I can hardly believe it but there’s only 9 days until RMP is leaving on this grand adventure. The time feels like it’s just melted away all of a sudden. At times, it felt like this trip could not come sooner and now it feels unreal for it to be so close. In retrospect, I can see the expanse of time, energy, and passion that has gone into this endeavor. We’ve been dreaming and planning and working for this for nearly half a year now and it’s finally on our doorstep. Perhaps it feels so surreal to have it here at last because it’s already been such a long road to get where we are now. Conceiving of the RMP has been a journey in itself and that’s exactly what I’d like to begin writing on in this post. There’s been a lot of organizing and strategizing that has gone into this project and we, as a collective, would like to share a little insight on how we did it. It’s our hope that folks who may want to plan adventures like this in their future can reference us for some guidance. We aim to have more posts written by other collective members following this one in a series on how we (to put it plainly) did this damn thing. So here we go! Here’s some thoughts on how we imagined this road trip into existence…
The Radical Mapping Project really did start with a conversation. My partner, Madeleine, and I were eating dinner in our backyard and over some dank vegan grub and probably some wine, simply asked each other a question:
In our ideal world, what would we want to do after we graduate college that would make us feel excited instead of scared for our futures?
Madeleine and I, like many soon to be college grads, were feeling exceedingly anxious about the abyss of post grad life that seemed to await us and more largely, scared about the state of the world. As students who essentially majored in social justice and activism, we were unsure about the ways in which we could continue to live out these principles sustainably. It just took one thought provoking question to allow us to spark an idea that would eventually be our answer to our plight.
We both knew we wanted to travel but that we didn’t want to participate in typical tourist behaviors and economies. We wanted to travel with a purpose. Even more, we wanted to seek an answer to the questions we had. We wanted to find out if it was possible to live radically and how and where we could do this. We wanted to meet radical people that could teach us this. We babbled excitedly into the night, conceiving of a road trip around the U.S that would allow us to do just this. The trip would be about exploring and traveling, but would also be about adding to a radical narrative that we needed and still need to inspire us. The idea of making a road trip out of an ethnographic style research project attracted us admittedly because we’re kind of nerds, but mostly because we liked the idea of travelling in a way that forced us to be conscious, informed, and observant of the places and people we were interacting with. The hope of turning our research into something that could somehow benefit others also drove us. That night, after hours of chattering enthusiastically about every possibility and hope for our trip, we left that conversation feeling high about how surprisingly tangible it felt. The more we talked, the more possible it began to feel and the more we began to realize ways to actually make it happen.
In the weeks that followed, we began telling our friends about our idea in the hopes of having some of them join us. Many of them were excited and impressed by the ambition of our trip, but were not willing to embark on it for either the expense or time commitment of it. Eventually, we found that our friend Hannah wanted to join us and later on, our friend Naz. We were elated that our idealistic ramblings about a lofty 4 month trip around the country were actually able to motivate some of our friends to join us. It proved to us that what we were hoping for in this trip was not our hope alone. It was energizing and affirming to have our friends believe in what we were doing as much as we did, and it created a newfound investment in the trip that was rooted in the dedication we’d made to them. We had envisioned a dream that was now shared collectively and that was powerful. Once that was established, it didn’t take long for the rest of trip to begin piecing itself together. We had the vision and now we just needed the plan.
However corny it may sound, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to allow oneself the time and space to daydream. It reminds me of a concept that author Shawn Ginwright discusses in his book Black Youth Rising : Activism and Radical Healing in Urban America. Ginwright references Robin Kelly's theory of "radical imagination" in explaining it as "the revolutionary potential for hope." He explains how the everyday life and oppressive conditions of our country "render hope and imagination inert" but how critically important these two things are as "prerequisites for activism and social change." We can't have revolution if we can't imagine it, and no truth speaks more to how I've been feeling since graduating college. In these few months since I’ve been out of school, I’ve realized how much my experience for most of college didn’t allow or foster the kind of radical imagination needed to beckon real change. This summer, I've had the privilege and time to read, write, make music, and explore the outdoors again. This has fed a part of me that I feel was so incredibly dormant before- whether or not I realized it. School expanded my mind in so many new ways but also harshly stunted my ability to imagine new possibilities. Many of the lessons I learned were necessary, but only taught me to critique the injustices and oppressions of our world rather than imagine what justice and freedom could look like. In the first few weeks of summer, I felt awakened again; like my ability to dream was returned to me. I began to remember what my desires for myself were when I was younger and what this meant to me now in my life. This gave me a beautiful and startling clarity on who I was again that I hadn’t even realized was lost. I started fantasizing and although it felt kind of silly at first, I realized that this was allowing me to refocus my intentions and energies for my present and future- for not just myself, but my world. It definitely took lots of time and rest and healing work, but in accessing this, I finally felt my creativity return to me.
In a book that I'm reading titled Radical Hope: Letters of Hope and Dissent in Dangerous Times, Viet Thanh Nguyen puts it perfectly in responding to the political despair of living in Trump's fascist regime:
"here's what I have to say to American liberals and leftists: instead of listening to the strategists, who don't believe it's possible to dramatically change our society, can we finally be bold and listen to the artists and the outsiders and the radicals and the freaks and the avant-garde and the base and the youth and the anarchists and all those who don't want to do business as usual with the limousine liberalism of both the elite democrats and the republicans? Can we listen to the dreamers instead of the doubters? Can we dare to demand the impossible?"
The Radical Mapping Project really did emerge out of a conversation inspired by imagination and dreams. We asked ourselves a question and as friends, allowed ourselves the space to vision together. It was in these scattered thoughts, fantasies, and daydreams that we were able to conceptualize something we had no idea was even possible. For this reason, dreaming truly is in every sense of the word, a remarkably radical act. It's in these dreams that we're allowed the freedom to envision that another world is possible; another future; another journey for us to embark on.
1st image used from here
2nd image used from here