I’m getting ready for a trip. Not just the logistics of packing or checking passports, but the deeper work of preparing to see differently. To walk into another country—another way of structuring care, community, public life—with enough humility to learn something. Back home in America, where polarization deepens and public trust frays, it feels like a rare and urgent privilege to ask better questions about how people live and what they owe one another. What kind of systems help us thrive? What kinds of relationships help us endure?
At a recent lecture at Duke, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Rowan Williams said something that has quietly rearranged the furniture in my soul. “We are all responsible for bringing each other alive.” It is a staggering statement. Not just that we need one another—which we do. But that our aliveness is something we owe to one another. That interdependence is not weakness, but the shape of being human.
In America, where autonomy is currency and bootstraps are myth, it’s an unpopular truth. The idea that we might be formed in relationship, that our thriving depends on giving and receiving, feels tender and radical at once. And yet—it’s what I hope to carry into this trip with The Gambrell Foundation.
We’re traveling across oceans to see what it might look like for communities to build belonging, for cities to reflect care, for systems to prioritize well-being not only for the exceptional or resourced or able-bodied—but for all. I go as an explorer with a spiritual hunch: that purpose and connection aren’t just good for the soul, but good for the resilience of a people.
I’m curious about how Finland and Denmark embed these values into their daily rhythms. What do their streets and schools and sacred spaces say about what they believe people are for? What kinds of embodied knowledge—as Dr. Williams called it—are necessary for us to be fully alive? Not just ideas or policies, but ways of seeing, touching, trusting, receiving.
I’ve been thinking about time lately. How we spend it. How it bends and expands in new places. This trip feels like a gift of time—set apart for wonder and learning. An invitation to breathe in, so that we might breathe out something more beautiful.
We’ll be a small band of travelers from North Carolina and beyond—artists, organizers, thinkers. People who care about thriving. People who care about people. And it’s not lost on me that even now, before we take off, we are beginning to shape one another. In questions asked over a coffee or Zoom call. In the shared sense that we’re trying to pay attention.
So here I am, still stateside, holding the first of many Russian nesting dolls. I don’t know what gifts we’ll find inside. But I do know this: we will give and receive. We will look and listen. We will come back changed.
Because sometimes to be made alive again, you have to step outside your life for a little while and let someone else show you what’s possible.