This was my first attempt to tell a story about my mother's life and her effect on mine. It is told in more of documentary style but it is worth a listen. It is one of my older stories first released in the book, "Imperfect Stories: Memories from Holt Street."

Before I really knew what my life would become, just as I was finishing up my junior year in college, I traveled to the remote western rainforest of Brazil. I spent 5 weeks with a community of people and in a place, "a living room" as different from the one I was first taught about what was important in life as possible. Now when I look back on it and experience the world of today, I wish - no I hope that people could learn to see the common elements between each other. I guess what I really desire is that people would connect their experience/living rooms with the people they see as most different from themselves. My favorite word and the name of this podcast plays underneath this story ; Propinquity: The necessity of close proximity for relationships and trust to begin.

In a small neighborhood in Ottumwa Iowa, my younger self learned the transformative power that happens when people (his child neighborhood friends) focus on a lot in between. A metaphor based on a real experience that started with the irrational act of mowing an abandon lot, knowing that it would not, could not last beyond that one summer. This became a core experience as to how the world is often transformed through acts of collaborative propinquity in the midst of a world that constantly promotes division and selfish individualism.