What’s on your mind?

Written By Mary Bibbey

Welcome to Exhibition 09

As always, totally honored and amazed when ANYONE carves out a little time to breath life into our question of the month. What a gift it is to get a peak into the mind of another.

It is the people in my life that have been the most “transformative engine for becoming and growth I’ve ever known” …

So if you submitted, thank you again for sharing! If you’d like to add to the collection or have any thoughts / questions you can reach us at contact@strangerbound.com.

<3

Mary, Ilaria, Asher

Reflections

  • Seasons…
    Of life, weather, of body and mind
    Last season, this season, and next

    Last season was
    Colorado
    Where the 1st snow surprises and the last melts with the tulips 
    Skiing, climbing and biking
    Marriage, teaching high school meteorology, astronomy, physics and
    geology
    4 children over 10 years
    Schedules, sports, logistics and chaos
    Tears, laughs, love

    This season is
    Hanalei
    Where seasons are subtle, waves become gentle swims
    Surfs and canoes, and yoga...but naps in between
    Slowing down the mind
    Being more, doing less
    No weekend plans
    Final college tour with my 4th baby
    New friends

    Next season
    Unknown
    Wherever my husband of 31 years is
    Less logistics, more travel
    Weddings, grand babies, in-laws & more love
    Not past, nor future 
    Just now
    Not the final season
    Thanking my body of 57 years

    What’s on my mind at this moment?
    Asher
    We met on Kauai
    I am glad

    kirnewhard@comcast.net

  • The relationship between attention, technology, and connection has been on my mind.

    —

    The other day, at the local coffee shop on my neighborhood’s main drag somewhere between the hours of noon and 1 in the afternoon, I did my usual: slither to the counter, order an Americano, and make banter with the barista. Caffeine in cup and cup in hand, I beelined for the couch, where I set up for an hour or two’s worth of work on a report.  

    M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” pounced the air waves, chatter crackled at an ambient low hum in the soundscape, and I sat there, one leg crossed over the other, laptop balanced on top, when a woman, by looks in her late 20s, passed through the front door. 

    Chic, in the Zillenial sense—black blouse, true blue denim jeans, New Balances grayer than Gandalf, carrying a caramel bag the brand of which was undecipherable, tastefully so—she strode to deliver her order, a cappuccino coupled with a bagel topped with scrambled eggs and melted sharp cheddar, if memory serves correctly about the choice of dairy. 

    Scanning the room while still standing, her gaze met my face, but not my eyes. There is a certain burning sensation another’s attention imparts as it swivels its telescope your direction, and I could feel her eyes on my right temple, in the outermost region of my visual periphery, as I hammered away at the keys, my attention oblique to hers. She crossed the room, passing from my perspective behind my laptop’s rectangular screen, in the right, disappearing, and emerging once again at the left, as if an avatar wanting to jump through the boundary between physical and digital realities. 

    “All I wanna do is . . .” rang M.I.A.’s chorus from the small speaker in the corner, compelling an older man in the bank of chairs opposite me to rhythmically tap the ball of his right foot against the ground as if hypnotically induced. 

    Having reached a clear stopping point, I ambulated my attention up and out of my laptop’s portal from the world of the digital into that of the physical and over to the chic, bagel-eating, cappuccino-drinking woman from earlier, she now having settled into her nest, laptop out, spreadsheets open, committing herself to balancing the consumption of, on the one hand, physical food and drink with, on the other, the consumption and production of digitally mediated goods, between her laptop screen and her eyes, between her nervous system, her fingers, and the keys. Crumbs from her bagel landed on the laptop’s body, just shy of the keyboard, but before they had a chance to sink into the crevices beneath the keys, she brushed them away. 

    I studied her for a moment, her eyes glued to the screen, her attention engaged in a digital reality the content and dynamics of which I couldn’t have guessed. Where her mind was I couldn’t have begun to hypothesize. No cues offered any purchase for my interpretation. No signal was on offer. 

    My eyes returned to my window into my digital world, and my mind whirred into oscillations between information I had to digest, analyze, and synthesize: facts, figures, numbers, and phrases, and video and image and links and sheets and words. All entered my eyes and ears, via pixels and soundwaves, and out emerged words and phrases and cohesive paragraphs, trickling, sometimes ebbing, sometimes flowing, from my fingertips.  

    Locked in, staring at screen, I felt the burnish of her eyes once more, this time stamping its force onto my left temple. Sentences continued to exit my body, so I let my fingers continue their dance on the keys, shackling my attention to the task at hand. To not do so would be to stop to an abrupt halt a train whose boiler was at full pressure, its cylinder-driving crank speed at maximally efficient spin, a mount of coal wanting transformation into energy in its furnace. Information was potentializing and wanting its output actualized. 

    By the time I felt the steam waning, the train slumping to a stoppable speed, I relaxed my attention, allowing my eyes to once more crawl out of my digital portal into the café’s goings-on. My eyes swung left over to the woman, in a hopeful chance to reciprocate a shared awareness of each other, but the timing was inopportune. She was again encased in her digital chrysalis. 

    Dwelling a few seconds, I thought it rude to stare for too long a time, and under no circumstances was I wanting to make anyone feel uncomfortable. Promptly, I crawled back into my own shell. Three or four minutes later, it happened again. I felt an inquisitive peer whose vector had sufficient magnitude to suggest interest and whose direction indicated her as its origin. Again my cognitive train was full steam ahead, but this time, instead of waiting minutes for its self-petering halt, I decided to stop it after ten seconds or so, allowing the last sentence to stamp itself into my digital palimpsest. My eyes swiftly found her face, but to my chagrin, she was lost in her other world. 

    Traversing vast digital and physical attentional landscapes, we wandered, tagging back and forth three times more over the course of the next hour and a half, moving in and out, grazing the edges of each other’s perceptual peripheries, but never making the mutually sought-after connection we seemed to want. It felt as if some unknown set of psychosocial digital kinetic laws were at play, toying with our lives, working against us. It was dizzying, disorienting, a combined cognitive load and social tax no pre-personal computing, pre-web, pre-information age human could have experienced. It felt as if software had eaten the social world, leaving nothing but entrails in its wake, we left hastily strewn without consideration in physical reality’s carcass. 

    We lacked reciprocal recognition, not attention; mutual contact, not eyeballs; context, not place; signal, not speech. 

    Two hours passed, I packed up, and I slowly made my way to the door, placing my empty mug in a collection bin while her fingers clattered on her keyboard, variables and values manipulated in spreadsheets, her concentration honed and locked in as her education had trained it to do, her train full ahead as it accelerated into maximally efficient cruising speed. My body passed through the front door, my mind nagging at a conversation never had, feeling the gravitational pull of a future that would remain absent. Turning right, determining my heading down the sidewalk, I glanced one last time through a slightly distorted portion of the shop’s window, surprised yet torn to see two ocean blue irises and a wistful smile meet mine. 

    My train was already on its way, the furnace fully stoked. I steamed down the tracks, down the sidewalk and away from the café. 

  • You are brave for sharing so openly what is on your mind. As I try to write something I find myself thinking about how my words will be perceived, especially since I don’t know many people in the stranger bound circle. But I feel compelled to write something because otherwise I am just consuming others’ creations and thoughts. 

    Something that I’ve thought about over the past few years is the balance between creating vs consuming. Social media allows us to consume and not create, and I find myself not wanting to post things. I think an antidote to this consumption is creating things for ourselves, and I think Stranger Bound invites us to do that. 

    Something else that I have been thinking about is the question - What keeps people from coming together, especially in times in history like these when we are watching an evil authoritarian steal health, liberty, and safety from our communities? Who is standing by watching? Who is resisting and how? For NYC people, watching the Zohran Mamdani campaign has been an example of people coming together to resist and fight back while working across difference and finding common ground. I’m curious how to do more of that. I am living in San Francisco now and am trying to figure out how to do something to respond to the moment and organize, and it has been apparent that there are forces bringing people together, and forces dividing people. How do we lean into the ones that bring us together? Last night was Halloween, and I was struck by how the holiday is actually a perfect example of communities coming together. San Francisco goes harddd for Halloween, and my neighborhood had families streaming in from surrounding areas. 

    Halloween is a holiday of creation - trick or treaters (kids and adults alike) dream up and build creative costumes. It is also a holiday of coming together. Strangers offer each other free candy and neighborhoods decorate to provide an experience for kids. Kids run wild, navigating friendships, candy trades, self expression, and adults invite friends and strangers alike into their homes. One guy on my street makes hundreds of hotdogs every year to give out. He has a set up called “The Swedish Hot Dog Stand” and is in his garage with his two kids, all wearing chef hats with a Swedish flag on them, churning out hot dogs. While waiting in line for a hotdog I met my neighbors, who added me to a neighborhood group chat where people ask for an egg or a stick of butter, or a soccer ball, and leave them on each others front steps. Maybe knowing each other is how we resist. 

    For anyone who wants to smile and grow your faith in humanity, look up “Danceoween”, a 3,000 person street dance party in the Mission District of San Francisco that happens every year. While I didn’t go this year, I think it is full of creation and coming together. How do we bring that energy to moments and days that aren’t Halloween?

    Also I’ll just say that I actually usually am not a huge Halloween person because I hate scary movies and scary things. But I do like the other parts of it.

    I was a nerds cluster for halloween. 

  • What part of New York feels the most like home?

    At first, I didn’t give the question, nor my answer, much thought. The question echoed in my brain as images of places, neighborhoods, and street corners played like a movie reel in my head. I hoped a definitive answer would come rushing forward. As I spent some time thinking about my own answer, I let the answers of my two other friends drift into the background of my focus, their voices fading beneath the rhythm of our feet as we continued to run across the Manhattan Bridge. Several moments later, I had an answer: “Nowhere,” I said softly.

    It wasn’t a satisfying answer, but it was the truth. It had been ages since I’d given this question serious thought and “Nowhere” was the best I could do at the time. “Nowhere,” I said again in my mind as I carried on running and rejoined the conversation.

    The next day, almost by coincidence, I met up with a girl I’d dated in high school. We’d reconnected a few months back, and she mentioned she’d be visiting the city.

    The first few moments of being around her were quite odd. I hadn’t seen her in five years, and although we did our best to catch up, I found it hard to ask the right questions. Where do you start after not seeing someone for five years? It felt like meeting her for the very first time. Our shared memories were a distant blur. While my brain struggled to piece together the person in front of me with memories buried deep away, my heart did not. I still recognized her warmth, saw her radiance, and felt her depth.

    At dinner, we kept the conversation light, catching up on the major events, tiptoeing around the questions we both wanted to ask, but that time had made it so we didn’t need answers anymore. After dinner, we walked to the edge of the water and sat on a bench, shoulder to shoulder, watching the NYC skyline shimmer as it does best at night. Despite her being right next to me, she felt impossibly far away. The flames of what we once had were long gone, and only faint embers remained. We shared some final thoughts and memories, gave each other a hug, and, as quickly as she had reappeared, she left again. I walked home feeling heavy, confused, sad, and a little angry to be honest. I couldn’t quite name why. I didn’t still love her, not in that way, and yet something in me resisted letting go. After journaling and sitting with the feeling for a few days, I finally understood.

    I had hoped that seeing someone like her would feel more like home. The anger and sadness were my heart’s last attempt to hold on to that idea, to cling to the warped version of home that I still held in my heart, but which had been quietly taken from me by time. Even though that version of home had long faded, some part of me wanted to guard it, to defend the memory as if it were still present. Letting go of it felt like losing something sacred. As I reflected on all this and on that simple question that started it, “What part of New York feels the most like home?” the answer became clearer. Home isn’t found in cities, or places, or objects. It is created and kept within people—people who make you feel known, the ones who see you even when the skyline shifts and time pulls you apart. 

    Over the last couple of months, I have been trying to understand how to be more intentional about recognizing the people who feel most like home and reminding myself to be grateful they are in my life. I have also been reflecting on how relationships are built and nurtured so I can experience that feeling more deeply and regularly. Having moved to NYC over a year ago, I hadn’t given these ideas much thought. I came here on a leap of faith, with little intention and a naive blindness to the unknown unknowns. The city has plenty of people, spaces, and thrills to keep the mind and body busy. Yet it is also a mirror, forcing you to reckon with parts of yourself you may have been ignoring. It asks you to experience, to learn, to reflect—constantly. The process is messy and rough at first, but like a rock worn smooth by a flowing river, sharp edges fade and jagged corners round. Without much thought, you begin to build a life in a new place. But there is a difference between building a life and building a home. Home is not found in the city’s streets or corners, but in the people and connections that make anywhere worth being.

  • What's on the mind is what's going on, and what's going on is what's in the mind.

    In part inspired by Marvin Gaye's What's Going on?, written on a bench while people watching in SF's Golden Gate Park in front of the Conservatory of Flowers on a brisk Saturday morning.

    —

    Notice. 
    Notice yourself noticing.  
    Notice what is there. 
    Notice what isn’t there. 
    Notice who you notice. 
    Notice who you don’t notice. 
    Notice what you’re noticing. 
    Notice what you’re not noticing. 
    Notice what you should notice. 
    Notice what you shouldn’t notice. 
    Notice what you want to notice. 
    Notice what you don’t want to notice.  

    Notice what others notice is there. 
    Notice what others notice isn’t there. 
    Notice whom others notice. 
    Notice whom others don’t notice. 
    Notice what others notice they should notice. 
    Notice what others notice they shouldn’t notice. 
    Notice what others notice they want to notice. 
    Notice what others notice they don’t want to notice. 

    Notice the whole. 
    Notice the parts.  
    Notice everything. 
    Or notice nothing. 
    And notice yourself noticing nothing.

    swonkg@gmail.com

  • I am a sleepy contortionist. My mind is split, constantly ping-ponging between my body’s physical pain and my brain’s trepidation over work, the cost of my apartment. At the same time, it pivots towards astonishment at the job I get to do each day and wonder at what my new life beginning to put roots down in Venice.

    Working as a line cook in a restaurant is hard work. I imagine under normal circumstances it would have its moments of intensity and then boredom, of learning and then repetition. But I’m not working under normal circumstances. I work the slowest shifts of the week at one of the busiest restaurants in Los Angeles. The past month and a half, every day has been extremely busy—even when the service I’m working isn’t slammed, I’m doing prep for someone else’s extremely busy shift to come. My wrists ache, my head spins. I don’t want to let anyone down, and I don’t want to push myself past the limit. Two weeks ago, I sliced off the tip of my right thumb with a mandolin. I’m reaching my limit and pushing past it in search of the new one each and every day. I feel like I’ve gone back to school. Perhaps there’s nothing more you could ask for in a job one year out of college . . .

    Two months ago, I moved to the part of Los Angeles where I grew up. This time, I’m living on my own. I find myself here without many of the friends who helped me to fall in love with life in Los Angeles. They’ve moved across the country or we’ve fallen out of touch or perhaps they just live across town. My hours don’t really align with my friends who work 9-5. Mostly I’m working when they are free. My new Venice community is forming but slowly. With little energy to give and inopportune moments to make it happen, community is formed in the cracks of existence, not upon its frontier. Last week, I placed a Stranger Bound journal in a little free library as Ilaria did across the world a couple weeks before. Today, I see it is gone, disappeared into another’s little world. I wonder what life it will live out there out of my hands.

    I read Anaïs Nin. I read Henry Miller. I read André Breton. An abstraction of Paris swirls into my head and just as quickly evaporates, replaced with the sunny hobos across the street meandering outside their vans. I can’t do everything I want to do at once. I crave stability and I’m getting closer. But I know I will never reach a point from where I feel only then can I jump off into new forays. There will always be another friend visiting for two days who I must drop everything to see, I will always cut my hand at the worst possible moment on the restaurant’s busiest day ever. If I want to do something, I must do it now and suffer the consequences. If I must rest, that too I can do. Today, I choose to write for you.

    I wonder, stranger, what’s on your mind?

  • Note to self | What’s on my mind? | September 29, 2025

    How do you know when it’s time to just keep swimming versus lift your head up, look around, and ask yourself, what on earth am I doing? Am I even swimming in the right direction?

    Sometimes it feels like my mind and body want to head ferociously in three directions at once. But if the consequence of indecision is treading in place, how do you choose? I’ve been reflecting on this chapter of my life as if to uncover the intentions informing who it is I wound up being. Why did I leave DC, move to Brooklyn, join forces with 1 other person to build a startup? Why did I start Stranger Bound and what about it brings me joy?

    Since moving to Brooklyn I’ve been observing the way I nestle into a place, build a sense of home, and reach for and create community. In many ways this process feels like an assembling of self. I’m learning what matters to me in real-time. The conversations that light me up. The cafe corners or patches of grass in a city park that feel just right.

    It feels like I’m taking a back seat in my own life. Witnessing the nature of the voice in my head as it reacts to this crazy city and the swirl of newness. Newness like, where the heck is the yogurt in this damn grocery store, or like late last Saturday watching my friend talk about the struggles on his mind to “god” reincarnated in puppet form. An earnest conversation unraveled in a room full of tipsy people sat on pillows. At one point I had little tears in my eyes — humored by life and the unexpected places we find ourselves.

    So, what’s on my mind?

    It’s been 4 months in this city.

    If “how I spend my days is how I live my life” I find myself coming up for air to look squarely at what I’m doing at work and what I’m prioritizing outside of it.I want to make sure I’m choosing both with intention.

    I may not know how these things I choose will shape me, but I do know there is a portfolio of feelings and a mental playground that I find nourishing and wish to protect at all costs. In this place, there is room to breathe, to adventure, to notice, to connect deeply. In this place I lose track of time and laugh a lot.

    Everything about Stranger Bound and the invitation to explore something each month is unreasonable. Taking time to pause and reflect, who has time for that? What’s the point? Maybe for you it’s an opportunity to get present to something you’ve not had time to see. Maybe it’s just a fun outlet to write or create something for yourself. I’m still exploring and learning about my why.

 

Creations

01 — ambition with no action — priyanka — lalitpur, nepal

"i wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and as i sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet"

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

in the bell jar, sylvia plath uses a fig tree as an analogy to choosing a path in life. i've been thinking about the fig tree analogy quite a lot - especially since i've been gifted with the endless time for pondering from being in my funemployment phase. as the quarter life crisis hits me at the ripe age of 26, and as my adhd brain tries to swing me to 20 different directions, i try to think deeper about where i'm meant to go, what i'm meant to do, if there is even anything as "meant to" at all? 

all the possibilities are frightening and exciting at the same time, and my decision paralysis hits me hard.

but, my figs haven't all fallen yet. 

and i want to pick a fig before they've all fallen. 

cause i'll never know how it tastes if i never choose it 

02 — Too much on my mind? — Mary — Brooklyn, NYC

My impulse to run comes in many flavors. One of them? When there’s too much on my mind.

Running slows time down. It drains the brain sludge, wakes up my senses, and pulls my attention outward…

A run knocks my sense of time back to center. Back to presence.

03 — Too much on my mind? — M. Douglas Bibbey (Mary’s Mom) — Connecticut

Created in reaction to Mary’s video… What do I do when there’s too much on my mind?

04 — a What’s on your mind? Wageningen Workshop — ila

Sometimes I’ve noticed I really have to carve out time and schedule moments to craft, do art, reflect, or just be. This month, as we asked what is on our mind, I thought — why not go through this process together by having a workshop?

It was hard to explain the concept to people, especially since some weren’t aware of the space Stranger Bound provides. How do you engage people to come participate in a self-guided workshop where there are no rules — you just use the materials around you to answer the question of what’s on your mind?

I can’t deny that I was nervous; it was one of my first times hosting a workshop completely alone! But I guess it’s normal to feel anxious, especially when you let your vulnerability show. Not setting expectations for what needs to be completed, or what has to come out of it, can feel unsettling. But put some friends and strangers in a room, give them some craft supplies, and then watch them find their direction spontaneously and know exactly what they’re doing.

Everyone delved into their own artistic creation — some by playing with new materials, some by focusing inwards, some by collaborating, some by lying down instead of sitting, and some by not thinking about mistakes but rather following their instinct of what should come next, based on what was on their mind.

Each piece had its own story. Some were shared, and some didn’t need to be.

Together, though, in that very moment, we were a unit — a group of people, strangers bound by the connection of what was on our minds.

As someone who can’t answer in a single way what’s on your mind, being pushed to reflect on it in a special space, at a specific time, and with spectacular people made me realize: what’s on my mind is the sense of belonging I feel around them.

P.S. It feels almost unreal — a friend of mine stumbled upon this magazine page on this very day, carrying this very question. Such perfect synchronicity.

—

This was the very first Stranger Bound workshop — maybe the beginning of something more. I’d love to plan more sessions, perhaps even with others. I wonder what you think.

Resources

Articles / words / links shared this month in response to ‘What’s on my mind?’ :))

That concludes Exhibition 09. Thanks for stopping by!

Consider sharing a thought or reaction in the comments below!

If you didn’t get a chance to submit something but would like to contribute to this collection, email contact@strangerbound.com with your entry.

 
Mary Bibbey
Next

Letting Go