Walk With Me, Week Two: Finding the Places Where We Belong

Week one showed us how different places can spark connection. A walk on the beach. A festival. A friendship. A lemonade stand.

Week two carried us from Southern California across the Mojave, through Las Vegas and Utah, into Wyoming and northern Colorado. The miles got longer. The conversations got deeper. And a new question started riding along with us.

What makes those connections possible in the first place?

Day 4: Glendora to Claremont

Monday was a walking day through Glendora, San Dimas and La Verne, past homes, schools and people heading to work.

In Claremont, we met Yvonne Cervantes Coleman, who has spent the last decade building Common Thread, a sewing studio where she and her team now teach more than 140 kids, teens and adults each week. The sign out front reads, "Crafting a creative community one stitch at a time."

Some people come to her classes to learn to sew, Yvonne told us. Some come to meet people. For some, sitting in a room and making something alongside others fills a space that has been empty for a while.

Connection often needs a reason to begin. A needle and thread can be enough.

We ended the day with the Inland Valley Storytellers at their monthly story swap. Their openness moved Lucy Rose, founder of The Cost of Loneliness Project, to share more of her own story.

We had spent the day walking past the front doors of other people's lives. We finished it in a room full of people telling each other who they are.

Day 5: Claremont to Las Vegas

Our last conversation in California began because someone noticed our van at a gas station.

Carlos Heredia walked over to ask what we were doing. The next day, he and his wife, Martha Mendez, were telling us about some of the hardest parts of their lives.

Carlos grew up in the foster system, alone in a broken home. Loneliness had run through generations of his family. He went looking for safety, for worth and for somewhere to belong, and that search led him to a gang. For someone who feels unseen or unwanted, he explained, a gang can offer everything that is missing. You're noticed. You're valued. You're told you belong.

Today Carlos works with people searching for that same feeling, and he helps them see another path forward as part of his work with From Gangs to Glory. 

Martha grew up as one of 14 children, and she still remembers feeling deeply alone. That experience shapes her work today with Volunteers of America. Kids, she told us, often aren't asking for more things. They want someone to ask about their day. They want someone to notice them.

When we asked what belonging means to them, they both came back to intention. You can share a name, a home or a family with someone and still feel alone. Belonging grows from the time, attention and care we choose to give each other.

Both of them became emotional as they talked. We're grateful they trusted us with their stories.

In the desert outside Las Vegas, strangers gathered around the fluorescent towers of Seven Magic Mountains, pausing together over something bright and unexpected. Author Ingrid Fetell Lee calls moments like this "joy spotting."

That night, the scale grew by thousands. At a Las Vegas Aces game, an entire arena cheered for the same team. WNBA fans spent years seeking each other out and building their own community, and you can feel it in the building.

Day 6: Las Vegas to Salt Lake City

Kelvin Watson leads the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, and this year Library Journal named him its Librarian of the Year. After a morning with him, we understood why. Kelvin treats the library as a front door to whatever a community needs.

His district has handed out smartphones to low-income and unhoused residents. Kelvin wanted us to understand what one of those phones can mean. For someone without a home, it can be the difference between being found and being missed. It can mean getting the call that says, 

"We have a place for you to stay."

He builds all of it through partnerships, and each one, he told us, should start with what the other side will get. "If we work together, everyone wins." Kelvin put it in one line. "The library in the community and the community in the library."

He also told us how he thinks about loneliness.

"I think loneliness is feeling like you can't find a way outside of yourself. People need a space and place to go to."

Day 7: Salt Lake City to Cheyenne

In Cheyenne, we gathered at Open Door Studio & Gallery. When it opened last fall, one of its owners told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle the name meant "opening a door for someone to sit down and feel welcomed." That's exactly what happened.

We had come to meet airmen, commanders and host families from Adopt an Airman, which pairs first-term airmen at F.E. Warren Air Force Base with families in the community. Most of the airmen are between 18 and 24, on their first assignment and far from everyone they know.

The program's founder, Carolyn Ritschard, knows that life from the inside. Her husband served 23 years on active duty, and they moved 11 times. In one new town, a group told her they probably wouldn't get to know her. Military families always leave, they said, and it was too hard to get attached.

Imagine hearing that when you're already starting over. Carolyn started Adopt an Airman to help airmen get off base and into the community.

"People aren't projects," she told us. What she wants for every airman is a real relationship, built on trust and safety.

Airman Savannah Levett described loneliness as emptiness. She was raised in the South and arrived in Cheyenne on a cold November day. One of the first things she noticed, she told Cowboy State Daily, was "There's like no trees out here." Her host family, Maggie and Stan Hartzheim, took her out for her December birthday and found her shivering in a thin hoodie. For Christmas, they gave her gift cards for a real Wyoming coat, which Cowboy State Daily described as a warm hug telling her she belongs. Maggie and Stan are empty nesters, and they gained a friend.

Col. Terry Holmes, commander of the 90th Missile Wing, has spent 33 years on active duty. "Being in the military is a team sport," he told us. He wants young airmen building meaningful connections early, before anyone is struggling alone. And he was honest: "It's lonely at the top." He told Cowboy State Daily about the day his wife said, "You might be here physically, but you're not here mentally and emotionally." He closed the laptop. He now tells his airmen, "We recruit citizens, but we retain families."

Airman Trevor Temple has learned how much it matters to show up as himself. "When I'm being myself, I like myself better as a person. And I think other people like me better too." He asked us to honor the courage it takes when someone reaches out. Then he offered a line meant for anyone who needs it.

"You may not feel it, but there is always someone who cares about you."

Dave and Georgia have been host parents since the program began. Their airman, Kaleb, is from Houston, and this is his first long stretch away from home. They cook together, play cards and laugh a lot. Georgia taught him to bake. Dave taught him to talk to anyone. Kaleb once wore a banana costume to order a banana split. Some of the best connection is being ridiculous with people who are happy you're there.

Asked to describe connection, Kaleb needed only three words. "Someone who gets you."

Georgia has a rule of her own. "Welcome people into the space that you occupy." That welcome reaches all the way to Houston. At one point, Kaleb's mother asked Georgia for something only another person could give.

"Georgia, I'm so far away, can you stand in the gap for me?"

It was the most loving request we heard all week. The Wyoming Tribune Eagle made "Stand in the gap" the headline of its story on our visit.

Day 8: Cheyenne to Fort Collins

Cheyenne grew up around the railroad. Mayor Patrick Collins talked with us about the railroad's role in connecting the coasts and helping communities grow. We've spent this trip talking about connecting people to each other. Communities need connections to each other, too.

He also talked about access. Sometimes it's a neighbor building a ramp so someone with limited mobility can get beyond their front door. The gathering place matters. So does the path that gets someone through the door.

Day 9: Fort Collins

Saturday was meant to be a rest-and-reflection day. Time alone gives you room to notice what you need, and that is often where reaching out begins.

Connection still found us. An unexpected introduction to a Salem College alumna who lives in Fort Collins turned into the start of a friendship for Lucy.

Then we met James Sims.

James had come to a park that morning for a men's walking group, and no one else showed up. He was minutes from leaving. He told us he almost didn't stay in Fort Collins at all. Then he saw the magnets on our vehicles and asked about our project. 

James grew up in Alabama, inside a cult, in a home where his father's anger could feel like a wrath. Accordingly to James, being a young Black man there deepened his sense of not fitting in. When he left, he had to learn to live in a world he had never been taught. He spent years searching, including two years on the road, looking for himself and for connection.

He described loneliness as heartache, and as emptiness. He talked about how hard it is to let people in when the people closest to you were the ones who hurt you. Most of his wounds came from his father, he said, and he came to the park that morning hoping to heal among men who might have walked a road like his.

Admitting you're lonely still feels taboo, he said, especially for men. According to James, in many Black communities, mental health carries its own stigma, shaped by generations of systemic mistreatment and by a toughness that once meant survival. He summed up that old way of thinking in one line.

"Who's going to help me so I have to help myself."

He has chosen a different way. Therapy has helped him a great deal, and he goes every week. He wants to break the family patterns that told him who he had to be, and he wants to make his pain worth something.

Then he told us about an elephant. Tie a young elephant to a fence post long enough, and eventually you can take the rope away. The elephant stays, because it no longer believes it can leave.

James knows what it means to find out you can leave. After being hurt by people, he has found connection in nature and with animals. He calls intuition his heart's messages, and he has learned to listen. He wants anyone who grew up being told there was only one way to know there are other ways out. There is a way out of the tunnel, he said, and a man can make it through.

He doesn't know yet where his life is leading. He still hopes for deep, lasting connection. And he told us that if he could see the whole script of his life, he thinks he would be pleased with it.

We weren't looking for a story that day. We weren't even supposed to be walking. And by the end of it, there was a rainbow over Fort Collins. 

Belonging at work

While we were in Fort Collins, we also sat down with Tyler Miget of Blue-Collar Belonging. When people feel they don't belong, he told us, they often don't feel safe enough to do their best work. That's especially true in the trades, where the expectation is often to stay tough and figure things out yourself.

His answer is curiosity. "Let your curiosity be the most used tool in your tool belt." His advice for CEOs: "Slow down. Take interest. And be a person."

Morgan D'Avis, a supervisor with the Fort Collins Police Department, told us he was grateful the day his team said he wasn't giving them what they needed, and even prouder that they felt safe enough to say it.

"Feeling words are hard for guys," Tyler said, echoing what James had told us in the park. Loneliness shows even when nobody says the word, in how people withdraw and whether they feel comfortable asking for help. Maybe that's where destigmatizing loneliness starts, with making it safer for someone to say they need another person. It takes strength to ask for help. It takes strength to say you're lonely, too.

What we're starting to notice

Two weeks in, one thing keeps showing up. Connection needs an opening.

A sewing class. A story swap. A phone that rings with good news. A host family's kitchen table. A ramp to the front door. A coworker who asks a question and waits for the answer. A van at a gas station, or a stranger who decides to stay a little longer in the park.

Loneliness takes just as many forms. Carlos looked for belonging in a gang. Martha felt alone in a house full of brothers and sisters. Savannah arrived somewhere with no trees, a long way from home. Carolyn packed up her life 11 times. James waited in a park for a group that never came.

The settings change from town to town. The need shows up in every one of them. And in every one of them, we've met people making room for someone else.

That's usually how belonging starts. Someone makes room.

Next up are Loveland and Boulder, then east onto the plains toward Topeka. We'll keep walking, and we'll keep listening.

If there's someone we should meet along the way, or a place in your community where people already come together, tell us.

And on Nov. 12, join us for the first National Day of Connection. At noon, take 12 minutes with someone you want to know better.