photographers artists

Chris Bartoldus is a graphic designer based in Cary, North Carolina. His work is focused on creating advertising campaigns, digital experiences and creative technology. Chris was featured in the 2020 Communication Arts Magazine for excellence in design. He is graduating in May 2022 with B.F.A.s in both advertising and branding, as well as graphic design.

(“Crossed Words,” page 10)

Audrey Meeker creates comics. Previously, she was published in POMEgranate Magazine. When not working, she enjoys playing volleyball and swing dancing. She is currently completing her B.F.A. in sequential art, due to graduate in spring 2021.

(Illustrations, page 36)

Geoff Hagray is a photographer based in both Savannah and Philadelphia. His work has been featured in Buzzfeed and Harper’s Bazaar. He is earning a B.F.A. in photography with a concentration in documentary photography and a minor in film and television. He will graduate later this year. (“The Art of Snakes and Disregarding Fear,” page 30)

Anya Driffill creates paintings and illustrations. She was previously featured in SCAD’s Drawing Works 2020 exhibition. Anya will graduate with a B.A. in sequential art in fall 2021.

(Portraits, page 2)

Krista Miller makes work inspired by nature and animals. Krista works through graphic design and illustration, both in traditional and digital mediums. They will graduate in 2022, earning a B.F.A. in graphic design. (“Sweet Rejection *Sweats*,” page 4)

It’s an age-old tale — rejection. You thought you were adequately prepared; you lost your share of school play roles, sports competitions and raffles. Your adults warned you that the beast would look through your window at some point. Well, some point has arrived.

Yeah, yeah, talking about early-stage career failure is as unpleasant as listening to a coworker’s dream from last night. That’s why you’re sharing, because it’s always different when it’s your dream, right?

Starting out, a couple of nos seem inevitable. It’s easy to stand behind the well-worn “third time’s the charm.” But months and a dozen nos later, you plan your backup moves and wonder if you’re playing right into the wolf’s trap. Your only defense against him is the smell of the stress sweat that leaves you randomly aglow.

You’ve dragged blankets into your workspace, and it’s looking more like a nest every day. Keep sittin’ there like a brightly dressed yet broody chicken, and stare at your submission spreadsheet, which is splattered with red. Throw the beast bits, short pieces. Watch him slurp down shorts, devour description. Hopefully, he’ll fill up before getting a whiff of your favorites. But we’ll get back to him in a bit. For now, you’re on LinkedIn, checking if that newsroom internship you applied to last month is still “actively recruiting.” They are. Good, that’s code for “there’s still hope

written by Maggie Maize, illustrated by Krista Miller

you’ll get a callback.” You peep a post titled “Your breakthrough is coming. Hang in there.” Close the tab. Slap that laptop shut.

Perhaps inspirational posts feel like a slap because we’re in the middle of a pandemic that’s weighing on your life. Or maybe because you want everybody to be more vulnerable … It’s also possible you’re just preoccupied with how you’re going to rearrange your website for the fifth day in a row, even though nothing new has been published.

where you’re maskless in a crowd, late for work, sharing butterfly kisses with the wolf, or your favorite: pleading your dad to stop watching Fox News. Your brain plays tricks on you while you’re awake, too. It tries to change the “word of the day” email blast into an acceptance note from The New Yorker. And just this morning, you were making headway on a piece about the grime building up on your computer keys when things got weird. You took your childhood ophthalmologist’s advice for the first time and stared at the wall for a good 20 seconds. Any reason for a break, right? The twenty seconds turned into a 20-minute conversation with yourself about if you should paint the wall that red color that plagues your spreadsheet.

Snap out of it. No, close Duolingo. You’ve already mastered how to say, “My, what a lovely den you have” in five languages. Just put the phone down! Doomscrolling wedding announcements won’t get you anywhere, either.

It’s OK to laugh at yourself. No one will hear. Well, maybe your adults in the next room will, but they’ll only rush in and ask what’s wrong. While they’re lurking in the doorway, show them how you brush your hair now — only in the front, like all your friends with Zoom jobs do. The comparison to other people who found success should convince them you’re back to normal.

Face it, rejection has changed you. There’s no point suppressing those stress dreams

Try spicing up your routine. Take a step back from reading about COVID parties, convening megachurches, overflowing ICUs, people dying alone and mass graves. Carry your old typewriter outside. Don’t worry, the wolf will behave. He understands that you have to try to make something before he can feast on it. The clunky machine makes you feel like a real writer, and its weight on your lap is comforting. But the fresh air excites your phalanges, and they forsake “home row” and begin pecking the vintage keys. Surely this is a gateway habit. One minute it’s pecking fingers, the next it’s painting the white walls with your spaghetti sauce-stained hands. That thought gets you back on track. Still, Mr. Lefty ring-finger doesn’t take responsibility for his flubs. home without a pandemic obliterating the market. Your response: “My, what an active imagination you have.” don’t give it a hard pass as well. Thank you for your time.”

“I’d perform better wearing a ring,” Lefty says. Marriage … you say, “Keep dreaming.” But after a few more blunders — weedeadter, Linkedfin, craigslidt — you track down a lovely promise ring on Etsy. Now put that writing degree to use and craft some vows. Damn it, I promise to get this piece published.

The clever response goads you to reconnect with your old self. After all, your sixth-grade writing teacher called you an excellent writer. Bless her and how she always overlooked that you spelled writing like “writting.” Blame Lefty. All of the joyful and lopsided words clash with your newfound pessimism.

Come on, rejection can be OK. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to skip a couple of the grieving steps and accept it quickly. Brush the wolf’s fur while you can; braid it if he lets you. Heck, buy the good boy a bed and a round of kibble.

Another plus: you don’t have to update your bio as often because, on paper, you’re the same person as you were at the beginning of the year. And not having a job means people won’t see your new grimace wrinkles or that you started adding exclamation points in your writing to make up for your hollowness.

Surprise, the sweats are back. You want to prove yourself so badly that you’d help your co-worker interpret their dream. Will that fit on your résumé?

As you become a connoisseur of rejection emails, you appreciate all the ways to say no. There’s the soft let down: “We receive many excellent submissions each reading period, and while yours is one of them, it was not chosen for the upcoming issue. This is not a reflection on your worth as a writer. We hope you keep creating and stay healthy and safe in the coming months.” The basic: “It was a pleasure to read your submission. Unfortunately, we cannot publish your work at this time.” And your absolute favorite: “Thanks for thinking of us for this, but I’m afraid it’s a pass.” That’s the one you’d send; no sense in dragging it out.

Now try out a new saying. Your catchphrase, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” isn’t helping you transform into the strong main character everyone hopes you’ll be. Give this a go: “My, what shiny teeth you have.” The wolf dissolves into tears. Pity him because that’s your go-to reaction when your family says, “There’s plenty of time to figure it out.” Perhaps “watch, I’ll do it,” will suffice. Of course it doesn’t feel onbrand — your brand is currently depressing. Ahh … another spam email bearing your favorite words. “These are unprecedented times.” It’s true, but the wolf is living his best life outside your coop, waiting for your next round of chicks to hatch. He whispers that you’d still be jobless and back at

Yank the string that lights your business mind. Search for the newest “perfect home” for your article and shake off that you thought the last one was, too. Brush off that bitterness in your cover letter. Quick! While the wolf’s full, try to sound charming. Press submit. Remember that the fees make other people’s dreams happen.

Go back to the spreadsheet. Soften the no that’s rounding the bend by picking backup homes. That way, when you’re numb, it’s easier to move forward. What’s this? A sub that said move on if they haven’t responded within six months. Today marks six months and a day. “It’s cool. I can take a hint.” Look over the submission again. What went wrong?

Curses. It was the happy cover letter. How could you have written such smiling prose only 181 days ago? This is how you want to write the next one: “Dear (editor’s name), I’m hoping this piece is up your alley, unlike the other three pubs I tried before you. Please

JUST IN … another no. One lick from the wolf skins your ego and leaves you shivering. You weren’t expecting this knockback for another two months. The piece jumped from “Received” to “Declined” in Submittable faster than your obsessive checking could catch. Go on, go climb into bed. It’ll be easier to overthink snuggled under your childhood duvet. The other blankets will keep your nest warm while you’re away.

Fall onto Pinterest’s soft lap. Absorb all of the bread, pasta, platform shoes and composting tips. Stop at a quote that’s set over a misty forest line. “If it’s not OK, it’s not the end. — John Lennon.” Close Pinterest.

Melt into the mattress. Remember that this is where Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf ate both her and her grandma. When your wolf compliments your vibrant, sadness-fighting outfit, tell him, “I do this for me, not you.” How’s that for a new saying?

We’ve heard enough bad news surrounding COVID-19. What are the positive impacts of the pandemic, and what lessons can we take away?

In January 2020, when the first news about a COVID-19 outbreak spread around the world, we didn’t expect the virus to spread almost equally as fast. Since then, there hasn’t been a day without the pandemic on the news. And since then, many have lost family members to the virus, faced financial crises or health problems — on the physical and mental level. There’s no doubt that this pandemic has been a time of transformation in many ways. But despite all the not-sowelcome changes, there have also been positive effects.

Valentina Garcia Ruiz

“I was supposed to go to Lacoste in March,” said Valentina Garcia Ruiz, a third-year student pursuing a B.F.A. in industrial design. But instead of catching a flight to France, she boarded a plane to Bogota, Colombia — her hometown. “And when I was back home, we got quarantined for about five months.” Although being stuck at home with her family was the flip-side situation of what she had planned, quarantine was also a good time to rediscover herself. “I was thinking more about what I was doing and how I was approaching life, like the impact I have and what my career goals are.”

The pandemic has shown that we can’t continue like we did before. We can’t go back to the normal we used to know. “Normal has to change,” Valentina said. “It’s been a great damage to our planet and in some ways also to ourselves.”

During lockdown, when the world came to a halt, she started educating herself about how she can have a more positive impact on the environment. While listening to podcasts about the climate crisis, veganism and sustainable design, said she realized that our personal choices shape the world around us.

“Sometimes we think that what we do is not relevant but when people ask you why you are doing this and you know what you’re doing, then it has a greater impact,” she said. That’s why she started replacing animal products with plant-based alternatives and includes more sustainability in her designs now.

When quarantine lifted, she decided to go to the United States to stay with her uncle, an industrial designer. “I thought it would be more convenient for my career because I have more resources here than at home,” she said.

For her, 2020 ended with an outlook towards an industrial design internship at a car company in Shanghai. “I’ve never been to Asia but I’m excited to get to know another part of the world,” she said.

Talia Sullivan

“In March, schools shut down and A-Levels got canceled,” said Talia Sullivan, an incoming first-year student from England. She was supposed to run for SCAD’s crosscountry team in fall 2020, but now she’s starting her studies during winter quarter 2021. “So, I couldn’t do my A-Levels. I worked quite hard from September to January and I was putting in a lot of work for these exams. When they said they were canceled, I almost felt a bit cheated.”

When school suddenly ended and studying didn’t take up all her time anymore, she said she found herself a little hopeless. “I didn’t really know what to do with myself,” she said. As she was also injured from running for a while, she had to find another way to keep herself active. “Then, during the lockdown, I kind of got into cycling,” Talia said. She didn’t have a good bike, so she started using her friend’s bike. And she discovered that she really likes cycling. “It really was helpful, and it made me happy.”

But cycling was not the only thing Talia discovered during quarantine. “I started my art career,” she said. The extra time in lockdown gave her a chance to work more on her paintings.

When other people started seeing her work on Instagram, she started doing commissions. “I had never really sold many commissions before lockdown, but I got really, really into it over quarantine.”

In summer, when the lockdown was lifted, she also got both of her two jobs back. Juggling work and her commissions, she has only been working and painting since July. The restrictions imposed by the government were loosened throughout the summer, but with the second wave going through Europe, the United Kingdom went back into lockdown. “Where we are in England, in the middle of nowhere, the whole thing hasn’t really been affecting us. So, the second wave doesn’t feel as bad,” she said.

The year 2020 also taught her a lot about friendship. At the end of high school, when you’re not surrounded by the same people every day, true friendship is revealed. “I’ve learned who my real friends are, and it sounds quite bad, but I know who I’m gonna stay friends with for a lot of my life,” Talia said. She said the lockdown also made her realize that she wants to be more independent from her family, so she is glad to be starting college now.

Mason Sauikie

“This year I came out as trans,” said Mason Sauikie, a second-year student earning a B.F.A. in sequential art. “For the longest time, I was really, really scared to come out as transgender. For years, I identified as something else.”

He said it was the pandemic that inspired him to finally be who he really is. While friends were losing family members and the pandemic changed the world so quickly, Mason also changed. “I just realized that life is too short to not live as myself. If [the pandemic] didn’t happen, I probably would never have come out.”

In New Jersey, where Mason is from, the lockdown at the beginning of 2020 was especially tough. Masks, curfew and long lines for groceries and gas were only some of the changes that COVID-19 brought into daily life.

“To be honest, I did downplay this virus in the beginning,” Mason said. “Until I saw how many people were passing away in my town.”

The pandemic makes us aware of how short life can be. And in realizing our mortality, we realize that life is precious and there is no time to live as someone else. “It made me realize that I shouldn’t really care about what anybody thinks as long as I’m happy,” Mason said.

The process from deciding to come out to changing his name and starting gender therapy was not a short one. But with his best friend by his side, he said he gathered enough confidence to come out to the rest of his friends, his family and the SCAD Cross Country team that Mason is a part of.

Competing in cross country for SCAD is also the reason Mason can’t do any physical transitioning until after college. “Right now, I’m just getting everyone to call me Mason, wearing a binder, wearing trans tape and going to groups that help me with the voice change. That’s small things but they’re big steps in retrospect,” Mason said.

Due to the pandemic, the team’s spring and fall season were canceled. Later in the year, the team’s coach resigned, and both fall and winter quarter didn’t resume on-ground. But despite all this unfortunate news, there were also positives to the situation.

Without a strict training schedule, there was more time to focus on work and doing well in school. “I was finding new ways to express myself in my work,” Mason said. As a sequential art student, he’s dedicated to bringing more diversity into the world of comics. “We’re so hooked up on the Golden ages of comics where it’s predominantly white, male superheroes. I want to get away from that and I want to have more people from the LGBT community in comics and more diversity in race,” he said.

For Mason, being back in Savannah in the fall was one of the best things that happened in 2020 because he was surrounded by people he could relate to. “But other than that,” he said, “the best thing that happened was probably coming out and bettering my art.”

written by Ben Elhav, graphics by Chris Bartoldus

One front of the culture wars is a debate over the need for new words and the definitions of old ones. Yet, even as conservatives maintain that language is untouchable, it continues to slip through their fingers.

As is often the case, one Shabbat dinner conversation became the pretext for philosophical investigation. Swiveling what was likely an overfull glass of red wine, I told my staunchly conservative friend Tony that I had recently read “Slaughterhouse-Five.”

“How was it?” he asked.

“It was easier to digest as an audiobook,” I replied.

“So ... you didn’t read it.”

I was stunned. Having failed to drag my eyes across physical words on a page, I had somehow fallen short of “reading.” Tony was adamant. No matter how much I protested, the word wouldn’t bend. “Reading” would remain reading, as it had been defined since the first clay tablet or papyrus scroll. What were the implications of this semantic scuffle? Had I lied in characterizing my actions as “reading?” Had I done something worse by changing its meaning?

What’s Orwellian anyway? The term, typically used to describe a dystopian society with characteristics of those in the writings of George Orwell, seems to mean different things to different people. Indeed, though the left and the right increasingly agree that the novel “1984” is relevant to our times, they remain divided on why. Those of us on the left might see parallels in the quiet growth of a police and surveillance state. The right, however, seems uniquely concerned with the idea of “newspeak.”

In the world of “1984,” “newspeak” is a tactic used by the authoritarian government of the novel to stifle dissent and speech by abbreviating existing words and altering the meanings of others. Some obvious examples see the word “war” substituted for “peace,” the word “injustice” for “justice” and “truth” with “falsehood.” To many of Orwell’s rightinclined readers, the idea that such crucial values can be expressed as their opposites is horrifying in concept alone, and seems to be occurring every day in reality.

“[Newspeak] finds expression today in the Pronoun Police, who demonize the use of ‘he’ and ‘she’ as potentially transphobic and invent Newspeak pronouns in their stead,” wrote Brendan O’ Neill, editor of Spiked, in his essay “Orwell’s ‘1984’ Describes the Authoritarian Left Better than it Does Trump.” “Some campuses now want everyone to use ‘ze’ as a default pronoun. ‘Ze’ might be the most Newspeak word ever: a strange small word you must use if you want to be considered morally good.”

In O’Neill’s understanding, the word “ze” is nonsensical at best, and at its worst a form of slander, having replaced fundamentally truthful words like “he” and “she.” O’Neill assumes that the word has been dreamt up by a nefarious cabal of liberal elites who enforce the word from on high with threats of social ostracization. Nevermind that their actual power seems limited, as O’Neill has so far evaded arrest and publishes with impunity. In time, it will somehow become a word we “must use.”

Yet even if the pronoun police were as real a menace as the omnipresent party of “1984,” one suspects that their evil efforts to change meaning itself would fail. After all, do we truly believe that North Koreans live in a “Democratic Republic?” Was the Nazi Party’s “National Socialism” really leftist in its economics? It only took Winston, the protagonist of “1984,” a couple of chapters to understand that he could refer to the idea of “freedom” by using the word “tyranny.” Language coined by authoritarians is subverted, its credibility eroded. Ultimately, a rose by any other name still smells as sweet.

Is it really the case, however, that nonbinary pronouns have become more accepted through some combination of coercive governments and liberal think tanks? It certainly seems like our corporate overlords have become more receptive to the “gay agenda.” Pride Parades across the country are now frequented by representatives from the largest cosmetic brands, department stores, and even banks. Yet, as people on both the right and left are quick to point out, this is often nothing more than vapid virtue signaling, an appeal to consumers who want capitalism with a conscience. Companies can see that the market for people who care about gay rights is expanding.

Perhaps then, the growing number of politicians and CEOs in the pocket of “big gay” has less to do with some inherent ideology, and more to do with recognizing what their constituents and customers want. Likewise, with Pew Research Polls indicating that a majority of Americans are comfortable with gender neutral pronouns, their use will inevitably permeate the public square. Words like “ze” are coined and used organically, a response to the confines of the gender binary. Their prevalence is hardly due to some shadowy authoritarian force, but is the consequence of their actual utility to society. Why then, conservatives ask, should we leave language to the mob?

Language has an inescapable social role. These societal implications become clear when we consider how language defines race. As could be inferred by the setting of the anecdote above, I am Jewish. Unlike the majority of Jewish people in North America, however, I trace my roots (and olive complexion) to the Middle East. None of this matters on a census, of course; in the United States, Middle Eastern and North

African people are typically classified as “white” regardless of whether we are perceived this way. Similar language lumps Latinx people of all shades into one “Hispanic” group.

Our words set the boundaries of the categories we inhabit. It is not surprising then, that we are constantly seeking new words. In the span of a century, one segment of society was referred to as “Negro,” “Black” and “African American.” These rebrands, however, were not driven solely by some politically correct search for the least-offensive term. They are an example of renaming as an act of power. A new name allows a group to take agency over its presentation in public; to assert its identity to the world on its own terms. To quote the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”

Crucially, language not only describes what we see, it tells us how to see it. Why should a banana duct-taped to the wall of a gallery be called “art?” To some, the term must be reserved for pieces that meet a particular aesthetic standard. The specific criteria, however, depends on who you ask. Who should make the determination? In the past, we sidestepped this challenge by leaving it to prestigious academies. For a time this worked, and the system churned out a few thousand paintings of Jesus and bowls of sumptuous fruit.

Expert arbiters conferred the title “art” on a piece, and suddenly it was fit to exhibit. This proved unsustainable, however, when their decisions kept Vincent van Gogh and Monet out of museums. In every preceding generation, the purist definition of the word has sidelined pioneers and visionaries. When the term was given to the people, it became flexible, capable of meeting our changing tastes and expectations. The all-encompassing freedom of contemporary “art” is well worth the occasional banana on the wall.

Few would debate the power of the Oxford English Dictionary to add new words to its lexicon every year. For 2020, entries included

“freegan,” an eco-conscious dumpsterdiver, and “hellacious,” a term that was appropriately introduced in the same year as a global pandemic. For some, the addition of these sounds to the renowned OED is their canonization as words.

Yet, if you asked the average person why we endow the Oxford University Press with the unique power to alter and update the rules of English itself, you might come up short on answers. Most would simply point to the prestigious reputation of Oxford as an institution.

Why are we satisfied with the conclusion that a dozen eggheads on the OED staff make decisions about a language used by over two billion? Why isn’t it undemocratic that this group of unelected linguo-bureaucrats adds and alters words on a whim? Because their mandate is given by the public. Words “become” words when we use them. Ultimately, the speakers of a language are its best guardians.

My argument with Tony wound its way through the streets of Savannah. Politely booted from the Chabad house, we had continued our discussion outside the Rabbi’s apartment. Though the matter of whether I had done any “reading” remained unresolved, by the end of our discussion, everyone within a five mile radius could summarize the plot of our conversation.

As far as I saw it, I had fulfilled my fundamental obligation to Vonnegut. I had voluntarily absorbed his text. What more did I owe the long-dead satirist? What more did I owe Tony? That night when I got into bed, I put on my headphones, and read with my eyes closed.

In the beginning was nature. Whether one looks skyward with spiritual zeal or digs deep below the soil in scientific persistence, this fact remains universal. Past, present, future. Apes or Eden. Nature surrounds us, sustains us, surprises us. The phenomena of the physical world. Life itself. Mountains that shift in their slumber. Oceans that carve the coastlines. Sunlight that inspires each living thing to wake up and grow just a little bit more.

Everywhere around me is beauty, violence and grandeur. Yet I typically miss the entirety of it all, while on an absent-minded commute to work or lost in a catalog of browser tabs and streaming platforms.

It wasn’t until after I had turned 17, that I truly began to recognize the wonders of the woods. That is not to say I had never been in the woods before. In fact, the woods and I go way back. As a kid, I would spend my days roaming the dense backyard acreage with my friends from the neighborhood. Stone hopping between the bends of silty streams; making forts out of fallen branches and sturdy trunks. But here, beneath a patchy canopy of goliath Sequoias, the ones that seem to scrape the sky, something shifted, sprouted within me. I had spent my life sprinting through the forest, never thinking to stop and look more closely.

I was meant to be there, in that very moment. A sun-stained mosaic etched its way into the jagged plates of faded red bark. The scent of spice and pine drifted just above the blanket of needles on the forest floor. A gentle monarch butterfly sculpted the breeze with its orange, ink-dipped wings.

It was a breeze of greeting. Not a “nice to meet you” but a “welcome home.” I looked up to find my family far ahead, following along the trodden trail. I’d catch up eventually.

Now, after my humble and swift twentyone trips around the sun, years of trekking, exploring and discovering have all boiled down into one loosely stitched question. The same one that echoed through my mind as I gazed up in awe at the bleached cliff face of Half Dome or the red ravines of Zion. Why do I hike? Why do we, as humans, hike?

Iliked to think of it the way a man by the name of John Muir did. “The world’s big,” he wrote, “and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.” It was a quote I saw in a gift shop outside Yellowstone. For a time, that was all I needed. A nice one-liner for anyone who asked why I liked the outdoors so much.

It only took a couple of times repeating it aloud, though, for Muir’s remarks to make me wish I’d dig deeper beneath the soil. Small talk was one thing, but I wanted to figure out the real reasons why I kept longing to be in nature. So, I wound back the clock.

Hiking. Rambling. Bushwalking. Backpacking. With much of the world underdeveloped and relatively unexplored, people actually lived in nature. We’re talking about the 1600s, when a walk to town required a lengthy stroll through the countryside. Entire civilizations, both at home and abroad, still sustained themselves by hunting and gathering.

What we consider to be hiking today was a tradition originally only acted out during religious pilgrimages or charting the frontier. Hiking had to be intentional, set apart, or else it would be mistaken as rather ordinary.

Its context evolved alongside us over time, intertwining itself with the development of the Romantic movement of the 18th century. As humanity pressed deeper into the complex landscapes across the Earth, for curiosity’s sake rather than necessity, regular people could now experience nature in all of its untainted glory. Many dreamed of becoming mountain men, betrothed to a life amid the rawness of the wilds.

European poets such as Switzerland’s Albercht von Haller, as well as England’s Thomas West and William Wordsworth, popularized the idea of long walks in the wilderness and the rejuvenating qualities of a life spent wandering the mountains of the northern countryside.

With the coming of the 19th century, American writers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman began producing works that depicted the beauty of the “promised land.” Manifest Destiny, the westward expansion in the continental United States, gave way to the works of John Muir, the man known today as the “Father of the National Parks.” As the world read these accounts of what magic was hidden beyond the comforting monotony of town, or citybased life, people yearned to explore these naturally occurring wonderlands.

Actual curated hiking trails, the ones we are familiar with today, equipped with informational bulletins and skill level charts, started to pop up around the woods more toward the turn of the millennium, when hiking became officially recognized as a recreational activity. Whether it be the national parks, the local state forests or someone matting down their route to a honey hole they found, everyone worked meticulously toward a common goal: to craft a trail that was beautiful. To shower those who walked it in the glow of Earth’s natural radiance.

What followed was a rush to protect land, build campsites, designate havens for wildlife, preserve natural landmarks and more. Trails splintered in every direction, carving their way across the untamed wilderness. Even now, they still serve as our guide rope, keeping us steady during our transitions back to our old, wooded stomping grounds.

Thus, the custom of hiking soon became a common, and shared, cultural experience, wherever nature could be found. Whether it’s a paved loop around a pond, a three-day camping trip in a national forest or clinging to the wind-whipped summit of Denali, humans have found so many ways to experience nature. Yet so few of us remember, in the busyness of our daily routines, to dust off our boots and explore for ourselves.

Iwas born in 1999. I was present for some of humanity’s most drastic shifts away from nature. It had been an ugly divorce, filled with fossil fuel fracking and melting polar ice caps.

After mankind entered the 21st century, technology enveloped the world like never before. Who needed nature anymore? There were light-speed laptops, full-length movies pressed into shiny DVD’s, video game consoles that could not only replicate reality but create new, fully customizable realities as well. Now, we have smartphones brimming with infinite content, cars that can drive themselves and solar satellites exploring the unknown chasms of deep space.

For all the blessings that have accompanied our technological advancements, I was glad to have known life before it all. Not that I wish to regress to the stone age. Nor do I have anything against lifesaving medical inventions or the ability to travel and connect with people in ways no one could have even dreamed of centuries ago.

There are truly wonderful things that technology has made possible and I’m thankful for it. But I also think of the generation that follows me. Kids who are born slaves to a screen, shackled to a social media presence, not knowing that there is a world far richer all around them — one waiting to be discovered, and one waiting to be rescued.

In their own reflections on their natureinfused childhoods, medical professionals Eva Selhub and Alan Logan pose a question in their book, “Your Brain on Nature.” “What might happen if those memories didn’t exist?” they wrote. “What would happen if our childhood experiences and relationships to the natural world were to be shaped exclusively by pixelated images and time spent in front of a screen?” my car and drive back to my suburban nest. I realized that, throughout my entire life, I had been missing out on so much of what nature had to offer. By no means did I miss a single second standing on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon or watching the sun slip slowly behind the silhouette of the Tetons. But, that’s the thing. It wasn’t about the scenic overlook or the picture at the summit, not entirely at least. What made those memories so nostalgic, so awe-inspiring, in the end, were the little miracles I would stumble upon with every step I took across the forest.

Their question was enough to inspire a trip through the dog-eared memories of my own years as a little kid. I found myself leaping into piles of autumn leaves that my dad had spent the last hour raking up, sledding on a snow day, bundled head to toe in handme-down attire, making a moat in the sand before the crashing waves could wash away all my hard work.

Thinking about a life without such things made my blood run cold. Those moments were more than just good ideas for scrapbook pages. They were me. Each one a snapshot, a poem, a painting that collaged into the portrait of who I am today. The rings behind bark taught me to endure. The flowers blooming in the wake of a storm taught me to be patient. The hills chiseled by glaciers taught me to be strong. If I were to be unplugged from nature so abruptly, so completely, then I might very well cease to exist, I suppose.

Growing up, I had a fairly cut and dry definition of hiking. I used to think it was about making your way through a maze of switchbacks and colored dots to be rewarded with a particularly gorgeous view. Clearly many others have assumed the same. Hiking maps, trail heads, online ads, all boast the breathtaking views of hallowed mountains and glassy lakes. How could we not? Are they not the most beautiful strokes to flow from the brush of the Creator? But then I happened to actually read some of the poetic prose of Muir, Thoreau and the great Whitman, for myself.

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see,” wrote Thoreau. It wasn’t until my next trip into the evergreen hills of the coastal Acadia National Park that I understood what exactly he meant. All I took with me was water and a few power bars in a beat-up, dirty-green, air force bag. No iPhone, no Nikon, nothing but my five senses and undivided attention. My mind raced in circles, panicking without its usual buffet of dopamine stimuli. I fought against the urge to turn back, to come up with an excuse that would let me put off this experiment for another day, or week, or month. This time, however, nature won me over.

Within an hour of hiking, I was completely lost but entirely unaware of it. I was overwhelmed by the beauty that had always existed but had gone unrecognized for far too long.

The way a fern fans out its leaves, soaking in the sunshine that slips through the treetops. The birds calling to one another in a spontaneous symphony of chirps and song. The water as it tumbles freely over rocks, under branches, leaping in jaunty streams, from pool to pool.

Can you see it? Can you smell it? Can you feel it sweeping over you? A calm, an inner peace, a deep, quiet whisper within that says, “This feels right.” The intensity of such an immersive sensation alone was enough to keep me returning to the wilderness, time and time again, in search of that feeling. It was beautiful but I would soon learn there was more to nature than what meets the eye.

In my self-proclaimed “awakening” to the forest’s secrets, I came across the name of what I had been experiencing recently out in the woods. It was a process called “shinrinyoku,” or forest bathing.

Originally, shinrin-yoku is a concept that stems from Japan during the 1980s. Forest bathing is not simply an activity, but a lifestyle centered around a therapeutic intimacy with the natural world.

The earth is rude,” wrote Whitman, “Silent, incomprehensible at first; Be not discouraged — keep on — there are divine things, well envelop’d; I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.” It’s not an instantaneous effect. One doesn’t simply cross past the first bush of a garden and suddenly enter into a threshold of enlightenment. It’s something we learn over a lifetime. Our love, our curiosity, our relationship with nature grows with each passing moment we spend exploring.

There is the cliched saying, “It’s about the journey, not the destination.” It’s the type of phrase you hear all the time. So often, in fact, that you forget to process what it actually means.

The older I got, the more it sunk in. And sure enough, the more I looked, the more I saw along the way. The further I ventured, the harder it was for me to want to hop back in

It’s been quite a while now since we traded the great outdoors for assigned rooms and artificial light. We were never intended to live out our lives in boxes. Why do you think we breathe deeper in the snowy mountain air or under the shade of a wide-reaching dogwood?

Each day I arrive at the forest’s edge; I’m never calm. Nature is about the only place left I can go, outside my apartment, and not think twice about filling my lungs with fresh air. It doesn’t help that I spend the car ride there mulling over the chaotic unraveling of my weekdays, but in times like this shutting off my brain often seems impossible.

Even if we disregard the global pandemic, the dumpster fire that is politics and the explosions of hate and death across the world, everyday life, in and of itself, is stressful. Creative block, a throng of thoughts arguing for attention, figuring out how I’m going to find the motivation to do anything productive. More often than not, we fail to recognize how suffering through barrage after crippling barrage of anxiety, stress and depression drains us of life. It makes us forget who we are. If you’re feeling this similar fog of burnout or utter turmoil, then you’re in luck. That’s the wild reaching out.

The journey begins before you’re totally aware of it,” wrote Julia Plevin, in her book

“The Healing Magic of Forest Bathing.” It seemed like a reasonable place to start looking for answers. “The call to return to nature — your true nature — comes from deep inside and often manifests as chaos in life before you really begin to pay attention,” Plevin wrote.

The first time I took an intentional forest bath, I was in a cozy corner of my hometown woods, a place called Chatfield Hollow. Realistically, I could have gone anywhere. A forest. A mountain. A beach. A garden. Preferably somewhere pretty and peaceful, framed by nature. But I chose Chatfield, a place distantly familiar, where I had vague touchstones and a warm connection.

It had been some time since my last visit. Before I stepped off onto Lookout Trail, I stopped to take a deep breath. It was a rush of cool December air, the kind that fills your lungs with Christmas and a frosty yet refreshing awareness of your surroundings. I’m not really sure why, or how, but I looked around and remembered something so simple from my growing library of nature reading material: The forest was — is — alive.

Her breath rustled the layers of foliage in drafts of that same cheerfully cool air, her heartbeat pulsed beneath the veins of roots and waterways. Once I’d been properly reacquainted with Mother Nature, I was free to continue my conversation with her.

I started to walk differently after that, treading lightly, zig-zagging my way through the puddles that formed over damp leaves and graveled rock. I started to learn the language of the forest. A universal language: beauty.

It makes sense why my eyes arrived first to the forest that day. As humans, we are naturally sight-oriented creatures. Studies conducted at the University of Toronto show that people can remember more than 2000 pictures with at least 90% accuracy. David Ripley and Thomas Politzer had similar findings with their neurorehabilitation research indicating, “80-85% of our perception, learning, cognition and activities are mediated through vision.”

It’s how we understand the world around us. We are constantly observing. Even when we’re asleep, we see sprawling dreamscapes in full color. Here in Chatfield, Colo., the forest did not disappoint. She had prepared a feast for my Zoom-weary gaze.

I noticed how she greeted me, like her longlost little one. She dotted the sky with clouds, each adorned with crowns of sun and gowns of distant rain. She laid out patches of wild lilies and brambles of red-berried holly. A stunning display made just for me. I say just for me since my Ford Escape was the only car in the icy parking lot that evening, but the cold didn’t keep the forest from showing off the best of her heirlooms and relics.

Despite our sight’s dominant hold on our brain, it is not the strongest of the five senses. In a 2012 study conducted by the Smell and Taste Clinic at the University of Dresden Medical School on the neuroanatomy of odors, experts discovered that the sense of smell is capable of activating more regions of the brain than sight. Through behavioral indicators, they also found that smell, out of all the senses, was the one responsible for retrieving the oldest, richest, most emotional memories stored away in a person’s mind.

Every day, entirely oblivious to the process, I had been gathering time-travel tokens. Fall rain. Sunscreen. Laundry detergent. Bonfires. Low tide. Cinnamon buns. Mowed grass. Gasoline. Birchwood. Warm cookies. The list might very well be infinite, but each moment tethered to a smell is just as vivid as it ever was.

The smell of maple and winter frost had a way of soothing me. The incessant bickering of my worries and aliments drifted away on the gentle waves of fresh air, slipping beneath the cover of my subconscious. As my breaths grew deeper, fuller, I was able to be more present, take more in.

Life out here was slow. In a culture so prone to efficiency and speed, I often forget that life ought to be that way more often. There’s no need to race one another to an early grave, yet for some reason we always insist on racing anyways. We need the best; we need the most and we are constantly reminded of how far from those goals we actually are anytime we turn on our phones. It was not until I stepped away from my arsenals of screens and machines, that I felt awake. At ease, even. I found a spot, just big enough for my backpack and me. An out-jutting rock hung over the edge of a lively little stream and seemed like the proper place for a snack break. Something was different though, as I cracked open the thermos lid. Those deep breaths of fresh air I had been so focused on earlier were swirling, morphing in wild collisions along my taste buds. Hand-crafted root beer and river water foam. Smoothedover stone and cold vanilla. Melted snow and warm apple crisp.

Taste, often designated solely to the evaluation of food flavors during meals, is, in my opinion, a rather underappreciated sense. Because of its common occupation, however, it is closely associated with our sense of smell. In findings published by the Journal of Food Science, researchers at Cornell University uncovered that taste actually unifies the senses. Different subjects were brought to a variety of locations and given a sample of food to try. Radically different opinions of the food depended directly on the environment the person was in while eating. Taste was pulled from all of the other senses to create a more complete and authentic experience for the palette.

Nothing else in life mattered for those few moments on the rock ledge. For an undiagnosed ADHD, anxietystricken and overthinking hypochondriac, such as me, the previous experience was quite rare.

Due to massive strides by researchers in understanding the fields of psychology and psychiatry, we now see more people than ever before in human history are plagued by mental illnesses: depression, anxiety, impulsivity, scattered attention spans, burnout. Experts have attributed these imbalances in the brain to a number of possible triggers. For some it’s the side effects of urbanized isolation. For others it’s the maladaptive habits of alcoholism and drug addiction, or the consistent overuse and abuse of technology. It could be financial debt or a strained relationship. The list only gets longer and more inclusive. That thorn in your shoe, the one that keeps digging into your heel, may have earned itself a new nickname:

“Nature-deficit disorder.”

It was a diagnosis coined by author and journalist, Richard Louv in his book, “Last Child in the Woods.” Although not a widely recognized mental disorder, nature-deficit is rooted in the reality that human beings, especially children, are spending less time outdoors. The disorder seeks to explain such drastic behavioral problems that have evolved in recent decades.

Environmental Health Perspectives published an article titled “Nature Contact and Human Health: A Research Agenda.” The research within estimates that Americans spend more than 90% of their time indoors. That accounts for any time in your home, office or mode of transportation. They also found that roughly four out of five Americans live in naturedeprived urban settings.

This time indoors is often saturated by televisions and tablets, iMessage and Instagram. Children younger than 8 years old are averaging 1 hour 55 minutes of screen time daily, and by the time they grow to be 18 that daily average rises to 7 hours 38 minutes. “In 2016,” stated a team of Danish researchers,

“the average ‘total media consumption’ was 10 hours 39 minutes per day among young adults and was rising.” The article also overlays survey results ranging from 2004 to 2016 to chart the trend. Across the U.S., activities such as park visitation, hunting, fishing and camping “have all declined substantially over recent decades.”

In just nine months of quarantine, I’ve watched myself slip slowly into the ones and zeroes, trading the real world for a digital one. One blurred by filters and green screens.

According to the research, it looks like I’m not the only one who had started to forget about the forest. This computer-induced amnesia was happening long before COVID-19 struck.

My love language is physical touch. No one, apart from my girlfriend, really cares, I’m sure, but it was, and still is, my way of reaching back out to the forest. I treated Chatfield Hollow the way I would have treated my childhood bedroom, after having left it for a year or two. I picked things up, turned them over in my hand, studied them as if each mushroom cap or hollowed log was a prehistoric fossil, something from another planet altogether.

Touch is the most dramatic of the senses. It is pleasure, it is pain, it is the biting cold and the bubble bath. It is the very first sense we ever encounter after just eight weeks of life in the womb.

Dr. Qing Li was the first to champion the ideas of “forest medicine” as he called it. Studies conducted by medical professionals on the connections between forest exposure and human health has proved, on numerous occasions, nature significantly decreases stress levels, heart rate and blood pressure, all while improving your immune system, mood, creative connections and overall energy.

Many of these developments occur during our tactile, kinesthetic experiences. Scientists revealed, in a research article published by The New York Times, that touch has a significant connection to a very influential region of the brain: the frontal insula. “It is in the frontal insula,” says Dr. Arthur Craig, a neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute, “that simple body states or sensations are recast as social emotions.” When I pet a golden retriever pup it is translated into delight and happiness, relaxing my racing mind and rapid heart rate. When I wrangle the reel after a rainbow trout snatches my lure, my brain’s translation reads excitement and admiration, sharpening my focus and improving my mood, after a long day of nibbles and stolen bait.

It had been some time since I entered the forest that wintry afternoon, in hopes of tapping into the transcendent experience of a forest bath. I would find a spot to sit, a little patch of sunshine or a patchy quilt of moss, then after a while I’d get up and wander some more. Without the deafening waves of white noise and constant chatter, I listened only to the quiet of the forest.

It was louder, more intense than I remembered. What I was hearing wasn’t silence entirely but nor was it noisy like a subway station. The forest was an intricately balanced melody of space and sound. Crunching leaves, bird calls, bubbling brooks, snapping sticks, frog croaks and cricket chirps.

It didn’t take very long, out in the woods, for my eardrums to relax. There was no effort involved, sound just came and went as it pleased, like a jazz band made of water and wood.

In a research effort at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Dr. Cassandra Gould van Praag worked in collaboration with visual artist Mark Ware. Their experiment monitored people’s brain activity when played sounds from nature versus the artificial noise of urban environments. Natural sounds produced brain connectivity that, “reflected an outward-directed focus of attention.” Artificial noise, conversely, produced brain connectivity that, “reflected an inwarddirected focus of attention, similar to states observed in anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.”

Hearing is arguably the most complex phenomena of the five senses. From the labyrinthine inner channels of the ear to the processing of sound wave vibrations, our hearing is responsible not only for the blessed invention of music but also our sense of balance and equalized air pressure. A miracle in design, truly. Far more perceptive than I realized, once I took out my earbuds and let myself listen.

After stretching each sense individually, I felt now that I had finally, officially arrived in the wilderness. I felt free to use them all at once, to converse with nature, with myself, with God. At times with all three or sometimes none at all. I spoke candidly, quietly, loudly, with my own voice and my own clumsy words. As I let my thoughts unravel and untangle themselves through my words, I learned that I appreciated honesty with myself instead of excuses. A small realization but one I may have not discovered had I missed this moment. Just as the rippled rings showed the many lives of the aging pines around me, in turn, I too discovered a new layer within myself.

Some of my most intimate moments exploring nature have never found their way into a Word document. Someday they might, but I’m in no rush. I’ve learned the hard way not to always try and force the world into one-inch margins. When the time is right, the words will flow. Those memories will always be as vivid as etched stone. The key is tenacity and consistency. Meeting the muse in her living room, as often as I can, instead of waiting for her to arrive at my desk.

“Keep close to Nature’s heart,” wrote Muir. “Break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” It was as if the forest planned it so, before the purple clouds turned gray, I arrived at the empty visitor lot of Chatfield Hollow.

I love trails that end in loops. It’s almost as if that one particular section of forest had always been destined for a scenic backwoods path. One that would showcase our interconnectedness with the Earth, all neatly arranged within an odd, organic perimeter. On my drive home, chasing the sun toward the west, I noticed how nature paints with every color our computers can’t seem to quite capture. Trees and rivers sprouted and branched like blood vessels. Clouds shifted like tempered moods. Leaves stretched and withered with the changing of the season, growing old with wrinkles of scarlet and burnt tangerine.

Portraits and still lives painted in the rippled reflections of fresh water ponds. No pine cone or dragonfly was insignificant, not a single one left missing from view, even at 45 miles per hour. If I looked hard enough and long enough, I could see them. I saw their brilliance, and, in their brilliance, I began to rediscover my own. The brilliance my mom always saw in my abstract finger paintings from kindergarten. The brilliance my dog saw, wagging his tail as I walked through the door. The brilliance I saw the day I got my driver’s license.

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature,” writes Muir, “he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” writtten by Kai Lun Dingcong, photographed by Marygrace Gladden

Who knows? It might just be the thread that unties the knots of worry and stress bunched in your chest. Maybe you’ll discover a new thing or two while you’re out there. Worse case-scenario, you’ll have a good time exploring.

In my experience, hiking, forest bathing, the trips into the wilderness, none of it is hinged on walking away with a product or epiphany. Walking in nature, at its core, is about the subconscious search for your inward beauty as you consciously seek and reflect on outward beauty. It happens naturally, no pun intended.

The wild is calling. I’m sure she’s got something good to share. You’ll never know unless you go.

Finding community in Boston can be difficult. Music is how this singer-songwriter knows how to hold space for her audience, her students and herself.

On a partly cloudy afternoon in a backyard in Jamaica Plain, a Boston neighborhood, musicians gathered in a loose circle, the masks covering the singers’ faces doing little to hinder their effortless harmonization. The temperature peaked at 58 degrees that Sunday, Oct. 18, but still they had come out to celebrate one of their own — a young woman with long, wavy black hair styled over one shoulder, her smile hidden behind her mask but her eye-roll plainly visible. The camera panned from one face to another before landing on her, the star of the party: Ava Sophia Dudani, 27 years old that day.

I watched the videos on Ava’s Instagram story, one after another capturing the party from every angle, each tagged @avasophiamusic and filled with the unabashed joy of a jam session among friends. At some point, the camera zoomed in on Steve “Barefoot” Chandy, a guitar slung across his lap and his mask billowing with the force of his song.

“I’m gonna make it! Oh, whoa-ohh! Out of my bed,” he sang, the rest of the circle joining in with the rousing chorus. The last time I heard him perform that song was as a guest artist for Ava’s youth showcase in December 2019, an event she had organized as the music director of the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Lowell.

The show was, in a way, Ava’s good-bye to the children who sang, rapped and hyped each other up under the fuchsia stage lights of that tiny café, one last effort to give them the spotlight before she moved onto a job closer to home.

Ava Dudani, Ava Sophia on stage and in her songwriting credits, hails from Boston, specifically Brighton, and specifically the part of Brighton with a 17-year-old independent coffee shop and a deli that’s been around since 1991. She drove me through the neighborhood once and told me of her childhood home nearby, the walls lined with abstract abstract acrylic paintings produced by her mother, Lynn Rosa-Dudani.

“Going back and forth from my mom and my dad’s house, when I was with my mom, that’s when I felt like I was the most grounded,” she told me. “I felt like I was home.”

As a multicultural child whose parents had been separated as long as she could remember, home is a topic that comes up often for Ava. Her father Surrendra Dudani immigrated from Mumbai to obtain his Ph.D. from Syracuse University, adding the layer of diasporic identity to the already complicated idea of home.

“A lot of the time, when I couldn’t really find something to identify with, I could feel really, really grounded in my neighborhood,” said Ava, “I could say, ‘I’m from Boston, I grew up here, I’m proud to have grown up here.’ So I think I became really attached to that identity marker because it was hard for me to find one that made sense to other people.”

Ava’s music — rooted mainly in rhythm and blues, with influences from singersongwriters like Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson — deals heavily with the navigation of identity and intimacy. Her debut EP “To See and Hear Hxrself,” released in October 2019, holds space for dichotomies as varied as racial identity, attitudes towards love, and the coming-of-age tension between self-doubt and self-confidence that characterizes so many people in their 20s.

Her most recent single “Love Language” is a collaboration with rapper Tashawn Taylor, produced for 617Sessions’s “Sound of Our

Town 2020” album. The song resulted in nominations for Ava in two categories of the 2020 Boston Music Awards: 617Sessions Artist of the Year and, to her surprise, R&B Artist of the Year.

“It’s been such a long-time goal to get nominated,” said Ava, whose love language is words of affirmation, a trait we both share.

Though the awards went to Red Shaydez and Miranda Rae respectively, Ava expressed that it was more unusual to compete with other artists in the Boston scene than collaborate.

“A lot of us have worked together and a lot of us have supported each other,” she said, “My approach is just to appreciate when I get love and keep it moving when I don’t.”

The Boston Music Awards was her “gateway into the local industry” after her return from Los Angeles in 2017, where she had lived post-graduation from Berklee College of Music. To get back into the Boston scene, she looked up the BMAs nominees and discovered names like Oompa, Marcela Cruz and Mint Green.

From personal experience, I can confirm how difficult it is to access the oftentimes insular social spaces in Boston, but Ava has great pride for the communities that do exist, ones that she has helped cultivate.

“Even though Boston is such a difficult city to navigate sometimes, and you really, really have to look to find the right community if you’re a queer person, or a person of color, or both of those things. The community seems to care as much as I do about that representation being visible,” she said, speaking not only about the city’s music scene but also the Boston chapter of

Subcontinental Drift, the South Asian open mic night that was the first place she sought out after her homecoming return.

It was there that she met Payal Kumar — artist, activist, SubDrift board member and my former housemate — who introduced the two of us during a grocery run to Haymarket. Ava was waiting for Payal and me at the Coolidge Corner T stop on a balmy mid-September day; hours later, I returned with several pounds of lychee and a friendship that would give rise to early morning runs, fruit smoothies for breakfast, and casual trips to Trader Joe’s for mulled cider ingredients. But even more than that, some of the most inspirational people I know would come into my life because of Ava and Payal, who are more actively invested in creating community than most folks I’d met before.

“People don’t realize that to be part of the cultural zeitgeist, what that actually looks like is being part of these local communities and creating culture,” said Ava. “Sometimes where there isn’t any, and sometimes out of desperation or out of bad circumstances.” She acted on this newfound truth when she first stepped into her role as an organizer in 2018, curating a show of all South Asian performers in what would later become the Dusky Peril Arts Initiative.

“I wanted to create a space where my dreams could be visible and possible, and I didn’t want to leave my city to find that space,” she said in her introduction of “The Art of Accountability” workshop on Nov. 14, 2020, an event held over Zoom that featured local artists Eva Davenport, Noemi Saafyr Paz and Hassan Ghanny.

“There needs to be more of a conversation about what the South Asian narrative looks like in the United States, and what it looks like to be a diaspora kid,” said Ava. “And that includes: what does it mean to be a South Asian artist? What does it mean to be marginalized within the South Asian community, to be caste-oppressed, to be multiracial, to be an adoptee, to be Indo-Caribbean?”

Alongside the responsibility of creating a space for greater representation, Ava admitted that she feels “a bit of impostor syndrome about speaking for an entire community.” shape her own understanding of the world. “Both sides of my racial identity were very polarized, so I didn’t grow up seeing my mom’s family and my dad’s family interact,” she said, describing a disconnected game of intergenerational telephone in which she would hear her mother’s stories about her father’s family and vice versa.

However, she’s tackling the work ahead of her with the same mindset as her Berklee professor, Annette Philip, who founded the Berklee Indian Ensemble.

“Both had very, very different points of view, and a lot of my experience growing up was making sense of everybody’s perspectives.”

Ava never questioned the fact that her parents lived in separate houses until outside opinions challenged the norm of her everyday reality.

“It was always weird to me as a kid that the expectation was your parents look the same,” she said, denouncing the significance that society places on genealogy and racial categorizations.

“People have been mixing throughout history. There’s no such thing as racial purity; there’s no reason to look at me and feel like I’m this weird person because society is trying to make me feel that way,” she said, an opinion that enables her to put away the common biracial narrative of “not being able to pick a side.”

As children of immigrants, Ava and I have had many conversations about what it’s like to exist in the hyphen between descriptors like “Asian-American” and “first-generation.” For Ava, this cultural tension becomes apparent in the album “To See and Hear Hxrself,” a collection of four tracks that layer joy, anxiety, contemplation and desire. Be it desire for intimacy, community or answers, Ava addresses that from different angles in each track.

The connective tissue of the album is the audio clips that serve as short skits between songs, snippets of conversation with her aunt, Sheela Gursahani.

“You can learn along the way, and you can always learn more,” said Ava, paraphrasing Philip, “I have to be a little bit more grounded in the fact that I am the right person to do this.”

Ava stressed the importance of bringing in diverse voices, one of her first moves after rebranding Dusky Peril was to host a community strategy meeting, where she would meet her future co-leader Aswini Melekote. She stands firm in the belief that her individual South Asian experience doesn’t make her any less qualified to take on the tasks ahead of her.

After all, growing up at the intersection of two cultures, she’s had plenty of practice listening to different perspectives in order to

“What kinds of things do you get anxious about?” Ava asked in the clip following “Can’t Love You,” a heavy confession that knows the gravity of its titular lyrics, unfolding almost mournfully in its slowness.

“Everything,” said Gursahani, “but I was very sensitive. You can’t do anything if you’re sensitive.”

Gursahani’s advice on toughness and anxiety strikes a clear contrast with the emotional vulnerability of Ava’s lyrics, especially in the gentle revelations of “Love Is Love,” which has become something of an anthem among her fans.

“Learning to live/Learning to grow,” she sang in the opening verse. “Give all you have to give/And let your worst parts show.”

The generational dichotomy is clear, but the skits are just as much a part of the album as the songs themselves.

Ava never shies away from dualities in her work, which illustrates as much uncertainty and friction as it does reconciliation and celebration.

“My goal in making that was to empower people listening, and especially empowering people who identify as femme, to give themselves the space to listen to their own selves on their own terms,” she said of the album, which is spelled with an X in “Hxrself” to include femmes of variant gender identities.

“Sometimes I feel like we can’t even hear what we’re thinking, or we can’t even feel what we’re feeling because there’s so much in the way,” she continued, “Especially if you live in a society where everyone is constantly telling you how you should feel about yourself or what you should think about yourself.”

“Ava Sophia Wisdom,” I replied, riffing off her Instagram handle in what has become a long-standing joke among friends. I could hear her eye roll on the other end of the line.

“You know, I’m just trying to figure it all out.” “You could say you’re … ‘Searching,’” I said, referencing the first track of her EP, and then the third not long after, “You’re … ‘Restless.’”

“Oh my God.”

“And … ‘Imperfect,’” I laughed, pulling out the title of an unreleased song that I’ve had the privilege of hearing at shows like “Community Over Consumption,” a potluck/performance/ open mic hosted by Ava in November 2019 with fellow musician Anaís Azul.

The event was just one of many shows that Ava has organized in collaboration with other Boston artists, including “An R&B Femme Takeover” with Eva Davenport, Marcela Cruz and Miranda Rae and “Color Theory: A Multiracial Lyric” with Hassan Ghanny, described as “a narrative that draws the listener closer to the experience of being a multiracial person in America.”

When it comes to balancing performances with teaching, Ava said that music and education are interrelated in accomplishing her goals. Whether as a performer, organizer or classroom instructor, music has always been “that vehicle for me to make that impact on my community, or on the world, that I’ve always wanted to make.”

Currently she works at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center as an Art Specialist, a position that originally involved teaching music classes in an after-school care program, but since March, the BCNC has experimented with a variety of in-person and online instruction plans. Weathering the pandemic with her students, she says, has been one of the most significant experiences of her teaching career, but prior to COVID-19, one memorable batch of students stands out: a group of girls in their early teens who attended her weekly singing class at the Charlestown Boys & Girls Club.

“I think working with that group of girls in particular really gave me the kind of vocabulary to say, ‘This is why working with girls of color matters to me,’” said Ava, recalling one girl who was both especially talented and incredibly shy. “I ended up being really, really lucky to have the opportunity to coach her through the audition process for my high school.”

The Boston Arts Academy is the city’s only public high school for the visual and performing arts. After some encouragement and guidance, Ava’s student passed auditions and enrolled with the Academy, a fact that Ava stated with pride.

“You can’t be successful with every group of kids, but I feel lucky to have been successful with them,” she said. “There were times that I saw them cry, I saw them … be scared to sing in front of each other, but it was real trust building. I was lucky to have really gained their trust and built community with them.”

The artist development process, she says it’s her favorite part about working with kids, where she can help them build confidence and discover music as an outlet for self-expression.

“Music has always been that for me. It’s been the place where I feel like I can express myself in the most honest way, and just sit with who I am, how I feel, and what I believe. And I think everyone needs an outlet like that,” she said, thinking of her students. “I really hope music can be that for them, and if it’s not, then I hope they can find that. They can find whatever it is that allows them to have that voice.” written by Ka’Dia Dhatnubia, photographed by Geoff Haggary

Whether Nigel Smith herps for the cool snakes, inner peace or personal activism, one fact remains: herpetology is much more than a casual pastime for the Midwestern native.

It began behind a library beside the discarded books bin. A little Black boy stared with big brown eyes, mesmerized by pictures of snakes in a book his mom found. After digging and digging, devoted to finding books for her two sons despite their impoverished circumstances, this book would be the one to spark a life-long love in one of them.

Two years later, that same little boy came face-to-face with his first snake on a nature walk with some older neighborhood boys. “I ran and I grabbed the snake, and it bit the hell out of me.” Nigel Smith laughed one of those deep-rooted, home-grown laughs. “It bit the hell out of me and pooped everywhere. I felt so intensely satisfied there, staring at that snake, with that snake in my hand, and I’ve been hooked ever since.”

Nigel Smith works as assistant manager at Maple Street Biscuit Company. Although he has a wife and two sons of his own, his comforting warmth is such that the majority twenty-something staff also call him Dad. If you ever find yourself at the Broughton Street restaurant, you’ll no doubt hear his laugh echo through the open kitchen.

When Nigel isn’t at his day job, he spends his free time exploring the outdoors as a “herper” and amateur herpetologist. He’s well aware of and amused by the term’s unfortunately close phonic connection to herpes, but he assured it has nothing to do with the sexually transmitted disease.

Herpers find reptiles and amphibians for fun, while amateur herpetologists “study reptiles and amphibians without an official degree in herpetology.”

After his close encounter at age 7, Nigel began herping in the woods by his neighborhood at 8 years old. “And I would get whoopins’ for it. Because, you know, an 8-year-old kid, well, to my mom, she thought I shouldn’t be walking in the woods by myself.” To alleviate his mother’s worries, he read all of the books he could to assure her there were no poisonous snakes in their area. Of course, his mom, like any, still wasn’t too convinced. To her, a young Black kid had no business in the rural outdoors. To Nigel, the outdoors were nothing more than just another environment he had to learn the rules of, a skill he’d developed very young.

Throughout his entire childhood, his family never stayed in one place for more than two years. From a year in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to a year in Mississippi then two years in Gary, Indiana, to two years in Milwaukee. After Milwaukee, they moved back to Michigan where they stayed until he was 16. Despite periods of homelessness and lessthan-ideal circumstances, the moving around no doubt played a role in Nigel’s affinity for exploring new places. Herping kept him out of trouble by keeping him busy and provided an escape from the instability of his home life.

For the better part of his youth, Nigel scouted the wilderness alone, until he connected with a community through a message board on fieldherping.com. “This was the late 90s, early 2000s. Now, everybody’s moved to Facebook,” he said. There were “nationwide meetings, meet and greets, where [the community] would get out into the field and look for animals and get to know people.”

When asked if you had to be at least a little crazy to be a herper, Nigel couldn’t stop laughing. In short, “Not necessarily but it helps.” He described the eclectic community as “some of the strangest hobbyists in the world,” concluding that insanity was less a requirement and more a natural expectation. “You know how every psychologist or therapist you meet is a little bit off?” He contained another laughing fit. “Anyone into herpetology and reptiles will tell you the same thing: These f***ers are crazy.”

While it would be easy to imagine a quirky group of people all happily gushing about their niche interests and comparing their most exciting reptilian discoveries, the herpetologist community is also known for its aggressively competitive nature. “Some of us spend our time looking for very rare snakes, and herpetologists themselves, they have to fight for resources. They have to fight for grants and things like that,” Nigel said. Not only do they compete over resources, but also land. “There are limited areas that these animals exist in. So, when you come in areas, people can be very territorial.”

Competitive, jealous, egotistical. Nigel even went so far as to use the word “warring” between different universities and schools of thought. “They have to come up with something more clever, more engaging than the next university just to secure their amount of funding,” he said. While a majority of this funding is obtained at the federal and state level, the latest organization Nigel was working with, the Orianne Society, “had a philanthropist, a wealthy benefactor that secured their funding and continues to secure their funding.” In that way, they are one of the lucky ones.

Despite his lack of degree and license, Nigel is well-respected within the community, working closely with scientists and researchers to provide reptilian and amphibian subjects. He connected with different societies through friends of friends. “It’s a reputation thing,” he said. “I’m known for not abusing the snakes and not collecting the snakes. Those same snakes that I give to the scientists are worth hundreds of dollars, ’cause they’re really rare snakes sometimes.”

The line of work isn’t without its challenges though. And, surprisingly, those challenges don’t include the snakes.

As Nigel started his car and began to drive home from his latest herping excursion for the Orianne Society, he said, “I’m about twoand-a-half hours from Savannah, deep in the middle of the woods, deep in Confederate flag country.” He recounted the 16 times he’d been pulled over during his three years living in Georgia; 14 of those times happened while he was out herping. “Their excuse is always that I have an out of county tag. Sometimes, they’re racist and they just blatantly tell me,” he said. “Sometimes, they’re like, ‘Oh, well, you’re just out here, you look like you don’t belong out here.’ That’s their way of telling me, ‘Hey, you’re a Black guy in the middle of the woods, what the f*** are you doing here?’” underappreciated,” he said. After talking with some of his colleagues, they had confirmed that assessment. “The conversations I was having with folks today is that their jobs don’t last. Herpetological jobs, first of all, are rare.

Most positions are seasonal, only lasting a few months. Most herpetologists move all around the country because it’s so hard to find jobs in your area.”

Moving around is something Nigel would like to have left in childhood. However, life is never that simple. After five years of raising his family in Akron, Michigan, uncontrollable circumstances forced them to move to Mississippi. After five years, they moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they stayed for three years until a family death moved them to Kentucky. After three years in Kentucky then three years in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the Smith family finally settled in Savannah. “So, that moving from my childhood made its way into my adult life,” he said. “I’m to the point now where I’m over it. The kids are over it.”

Still, to Nigel, none of that matters. “I love these animals so much that I’m willing to go through that just to enjoy their presence, just to spread the word about them, just to share that joy,” he said.

Even as he confessed the lethal disadvantages he faces as a Black man, his voice didn’t waver. “It’s always a fear of mine that I’ll get cornered out here and shot.” He drove ahead, steady and unhurried. “I would love to curse [police officers] out. I always stay calm, tactful, ’cause I understand that any of these interactions can go the opposite direction.”

Nigel revealed that one of his favorite places to search for snakes and salamanders is 15 minutes away from where Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed. Before that high-profile killing in February 2020, Nigel had been followed and accosted by locals for driving down that same road. He even encountered an individual that pulled a .45-caliber gun on a herper acquaintance.

Still, to Nigel, none of that matters. “I love these animals so much that I’m willing to go through that just to enjoy their presence, just to spread the word about them, just to share that joy,” he said. “If fear ain’t never stopped us before, we ain’t finna let it stop us now.” Despite Nigel’s immense love for the discipline, he confessed that he wouldn’t commit to it full time. “It’s a tough life. It’s one of those jobs where they’re underpaid and

Along with the instability, Nigel noted the “pettiness” within the line of work as another turn off. “I had this misconception of what science was,” he said. “In my brain, all scientists would work together for the betterment of science. That’s not the case.” As it stands, Nigel is content with herping remaining a hobby.

“My love for herpetology is so that if I could, I’d be out five days a week doing it, [and you would] never have to pay me.” Of course, with any passion this intense comes the need for balance.

While herping isn’t solely expensive in terms of money, it can also be expensive in terms of time. Nigel is dedicated to both his own personal happiness and his duties as a father and husband. Even though he himself grew up without a father, he often credits those older neighborhood boys as providing that necessary positive male influence. “The neighborhood guys, older guys, would take us on nature walks. So, they were about 15, 16. We were all little kids, so we didn’t have any dads around,” he said. Something as simple as a teenager taking a 5-year-old on a nature walk made all the difference.

“I have to be sensitive to my family’s needs,” Nigel said. “I have to ask them and watch them. My wife will never say to me, ‘You’re herping too much.’ I just have to watch her and see what she’s comfortable with.” It’s a practice he’s grown more adept at over time, taking into account the principle that just because he can doesn’t always mean he should.

“As much as I contribute to science, in the end, this is a leisurely activity, so I have to balance, because that’s what’s fair to my family, to everybody at the job so I can be there. So, I’m always conscious.”

Just as Nigel’s committed to his personal passion, his family, and work, he is also devoted to his community. After many demanded he start a YouTube channel, on Dec. 13, 2011, he finally did. On Nature Nigel, he posts one-to-three-minute clips of his reptilian and amphibian finds for his audience of 990 subscribers.

Nigel was lucky enough to be able to capture his rarest find for the channel — two pine snakes. According to Benjamin Morrison, IT Senior Manager at University of Georgia College of Public Health, “pine snakes are large, fairly heavy-bodied snakes that average 48-66 inches.” They are found scattered across the Southeast and spend most of their time underground because of their notable burrowing skills. While the species does not have any federal protection, they are listed as threatened in several states; some states even have laws protecting them.

“In Georgia, pine snakes are listed as threatened and have a state conservation rate of S3 (rare to uncommon),” explained Morrison.

This is why Nigel defined the encounter as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Most herpers will go their entire career without ever finding one, let alone two of these elusive creatures.

While Nigel was in awe recording the female pine snake he had found in the road, out crawled another pine snake, a male, her mate. In the video, you can hear the excited, mystified tremor in his voice as he thanked God. He confessed that he was even near tears. “These snakes, to me, they’re spellbinding.”

Still, for Nigel, it’s deeper than going into the woods for the sole purpose of discovering rare reptiles and amphibians. Before being outdoors that day, Nigel described himself as “low in spirits, tired, aching. Right now, I’m high in spirits.” He hadn’t seen a sing snake while he was out, but he regained his energy, which is how he maintains motivation.

According to Nigel, his endless passion is scant among most professional herpetologists and amateur herpers alike. “They don’t see a snake? They’re bummed out. Not me. I’m just happy to be outside,” he said. From pressure to secure funding to the misleading online posting of notable finds , any number of reasons can contribute to this limited motivation. “Part of it is all we post online or on the forums, all we show you is the days that we find something,” he said. “Inbetween that, there’s a lot of failure.”

On days when the snakes are nowhere to be found, Nigel immerses himself in the fine details of his surroundings. He keeps his eyes and ears open for anything and everything the woods have to offer him. “So, on a day when I’m not seeing a lot of snakes, well, the birds are out, the trees are beautiful, the sky is beautiful. There’s insects out; there’s mammals out. There’s always gonna be something in nature for me to appreciate,” he said. “It’s never a loss.”

The short YouTube videos represent more than entertainment for the herping community. “What it became was a way for me to show people of color that it’s OK to do what I do,” he said. Saying this is an uncommon view for a Black man to have would be putting it lightly. “You know, in our communities that’s crazy. Going out at night with some people you don’t know to look for snakes in the middle of the woods? That’s crazy talk.”

He pointed out how Black people and those from urban backgrounds are taught “that [the forest] isn’t a safe place for us.” He elaborated, “What’s ironic is those from rural areas are taught the same thing about the hood.” When put into simple perspective, rural and urban areas are just environments with their own habitats and order of things. Anyone looking to enter those areas need only learn the rules. More than anything, Nigel wants Black people to know: “We share these public lands, and it’s free and it’s cheap. All you need is some gas and a little fuel to get you out here and you can come enjoy these woods.”

Maybe it’s virtuous. Maybe it’s grassroots activism. Maybe he just wants others to know about the solace he finds in the outdoors. “As a kid growing up in the projects, we had motherf***rs fighting, arguing, drinking, doing drugs, f***ing shooting, all kinds of crazy s*** 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” he took a deep breath, exhaled, “but I can walk into that tree line and none of that exists. It’s just me and the woods and I’m safe.”