"Built for This": Al Murray on Belonging and Becoming

The South holds stories that refuse to fade—stories of resilience, reckoning, and renewal. For queer and trans Southerners, those stories are often equal parts love letter and liberation map.

In this episode, we sit down with Al Murray, Tzedek’s 2025 Pauli Murray Brilliance Award recipient, whose work reminds us that belonging isn’t found, it’s built. Raised in rural Western Kentucky and now rooted in Asheville, Al shares their journey through art, activism, and identity: from escaping the small-town South to returning home to reconcile with its complexities. With humor and heart, they explore what it means to stay, to fight for joy, and to refuse the myth that the South belongs to anyone else.

Together, we weigh: What does it mean to build bridges instead of walls? To stay complicated, visible, and connected in a place that doesn’t always feel safe?

About Al:

Al Murray (they/them) is a queer, nonbinary, trans artist, storyteller, and community strategist whose work bridges creativity and justice across the American South. A self-described “poor kid from rural Western Kentucky turned Southern builder,” Al brings a rare mix of artistry, grit, and systems thinking to their leadership. Currently serving with the WNC Health Network, they focus on data equity and community-driven storytelling that transforms public health into collective action.

Before joining WNC Health Network, Al helped launch Southern Equality Studios at the Campaign for Southern Equality, a program uplifting queer Southern artists through creative visibility and resource sharing. Their career has spanned youth advocacy, harm reduction, and arts-based liberation work, all grounded in a deep belief that we heal when we know one another’s stories.

Al is the 2025 Tzedek Pauli Murray Brilliance Award recipient, honored for their intersectional leadership and unwavering commitment to collective liberation in Asheville and beyond.

Whether you’re a creative, activist, or anyone learning how to stay rooted while building a more just world, this episode is a reminder that our stories are bridges, and that joy, too, is an act of resistance.

Press play and remember: We were built for this.

We'll see you same time, same place next month. Until then, peace.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

We're profoundly, profoundly interconnected. We don't always live that way, we don't always acknowledge it. But if we're going to heal, we have to live it, experience it, and create institutions that celebrate it. Can we create a we when no one's on the outside of it?

SPEAKER_02 0:20

Welcome to the Uplift with Zedek, real talk for real change. Before we jump in, a quick reminder of why we're here and what we hope to achieve. We're here to build authentic community relationships and help fuel social transformation in Nashville, North Carolina. We believe collective liberation is not only possible but probable as we share, listen, and learn together. We're here for the process. However, the views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent. Welcome to the Uplift. This week, Al Murray, our 2025 Pauly Murray Brilliance Award winner, is on the mic. This award honors a community leader who has been involved in a wide variety of social justice efforts and who leads with the wisdom that all struggles for liberations are connected. And guess what? That's Al to a T, no doubt. Let's get into it. Al, thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and the work that you're doing?

Rooted in Rural Identity

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Sure. Thank you for having me, Michael. My name is Al. My pronouns are they them. And I have lived in Asheville now since 2012. Prior to that, I was born in Western Kentucky and lived there until I went to college in Lexington, Kentucky. I always thought that over time that wouldn't, not that that wouldn't be part of my story, but that that wouldn't factor in. And now at this stage, it not only factors in, it feels like a cardinal direction almost, somewhere between south and west, is this rural beginning that I feel like I point back to pretty often as a reminder of who I am. I grew up in a very small rural town. I'll probably say more about this as we talk, but I still feel like I'm from a small rural town. I always feel like the person in the room who grew up without much in the way of financial means and who grew up with an interesting family. That no matter what room I'm in, I'm not the person with a graduate degree. I don't feel like the person who's been doing social justice work for up to, I don't know, between 10, 15 years. I don't feel like the person who studied and taught art history. I feel like the poor kid from Western Kentucky. I don't mean that in a bad way. I just mean that in a way that it still continues to be this mark on the compass that I always am. Yeah, I've been in Asheville for 12 years. Uh, I'm from the South. I feel deeply connected to the South. And I've been doing social justice work, I don't know, in some way my whole life.

Navigating Identities

SPEAKER_02 2:50

Yeah. Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about that. Sure. Your identities bring you into this work almost by necessity.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Yeah. When I left the small town I grew up in and thought about what I wanted to be in the world, there didn't seem to be an option that really aligned with the majors and minors in the course book at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. But there were a lot of extracurriculars that did. So I knew that whatever I was doing, spending the majority of my time doing, had to be aligned with the impact I wanted to have on the culture around me. Originally that, yeah, I'll uh I'll become a doctor, I'll become a lawyer, whatever I could imagine that would one, make me the most money, to feel like the most prestigious that I could take back to my family and say, look what I did. I made it. Um but I always had this orientation that took me to a place to be visible, to be a person with power and a person who moved power because I think that was the thing I never felt before. An access to power, an access to visibility that felt good. So I studied art. I took a women's studies um course and then built a major out of it. Of course you did. Yeah, I did. Um been there. Yeah. And so, like three black feminist theory courses later, I I had a, I think a, they called it a multicultural minor, uh, multicultural studies and women's studies, uh, art studio double major. I started working in nonprofits, large ones, small ones. I had this parallel life where I worked in summer camps and did outdoor rec. So I worked with for the Girl Scouts, I worked for YMCAs, and then eventually went to um grad school, a Yukon in Connecticut for art history. But still, I didn't have as much an interest in researching and publishing what was on the list. I was way more interested in having conversations about how we use art, can use art, and making an expression to fuel change and understanding how that has worked over time. I found myself in a lot of history classes and a lot of sociology classes, even in grad school.

SPEAKER_02 5:11

Can you tell me a little bit more about how you identify?

SPEAKER_01 5:14

Oh, yeah. So personally, I identify as queer, as non-binary and trans. I do identify as trans and non-binary. For a long time in my life, these were identities that I didn't know existed. So for the majority of my life, I only understood that there could be straight people or gay people. Uh, I also barely understood that there was any sort of nuance other than folks being black or white or indigenous. And I I had no concept of what race looked like in me in the world because of the town I grew up in. I was also learning those things in college as a human being, sitting next to people who were not like me and like me at the same time. And so being a white kid, understanding what whiteness is, is just this ongoing process. I think I'm still building the muscles around understanding whiteness, understanding white supremacy, understanding how race shows up when it's not neutral.

SPEAKER_02 6:09

Do you feel like you had to leave the South to learn that?

SPEAKER_01 6:13

I feel like I needed just to see more of other people and to understand how they were seeing me to do this work. I remember when we moved, well, when I moved to Connecticut and I had met my now wife and some folks we worked with. I was working at a a large family YMCA and membership. And I remember saying, I think it was when we decided that we were gonna move, we were gonna leave and move here. And uh we said, yeah, we're gonna get married. We got married a couple months before we moved here. We're gonna get married, but it's not gonna be recognized in North Carolina. And I remember all of these people with all of these master's degrees, and so many of them said, What? What are you talking about? When we go to North Carolina, our marriage will not be recognized. And they said, No way. But these are the same people for whom the KKK still exists. Yeah. So there were still clan rallies in Connecticut and that they knew about. There was a strange juxtaposition in me when I got to Connecticut that further untold this story about access and whiteness and academia that it was somehow this place, this like all-knowing, omniscient place where people understood and knew everything and knew everybody and was still so limited by context, so dependent on knowing people. And so I found myself having to explain, yeah, actually, that is a struggle. And and I remember people really characterizing the South in a way that didn't feel good to me and saying, oh, they're just so backwards. How could you go? And da-da-da. Oh, your your marriage isn't even recognized, recognized. And I would say, well, you didn't even know that until two seconds ago. Yeah. Like I said before, the KKK is still active in your backyard. So I'm not sure really what difference you're pointing to here. So I I think access and privilege was something I I learned and understood characteristics of my upbringing in a rural southern town over time, understood how isolated I was and the impacts of that. What really led me to continue orienting to social justice or understanding how people's conditions are different across identity, geography, and how they those can be changed or affected. It really came from a place of constant knowing and unknowing, and then constantly understanding how that just meant different things at different times. Connecticut or the Northeast, while there were colleges on every corner instead of churches like where I grew up, and there still are churches on every corner. Um somehow access to that knowledge didn't result in some increase in justice.

SPEAKER_02 8:47

Yeah, really well said. I went to school in Boston, grew up in Homestead, Florida, and there's still something about the South that just feels like home for you. Why the South? Why now?

The South as a Mirror

SPEAKER_01 8:56

I think the South for me holds up important mirrors. The South gives us an opportunity to consider histories we need to reconcile while we're living them out. We're seeing them presented right in front of us if we're paying attention and if we have our eyes open to it, we want to talk about it in a way that is very immediate and recognizable and painful. Tangible, tangible, you have to see it. Yeah, you can sort of taste the racism in and the legacy confronts you as much as you confront the legacy, both the you know, the intense violence that is still so recent in the South. It's not that it doesn't exist elsewhere, yeah, but we still have monuments to it here. I think in some ways, when we go into those intellectual spaces, they they remove us from it a little bit in a way we can retreat into academic spaces and write about it and study about it. It gives us a distance that we can do some analysis, but it also kind of removes us from it. At least that's what it did for me. Yeah. And being in the South meant two things. One, I was literally physically closer to my family, closer in proximity to my family of origin. And two, I really, and this is something that I I have tried to articulate over the years and still struggle to in in art and in sculpting, or the only places that I feel like I come close to describing this feeling, but the idea that I grew up telling myself I had to escape my small rural southern roots to be free, to find my place, to connect to myself. And it turns out that when you build a bridge, you're actually connecting two sides of a thing. You're not creating distance. You are creating connection. Like coming back across that bridge back to a space that scared me, that made me sad, where it didn't feel safe to be queer, where I felt ashamed of some of the some of the roots that I had been born from. Yeah. And actually that has influenced more of how I've shown up in the world to reconnect and bridge those and reconcile and choose joy and creativity and and using those stories over being ashamed of them and running from them and burying them. Yeah, as a as a poor identified white kid from the middle of nowhere, it turns out like going to Connecticut and going to university and going to grad school and finding a way to not connect to those things in my past that felt so sad or scary or legacies of um racism or poverty that felt limiting, it was actually coming back to it and acknowledging all the ways I had so much mobility that I could understand that existence as already free. Moving back to the South felt like I was able to work with the material that I had rather than trying to work with somebody else's material.

SPEAKER_03 11:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:54

You know, no matter how long I lived in the Northeast or how much I loved it up there and I did, being here, it's a language I speak. It's my accent. The South is gritty. The South is people have had to really learn how to do their own versions of liberation here. And there's no two ways about it. You either work with your neighbor or you don't. Honestly, if you don't, you don't you don't have a lot to work with. I think there's a a sense of community that I didn't feel up north. There's a familiarity.

SPEAKER_02 12:22

When you're talking rural too. Yeah. My grandparents are from Waynesville and I spent a lot of time in Waynesville. And community works differently in that if it snows and grandma needs the roads plowed, like somebody has to come do that. Right. And so there are ways that our survival are right in our faces tied together. Yes. That's not always true in a city, despite those liberations still being connected.

SPEAKER_03 12:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:46

Do you feel or have you felt really held in social justice spaces, especially non-queer centered social justice spaces in the South? Asheville.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

In Asheville, that's an interesting question because sometimes I have felt when we have a really clear shared purpose, when there's something very tangible to do, there's an activity. Yes. And when we when there's a lot of analysis or when we're we're taking a lot of time to think through our own identities, um, I think sometimes we get a little lost. In the spaces where I haven't been able to disagree with people, I have not felt held. And I'm not saying that has happened a lot. I honestly can't. I think everybody's a little afraid to disagree with one another in social justice spaces because we want to do the most work toward the most right thing in the best way we can because it feels like there's so much at stake. And if we get it wrong, oh gosh, we have those limited resources and that limited time, those limited efforts to make something happen. I have felt held in different ways. In the same way that you can't flatten somebody out into one aspect of their identity in queer spaces. It hasn't always been my queerness that has helped me feel seen or useful or happy or at peace. Sometimes it has been my role upbringing where I've connected with somebody who has said, Oh yeah, me too. So in spaces in Asheville, you know, I've done um I've volunteered in in places where we did harm reduction work, where we did um language justice work. In the end, it has been a commitment to doing the thing we set out to do that felt really connective, like the connective tissue, not necessarily identity that we were bringing.

SPEAKER_02 14:33

As a white queer person, though. I'm guessing with all of your gender, right, your gender justice lens, yeah, that you've learned how to be a good white person. And for me, I mean Zedek's focal areas, right? Right. Racial justice, LGBTQ justice, and dismantling anti-Semitism.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Small things.

SPEAKER_02 14:52

Wow. Yeah. And then you have these groups that don't, they're not naturally seated together.

SPEAKER_03 14:58

Yeah.

"Built for This Moment"

SPEAKER_02 14:59

And so trying to bridge, as you were talking about, building those bridges and just to get to the simple understanding of that truly that we're all connected. And not like uh woo-woo kumbaya moment, but like for real. If my rights are somehow able to be dismissed or downgraded, you are just as vulnerable. And that basic level of connection has been challenging for me. With everything going on, you talked about being trans. You have a family. Have you thought about leaving?

The Power of Honest Disagreement

SPEAKER_01 15:28

Oh, yeah. So um I I remember the first Trump presidency when I went outside on my front porch and my wife came out there and I just looked up at her and I said, What do we do? What do we what in the world do we do right now? Like, how do we show up in this moment with whatever access privilege or gumption we have? And and she said, you know, for better or for worse, we were built for this. And it's it's that metaphor of like you don't build a ship for calm waters. And I I don't I don't like that metaphor because it also suggests we're only we're only intended to be in a fight at all times, and and that is not the case. Like we're it's we need to rest and celebrate as fiercely as we engage. But yeah, I think about leaving, and then I think about I'm from a long line of people who have been forced out of places, a legacy of people who have been told you can't be here by somebody in power with money who at one point physically removed them from their homes. And I will be damned if these are not queer mountains. Yeah. These are our mountains, all of us, and none of us at the same time, right? When I think about the idea of leaving, I think it is not my place to leave from. And also, where would I go? Yeah. My community is here, and if I leave, what happens to them? My neighbors, I am a neighbor to them, and my way of being a neighbor to them, and this is something that really rang true during Helene. My way of being a neighbor is to be present. And so, yeah, for I my wife is Jewish, and um, it is far too recent a memory of the Holocaust and of um fleeing persecution. For her, the experience of this political moment makes it a very hard thing um to just say, give this blanket statement, we are never leave, never go anywhere, because there's absolutely something that is activated in her body when we talk about staying or going and why and what conditions would have to be present for us to go. But when I think about the ability of somebody in power to either pressure an entire group or population of people to physically remove themselves or be physically removed from a space, my gut reaction is just no. What makes you think you have the right? And also, I have no judgment for anybody who decides it is time for me to go. It's also the way I see the South is the South is queer, y'all. The South is black, the South is indigenous, the South is immigrant, like the South is all the things that I feel like popular rhetoric and political sound bites are trying to tell us we're not. Actually, as it turns out, thinking about what you're asking earlier, how have I felt held in social justice spaces? Like I'm a white, queer trans person, and also trying to work in social in in racial justice spaces. And actually, I won't say trying to work, like trying to be useful in those spaces is what I'm trying to do. I think it's our job and our role as queer folks to keep it messy. But it not in the way that it stalls us out because we're overthinking everything, but in the way that we are never one aspect of our identity in any interaction. There may be something that's highlighted or amplified or that feels more present than others, but in truth, I think what harms us the most is when we can only be one dimension of ourselves. One of the things that we can do as queer Southerners, that I can do as a white queer southerner, is to keep it as complicated as possible, to refuse a unidimensionality, like to refuse to be only one part of myself. There is a poor white kid who would never consider leaving these mountains. And so who am I to take that kid out of here? Yeah. Yeah. If I left, I would be acting on that one piece of me that's not safe. All of me is not safe when anyone part of me is persecuted. Same for my neighbors. I think if we can sit with the scary reality that we have power, that I I have power as a white person here, I have power from many directions that I could stay and use it. And that maybe there's an imperative there. What is scary is that I actually could shift some things for the better if I stayed. Yeah. One of the questions that you one of the questions you sent um was what do you wish was more socially acceptable? And this has been something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I wish just as a as people in this community, people in the south, southerners, people in the US, I wish we had more of a practice or more of just a way of being together that that we just disagree with each other more. I wish we could maintain a mutual respect and a common humanity and just disagree. Well, I never want to ask someone to put themselves in a position that feels potentially harmful or like they're at risk for violence. And that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about just straight up disagreeing and having someone be honest to your face about the way in which you are not aligned. Because there's two things that that enables to happen. One, if you're not with other people, if you isolate from other people, you never get to tell them that you think they're wrong. And and if you truly believe what you believe and you have convictions, for instance, racism is bad. And there are certain things that constitute racist actions. If you never put yourself in a position where you are with somebody who holds the belief that whatever this action is isn't racist and or that it's not wrong, you never have the opportunity to say, actually, buddy, here's why. And if you never have the opportunity to say that, then they never have the opportunity to hear that. I notice for my own myself and in Asheville, like I have this beautiful, lovely bubble full of queer folks who I di who I who I agree with all the time. And there's nuance to the ways we agree. And sometimes the only rub or edge we meet is a about just agreeing differently.

SPEAKER_02 21:42

It's almost like though a willingness to interrogate our truths to get closer to the truth.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

Yeah. Yeah. It's this idea, again, like we come back to flattening ourselves into these categories or orienting to something that may matter less than the thing we have in front of us.

SPEAKER_02 22:01

Totally. I mean, being queer, one of the gifts for me has been that I've been put in a position where I really have to question everything because even my own self doesn't make sense that way. And I I love that. What gifts do you see from that rural perspective? What are we missing in social justice by not including those communities?

SPEAKER_01 22:19

When you only have so many people in a population of people, I feel like you can become a little more committed to finding ways to be together. Like you said, if so-and-so has a snowplow and you're snowed in, but you don't like that guy, you know what you still need your path plowed. When there's a certain number of resources available and a certain number of people to connect with to access them, you're way more willing to be flexible around stuff that may matter less. When you have a lot of options or a lot of resources, you can be pretty precious about stuff and hang on to your grudges. But I think growing up where I did, where you only had a few options for a lot of things, you figured out what really mattered to you really fast. And it meant you might be working with somebody or communicating with somebody or being with somebody at a at a dinner table who you really didn't care for, but you still showed up at a table together and you ate because that's where the food was. And so I think in some cases we can learn how to show up to the table and eat. When we have a shared need for survival, that's where our priorities are. I don't think you ever excuse truly harmful behavior. But when there's only so many people and so many resources, there's a flexibility and an ingenuity and a willingness to be present and show up in the presence of people you may even disagree with that I think we could take some lessons from.

SPEAKER_02 23:42

How has parenting shifted you in doing this work?

SPEAKER_01 23:46

I've been a lot more patient. So there's, you know, I I have really had to check myself around um fortitude and determination. The idea of really going after something because I think it matters. Because when there's a wee one or two of them who need you for their little survival, you your priorities shift.

What Now?

SPEAKER_02 24:08

The parenting experience has been transformative for me also. And I would pretty much almost do anything if someone's like, hey, I'll make sure your baby's safe too. Like, I'll give you the same thing. Let's go in hard. I don't even care. All of these other things, if we can just hold this basic standard of human rights and decency, give me that. We can do this. Like yeah, tell me where you're at now.

"We Are Storytellers"

SPEAKER_01 24:31

W and C Health Network. I never really answered that part of your what you been doing? Where did you come from? Question. When we moved here, we um did not have jobs. And so I had like six jobs that I was working. I was working at Sherwood Williams and the YMCA and True Asheville Youth. Three other oh, yeah, yeah. And and one of those with Youth Outright. So I was the first program manager there for like 10 hours a week on a contract. And that was just me and the then ED. And over the course of two years, I did not strike that balance between home life and being really invested in community and social justice spaces. And I needed to retreat. So I, while I was there, also was learning to do some blacksmithing. Also, those two years, I worked my way up to opening up a metalworking studio. I felt like I was doing the work that I saw my dad and my uncles doing in their shop. And it was this just this return to myself and my body, just building things that then I could see in the world out walking around, made me feel like, okay, I exist. You know, you can't argue with that. And that was more radical than anything I had done or said or thought. And so for the next five years, I ran a metalworking studio, eventually started working with a campaign for Southern Equality and took their Southern Equality Studios. It had been like a pilot program. Then with Liz, I launched it into a full-on program that became a fixture and is now thriving. To me, that was a turning point of being able to create, tell a story that then someone else could hear. It taught me about visibility. I will always hold up CSE, the Campaign for Southern Equality, as one of the most impactful organizations I've ever been a part of, and am deeply grateful to them for all they do. And part of that was being willing to say that queer Southern artists matter and giving space and financial resources and attention to the storytelling that comes from queer creatives is worthy. That right there uh gave me this fuel that it regenerates itself about storytelling and ways of knowing and grit and resilience that I also think is deeply southern. We are storytellers. We have oral traditions, we have trades that bear the marks of the people who make through them. You know, the techniques, the materials, they have our hands on them. Somebody's uncle taught somebody who then taught their daughter, who then taught their so-and-so, and now they do it that way. And the thing looks a certain way because that guy did it. We have these legacies built into the things we make. And when we connect with them, we connect with us in a way that's deeply rooted. And I think that deep-rootedness gives us the type of grounding we need to be resilient in an uncertain time. So art and making and creativity remains at my core, this fuel and this purpose.

SPEAKER_02 27:33

How are you bringing that into the work that you're doing now?

SPEAKER_01 27:35

It's in the storytelling. I left CSE on a great note, but also to try to support trans youth in a way. I saw a story and I saw something I could build around it. And I saw something compelling and powerful that I could generate that didn't exist. Mainly was making sure that um there was some form of a strategy around queer and trans inclusion in out-of-school time and out-of-school spaces. So in youth-serving organizations like summer camps, I wasn't seeing an organized national strategy to do that. The part of me that felt very drawn to generating something, either as a problem-solving exploration or as a creative exercise, kept me going. There wasn't any guardrail. Ultimately, one of the things that was really useful in moving things forward for us was identifying um suicide prevention among trans youth as child abuse prevention. And so entering into a different messaging space and making those connections. That's what art does. That's what storytelling does, is helping people connect the dots and be moved. And this also, I think, ties into visibility because if you never talk with somebody, then they can pretend you don't exist. The other thing that can happen is it's easy for them to not believe that you are real.

SPEAKER_02 28:51

And to believe the stories they've been told about you. Exactly.

Making It!

SPEAKER_01 28:55

Where I am now, and it's very recent. I just started working at the WNC Health Network. Something that feels very poignant right now and very important and necessary to that concept that visibility of some form or another is necessary for our survival. You can't save who you can't see. If we don't know one another, it is absolutely possible to tell an untrue story. It is absolutely possible to tell no story. And WNC Health Network does a tremendous amount to not only collect and curate data, but make sure that communities are involved from start to finish, what information is being collected, how it's being collected, how communities can use that information themselves, and what the story is that's going to be told so that people can pull the right levers to shift it in the direction that community wants that story to shift. We're talking about public health, but honestly, we're talking about making changes that affect people's lives on a daily basis. And if you don't have the key that unlocks that mystery, i.e., the truth of people's experiences, you cannot make the right changes at the right times. And so I still feel Deeply connected to this creative, generative aspect. And I still feel deeply connected to the power of story. And now very much in a way that I feel really deeply rooted in community.

SPEAKER_02 30:11

All right, poor kid from Kentucky. You said you could come back and feel like you made it. Do you feel like you've made it?

SPEAKER_01 30:18

Haha. Um, well, that was one of the funny things. One of the stories I believed a long time ago is that I had to do anything to quote make it. Having humanity is unconditional.

SPEAKER_02 30:29

You made it.

Wrap UP: Finding Hope in the Rubble

SPEAKER_01 30:29

Yeah. If you're here, you made it. The hardest thing for me to do to this day is to acknowledge that I'm worthy. Just for being alive. Yeah. There are enough external stories out there telling us we're not worthy or less than human or don't deserve for our full humanity to be to be seen for some reason or another. I don't need to tell that to myself. I mean, I made it a long time ago. I made it the day I was born. I made it when I fell in love with the preacher's daughter and decided I was going to marry her at four years of age. I've been making it for a long time and so have you, and so has anyone listening to this.

SPEAKER_02 31:05

All right. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to be with me today and sharing your whole human self. Can you take us out with uh answering this question? What brings you hope for our future?

SPEAKER_01 31:18

What does give me hope is that, and this is gonna sound a little backwards, but there are some people who are motivated by rock bottom. I think there's some rock bottoming happening. And what is giving me hope is that under that immense amount of pressure, I see people turning toward joy and being non-cooperative with the thing that is stealing their hope.

unknown 31:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:38

So what is giving me hope is people being too complicated to dominate, to be too complicated to silence. I do have hope from people's willingness to celebrate amongst the rubble and claim the space that they should have to be joyful. Seeing people have hope, taking time to just know one another and be seen. That's giving me hope.

SPEAKER_02 32:01

That's beautiful. Al, I want to thank you again for sharing yourself and your story with us. Sedicate is excited to be part of your story as well as privileged for the many ways you've been part of ours. To those listening, thank you for taking the time to get to know us a little better. All right, WNC. We'll see you same time, same place next month. In the meantime, stay complicated, stay vocal, stay visible. Until next time, peace.