Love, Fear, and a Phone Call
Thirty days on the road, this is The Love Fear Tour.
Sunrise on Beaver Lake
Hello Neighbors,
It’s been 30 days since I packed up storage in Chicago, loaded the car, and drove toward whatever was waiting.
I’m writing from the tranquil, rocky shores of Beaver Lake in the Arkansas Ozarks. The mornings here rise slowly. The intoxicating fragrance from the cypress trees hangs in the air like the mist burning off the lake each morning. Judy watches the shoreline for the snowbirds migrating south for winter. The Canadian geese began arriving two days ago. And Maeve takes a liking to her new tent home and adventure cat life. A proud moment for a cat from Bushwick, Brooklyn.
I’ve been calling this stretch The Love Fear Tour for reasons tattooed on my knuckles and perpetually rooted in my mind. Everywhere I look, the choice feels the same: do we lead with love or let fear do the driving?
Out here, I’m using my own life as the lab. Writing, photographing, recording, having the conversations I’ve avoided, and testing what happens when you actually live the questions instead of just asking them.
Refugio de La Mariposa — Fowler Creek, Missouri
How do you stay human in a world that teaches us to be numb?
What does it actually mean to choose love when fear feels easier?
What does courage look like in the small, daily moments without witness?
How do you bridge a silence that’s lasted years? And what’s the real cost of reconciliation?
What happens to your identity when you leave behind everything familiar?
What wisdom is hiding in overlooked places… the small towns, the quiet landscapes, the late-night music sets, and the solitary and starry nights?
Who do you become when you stop performing transformation and start living it?
Can art, writing, photography, and conversation be one continuous, infinite practice of searching?
What does it mean to be fully alive in America right now?
Three weeks in Missouri reminded me that friends and nature are the best teachers of what it means to live in harmony. Here at Beaver Lake, I’m facing something harder: making a phone call after more than a decade of silence with my mother. If I’m going to ask others about courage, and bravery, and vulnerability, and love, and fear… well, I need to know what it costs.
What surfaces when you let go of the script? When strangers become teachers, landscapes become collaborators, and you create a space in your heart to love your fear.
I’ll keep sharing dispatches from the road — new podcast conversations, field notes, images, and whatever else the search hands me. I look forward to sharing what trail magic has come to mean to me, and the belief that, “the trail always provides.”
