Story Mapping with Poet, Essayist, and Instructor Byron Aspaas

In this episode, we follow Navajo roads to academia, switch paths from engineering to writing, and change the cadence of running to the peddle of mountain biking, as we process grief through words and story mapping. 

Byron F. Aspaas is Diné. He is Táchii’nii, born for Tódich’iinii, and raised within the four sacred mountains of Dinétah, Byron received his BFA and MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in creative writing. His writing reflects upon the eradication of Navajoland, which draws readers into discourse about preservation with Diné culture and land. His writing can be found in Weber: The Contemporary West, Denver Quarterly, International Writing Program Collections, The Rumpus, Santa Fe Noir, Shapes of Native Nonfiction and The Diné Reader. Byron will begin as lecturer with Colorado State University – Pueblo (Fall ‘25) and will continue as poetry mentor for Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. He lives with his partner, six dogs, and four cats in Colorado Springs, Colorado. 

You can follow Byron at https://www.byronaspaas.com/ and read his Letter to America at https://www.terrain.org/2024/poetry/letter-to-america-aspaas/.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to the Heartpath Podcast. I'm your host, Yvonne Ellis. The Heartpath Podcast spotlights authors, change makers, nature lovers, and creators of all kinds. Each of our podcasts aimed to share interviews and stories of beauty, resilience, and inspiration for all.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Delamar entered her midnight rodeo, a room littered with disco balls. She poured water spirits, drink after drink, after drink six, a six she sinned. Of the smoke filled room, foggy dreams loomed over two young lovers woven in twos, leather heels, clicked bottles capped open, she swilled. Distilled laughter turned gin. He stomached the first swallow, a hollow reed of vapored stars, iconic swill down, into neon orbs bubbled vivaciously inside the ship lapped sky framed in a constellation of sweat beads created inside the creation of ghost lights of neon stars, lantern palms swayed to midnight in a cavern of liminal space, near the jukebox, men in shadows a hidden sun dried lips licked, Delimar's hips took the lonely light. Beneath the neon moons, he danced in and out of the beams of broken dreams. He shook the world whole turned blue he released into the east as the sun set down. He danced in and out of broken dreams. Her spirit streamed into Thanks.

SPEAKER_03 2:20

I love this poem, Byron. Thank you so much for sharing with us. Yeah, I would love to hear the story behind this poem.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Interesting. I wrote this years ago in undergraduate school, and it was probably one of the first poems that I had written where I was playing with lyricism and prose blocks. And you know, the fundamentals of poetics that hide inside it, auto repetition, and it just sat there. I had no idea why I wrote it. It may have been published actually through the anthology of IA, think about it. But uh recently I was asked to submit work for publication, and I broke it down into line breaks, creating these different lines, and it didn't get picked up. And I wasn't bummed about it because it was just one of those things. But eventually I had a friend look it over and she asked me, What's your favorite song? And I was thinking about Neon Moons by Brooks and Dunn. So you'll see a couple of the lyrics italicized in here. And yeah, it made me rethink this poem when I decided to go sit with it when I was talking through with my friend, it was 2018, and Stephanie Yellowhair was famed at that time as a Navajo who said, Excuse this beauty. She was mocked really bad. It's sad because you hear on RuPaul's Drag Race them say, Excuse my beauty, you know. And she just never got the respect for who she was at that time. Beautiful girl who was just ridiculed for being transgender, um, and ridiculed for some of the things she would say. And that's how people would talk to me about it. And it broke my heart because she passed away in 2018. And she was friends of mine on Facebook. But anyway, it bummed me out. And so I wrote this, uh, Excuse This Beauty. I was thinking about Stephanie Yellowhair, Shalomar is a piece. Started out with country music drags Shalomar out of bed, and then it transformed into just Shalomar itself. And then the third poem that was kind of untangled inside it was Excuse This Beauty. So yeah, it got published at Tempered Steel or CSU Pueblo's literary magazine. And so I wanted to show my students the vulnerability of how poems happen. Well, because when it comes to poetry, I feared it because I didn't understand it. And I thought only smart people did it. Um and I didn't understand why people did it. Then I tell my students this like, write it on prose blocks first, find the lyricism in there, and play with the repetition, play with asinance, play with alliteration, play with metaphors, all that good stuff. Just write it out, and then let's turn it into line breaks, and then let's find the poem inside there. So the actual publication is this called a metaphorphosis, a poem. And I was thinking about the transition of Lamar, but also to thinking about Stephanie at the same time.

SPEAKER_03 5:33

I'm wondering about your journey with poetry and how you came to understand poetry over time.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

It's funny because I always hear a poetry works and walks, and there's cadence to it on my introduction, was basically just narrative poems. And so I felt comfortable with narrative poems. Then I got introduced to prose blocks and the swirling action that happens inside. I learned my clans at a young age, and I would recite it in English, and I realized that it was poetic in its own sense because I would say, God, eh, my name is Byron Aspis. I'm born for Red Runs into the Water. I am Red Run into the Water. I'm born for Bitterwater people. And so I just realized how very poetic that sounds. And then listening to Orlando White speak about movement inside poems. Oh, we're constantly flowing and moving. Everything has a life entity to it, and it felt like poetry does that as well. And so I also stole that to poem from Laley because Laley Long Soldier said how to poem. And I realized my peers were my teachers, and also my dad was my teacher, and he would always talk about this mountain, beautiful mountain. He would say always like that's how I grew up saying it. And finally I asked my dad, do you know what the story is behind it? Because I learned the story of the whole location. My friends that I started to meet outside of my family, he started to share a story with me. And so I realized that the place he was talking was the foot of uh male for mountain. And so today, like the mountain's foot is mountain, bik is the foot, and then hajogi, that which is beautiful. And so my dad didn't know the story behind it. His grandma taught him Navajo. He he hears the word and just knows it. But phonetically breaking it down, I think that's where the confusion kind of gets. And my thoughts, what I'm thinking, our language can be broken down, like etymology almost. But through stories. It's just so fascinating. But I just started to associate our culture with poems and poetry and realizing places have stories and places of beings that live there, the mountains, the trees. Every mountaintop has a different song because the trees all sing a different kind of language. And so I like to hike though, bike and do everything. I used to like to run, but I can't run anymore. So biking has kind of allowed me to go a little bit further. But I have to work three or four times as hard to get the same sweat that I did from running.

SPEAKER_03 8:42

Yeah. Uh did you have a an injury, a knee injury or something?

SPEAKER_00 8:47

Or when I was younger, I tore my ligaments on my right knee. Eventually, my left knee from overcompensating started to wear itself out. And then I ran from terminal to terminal a couple of years ago, sprinting, and must have done something. The next morning I tried to get up and I just collapsed. And I couldn't really walk on it for about a week. Just limp. And after that, I just felt this clicking, and it felt like bone on bone. That's what it felt like. I gotta get it checked out soon. But I can bike now. So good.

SPEAKER_03 9:25

I'm glad that you're still in movement.

SPEAKER_00 9:28

Silverb. Yeah. I teach through that, I guess, element of grief when you think about it. And I knew one day I wasn't gonna be able to run. I remember hearing someone say that. I run because one day I'm not gonna be able to. And I've always thought that one day I'm not gonna be able to run because I knew my knee was kind of messed up, and people would always be like, Well, you have a knee injury, aren't you afraid? I'm like, Yeah, but I can still run right now. But I know one day I'm not gonna be able to. And then when it happened, I got depressed. That was my thought. Like I needed to go out and think, and I would just run miles. And so when that stopped, what am I gonna do now?

SPEAKER_03 10:15

Yeah, yeah. When we are so used to doing something one way, it's really hard to move any kind of other way. So, how did you process that?

SPEAKER_00 10:25

I think I just had to force myself to pull my bike out a little bit more. And what I realized too was that I was able to see more than just my usual path, you know. I know, I was just thinking about that. Uh, what I miss is the pitter powder, you know, the feet just growing. I think that's how I learned how to write poems too, was through walking poems and listening to that cadence of your feet and your breath, and you just start to look around. And my teachers went at Audestat, his name's James Thomas Stevens. And so try to give that to my students to go outside and see nature, but also hear their breath and hear the cadence of their feet. And so, yeah, that's what I missed. So I can still hike, I still do that. I can still run. I recently ran like two miles, but I mean it's just slightly there. Like just uh I don't want to push it so it comes back, you know.

SPEAKER_03 11:29

So uh well, good on you for making it happen, no matter how you can, and just doing it anyway, however it's possible. I I'm grateful that you're able to still continue moving. Yeah, yeah. So you are currently teaching right now. And you're teaching uh is it CSU and Western Colorado University?

SPEAKER_00 11:59

Yes. I work at CSU Pueblo down in Pueblo, Colorado, at the university there. And I was previously teaching at San Juan College. San Juan College is the initial school I actually went to, which is actually the birthplace for the the net reader. And so it was an honor to be asked to go back and teach for my pupil. I had to detach myself from my partner for two years. I taught down at San Juan College. And the drive back and forth, I wasn't doing it every day, but every other week. And I have six dogs and three cats. And I realized my dogs are getting depressed when I would leave. And so, yeah, I just got back from um the Northern Arizona Literary Festival at four this morning. And my poor pupp, Sebastian, Seth, was saying how depressed he was. And my oldest kitty, too, she was just all over me. She's gonna be 18 at the end of this month, but she's also blind now. And so she was just all over me, like just to hear my voice. And I just realized my animals are my babies, and you know, I'm just like kids. We have to not abandon them. And so, anyhow, I taught at San Juan College, and I was just driving back because CSU Pueblo is uh the place that initially gave me a job in academic space to teach rhetoric, rhetoric and writing. And so what I'm finding out is that everyone who's taught rhetoric and writing is like, I can't even tell you what rhetoric is, but I taught it. So it makes me giggle because I figured out rhetoric. I figured I could teach it from a brown person's perspective of culture, of sexuality, gender. I grew up in a very matriarchal society where my sisters and my mom were my primary teachers and caregivers, and I love them with all my heart. So I teach from that element of womanhood because I myself am very flamboyant and maybe I look cis hetero, like cis gender, but deep down inside I've always felt this fluidity of my own self, and I've always just really embraced that feminine part of who I was, which historically I didn't at first. I was just embarrassed by it. I had to hide from it. And you know, I think maybe it was that Catholic guilt.

SPEAKER_03 14:35

What helped you to break away from any kind of beliefs that got in the way of that?

SPEAKER_00 14:41

My brother's death actually really forced me. I write about my brother, and I think that's how I got into writing. They call me an accidental writer only because I enrolled at IA Institute of American Arts, just to kind of use it as a stepping tool to return to the university. I thought, well, I can up my grades and get my financial aid back or raise my GPA and go back to university. And my teachings in early years were math and science, except I didn't know why I was in there. Wanted to be in that because my brother, who passed away, wanted to be an electrical engineer. So I ended up going to school at the Institute of American Arts and wrote a final paper that involved my families, which was connected to a culture, which had language, which was connected to the landscape, which was connected to where we grew up, and connected it to my brother's sickness. Yeah, and my classmates heard that paper, and they're the ones who forced me to go to the admissions office, get into a creative writing program. And so I had Connie Jacobs as teacher, and I remember her introducing me to Lucy Tapahanso, and I had an introduction to writing, I just didn't know I could do it, and I think I was more fearful. And so before my mom passed away, I told her I went back to school, and she was like, What are you going to school for? And I said, Creative writing. And she was like, What can you do with creative writing, son? I don't know. Maybe it teacher or storyteller or maybe a writer. I really didn't know. But I remember telling Tanya Jacobs after reading Lisa Tapahanza, like, I didn't know Navajo's can be writers. I grew up with that like notion that only white people could be writers, or white people could be teachers. And my introduction to the school system was Indian boarding school. I went to Nahansad boarding school in the latter parts of the 70s and the 80s. So yeah, but then we were still going to boarding school where students were still being left home because road systems aren't what they are like today, you know, especially on the reservation where there was just mud and when it would snow or rain. I remember our bus sliding off the side of the hill. So I ended up in a writing degree. Little did I know that Dr. Connie Jacobs planned that little colonel because she had asked me when I graduated, have you ever thought about teaching English? And I was like, no, because I was scared of grammar, scared of writing. And I said, No, I want to be an engineer. I always remember that the day I graduated, her asked, have you ever thought about teaching English? And here I am, 25 years later. Yeah. This is what Dr. Connie Jacobs said. I want to thank all my DNS students at San Juan College, especially Byron Aspis, who were the inspiration for me wanting to see a book like that for them to read and to dream that they too could be writers. So I guess I just didn't know at that time what was gonna happen, like 20 years later. They took an essay, it was a lyric essay. I was playing with form, and they took that. I always play with these memory maps, you know, and I guess it's just a mapping system of a trip that I did, and I think about what I did inside this piece.

SPEAKER_02 18:32

Can we talk a little bit about that? About story mapping?

SPEAKER_00 18:36

Yeah. It was introduced to me by my poetry teacher, John Davis, who made us draw a map. And being a civil engineer student before, where we had to basically do surveying and plotting and schematic drawings. I was like, I'm down for this. I can draw all day. Drew the fire that my brother caused in the back of our house, drew the bottle rocket that's made that fire, drew my little bike that was popping a wheelie, you know, create the treasure map of this old neighbor that was drunk following us and saying, You killed my dog. So many stories were inside this memory map from my childhood. And a lot of my stories kind of come from that memory map. When I went to Google Maps, I saw a lot of things had shifted. My old elementary school is no longer there. Where my ball court is, is now a parking lot for the new school. And there's a double-story elementary school. But I didn't go to elementary school until second grade. That's the only reason why my mom put me at Nay Nanzad was I was too young to go to elementary school. And my preschool teacher said he's too smart to stay in preschool. But if I write him a recommendation, he would go to Nay Nahanzad. And so I was the only kid out of all the kids that my mom had that went to the boarding school.

SPEAKER_03 20:03

So what did you think about the boarding school?

SPEAKER_00 20:06

Oh man, I wrote about that first day. I remember it because it was so traumatic.

unknown 20:12

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 20:12

The piece was published on terrain.org. And I'm playing with form on there too, as well, because it's part of a larger essay, but it reads like a poem. And so they published it as a poem because they could not figure out if it was a prose or if it was a poem. But yeah, it speaks to my first day where it was just traumatic. Like I thought I was being abandoned, honestly. So and luckily I was a day student because back then they didn't have day students. When you went to a boarding school back in the day, you were just relocated. My dad went to a school, a Shilaco Indian school. My mom went to a Catholic school. They were both Indian schools. My dad went to Oklahoma, and my mom was in Arizona. But I I got lucky, a bus came and picked me up every day. But my classmates, some of them had to live in the boarding area. Yeah. I wonder ever happened to most of them. But it's still there. And I talk a bit about it now being considered a charter school. You know, the memories are still there. But I create those memory maps because it's like you realize how time has shifted everything and altered these memories because things are moved. And I made my niece, who's inspired to write, is a great writer, great thinker. She had to do it too. And it's funny because if you overlay them over each other, they're like ghosts that never see each other because their experiences are different than mine. And so, yeah, Latasha Diggs does this cool poem of Harlem of intersections of lines where it's Like ghosts that never see each other that just overlay and it looks like streets. It's kind of interesting, but I try to throw the memory map out every so often because it evokes memories for my students, and they were like, Oh, I didn't realize I did this.

SPEAKER_03 22:16

So heck yeah. Do you think that your education was different than your siblings? And if so, how do you think it might have differed?

SPEAKER_00 22:31

It differs a lot because I really tried to champion my older sister who dropped out of high school to take care of me as a kid. Really love her for doing that. She's been the nurse taking care of my older brother who passed from cancer. She took care of my mom. I remember helping her with her math to get her GED. Then she went to school while I went to school, and we've got our associates together at Salmon College. And she wanted to become a nurse, but you know, she started a family and just been taking care of them ever since. And yeah, my older brother, he dropped out too. I mean my eldest sister, she was a college student. I remember I think I really wanted to be like her because she was very dynasty and very stylish and had the cool hair and you know, the shoulder pads, and pretty too. The older sister I dropped out for me. I I just saw them as beautiful growing up. And yeah, I just met John Hickey, who is a native writer who just had a book come up called Big Chief. And I was talking to him about how my people are finally teaching in schools. And my nephew, who is now 16, though intellectually smart, he goes to school at the college while he's in high school, and he would come in with books like Animal Farm. And we would sit there and have conversations. And I said, What is it like to have an uncle who you can speak to about English or academics? I didn't have that growing up because I was too busy helping my siblings understand math or having to type my dad's papers out because we couldn't type and to figure out sentence structures. I knew I could write, I just didn't know grammar. I just always remember seeing all my papers run on, run on, fragment. And I didn't know what that meant. And so I think that's the reason why I feared it so much, because all the red markings on there. Yeah, my nephew is just, I think he realizes his privilege and how lucky he is because he says, I'm grateful I can talk to you about this because I can't when I go home. And so yeah, it's so fascinating because I had to figure all this out within the last 10 years, like how to develop the academic language.

SPEAKER_03 25:15

And it sounds to me like you're a cycle breaker in your family.

SPEAKER_00 25:21

I was a troublemaker.

SPEAKER_03 25:24

That makes sense. Cycle breakers can't make any kind of change unless they're troublemakers, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:31

Yeah. My sister, Trudy, used to call me Did You Know because I would always have this, did you know? And I think about that all the time. I was so curious about life, especially growing up on the reservation. Why can't we whistle at night? Why can't we point at the rainbow? Why can't we, you know, and I think as an adult, I've been going back and answering those questions myself. And when I began this whole writing process, my mom was nearing the end of her life, you know. And with the loss of my brother, I never really properly grieved. I didn't know how to grieve. Just growing up in a family in the 80s, I think everyone says, well, it is a different generation. Those people never said, I love you, unless you were lucky with parents. But when my mom passed, I thought I want to document her stories and document some of the teachings I know and leave it for my grandbabies. Because I meet them now, and I feel like I'm such a stranger to them that they just shy away. But then I don't want to be that stranger in their lives, but don't do that. So my hope is to leave something for them to reflect upon as they get older. Their Che, their grandpa is thinking of them, and also their great grandma has knowledge of them.

SPEAKER_03 26:55

So in writing, would you say that since your mom passed that you have been writing to grieve?

SPEAKER_00 27:04

Yeah. What I teach is through that element of grief, only because I don't think my students realize that everything they read, everything they watch, everything they hear is grief. You know, Disney puts beautiful songs to it and also some beautiful colors. But let's talk about the real issues that are hidden inside them. A lot of people they listen to every song out there is about heartbreak or some type of disruption in their life. Now let's look at literature. Conflict is always written in a form of repairing themselves, either in poetry, in fiction, nonfiction, a movie, some type of healing process exists. And so I teach you that element. But intertwined Navajo philosophy, theories that exist inside, or theologies, ideologies, I guess you could say. And it makes people see how important our teachings were, but yet it was considered witchcraft, it was considered unconventional thought, it was considered, I'm gonna say the S-word, savage, you know, because now it seems like the world is realizing, oh, maybe they were onto something. So I teach through those elements of incorporating my own culture inside rhetoric, inside storytelling, inside poetry, everything.

SPEAKER_03 28:32

Thank you for all of that. Thank you for helping others to see grief in what exists and everything that is around us. Because a lot of times we aren't taught to attend to grief. We're taught to just keep going, keep going, keep going. And I love that what you're doing is helping others to connect with grief and to see that that's part of who we are as humans and our experience here on Earth.

SPEAKER_00 29:12

Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, I was recently told you're not a therapist, you know. But in all actuality, every teacher out there, regardless of a degree or not, we're therapists. And our students are writing about issues that involve their treficacy, their hurt, their pain, and they need to put it down. And yeah, writing is therapy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 29:43

I agree completely. And I would love to hear a little bit from the essay that was published in The Net Reader, if that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 29:55

Yeah, I will read the first couple pages. It's called Interstate Badlands. I don't know how to begin my story. Initially, I wanted to share this experience that included a tale of the coyote. As a child, my first introduction to the character was in a book I plagiarized. In seventh grade, my version was placed high upon the wall with other great stories that my science teacher asked for. How do you think the stars were created? Guilt has sat upon the walls of my heart because I felt like Coyote. How do I begin this story? Fumbles in my mind. With a new laptop in front of me, I sometimes wonder, did I ever get through school? Thirty-three years old, I placed myself into a class that evolved into a writing degree, and then an MFA and creative writing. I do feel the beginning of this story should call for an exposition, an interjection, a small fact about me, explaining how writing was my worst subject as a child. My first book was a read-along where I followed the words of the tawny scrawny lion. I never read anything else in book form thereafter. My first diary was a small booklet of papers that I wrote and for a few days explaining how I missed my family while I spent six weeks in Champaign, Urbana, Illinois. In 1993, I was 16. Might I add, I never wanted to write. My spelling was embarrassingly corrected in seventh grade during a spelling bee. My English courses were remedial until tenth grade, and my stutter continued to follow me when I was asked to read aloud in front of my peers. In college, I learned a story has three parts, a beginning, middle, and an end. In graduate school, I fumbled with the narrative arc. Where is the conflict, the inner conflict, the climactic point? Are you not writing a linear story? These were phrases I heard constantly, and anxieties resurfaced. In March of 2016, I drove home to visit family members of the Ford Corners region. They lived in New Mexico. I lost my best friend the month before, and though my car had driven this path a few times, probably more than it had in the past ten years. It seemed with this visit, my car swerved automatically around familiar dips and fumbled on new ones. Cotta is where my story begins, a reservation border town where some of my earliest memories have spun themselves into reflections of my personal journey. My childhood community had shifted. What were once dirt roads are now paved with loose gravel. The elementary school I attended is no longer standing. A sandy mound of ghost memory remains. In the dark, a new school stands erected, all like a double layered cake decorated with concrete. Its bright lights flicker upon a once darkened neighborhood. My dad was not home when I opened the door. Since mom died, I am told he is never home, but the porchlight remained on and I sat in silence listening to the refrigerator speak. As usual, it hummed and echoed down the hall where I laid in mom's room, wrapped, awaiting slumber. For thirteen years my dad worked as a heavy equipment operator for Pittsburgh Midway Coal Company. For thirteen years I watched dad leave on Sunday evenings and return Friday afternoon, sometimes before school ended, and each weekend began with a surprise, but then it ended with sadness and goodbyes. For thirteen years, my dad traveled 100 miles away to live on a drag line as big as our house. He operated the crane for money, scooping coal for the home we occupied in New Mexico. For 13 years, he worked the night shift, and mom became our dad. His eyes red with no sleep. For thirteen years, mom began to show age while dad remained ageless. Because of nightmares and fear of sleeping at home, I began to travel with dad to his work site. Once he snuffed me into the cold pits and I watched the crane move slowly like a brontosaurus dipping into a lake of rock. I slept in the back of my sister's car wrapped in dad's blankets, listening to the moan of the machinery. I was nine years old. Upon driving home one morning, I watched the sun color the desert bright yellow and brown, then noticed the white lines drift to the middle of the car. Dad, I screamed. Dad's eyes opened as he directed our vessel to the side of the road. We were fifty miles away from home on a two-lane highway located between Gallup and Ship Rock. Highway 666 was known for its head on collisions. Maybe all those who crashed were just as tired as Vlad. Do you think you can drive, son? Dad asked. I can try, I said. It's almost like the motorcycles at home. All you need to do is steer. I'll have my foot on the pedal, he said. Sit on my lap, son. Okay, I said. For fifty miles my dad held his foot on the pedal. My foot rested upon his foot to add pressure to the gas. If needed, with one eye closed, he kept watch on the asphalt river. With me possessioned at the helms, my guidance was trusted as I led us home down the highway and through the windy dirt roads of the Burnham Badlands. Age ten, my foot reached the pedals of my sister's car, no longer a pirate. With one eye close, my dad began to sleep comfortably. As I age, landscape became present when purple mounds of clay turned mile markers and the badlands of Burnham became a map for story. Scattered rocks red from fire revealed truths of a story. I heard when Monster Slayer and his sibling fought evil. Pittsburgh Midway Coal Company devoured mountains while Dad remained employed with them. Behind our home, the Navajo coal mine has nibbled at the Burnham Bad last 30 years since I began driving and nibbled at my memory because those stories are now gone. I was not innocent, remember. Our homes needed food, and our appliances needed power, which was like food. We consumed like monsters.

SPEAKER_03 37:08

Whoa. Oh, Byron, wow. I am so glad that you were a writer. No matter what you went through when you were younger, and the red ink and the crossouts and the grammar and everything else, I'm so glad that you wrote anyway, because that is one of the most beautiful essays I've ever heard. Thank you so much for reading to us today and sharing your work and teaching others and inspiring people in your family as well as your students. I just know that as you move forward, that you are going to inspire so many more. So thank you for everything that you do in the writing world. You are one of the most humble writers that I know that I've ever met. And I appreciate that so much about you. And I appreciate hearing your words today. Thank you, Byron.

SPEAKER_00 38:07

Thank you so much. I'm just grateful that you picked me to speak. So grateful to be a part of this whole heartpath experience that you're creating.