Living in the In-Between

The dominant stories of our time demand certainty.

They reward division. They encourage us to stand firmly on one side or the other.

But the future will not be built from hardened positions alone.

It will require spaces where people can listen across difference. Spaces where identities are not fixed, but evolving. Spaces where creativity and memory can meet.

In other words, we need places where the in-between can exist.

For most of my life, I did not think of the in-between as something valuable. I experienced it as a question, or even a problem to solve.

I was born in the United States but shaped just as deeply by Ecuador, where I have now lived for half my life. For many years I have moved between cultures, languages, and ways of knowing. And for a long time I wondered where exactly I belonged.

There were moments I felt ashamed of being the “American” or the “gringo” in Ecuador. Moments when I became painfully aware of the histories I carried whether I wanted to or not. Histories of extraction, privilege, intervention, and unequal movement across borders. Sometimes I felt that no matter how much love, commitment, or time I gave, I would still remain external in the eyes of some people.

But there were also moments, especially when returning to the United States, when I no longer felt entirely at home there either.

I would speak differently. Move differently. Long for the rhythms, relationships, humor, and ways of being I had come to know in Ecuador. And sometimes I encountered subtle reminders that I had become strange there too. Too emotional. Too relational. Too critical of the systems I had once moved through without question.

For a long time, belonging felt conditional to me. Like something that had to be earned. Or proven. Or granted by others.

Maybe that is why the word belonging always felt so connected to longing.

I carried a constant sense of reaching toward something: a place, a community, a version of myself that would finally feel settled.

But living and learning alongside Indigenous communities in Ecuador slowly began to shift that understanding.

I came to realize that many of the crises we face today — environmental destruction, social inequality, cultural erasure — are connected by the same underlying stories. Stories that separate humans from land. Knowledge from community. Development from dignity.

But other stories exist too.

Working with Pachaysana has helped cultivate spaces where community-led visions, education, and culture can grow from within, while also opening the door to relationships that transformed me in return.

One moment that shaped this understanding took place in the Kichwa community of Mushullakta during a theatre for social change workshop held in the forest.

Community members were embodying the presence of their ancestors, standing among the immense trees that have sustained them for generations. As the workshop unfolded, a collective realization surfaced: the changes they were waiting for would not come from the outside.

Development, as the world had defined it, was not the answer.

The pathway forward lay in remembering. In revitalizing ancestral practices. In recognizing that who they already were was not something to overcome, but something essential to the future.

That moment changed the way I understood my own story.

What I once experienced as uncertainty, or the feeling of living between worlds, began to reveal itself as something else entirely.

The in-between is not a place of confusion.

It is a space of possibility.

It is not where we live trapped between two warring realities. It is where different stories encounter one another. Where assumptions loosen. Where imagination becomes possible again.

And perhaps belonging is not always about arriving fully into one world or another.

Perhaps belonging can also mean learning to inhabit the bridge itself.

To accept that identity can remain unfinished. That contradiction can coexist with love. That we can be shaped by multiple territories, histories, and ways of knowing at once.

Whether others fully understood that or not, I eventually began to embrace it myself.

At the heart of Pachaysana’s work is a deep trust in story and creativity as ways of rehearsing new futures before they fully exist.

And today, as political tensions intensify and our public conversations grow more polarized, I feel how strongly the dominant narratives of our time push us toward certainty and separation. They ask us to choose sides, defend positions, and close ranks.

But the work ahead requires something different.

Perhaps the future depends on our ability to create intentional spaces of in-betweenness. Places where listening becomes possible again, where identities can evolve, and where new stories about our relationship with one another and with the earth can take root.

My own journey has taught me that the in-between is not something to resolve.

It is something to inhabit.

And right now, we may need those spaces more than ever.