What I love about the natural world is it’s isolation. To this day, there are still places on our planet that no human has ever seen our touched. To me, that is a beautiful challenge. True isolation allows someone to be with themself and their thoughts, undisturbed. Populated areas have their obvious benefits, but it’s all too easy to fall into the cyclical motion of society: day in and day out of the same routine. This is when I can enter auto-pilot. Completing tasks but not being fully present. Feeling pressure from everyone else’s achievements and boastings. Time can evaporate when you spend too much of your life in this state. Going camping or hiking is a time when I can detach from the part of my identity that obsesses over success and wealth. In that moment, all there’s energy to think on is the next step, next meal, next task. I don’t think on the timescale of months and years, unless meditating on it intentionally. I don’t ever want to lose the freedom of being alone in the outdoors.

My personal sustainability pledge for future generations is to be hyper- aware of the amount of waste I produce on a regular basis and actively work to decrease it. The fact that there is a gigantic floating island of trash in the middle of the Pacific makes me so sad. I can’t do much to fix it, but I can at least do my part to stop adding to it. It’s as simple as utilizing reusable items and buying less things.

A recent project of mine that I felt passionately about was an album I recorded and am releasing on April 9th called The Iron Door. I travelled to Joshua Tree National Park here in California and recorded the album live inside of a cave. I hiked out a generator and all of my equipment and instruments before sunrise, then recorded alone for about 7 hours. It was one of the most challenging and complicated projects I’ve ever done, and it is also one with which I am the most prideful. As for the future, once Covid isn’t an impediment to live shows, I hope to buy a van and use it to travel across the US and tour with my music and comedy in as many states as possible. In addition, I want to create a podcast alongside it where I can interview different people from around the country to try and create a portrait of the American identity in all its forms.

Storytelling and creativity are what literally make us human. We are animals and thus have our impulses, needs, and instincts. But our ability to think and feel outside of our own body/experience is why we create and admire art in the first place. Otherwise, we’d be so extremely bored that we probably wouldn’t want to live at all. Storytelling and creativity are important because they are the shared attempt by all of humanity to understand each other and our existence.

With The Creative Process, I am learning from intelligent people so that I can better myself (specifically composers, musicians, writers, comedians) and expanding my knowledge of audio production. I hope to be able to travel for a professional podcast would be a huge plus as I love visiting new places and meeting new people.