for me. I am curious about the possibility of relatives that were not acknowledged or recorded because of racism and what, if anything, digging into that would stir up.

My friend Gretchen says that our ancestors animate us and I have been thinking that I have to go to this place I don’t know. Alice Caperton wrote the name of Union (Monroe County), West Virginia in her diary and online it says she is buried in the Green Hill Cemetery there. So much of this has been about encounter and it seems like a most appropriate next encounter would be to go to Union with a witness companion like you.

Shaw
Olympia, WA and NYC

Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, CA

For many years I have been interested in Zen Buddhism. I have spent time at the San Francisco Zen Center, Green Gulch Farm, CA, and Zen Mountain Monastery, NY, but I never got to Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the wilderness of the Los Padres National Forest, CA.

I own three Tassajara cookbooks that often catch my eye as I pass my kitchen bookshelf. While living in Guam, I met a couple also interested in Zen and when they lived previously in CA the husband volunteered his services as a doctor for the monks at Tassajara. The couple filled my head with visions of sitting zazen, hiking amongst wildflowers, eating the most delicious natural food, and bathing in the water of hot springs. The doctor is now deceased, but three years ago his wife (my good friend) asked me if I would join her at Tassajara for a week long retreat that would honor her husband and celebrate her 70th birthday. I would have jumped at the chance, except the retreat started the weekend of my younger daughter's wedding.

So I continue to dream about a joyful stay at Tassajara, the oldest Japanese Buddhist Soto Zen Monastery in the USA. First, I will have to travel this road!

Anonymous
PA

Denali National Park

I'm a city girl and as a city girl, I yearn for the outdoors. How lovely would it be to travel to Alaska and see the Northern Lights? Seeing it from Denali National Park and having Mt. McKinley in the background would make it a truly awesome sight. I don't get to see much of the night sky in NYC. The best celestial event I've ever seen was Comet Hale Bopp back in 1997. I saw it when I was visiting Cape Cod and I was awestruck. I can't even imagine what seeing the Aurora Borealis would be like. I've been thinking about it since I was a little girl. I would imagine that it would be a life changing event. I can't think of a better person to discover this sublime beauty with.

Lillian
New York, NY

Wichita, KS

Back in Spain during my college years, my friends and I used to goof and pretend we were talking in English (which was only vaguely true), and we always used Wichita in our sentences—We thought it was in Texas, and years later, when I moved to the US, I discovered it was the [largest city in] Kansas.

Miguel
New York, NY

Cape Canaveral, FL

I've never been to Cape Canaveral, Florida to see a rocket launch. Being that significant aspects of my visual artwork is inspired by the utopian aspects of space travel and technological exploration, witnessing a space launch with you would be inspiring.

Stephen
Baltimore, MD