In this episode of the WWN podcast, Aaron Nell reflects on the meaning of home, the power of the natural world, and the enduring value of connection — whether through music, friendship, or justice work. From kayaking the Whitewater River to bicycling around the country to coordinating prison education programs, Aaron shares a deeply personal journey rooted in place, presence, and purpose. Enjoy!
Transcript
Aaron Nell: I’m Aaron Nell, and I’m a proud native of Wayne County.
Kate Jetmore: From Civic Spark Media and the Western Wayne News in Wayne County, Indiana, I’m Kate Jetmore.
As a native of Richmond, Indiana, I’m excited to be sitting down with some of our neighbors and listening to the stories that define our community.
My guest today is Aaron Nell. Aaron grew up and has lived in various corners of the Ohio River Valley.
He loves reading and listening to poetry. Aaron accompanies his singer-songwriter friends on various instruments and released an album of his own music in 2021.
He co-facilitates community building workshops in prisons and currently helps coordinate a prison education program through Wilmington College.
Welcome, Aaron. I’m so happy you could join me today.
Aaron Nell: Thanks for the invitation. I appreciate it.
Kate Jetmore: You have a history of coming and going from Richmond and Wayne County as a resident, as a musician, a nonprofit volunteer, and someone with all kinds of local connections and friendships.
So as someone who’s thought and written a lot about the importance of place and learning about the peculiarities and characteristics of a given place, what’s that like?
What is it that takes you away? What is it that keeps bringing you back?
Aaron Nell: Well, friends bring me back mostly these days. I have many long-standing friendships that I built when I lived there for 18 years, and it still really is a home.
I think particularly because I spent so much time in nature there, and because Wayne County and Richmond, where I was living, is kind of so near, like there’s the gorge.
The Whitewater River gorge that runs through, and it’s so easy to access. And even though it’s not certainly like an urban place, because I’ve lived like in Cincinnati and Dayton and Indianapolis, it’s a place where you can just easily, particularly with the gorge, kind of go down in there, and suddenly, really, a lot of the man-made space sort of disappears in a lot of ways, particularly like in my case, when I took a kayak.
Yeah, so I would be heading to Brookville Lake, and just really, since I paddled that so many times, I really got close, and I would even say intimate, with a lot of the, the bends in the river, and that whole water course there, to the point where, like, there was a very sacred place to me, which was maybe not quite, just a little south of town, where there were two sycamore trees.
And there were, and heron nests. And when I say there were heron nests, I mean, there were a few dozen, and these are large nests.
These are very huge nests, and I almost would’ve missed them, because they’re very quiet kind of birds, and they were 50 feet up in the tree, but I happened just to look up for some reason, and there’s just above me all these halos of these really rough sticked heron nests, and sometimes little babies sticking their heads out, and so I would return to that just because, A, it’s another species and a lot of another species in one place.
And I just thought, this is their space, and I’m kind of traveling through it, and it reminded me that I’m one person among many other living creatures in this, you know, in the county, in the area that I’m living.
Kate Jetmore: That is such a beautiful image, and I have to be honest, it’s really not what I expected to hear when I asked that question.
And it sounds so peaceful, like, you know, on this show we talk a lot about community. We talk a lot about connections and relationships in various communities in Wayne County, but I think you’re the first guest who’s talked about that kind of deep, deep connection with nature, with local nature in Richmond, in Wayne County.
What else can you say about your kayaking adventures?
Aaron Nell: Well, the first thing that came to mind was the humility of… I had kayaked a little bit before. I came there to study at the Earlham School of Religion, and I ended up not finishing my degree program there.
And as I was processing that, I bought a kayak and thought, I want to use this kind of as a meditative practice to kind of make sense of what was next, you know, what had happened.
And the very first day, I put in, and I put in down in the gorge where the Starr Gennett area is, and maybe five minutes in, there was a really quick bend in the river, and all the water was running very near this bush sticking out, and it flipped my kayak over, and I let go of my paddle, and the paddle starts drifting downriver pretty quickly.
And I thought, I don’t know what I’m doing, I have no business doing this, and then part of me thought, well, A, you can get the water out of your kayak, and the second part was, go look for that paddle.
Part of my brain was like, well, it’s gone, it just is downriver, and then part of me thought, well, but there’s a part where the river slows down a little farther up, so calm down, stop getting angry at yourself, and go look for the paddle.
And so, I did, I walked the river with, you know, the kayak kind of towing behind me, and it was, it’s shallow enough in a lot of places, you know, you can just walk along. And sure enough, the paddle had come to a, this, you know, pool space, and had kind of drifted over to the shore, and there it was.
It took probably about 10 minutes of walking to find it, so just, I’m remembering that, that very beginning experience was one of, it’s you and the water and the craft that you brought in, and so you, to stay together, you need to kind of calm your mind, and be present, and also be, the river taught me immediately, like, there’s a lot of force here, like the water goes where it goes, and you need to be mindful. To the point of, when I was first learning the river, I would get out, and sometimes walk along the shore to see what was coming up, because there were places where I could really get into some trouble, if I didn’t kind of make a plan.
But once I learned that, you know, I knew what to expect. Although, that said, a river like the Whitewater changes, sometimes significantly after a flood.
It will cut a new channel somewhere. So, the river is a good teacher.
Kate Jetmore: Yeah, it sure sounds like it. And I wish we could spend a lot more time exploring that. But, you know, kayaking is one vehicle.
I also know that there’s another vehicle of choice for you, which is the bike. And a lot of people know you as the guy who rides your bike everywhere.
This would have predated the Loop Project and many community leaders beginning to prioritize bikeability as as a quality-of-life issue.
And I know you’ve also done several long bike trips around the region and the country.
So what role does bike riding play in your sense of self and in your experience of the world?
Aaron Nell: Two things. Well, three things, I guess, there’s kind of like three streams that kind of flow in together as to particularly when I was living in Richmond, why bike riding became really, for a while, I think it was about 10 years, I didn’t have a car, and Richmond being the size that it was, I could get to work, I could get to where I needed to go, really in, you know, 10 or 15 minutes, almost anywhere.
So part of that was economics, where I really didn’t have the resources to be maintaining a vehicle. These are in no particular order. Another was the fact that my father and I used to take bike rides around the neighborhood, and they weren’t crazy long, but I do remember, so he, I think he got me into just a sense of that, you know, riding a bike around town is just a normal thing, and even riding for a little bit of distance is normal, and so that ingratiated just having a bike and having that be something that is part of how you get from A to B, that was a part of things. Now, can I remember the third?
Kate Jetmore: Well, I’m going to pop in and actually ask you what neighborhood that was that you grew up riding around in with your dad.
Aaron Nell: Oh, sure. Sure. That’s Fairfield, Ohio in Butler County, which is really just a couple of counties away from Wayne.
Oh, the other piece was, I think, a desire to, when possible, to not be burning fuel, to not be adding more CO2.
And so there was a kind of pride in being able to get myself around, through my 30s and 40s, just peddling.
Kate Jetmore: Mm-hmm. And what about, what about longer trips? So, you know, it’s one thing to sort of be a kid and go for a bike ride with your friends or kind of tool around in the summer on your bike, and then there’s kind of commuting to work. That’s kind of a different context, right?
Were there ever times that you kind of packed up your panniers and, you know, biked all day and then slept somewhere you didn’t really know where?
Have you ever traveled like that on your bike?
Aaron Nell: I did, when I turned 40. So for my 40th birthday, I had a lot of friends come over and kind of had a send-off because for the last number of months, I had saved up money and I knew that I was going on this long trip and I had a rough idea of where I was going, but not entirely sure of how long I might be gone.
And that actually, kind of connecting to that first question, was my first, you know, is this home? Is Richmond home? Is Wayne County home?
I’m going to kind of go on this long peregrination and explore, and test my body. And I don’t know if the end of that loop ends back where I started, because I’ll be going to all these other places.
And so I ended up going on a four and a half month trip where I was sleeping in the woods. I had never… the term that I learned was called guerrilla camping, which is where you find a spot on the side of the road that clearly isn’t like someone’s private yard, and you camp, and then you get up and you continue your journey. And so I did that for four and a half months, and went to Missouri, went up to the Upper Peninsula, got all the way over to the Finger Lakes, went down to the Chesapeake Bay area, made my way back, and I ended up, a lot of people say, how far did you ride?
And a lot of times I’ll resist that, because it boils down the trip to a number. And I like the fact that, you know, there are stories, and I did keep a blog as I was going, mainly for my mom and sister and others who are like, we want to know that you’re not dead, so please give us these signs of life as you’re going down the road. And I’d say it’s probably that that trip was one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life, for lots of different reasons.
Kate Jetmore: Hmm, I can sense that. And I have to ask, what happened with this question around home? Do you have any more clarity about that now?
And also, what is home?
Aaron Nell: Hmm, that is such a huge question. I think home is this kind of intertwining of a sense of, for me, my animal self in nature, and because of our culture and human civilization, where I do work, you know, to provide for myself, and so it’s a kind of intertwining of those things, of the physical space, and like I mentioned before, kind of the sharing of what other souls, what other species are around me, as well as what gifts that I have that are being pressed into service for what we affectionately call a job.
Kate Jetmore: And is it a place, is it a physical place, or is it more like the sense that you have inside of you?
Aaron Nell: I think really it’s both, and I think it’s possible to live where one of those is maybe a little more marginalized, like, where if you have just a deep reverence for the physical space around you, but, you know, maybe you’re not doing what you’re “called to do.”
I think it’s possible to live into that in the same way that it’s possible to have a job that’s very, very meaningful, but the place that you’re living in maybe isn’t feeding you, and you sometimes have to maybe travel a little bit to do that.
I’ve kind of looked into that. I’ve kind of looked into both of those.
Kate Jetmore: Yeah, interesting. It’s almost like a dance between these two poles. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on that. I know a lot of your time in Wayne County has been focused on making and performing music with other musicians.
So how has that journey evolved, and where are you on it now?
Aaron Nell: It’s funny to think. I mean, as far as that journey, the end of that journey goes as long as I have a breath, just because I feel like I have friendships, musical friendships, that I think will last until…
I’m pausing because I’ve had some friends go through some physical hardships that have changed their music, and I happen to be in my mid-50s, and I have other friends who are a little bit older, and sometimes neuropathy happens and the fingers aren’t as adept, and so it’s been interesting to walk with people who I’ve made music with in certain ways, and now maybe it’s having to be different. Because they’re dealing with some, you know, challenges physically.
So, as I’m thinking of that question, I mean, I think there are people in our lives that, even if we haven’t named it, like I know a lot of people will name, like, I’m married to this person, I’m going to walk with you until the end.
But I think we sometimes consciously or unconsciously make that alliance with other people. Maybe a tighter circle around us. And for me, that’s a lot of my musician friends, where I will show up for them as a friend, you know, like on the other end of the couch if they’re moving, but also even if their music is changing in ways where even they would acknowledge it’s diminished, but what can we still make?
You know, like my fingers can’t play the guitar like they used to, but I learned some keyboard. So now I’m doing that and I’m still able to make music and write music that way.
And so how then do I continue to show up in that space with them for that part of the journey?
Kate Jetmore: Wow, that’s really interesting. I actually hear a really strong throughline in all of these questions that… I don’t know if you have words for it, but it just seems like… Flow.
I mean, there’s the flow of water, and the flow of a bike wheel turning and turning day after day, and the flow of music.
I was actually at a concert last week, and the concert was given by a good friend of mine who’s an organist in the cathedral here in the town where I live. And she had invited our yoga teacher, who had never been to one of these concerts, she’d never heard this woman play the organ, she just knew her as a yoga student. And we all agreed after the concert that there was such a strong parallel between what we all experience in the yoga studio, and what we all experienced in this concert with music, and I really hear that in your words as well.
Aaron Nell: Yeah, flow. I know there’s a book called Flow by a gentleman with like a name, I think it’s like Csikszentmihalyi. It’s mostly consonants, and it’s like Serbian or Czechoslovakian.
And he was talking about brain states and that kind of thing, and I confess I actually haven’t read the book, but I remember one of the tenets of it is essentially that being able to focus on something, and like music in particular, where there’s an attention and a presence to the moment where many things are possible, and I think a lot of people associate it with music in general, but particularly like jazz music.
People will say, he’s in the flow, where it’s like water, there’s nothing impeding it, you don’t necessarily know where it’s going, and the musician, too, doesn’t necessarily know. They’ve done the preparation, so that they’ve learned their scales, so that if the water wants to go somewhere, they can follow it, but yeah, as someone who improvises, particularly on trumpet and fiddle, yeah, there are some times where if I’m not too distracted by all the things that can distract a musician, particularly if you’re using electronic, you know, amplification, or there’s a crowd, a loud crowd or something like that, you can get into this space where everything falls away, and it’s just you and the music.
And when I say just you and the music, meaning there’s musicians maybe around you, but you’re just wholly, really present to the sound that’s happening, and it’s like, how do I submit myself to the sound in a way that continues it moving, you know, moving.
Kate Jetmore: Is one of those distractions for you ever judgment?
Aaron Nell: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. As someone who studied music at a university, the very first place I went to school was Bowling Green State University, and I was going to be a band director.
And the music system in America, as far as teaching music, I think there are a lot of people who do it out of a love and they want kids to enjoy it, but there are a lot of competitions.
I would just generally say our culture is very much about comparing and competition, and I think, unfortunately, that shows up in people’s music.
And even though I feel like I’ve gotten past a lot of self-judgment that keeps me from playing, it still shows up because I was steeped in it for a number of years as a young person.
Kate Jetmore: Yeah, I agree that that’s part of our society and it’s sort of a task, a universal task to sort of become aware and then unlearn a lot of those habits.
I do want to turn to another aspect that I’m aware of, Aaron. I know you’ve devoted much of your life to change-making, to activism, to the pursuit of justice.
What has that journey been like, both in Wayne County and beyond? And where would you say that your thoughts and priorities are now?
Aaron Nell: So, I am recording this in Wilmington, Ohio, which is where I graduated from in ‘95 as far as getting a BA in English from this place.
And while I was here, they had a program in the prisons where they were offering the same four-year degree to people who were incarcerated.
But during my tenure here, that program was being shut down for a number of different reasons. Part of it was access to Pell Grants and there were some other things.
But when I learned that that was happening, there was a part of me that was like, this isn’t right. Why are we not at least offering opportunities for people to get an education, and hopefully, you know, when they’re on the outside, be able to use those resources and knowledge in good ways.
And that seed kind of was planted there. And then I came to Richmond specifically to study in the Earlham School of Religion’s Peace Studies program with a focus from, you know, coming from me, of looking at our carceral system and studying it.
And so it was kind of like, and while I was there, I got involved with the Alternatives to Violence Project, which is a, they’re celebrating their 50th anniversary this year, of essentially going in and doing community building nonviolence workshops inside prisons.
So I was trained in that, and largely, that’s where a lot of, if I would even call what I do is justice work, has been over the last 20 years, going into correctional facilities, helping facilitate these workshops.
And then that arc then has brought me back here to Wilmington because they began, they revitalized the program that disappeared when I was a student.
And so now I’m helping coordinate that.
Kate Jetmore: Wow. That’s really full circle. How interesting. Can I ask, if you feel comfortable sharing this… And I don’t even know how aware you would be of it either. But is the program now in danger or is it on pretty firm footing?
Aaron Nell: It’s in danger partially because, I’ll be honest, the program was started with a little bit of naivete and not a lot of prep.
So that’s on the side of those offering it. Um, there is currently, um, on the table, some diminishment of what is awarded in Pell Grants.
So that would certainly affect, um, our program. And then just generally the system, it’s sometimes the indifference that gets you.
It’s not that someone’s pushing against you. It’s they’re like, this is extra, you know, someone getting their education, like, you know, if I don’t let them out for class, or if I, if the facility is slow to approve a professor coming in, or not at all, little things like that are hindrances and things that get in the way of that, that what is seemingly simple of a student sitting down in a classroom, receiving, you know, some knowledge.
Kate Jetmore: It’s interesting that you use the word classroom. I guess I’m realizing that I sort of assumed that all this instruction is happening in the prison.
Is it a classroom in the prison or are they allowed to come to the university and attend classes with university students?
Aaron Nell: It’s all in the correctional facility. And even if they aren’t hosting, you know, like college courses, which many aren’t, although in the state of Ohio, Sinclair Community College and now Wilmington and Ashland University are all higher ed places that have a presence, but a lot of these places do have an education building, although a lot of the times what they’re teaching there are like GED classes or addiction recovery courses, and so those buildings are filled with, you know, lots of different kinds of classes.
Kate Jetmore: I just want to, as we begin to wrap up, Aaron, I want to ask you one last question, which I feel a little bit bashful asking because it seems like somebody who’s more familiar with this subject, the subject of incarceration, the subject of, you know, what our goals are as a society in the prison system…
It seems like this is probably a subject that many people are familiar with, but I’m not. So I’d just like to ask you your feelings on how we are approaching that subject.
I mean, are people being sent to prison as a punishment, and that’s sort of the ultimate goal, that they be punished?
Or is the idea that there’s some measure of rehabilitation, and obviously the men that you’re working with, I assume they’re men, they have the opportunity to get this degree.
They have the opportunity to work with people like you and take classes and better themselves, for lack of a better word.
So I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
Aaron Nell: Sure, and I’ll also just mention, of the three facilities Wilmington is in, one is a women’s facility. So there are, I think…
There are a number of Ohio women’s facilities, less than the men, certainly, but to your question, I think, generally, society has approached the current prison system, A, it’s been a way to control some populations, I would just say, it’s a very racist, classist place.
If you are not white, it’s very easy to end up in prison. As far as rehabilitation, I think there are some people who are minded that way, and I know the Quakers, when they were trying to make some inroads in making prisons a slightly more humane place, you know, had some ideas about how to do that.
But a lot of people… and I’m learning, I’m continuing to learn about my culture as I live in it over a long, long period of time. I don’t know if this comes from our theology strictly or something that’s deeper in our bones from having made our way from old Europe and having a sense of being kicked out of there or something, but there is a deep reservoir of seemingly needing to punish and needing to, like, hold people accountable.
There are healthy ways to do that, but then there are the ways that I think we’re doing it, which is just really causing people pain and hoping that maybe out of that some learning can happen.
And also, we’re, as I would call us—and I know this is kind of stark, but we’re a throwaway culture in many ways, and that includes people.
And I say that because I’m working in these spaces where I think the average person, you know, who drives by a facility, like, I mean, we don’t think about, I think, a lot of the people who end up in these spaces. And even guys on the inside will say, there are people in here who need to be here, like, either because of what they’ve done or because they are not able comfortably to live, you know, in a sociable way among other people, but so many of the men there are there for drug offenses. Nonviolent things.
And there’s this sense that we need to be tough on things that we don’t quite know what to do with or how to deal with.
And so we will take away someone who’s, let’s say a father… 10 years of their freedom for selling, you know, some drugs.
And yes, does that, does the selling of the drugs need to be dealt with? Yes. But does what we’re doing… balance?
And it depends. Obviously, it depends on the case, the person, but, you know.
Kate Jetmore: Yeah, and I guess I find myself asking, what do we want? Like, what’s our goal?
Because it’s, you know, it’s one thing to say, you’ve broken the law. That’s not good. That’s not acceptable. So you go to jail because, you know, what we’re trying to communicate is don’t sell drugs.
Right? Or don’t do drugs or don’t possess drugs. But those are all negatives. What is it that we’re going toward?
I mean, is the goal to teach people to abide by the law instead of, like, don’t break the law?
We want you to respect the law. We want you to follow the law. I mean, I feel like I’m going down a little bit of a rabbit hole here, but I guess that’s where I’m headed with this question.
Like, what is it that we’re after?
Aaron Nell: Well, I think you’re right that there are a number of people who I’ve talked to in various positions, like in a prison, let’s say, like a deputy warden down to a correctional officer, who would say we’re trying to help turn them toward a lifestyle that is, well, I don’t know.
I mean, again, one that isn’t breaking the law, that isn’t harming other people, that isn’t, particularly with drugs, bringing poison into a community.
So I guess, yeah, it is to turn people toward better choices. But the ways that we go about it are so much on the… look at what you did, we’re pulling you out of society, we’re putting you in a uniform that has inmate in letters that you could read from hundreds of yards away.
We’re often infantilizing you and treating you like a child, day after day, we’re not allowing you to make any choices for yourself. So even though I hear that there’s this focus on, you know, you need to understand what you did and become a better person.
And yes, there are programs here and there, but on the daily experience of someone on the inside, mainly the focus is, and I hear this in the way people talk.
“These are the bad guys. People on the outside are the good people. And so we need to protect the good people from the bad people.”
And it’s unfortunate because then the people, people who aren’t in prison are like, well, we know where the bad people are.
They’re in, they’re being taken care of. They’re over there. And I think that’s another feature that’s probably less conscious as far as like what, you know, why our system sort of is the way it is.
In some ways, as we can feel a little better about like, well, at least I’m not, you know, I’m not bad.
I didn’t, and I’ve, I’ve never gone to jail. You know, I don’t think a lot of people see that huge difference between one person to the next.
Like, well, I mean, I’ve never done anything to land myself in jail.
Kate Jetmore: Right. At least that, right?
Aaron Nell: Yeah.
Kate Jetmore: Yeah. Well, Aaron, this has been such an interesting conversation. It’s not at all what I expected. And I’m really excited to bring it to our listeners.
So thank you so much for making the time to join me on the show today. And I want to wish you and your family all the best.
Aaron Nell: Thank you so much, Kate.