A Peace of His Mind

Turning the tables on John Noltner of "A Peace of My Mind" over sunrise and coffee aboard the Little Dipper

“What is your definition of peace?”

John Noltner has posed that question to hundreds, maybe thousands, of people all across this country — college students, protesters who crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge with Dr. Martin Luther King, Big Oil CEOs, immigrants, ex-gang members, shimpers, poets, and priests - as part of an on-going multi-media art project he calls “A Peace of My Mind.” The question has taken him on the road when he and his wife Karen sold their home, bought a camper van nicknamed “Vinny” (short for “Vincent ‘Van Go’”), and traveled 93,000 miles over 900 days to collect stories in 43 states for a new book called Lessons on the Road to Peace coming out later this year.

But this morning, he is aboard the Little Dipper and, although he doesn’t know it yet, I am about to turn the tables by asking him that very same question. First though, we throttle back, break out the coffee, and watch the sun rise dripping over Hermit Island.

A recent survey found that 72% of people consider “natural peace” a major reason for visiting national parks. But Noltner’s project has proven that peace can be found in a myriad of places, conditions, within ourselves, and even across seemingly unbridgeable divides, if we let it.

“In a world that asks us to focus on the things that can separate us,” Noltner has said of his project, “A Peace of My Mind invites us to explore the common humanity that connects us.” Born of John’s passion and talent for photography, storytelling, and listening, the project uses portraits and personal stories to bridge divides and encourage dialogue around important issues from the murder of George Floyd and immigration to gay marriage and race relations as well as a range of other hot button political and social issues. In the face of such complex issues, Noltner always begins with a simple question — what is your definition of peace, or what has challenged you recently, or even something as simple as, what do you want the world to understand at this moment? - and then he does something almost forgotten in this day and age: he listens.

Listening can seem like a dying art. So many of us listen only enough to gather ammunition to refute another’s point or only long enough to jump back in with a rebuttal. After decades of listening to others, Noltner has seen the keys to another kind of listening — listening to understand, making yourself vulnerable, showing a willingness to “stay at the table” even in the face of uncomfortableness, recognizing your own bias and moving beyond it — and its power. "There is beauty and wisdom all around us if we take the time to see it — if we take the time to hear it,” he says. Noltner gathers that beauty and wisdom in portraits and quotes and shares them in books, podcasts, his blog and website, as well as a collection of traveling exhibits that tour the country.

Ask John about his “favorite” interviews and he will get that far away look as though he is traveling the backroads of his mind and then most often try to beg off saying it is impossible. But if you push him, he may tell you about Alvaro Enciso, a 70-year old Columbian artist and immigrant, who creates crosses and has each week for the last seven years made treks into the Sonoran Desert near the border to search out and commemorate the places where other immigrants lost their lives trying to enter this country. Ask him why and Enciso might say, “I don’t want people to forget that these people have names, and that they had plans, and they had voices, and they had dreams, and they had people waiting for them.” In the process of trying to honor our common humanity, Alvaro Enciso has rediscovered his own.

(portrait by John Noltner)

Such deep listening takes a humbleness and grace, features John Noltner wears well. When I ask him about that humbleness, he returns to a metaphor he has written about in one of his books.

“Make a circle with your thumb and forefinger. Imagine all the knowledge that you’ve ever acquired is held inside that circle. Every fact. Every experience. Every memory. Now imagine a second circle that holds all the knowledge that has ever existed in the entire universe. How big would that circle be? If I let curiosity and compassion guide me - if I truly listen - I might learn something new, and my circle will expand.”

John finishes that explanation and comes slowly back to the moment in the Little Dipper just off Hermit Island. An eagle flies over, landing in a branch right on the edge of the shoreline as if to listen, and we smile. With all the places he has been, all the people he has interviewed, I ask John, is there a thread that connects it all? He pauses, taking time to let Lake Superior sink back into the morning, and then says “The thread is the shared experience of what it is to be human, to feel the same wind as someone else, the same warm sun on your face, the same love in your heart. And the not knowing what might happen next. There is power in the unknown, and a kind of beauty.”

It is then that I sense an opening. I seize the moment to turn the tables and ask John Noltner a combination of two questions he has asked so many others: how do you define peace right at this moment?

He pauses a long time and then, with a sweep of his arm meant to encompass the islands, the lake, the eagle and perhaps this whole beautiful morning, he says, “This.”

“You can talk about the stats. The science. The history. The ecology. The policy. Those things are important. But when you go out on the lake, it’s visceral. To float on the surface as you watch the first light fall across the red rock. To look out at the horizon and see nothing but blue water. To hear the gentle lap of the boat’s wake bounce off the rocky shore. To see the ripples of the sandy bottom through 20 feet of clear water. It gets into your soul and sticks.”

In the silence that follows, we both take another sip of coffee, looking out over those horizons of “blue water” and the “ripples of the sandy bottom” and hearing the “gentle lap” of those waves. The eagle preens its feathers.

In that moment, it seems impossible to disagree.

To explore John Noltner’s project “A Peace of My Mind” including his newest exhibit and an upcoming book which includes a series of interviews done on the shores of Lake Superior, follow the link below:

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— Jeff Rennicke