Twenty-thousand miles. Forty-one states. One-hundred and fifteen nights spent sleeping in Walmart parking lots and highway rest areas; or squeezed door-to-door in brightly lit truck stops, with the endless roar of engines starting and transmissions shifting; or camped off in lonely stretches of desert nothingness, soundless save the hissing of wind across the sand and the hum of hard earth settling in on itself, our own breath like something alien in the stillness.
We have seen the country. Endless miles of road like veins or tributary channels. We have driven through forests, along coasts, up and down mountains, across great plains of corn and wheat, the air above the highway shimmering like sky reflected in water.
And everyone we met along the way we have asked the same question: What makes you you?
Shraddha, as defined by Eknath Easwaran in his 1985 translation of the Bhagavad Gita, means “That which is placed in the heart.” Our faith conforms to our nature, Arjuna, says Lord Krishna, explaining to his young disciple the nature of reality and transcendence. Human nature is made of faith. A person is what his shraddha is.
I, along with photographer Sam Wrigglesworth, wanted to explore what makes a person who they are. To see if a stranger, in the course of a single conversation, could come to identify and communicate the core of their own self-identity. I wanted to know how people saw themselves when they took away everything external, when they were left with only the things that felt so central, so critical, that to wake up tomorrow without that element, whatever it may be, would be paramount to becoming an entirely different person.
Are you the clothes you wear? The music you listen to? The food you like? Are you your job? Your family? Your friends? Would you consider yourself you if any of those elements were different? What about your thoughts? Your feelings? Your memory? Your history? What is it that sits at the center of who you are?
At the heart of every raindrop is a tiny speck of earth. Blown up by gusts of wind and pressure gradients, particles of dust rise up into the upper atmosphere where water vapor is drawn around them. Those specks of dust are what brings the water back down to earth in drizzle and torrents. Rain. It was those specks of dust that we were looking for with this project. That thing in the middle that is the architect of the motion of a person's life. The nucleus around which everything else orbits, and according to which everything else responds.
We spoke to eighty-five people in twenty-five states. Hindu yogis, Orthodox Jews, Buddhist monks, interfaith priests, activists, lawyers, writers, professors, prophets. And we have asked all of them the exact same question. What lies at your core?
We were honored to be interviewed by the Huffington Post about our project back in January, and are looking forward to sharing some of the more in depth responses we received here.
We're searching for shraddha, and we want to know, what makes you you?
Feel free to contact Zack: Zack AT searchingforshraddha.com