Adam Williams (21:28): So if we can go back to Ireland for a moment.

Jonathon Stalls (21:31): Yeah.

Adam Williams (21:32): And I'm curious, if it's not going too deeply here, in the experience that you described, you had come to what sounds like the absolute low, and considering the lineage of concerning suicide in your family, what had taken you to Ireland and what added up to that moment perhaps before you felt that release and relief and ability to step back from that edge?

Jonathon Stalls (22:09): Yeah. There's so many things and it's so limited with words. I think there's something about being teased a lot as a kid, and that's the situation I was in a lot when I was growing up. I mean, you're a new student every two years. You're going into... I mean, kids are great and kids are cruel. New students get... So there was a lot of that. But I was also, I think, I always referenced just being so sensitive. I always was really feeling things. There was a lot of conflict in my parents in the household as well, between my parents both prior and after their divorce.

(22:51): And my coping was to absorb it, was to suppress it. I buried it. I buried things. And I played on the outside, "Don't be the reason, Jonathon, that you cause conflict." So as long as you can maintain harmony with your being in presence, then you can get through, get by. Because if you are also causing conflict... So everything would just get buried under this coping. That's just how it operated over time. So leaning into Ireland, there's a lot of layers that landed me there. I was a part of this church plant of sorts out there that was really complicated. Nondenominational.

(23:38): It was a journey through connecting to a church community when I lived in California. This was all alongside of some really difficult things that my mom was going through at the time. And I needed help and support. At that time, I was on a path of more discipline. "Well, pray the gay away. Pray the gay away. I got to get rid of this. I got to get rid of the gay. The gay is bad. The gay is sin. The gay is this."

And I, at the time, thought that more discipline would be it. And everyone's on their journey. But for me, it was again, suppressing, letting other people tell me, projecting their ideas of who God is or isn't, what is right and what is wrong, and absorbing my own truths, burying them, and just playing peaceful peacekeeper, just hold the... Like, all right.

(24:36): So this group can help me maybe process my mom. This is what I grew up with, knowing church is a place where you can seek help. And so that's what I leaned into in California. And that tumbled into this really problematic, lots of beautiful things in Ireland. Met some amazing people. It was a profound, maybe a first start at giving me a little bit of confidence to do something like the cross-country walk, kind of leaving uprooting from the US, going to a different country, learning different things from different people.

(25:08): But the other thing that Ireland in a way was, it was banging at the door around, "You better start paying attention to these things you're burying because you are a ticking time bomb. It's going to be really ugly." Literally, I was constantly on edge. I was constantly starting to feel the pressure of really just lying to everybody, everybody, at all times. There were times when I would just have to leave meetings or leave gatherings that we would have and just leave because I was just like, "This is so fake. I'm a fake. I'm literally lying with my energy." And because I'm so sensitive, I'm feeling all of that false energy. Right?

(25:54): So I just knew something had to... And then as I started to peer in and listen, that's when the twisted stories started to turn in on themselves and say, "Oh, well, then you should probably just end it because you actually being a little more truthful about what's really going on is going to cause some conflict, like serious conflict. Your family won't accept you. Your friends won't accept you. The world won't accept you. And ultimately, your salvation and God won't accept you. The church won't accept you. All these things. Your worthiness is on the..." So the attempt in Ireland was this stacked, like, "All right. The simple thing to do is to end it. I'd rather be dead than be gay." And so all the thing...

(26:51): And even in all that, I think, being an artist, being a creative person, being somebody that... I now do a lot of pen and ink artwork as one of my primary forms of work and creative work, but I would always get lost in sketchbooks as a kid kind of escape. And so in these worlds that I would create through sketching, I had visions of, there's other ways. Some of the people I met in Ireland that were not a part of the church, these glimpses of other people living and moving with a different vibration, however they're experimenting with their life and their art, I would notice and witness these things and they would land. And I was always so curious about nature as a teacher.

(27:37): So I think that's maybe why when I heard the wind in those trees, that it drew me off of that. And that's where... I consider myself a very spiritual person. Somewhere in the spaces between whatever words you use or don't use, but I trust, I love the term nature as the first sacred text. I just feel like I relate to that a lot. And so I trust that there was energy bringing me off of that ledge essentially in Ireland and giving me some permission to really start over in a lot of ways.

Adam Williams (28:18): I'm trying to process the immense burden and weight of feeling, not only when you were a child, the balance, the calm with your parents, but then taking that to this place, this recognition of who you are as queer, as gay in a world that you feel like no one accepts this. Not the groups I'm in, the friends, the family, whoever of these new kids at school, in the church, society. The weight of everything you just explained and sounding like-

Jonathon Stalls (28:58): Yeah.

Adam Williams (28:59): ... it's better off to not be. That almost has me speechless as I try to feel that.

Jonathon Stalls (29:11): Yeah. Yeah. The isolation is, it's a trembling isolation. And the real harm when you're associating that isolation and that lack of worthiness with something like God, it's such a dangerous, yeah, it's a really difficult place. And the environments, to what you were sharing, it's like, that's exactly. I didn't have peers that were queer, gay. I didn't have access.

I mean, grew up in these more siloed environments. And I just didn't have the support or any access for what that could look like in a way that was more liberating and honest and open and even to be on a journey. That's the piece too. It's like, we want so much. And I get it. This isn't a judgment. We're all on this funky, messy, imperfect path. But there's such a quickness to need a binary or to need clarity.

(30:21): So even to be in process and to have people that can just be in process with you when you're trying to figure these things out, rather than shutting it off, telling you you're wrong or telling you this is flawed and this is what it is and you need to do this. So the book is such... I try to put writing an invitation through walking practice or movement practice around these concepts or invitations of the unknown, just to be in process, dot, dot, dot. We are always in process, all of us.

Adam Williams (31:03): That's the scary thing for so many of us.

Jonathon Stalls (31:05): Yeah.

Adam Williams (31:05): Right?

Jonathon Stalls (31:06): Yes.

Adam Williams (31:06): And I feel like I'm coming to understand this more and more and more as I view... well, as I have been able to find some teachers and mentors and friends on the spiritual level who have introduced me to practices for myself. And it's therapeutic things, which would include walking, all kinds of methods. And what I am seeing, you mentioned binary, there's this black and white, "I need the comfort of labels and boxes and everything to be very crisply defined or else my whole understanding of the world falls apart."

(31:43): And I think that's where we are suffering on the big scale here, societally. We're doing it with socially, with politics, in all the ways, religion. In every way that we have it, we need things to be this crystal clear thing. And I love that we can talk about this, and I hope that if there's anybody else out there who needs to hear, this gray area is actually where life is.

Jonathon Stalls (32:08): Yeah.

Adam Williams (32:08): This is where we need to find our comfort is within that discomfort. And that's where the work is.

Jonathon Stalls (32:13): Yeah. Yeah. It's why the chapter titles are so intentional. The first chapter being Walking as Human Dignity. Just this grounding first, and that do you either... leaning into believing that we are all worthy of breath and life and our stories and just our messiness. We're all a mess. Let's stop playing around. And we have really beautiful things to offer.

But then the second chapter, Walking as Humility, this invitation of humbly. And I have a story in there where it's like we're all sitting on that toilet. We're leaking. Our fluids are constantly coming out of our face. Like, "Stop. We don't need to...." I get it. We don't want to always be playing with our stuff.

(32:57): But there's something so fundamentally messy about the human journey. And I just find that without getting even too conceptual about it. It's why I have a lot of practices in the book, because I don't want to overthink it. Just lean into movement, experience it for yourself, move with that person who may be causes some discomfort or causes some tension, or maybe just you don't understand, or whatever it is.

And to move with, to be alongside, shoulder to shoulder, right next to each other in an unhurried way, under an open sky with the trees and the birds and the river and all the things in nature that communicate to us, that it is so far from a binary, that the branches twist and bend.

(33:44): And sometimes, you got to break the biggest branch so you can grow a little more towards the sun. This is the tree. Looking at how trees adapt and how the wounds slowly heal. And I mean, I can go on and on.

Adam Williams (33:59): Hearing you say it like that, now it occurs to me that it's almost strange that we have even developed this system of whatever it is, psychology and expectation that is binary. Why isn't the gray area? Why isn't the fluidity of it all are norm? Yeah. I want to step back from some of these heavier things for a moment maybe, and let's go back to what you said about how you describe yourself as a walking artist. What do you mean by that? What does that look like in your life?

Jonathon Stalls (34:33): Yeah, thank you. It's fun, it's playful, it's experimentive. I think it's more owning walking or moving in an unhurried way through a space with someone else, with all the things bubbling up on the inside, the thoughts, the feelings, even the things in the gut. Walking is my medicine. It's my main medicine. It's one of my main teachers. Just moving through the world that way. And that being inclusive to on a wheelchair and powered scooter, moving in an unhurried way.

(35:09): So just trusting that medicine so much in my own, knowing it's not going to land for every person the same way it does for me, but just trusting it so much. And then just being an artist, have always been an artist, escaping as a kid into creating worlds with drawing and pencil and all the things. Art class was always the place I would thrive through school, but also in my college studies. And so, for years after the cross-country walk, I dove pretty quickly into hosting walking events and training walking leaders, because I just was like, "Y'all, we got to move. We got to move our bodies. We got to talk to each other in a way that's a little more healthy. We got to lean into each other's stories."

(35:48): I just felt we got to connect with these rivers and streams. I just felt so strongly almost from an organizing framework after the cross-country walk. And that's what ignited Walk2Connect, which became an organization at one point in a movement, if you will, with a lot of really beautiful people. But then even after through that, I just was like, "Oh, I'm still neglecting this artist. I'm leaving the drawing being child, person that I want to reconnect with, on the side, and I just didn't want to do that anymore."

(36:21): So Intrinsic Paths is the framework of my creative work. And it's everything from... To be a walking artist, for me at least, is sometimes I'm under a tree, drawing and making sketches and making pieces as fine art for prints and for sale and for trade and for gifts, but also writing and poetry. And then there's another part of my work called Pedestrian Dignity, where I do a lot of storytelling on pedestrian safety and accessibility from the built environment perspective, so the injustices of how we think about our public spaces and places from a vantage point of pedestrian access.

So how are people safely getting to the grocery store, home or older populations, children, people with mobility devices, various disabilities, and just broad, big, public health related to all the benefits of moving this way. How can I story tell and be an artist there? So I play there a lot.

(37:21): So in one hour, I'm drawing a picture under a tree. The next hour, I might be cussing at an intersection, making a Pedestrian Dignity, like "Nobody can get through here. What are we doing? Let's do something." Trying to play as an artist there. And then I'm writing. And then I'm hosting a walking group event. So it touches a lot of different spaces, and that gives me joy that I can access these different places of expression centered on a theme of walking.

Adam Williams (37:53): Walking with groups. You mentioned Walk2Connect, and I do want to come back around to that. But before we do, you've kind of alluded to this idea of walking shoulder to shoulder, walking with people and what that connection is about. You now lead groups of strangers doing this, but you have also cited in this book the relationships, your closest relationships and walks with them.

This has become part of the life experience in sharing and poignant moments with your father, your mother, and with your partner, your husband, who incidentally you met in Ireland while you were there during that period. And in the book, you reference... Well, let's start with the one with your mom.

Jonathon Stalls (38:43): Yeah.

Adam Williams (38:44): That was so, I think, critical to your relationship. And I think you know which one I'm referring to, if you'd care to share that story and just how that has now influenced your relationship from that moment forward on a walk.

Jonathon Stalls (38:58): Yeah. So this is the chapter titled Walking as Vulnerability. It was a hard word for me to choose to even put in the book like that because it's so loaded. But I just felt so strongly specifically to walking as a practice, as a tool for how we go into those what I imperfectly just describe as these trembling realms when we're really upset or we're really angry or we're feeling threatened or we're feeling like maybe even joy, we want to celebrate, but we don't know how to move our body and do it, whatever it is.

And for me, coming out was one of those huge trembling seasons of I'm choosing to live and try this life after those really hard things in Ireland and the wind in the trees and choosing to start over. So I want to invite my family into this.

(39:57): And because of that movement in Ireland, as I was trying to process, I was like, "All right. Something in me just trusts that this is going to be easier if I'm moving with my mother under the trees, with the breeze, under the sky, as I share, and fumble with these..." And so the story is a line by line invitation and inviting my mom into some really hard things that I didn't have a lot of words for, into honest, raw process. I didn't, at the time, know or would say that I'm gay. I just was like, "I'm on a journey. I know I am not straight, as we call it, but I don't know what I am, and I just want to invite you into this process."

(40:44): And one of the things that I was discerning at the beginning of that was just inviting her, "If we could just move for a little bit at the beginning, just to let the body, let the blood flow a little bit, let the brain open, let the heart feel things." I didn't have had those words fully back then, but I trusted that, "Can we just move for a little bit?" And she was nervous and she's like, "No. No. What's going on, honey? What do you mean? I don't want to just..." She was pushing in. I invited her to move. And then I started inviting her in. But...

Adam Williams (41:18): Did that seem strange to her at that time? "What do you mean you want to go for a walk?"

Jonathon Stalls (41:23): Yes.

Adam Williams (41:23): "What is this about? Where are we headed?"

Jonathon Stalls (41:24): Of course. She was just thrown off. She wanted to know. It felt scary for her. There was fear, which all makes sense. And I couldn't be more grateful for how it unfolded in terms of just... And I really trust that because we were moving, we could let these things fumble out. And this is what happens when you're walking next to someone and you're sharing difficult things. You're not across the table. And I believe this so much. I often share it now more frequently around artificial walls.

(42:00): We think about 90 degree walls that are artificially made mostly. So the material energy that we're next to or near when we're having difficult conversations. And if our bodies are across from each other, a table, or there's eye contact and there can be intimacy, but there is also so much that plays in this, maybe not all the way into combat, but there's a little bit.

You're not as naturally and organically flowing and moving together as you are on a walk. Our bodies are still moving next to each other as I'm sharing some of these things with my mom. She's still physically next to me as she doesn't quite understand what's going on and as she's trying to process.

(42:48): Those things might seem really simple, but they're not when we think about it as an actual practice or tool. And so for my mom and I, it was eventually getting to the place where she was just sharing very, very openly and in a very messy, tear filled way that she loved me no matter what, doesn't understand this journey, doesn't know any gay people, doesn't know how to support, is scared, is terrified. She got to share her process. That was a part of it. But I also got to really experiment in a very messy way with how do I begin to invite people all the way in, or at least a little more than I would have for the 24 years previous.

Adam Williams (43:33): And this was two, two and a half years before the big walk that really would cement walking as that medicine in your life.

Jonathon Stalls (43:44): Yeah.

Adam Williams (43:45): So I want to go from that very deep and meaningful personal experience with you and your mother to now what you do with things like Walk2Connect, this very public, open, inviting experience with people who've never met each other before. Describe what's going on there and what kinds of connections you see and hear and participate in happening through experiences like that.

Jonathon Stalls (44:10): Yeah. It just became so. And it stemmed the cross-country walk. There would be families or kids or people that would join me for hours and hours. They'd just see me and, "Hey, can I join you for a little bit?" "Hey, can my fa-..." I shared this in the book a little bit, I had homeschool parents drop their kids off. Y'all, that is trusting. And at the beginning, I didn't take their phone number, which was stupid. So I'm an hour in and I'm like, "Y'all better be coming back to get these kids." So I figured out some tools when people would do that.

(44:44): Anyway. So that would happen. And it was literally, it was clockwork, it was consistent. The stats. If I could research it, I would. The data behind 15, 20, 30 minutes of movement with a complete stranger, the things that would start to show up in our conversations, the things they would share with me, the things they felt comfortable sharing or asking, or the things I would share with them.

And by the time an hour or a couple of hours would pass, it's not that it's everything and it's not always going into the deep things, but there was a comfort and a flow around listening and offering and even being okay with moments of silence in between the talking.

(45:30): So there's all these other forms of connecting that are happening in the heart and in the body. So all of that was just so dialed in for me by the end of that walk. Yeah. So with Walk2Connect, it's just been constantly experimenting with hosting. And we describe it as connection focused walks or rolling events, if you're on mobility devices. And it's meant to just encourage with a little bit of structure and a little bit of guidance, moving next to each other, let that blood flow, open the mind, you're not across the table, you're not inside of a room at a networking event trying to just come up with stuff, which is great. Those have places.

(46:12): But there's just something, it's more open to me, it's more spacious. It's more forgiving. So a lot of the walks that I host that are... When I'm just starting with a community or with a group of people, we'll go 10, 15 minutes, you're walking with someone. And then at the intersection or at the end of a loop around a park, it's just being guided by me or by a walk leader to switch it up. Now talk with someone else. High five that person you just moved. It sounds a little like we're doing some stuff maybe we did in kindergarten. All right? Adults, we're going to be all right.

(46:49): But this is stuff that... It's medicine to move with... I mean, I've gotten to know so many people here in Salida and Buena Vista already just through the stuff we've been doing here, but in other places, so many people across all these different divides and lines, thinking about different experiences via race, via political stuff, via class, and to just move with someone who has such a unique experience in a way that's more open and flowing and not as the terms I use that are limited but not as transactional. Sometimes when you're meeting with people and you're getting to know them, there can feel like there's a transaction taking place of some kind, or maybe it's dictating the connection.

(47:32): When you're moving with people, it's a lot more open. And so the last note I'll just share on that related to it, the relationships that form because it's more flowing and open, the trust that forms, is so profound. I mean, we have people from our recurring walks, especially that we've done where it's a weekly Tuesday morning thing or a weekly Friday thing or Saturday thing. I mean, there's people who become... They're written in each other's wills, they're marrying each other if they... And I love this quote, one of my favorite authors, Adrienne Maree Brown, who wrote this book called Emergent Strategy, but one of my favorite quotes from her book is, "Moving at the speed of trust."

(48:16): It's like, "Yes, that's it. That's what it is." And it's not a gimmick. It's not an app. This is something we're made to be doing, engineered to be doing.

Adam Williams (48:26): Yeah. When you have been describing not only this right here, but also that experience with your mother, and what I'm picturing is how we actually, we do flow together, we are with each other. There is a motion and action in common. It's like a stream flowing. We're moving in the same direction together. And where we have those conversations with, say, a table in between us, there is that physical, it becomes a barrier. There is that opposition you were describing there. Yes, you can look each other in the eyes, but we're already putting in the physical and maybe the subconscious barriers to this connection.

(49:13): And like you're saying, you come to a conversation with someone who you don't know, there can be a guard up, there can be a, "Well, what's in it for me? Or what is it you're after?"

Jonathon Stalls (49:23): Yeah.

Adam Williams (49:23): So this movement with someone who might be from a different philosophy, religion-

Jonathon Stalls (49:29): Yes.

Adam Williams (49:30): ... politics, class, whatever all the categories can be, when we're moving together, we are starting from a place of this is something we have in common, now what flows out of us as we flow together?

Jonathon Stalls (49:43): Yes. And just even adding yes to all of it, like this kinetic connection. You think about just even sitting inside. So there's a physical stuckness around sedentary. Right? So you're sitting in your positions whether you know it or not, consciously or not. And your body is actually not at all even willing because you're sitting, sometimes inside of walls, or if it's in a cafe, you can't actually move all that far. So movement is irrelevant unless you're maybe doing connection while stretching or something, which is an option.

(50:29): But you think about the actual human bodies, humble human bodies exposed to the elements. So there's just this, you're out in the world and you're actually moving together. So your bodies are communicating without even the positions in the mind and what it does to position us. Your bodies are communicating. Yeah, we're in process, we're moving, we're shedding skin, we're growing, our joints are recalibrating as they connect to the gravity of the earth to keep our bodies... All this stuff is happening in the body when you're moving with someone. So there's movement. Movement.

(51:07): And it could work walking backwards, but you're typically moving forward. These are simple things, but they're actually really profound when we think about, are we going to evolve? Or are we going to remain giving over so much time and energy to stuckness, to being seated, to being inside of artificial walls, to being across tables and across these divides when really none of that is actually real and it's just... I shouldn't say that, that dismisses. What I mean by that though is I don't trust, at least personally, that it's inherent, that it's intrinsic, that it's something we're... It's not natural for us to just be in a place of stuckness so much, in so many ways, where we find ourselves so often.

Adam Williams (51:57): The simple things are often so difficult.

Jonathon Stalls (52:00): Yes.

Adam Williams (52:01): And I think, in art, especially with things like what we're talking about here, is because that's what gets overlooked. These seem like such simple ideas. "Yeah, let's go for a walking conversation."

Jonathon Stalls (52:14): Yes.

Adam Williams (52:14): You and I met a week or two ago for an initial conversation. It did not even occur to me, knowing you had written a book called WALK, to Say, "Hey, how about we go for a walk in this first conversation that we're not recording and get to know each other." Instead, I offered the conventional, the pat, "Hey, you want to meet for coffee somewhere?"

Jonathon Stalls (52:35): Yeah.

Adam Williams (52:35): And when you responded with, "Well, how about we go for a walk?" I just thought, it's palmed the forehead, "Of course."