In limbo between life and death after falling five hundred feet into a cement mixer, a construction worker reflects on the nature of love.

A young Native American man visits a burial site on a nearby island and must reflect on both his allegiance to his culture and to himself.

When a young man leaves his home in Kansas City to find a career, he struggles to settle down in one spot. He wanders, impoverished, across the western United States and finds a transcendent understanding of the human condition.

In a series of commentaries on the human condition — life, truth, happiness, death — a spinster sister takes in her dead sister’s children; a man is entranced by the endless waves which roll and crash in the ocean; a carpenter wrestles with the burden of being everyone’s confidante; a dying railroad crossing watchman shares a simple but complex wisdom.

Just before an American college student is set to leave for the airport after visiting her extended family in Ethiopia, she realizes her suitcases are too heavy. A fight breaks out between her relatives about what items should travel with her at their behest, versus which ones deserve to be left behind.

Two cartographers reach a geographic boundary and discuss what they see.

In a dystopian American Midwest, a young Arab-American woman tries to get in touch with a past lover as she journeys through the Dakotas with her dying mother who's a part of "the Movement," a philosophy based on continuous transience and the avoidance of violent places.

Irritated by a humiliating incident in his class, an anthropology professor takes a spin on his boat to blow off steam. He rides the waves and comes to a realization about alienation versus acceptance.

A woman who is not content with life and fears staying in one place works as a traveling writer, recording her thoughts and interactions on tape recorders and finding different lovers in each place she visits.

After her father kills himself, a young girl runs away with a traveling, unhoused stranger she meets at the bus stop. The two scrape and save for a life together until one day, she wakes up and he's gone. After looking for him in the cold, surviving an assault, and accepting help from a stranger, the girl realizes he's betrayed her, taking their savings and leaving. The next year, she gives birth to their child.