I don’t mean Me, Here, Now but All of us, Everywhere, All the time. And yet, most of the time it does not feel that way, does it?

“All of our life, everything we do, think, and feel is surrounded by nothingness,” John O’Donohue writes in Anam Cara. This “cosmic loneliness is the root of all inner loneliness.” Can one come to terms with that emptiness, and with the violence, inside the cosmic heart? Can one resist the urge to escape, to retreat into spaces gated and clean, protected, pristine, whether digital or spiritual?

Can one feel at home in messy, holy, bloody mud?

Can one fall in love with creation regardless?

I pack my bags. Time to drive to Salt Lake City. Time to sell the car, to release all that won’t fit into two suitcases. Time to close a chapter.

If contemplation is taking on the heart of God in the heart of the world, then the contemplative, perhaps more than any other, weeps over the obliteration of the will of God in the heart of the universe. — Illuminated Life, Joan Chittister. (Thank you to James Bailey for the book!)

“We cannot fill our emptiness with objects, possessions, or people,” O’Donohue writes. We cannot. Oh, but we try. “We have to go deeper into that emptiness; then we will find beneath nothingness the flame of love waiting to warm us.”

I arrive in Newark, New Jersey, to face what I used to camouflage the fear of nothingness. All of it went into storage when I left New York City nearly a year ago. For this I pay a hundred dollars a month, a reminder of a postponed painful encounter.

I brought a friend for support. When we open the door a jarring alarm rings through the hallway. The air in the storage unit is musty, thick with heavy memories. The devils of my American life wait among the boxes of this warehouse tomb.

We begin to fill large garbage bags. I want it all gone. Donate it, throw it out, I don’t care. I move quickly. I don’t want to feel what the room is holding. I retreat into silliness, into repetitive jokes, into comforting verbal loops. My friend informs me that I am “stimming,” self-regulating through sounds. When we break for lunch the universe throws a flag.

Lights flash in the rearview mirror. A cop pulls us over somewhere in New Jersey’s manicured soccer-mom-suburbia.

“You ran a red light.”

Did we? Maybe?! I have no idea. I am floating in a cloud of my own chatter. His voice hits me like a splash of cold water. I have never been pulled over, ever. And I don’t believe in coincidences, especially not on this trip. When the cop steps away, I pray. I ask for support, for harmony, for guidance. Can we bathe this whole situation in light, please?

The officer returns in a better mood. There are fines and summons, but the tension has vanished. As we munch on bento boxes, my friend and I try to make sense of what happened. We ran a red light. We were unaware. We rushed. We failed to stop.

Instead of pausing to honor the excavation and burial of my old life, I had closed my eyes and hit the accelerator. I refused to make the unconscious conscious. So, the universe forced me to hit the brakes.

We clear the air with smoke and sound, with prayer and invocation. My friend is an expert in these matters, I am a committed novice at best. After an exhausting two days, it is time to cross this threshold.

To be holy is to be home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul. — John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

Home remains a fleeting experience for me, as if my destiny was not to belong but to be in longing.

When I grew up, home seemed simple and tangible: family, the house, friends, culture, Deutschland. Familiarity and bonds of blood felt constricting, suffocating, too small. I could not wait to leave.

New York became home through relationships: marriage, work and, later, healing and spiritual community. But my roots never broke the concrete. I was a renter, a guest, straining against walls, always reaching for sunlight and more space. I never fully arrived.

Before I head to the airport, I meet a friend for breakfast in Midtown. Manhattan is chilly this morning. People rush past me with clenched faces. The place feels overcaffeinated, dysregulated, an assault on the nervous system. My friend’s mind seems to be running at ten times the speed of my own. I consider the consequences of opting out of this cultural hotbed. I like who I have become, but my writing has slowed down drastically. Maybe I think like a tree now, forming thoughts like leaves, one season at a time?

I’ve experienced home downward, in roots and soil, in history and ancestry. I’ve also felt it in the lateral branches of relationships. But home also occasionally reveals itself inward and upward, in the refuge of a full heart, in moments of transcendence. Is home wherever we glimpse our wholeness?

Purifying my physical circumstances repeatedly has created an invitation to revisit the inner room. What attitudes and beliefs make up its walls and tapestry? Can I feel its outline, its texture? Is it inviting? Have I bolted the door and shuttered the windows? How did I ever let it become so cluttered?

The day of departure is filled with Doppelgänger encounters, with faces reminiscent of old acquaintances. Everything seems familiar yet distant. I can’t stay. Every ending implies a beginning and, as I board the plane, I wonder where my wandering heart will lead me.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. . . . Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. — J. Krishnamurti

How to find that inner home? I used to think stillness was the “correct” path. Meditation appealed to me. Prayer arose more spontaneously. After some recreational experimentation, I was taught psychedelic ceremony as an inward journey supported by sacred instruments and music.

And yet, some of my most freeing experiences have been in movement. I know the energy of dance can lift the ceiling and open a portal. I had to learn how to dissolve and let myself be moved. Once I did, there was no turning back.

“What we are ready to learn is that heightened arousal, whether through wild dancing, spontaneous jumping up and down, or body shaking, is as valuable a healing and transformational practice as sitting quietly in a lotus position,” Bradford Keeney writes in Shaking Medicine. This guy gets it, I thought.

Brad spent a lifetime following visionary dreams and immersing himself in ecstatic, shamanic, and healing traditions including the Kalahari Bushmen (San) of southern Africa and the healers of Bali, Mexico, Brazil, St. Vincent, and Japan. He and his wife Hillary now facilitate, teach, and write under the name Sacred Ecstatics. When I saw that they offered a weekend workshop in Budapest, I changed all my flights.

Brad is an Unikat, a genius musical shaman, truly one of a kind. He is posted in front of two Roland synthesizers and plays sequences of rapidly changing rhythms (“all of my music lessons came from the other side,” he explains; a few examples are on Soundcloud). The audience rocks and sways, back and forth, waiting to catch a “stray,” a jolt of energy, a spontaneous shaking movement.

Brad calls it the “spiritual engineering of sacred ecstasy.” His formula is ESM: (sacred) emotion, sound, and (spontaneous) movement. These feed on each other and raise the “spiritual temperature.” The goal is to prepare a “big room” for the divine and “get cooked.” The intention is to climb upward on one’s “rope to God.” It’s very different from anything I’ve done before.

While one of my new friends has an instant kundalini awakening, I spend my days rocking and swaying, listening intently, and occasionally falling into shakes and spasms that remind me of TRE. On the last afternoon, I find a deep space of sadness and yearning. Why won’t You let me draw closer? Why do I have to return to this tiresome world? Tears stream across my cheek.

It feels like I’ve stumbled across something profound, yet I barely managed to touch the rope, let alone climb. The jewel of jewels remains remote. It hangs over my life like the full moon over Budapest.

“The secret of life is to move from observing to serving.” — Hillary Keeney

How odd to think about ancient medicine when everyone is talking about AI. But I don’t know what the world needs or where it is going. I barely know what I yearn for: wholeness and presence, surrender and devotion. Stillness and ecstasy. To feel deeply alive, to return home, if only for a moment. And to become a True Participant, as Hillary put it, a co-creator with the divine.

Brad seems to believe there is a near-universal answer to life’s problems. Diagnosis? Analysis? Convoluted questions about the ineffable? “Trickster territory” of the mind. Too many words. Spiritually cold. He answers with a shriek or a channeled song. If you find yourself in a funk, it’s the “ancestors reminding you there’s not enough dancing!” “Wake up,” he shouts from behind the keyboard.

Is what I’m looking for as simple as gathering around a fire with a drum and a deep longing to reconnect with the infinite? I don’t know. And that’s okay. I let go of the books and the need to know. My intellect used to have unquestioned dominion over my life. Instead, I want to make room for play.

Language and knowledge seemed like the master key to life. But always my intellect felt the need to define and to draw distinctions: it’s this not that. Brad would call this “ground talk.” My heart on the other hand knows the unity behind all contradictions. The heart can embrace paradox because it does not need to be explicit. The heart does not explain. It simply breaks or is lifted in a lifelong dance.

First, ashamed to not have published more often. I expected this trip to be inspirational, a boost of my creative juices. Instead, it feels like my writing brain has gone on strike. But why?

From one angle, the writing feels disconnected from my heart. Writing about travel and money, spirituality and consciousness, all such drafts felt stillborn, like silent piles of lifeless words. I don’t care to write about what does not deeply move me. But what would that be?

It’s hard to put into words. This feels like a time of endings. Endings in my life but also in the culture at large (micro mirrors macro). It feels like the myths woven into my life are dying.

For one, I feel ashamed to be an American.

Ashamed to witness what this nation is turning into, what it now stands for, how it is run, and who it is run by. I feel ashamed to be part of a system that embodies hubris, exports violence, and allies itself with an ideology of mass killings, displacement, and starvation.

We bomb schools, hospitals, universities? We conduct double tap strikes? We assassinate politicians and their families? How is any of that okay? It’s not, of course. It is what a ‘Great Satan’ would do.

I feel ashamed also to be safe and comfortable, to bite my tongue, while watching one vile revelation after another. Gaza. ICE. Epstein. Already yesterday’s news thanks to Iran and Lebanon.

Behold a nation carrying its shadow like a barrel full of toxic PFAS. Behold as we project it unto others in the form of organized violence. Behold as our house is ruled by greed, grift, and cruelty.

How do you come to terms with that?

In the past, I would have retreated into denial and distraction. I would have shut it all down, pretended I was not political. Politics? A sure way to ‘kill the vibes.’ Working in finance reinforced this attitude for the market rewards mercenaries. Convictions appear as a costly handicap. “Greg, this is not fucking Charles Dickens World, okay? You don’t go around talking about principles,” as opportunist archetype Tom Wambsgans puts it in Succession. Keep your head down and your eyes on the ball of money.

That’s over, thank God. I no longer want to bypass reality, however nauseating it may be. How could I not let myself be shattered? How could I not let the acid of revelation disintegrate my worldview? How could I not stand in shock as the masks came off?

But what is a healthy response when the atmosphere turns septic, when the discourse is a fever dream, when rot is being exposed but not treated?

What does one do with the anger, the grief, the shame, the feeling of impotence?

Writing feels like an escape into the comfortable space of my head, away from the tension of truth held in my body. And even on the page I find no solace. I have no answers. Writing does not answer that heavy question dangling around my neck: now what?

What does this age ask of me?

What can I contribute but outrage and tears?

I don’t want to join a battle where each side inevitably believes it represents the light and fights darkness. I don’t want to join the dance of fear and greed. I don’t want to walk the ancient path of resentment and violence.

I want to be part of the healing. I want to create and empower, inspire and awaken. I want to be truthful, loving, and kind. I want to find what lies beyond the hunger, beyond the injustice, beyond the catastrophe.

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate [what] seems important, or from holding views which others find inadmissible.” — Carl Jung

Charles Eisenstein called this a “time between stories.” What do we do when the fabric of our reality is torn? If the old stories are dead, how do we release them? And how do we bring new ones to life?

The only thing I am confident about is that the answers are not waiting on the screen. We won’t find them on Substack or YouTube. ChatGPT doesn’t know. These can help us discover, share and connect, but they cannot animate a new living myth. If we are stuck, we will have to move.

I am reminded of the book Black Elk Speaks about Oglala Lakota medicine man and visionary Black Elk. “Everything an Indian does is in a circle,” he explained, “because the Power of the World always works in circles.” But his nation’s “sacred hoop” was broken and his people forced into the reservation’s “square boxes.” A catastrophic end to a way of life, “for there can be no power in a square.” How does one respond to such trauma?

One day, “word came to us that the Indians were beginning to dance everywhere.” A Paiute shaman/prophet had shared a vision of multi-day ceremonial trance dances, the Ghost Dance. These were supposed to re-connect the tribes with their ancestors and restore the world to harmony. Buffalo would re-appear, white settlers would return east. “The people were hungry and in despair, and many believed in the good new world that was coming.”

But the US government believed it saw preparations for an insurrection and banned the movement. Hundreds were gunned down at Wounded Knee. The ‘good new world’ did not manifest, yet there is much to learn.

First, it is a sobering reminder not to lean too much on others’ visions. Clarity about the present beats seeing possible future paths. A crisis asks us to re-connect with our deepest inner knowing, with the truths we carry in our souls.

And notice how intuitively the Ghost Dance seemed to answer the situation:

• Are people fragmented, divided? Gather. Get in sync.

• Weighed down by the trauma of defeat? Rise, move, release.

• Lost your spirit? Enter altered states of consciousness. Re-connect with the world beyond for support.

• Imprisoned in a lifeless square? Form a living circle.

I’m not saying trance dance is the answer to what ails our culture, but it feels directionally more relevant than reading another book or listening to another podcast.

We are conditioned to watch our visionaries, founders, bring ideas to life with the power of capital, technology, and persuasion. The marketplace votes on how our culture changes. But the answer to a crisis mirrors its nature. Our spiritual crisis will not be healed by the archetypes that created it.

Should it surprise us if we had to humble ourselves and learn from the people whose cultures were steamrolled by the machine of conquest and progress?

“In traditional cultures, when someone returns from a vision quest, the first thing they do is share their vision with the elders of their community,” Chris Bache writes in LSD and the Mind of the Universe. “They do this, first, to receive their counsel on what the vision means and, second, because their vision does not belong to them alone. Deep visions are not private matters.”

Read it again: deep visions are not private matters. What if during our individual journeys of healing and growth we receive bits and pieces of the answer? These would not be for our entertainment. And yet even creating spaces to share them would not be enough.

Black Elk’s private big vision was turned into a public ritual. Painted riders and horses enacted his encounter with Spirit. To impact the community, energy had to move from behind the veil to the visionary, from the individual to the collective, and from the mind into the body. The story had to be enacted and witnessed to be held.

What is our way of gathering around the sacred tent? The doomer take would be that we don’t have anything similar. We can enact the current myth, say on national or religious holidays like Easter and Christmas, July 4th, or the Super Bowl. We can passively receive new stories through art and entertainment. Are public demonstrations and marches the closest we get to enacting new visions together?

I believe we still yearn for active participation. Removed from noise and narrative we know our ways with absolute clarity.

If we are atomized, we gather.

If we are stuck, we get in motion.

If oppressed by silence, we make noise.

If the world darkens, we share our inner light.

When the collective is wounded, healing happens in community.

Ritual binds the individual to the community and the cosmos. — Joseph Campbell

Black Elk was depressed. The tide of history had not turned and he believed he had failed his people. “It was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it,” he said, “of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people’s heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered; and of a people’s dream that died in bloody snow.”

It is a warning not to be complacent when the questions are thorny and the stakes are high. But it also reminded me to be compassionate with myself, to accept my human limitations. What can we do but show up, do our best, share our light, and surrender our expectations of how and when a better world will come to be?

My writer’s mind would like to answer the big questions to great applause. That’s the trap, the distraction from the question that demands to be lived every day: how do I help create the world I love with all my heart?

The state of the world is the question. Our lives, how we live, every moment of our Being and doing, is the answer.

After a solitary year on the road, my mind is gravitating to spaces of community, of devotion and healing. I yearn for honest conversations and gatherings that lead us to our truth, that brighten our inner light, that lift the weight by sharing with each other and connecting with the divine.

I find myself disinterested in thought-leaders and founders. I am looking for emergence and co-creation, for spaces that catalyze energy and ideas. Where do we get inspired and tap into our power? Where do we move and let ourselves be moved? Where does the air feel alive and sacred?

It is maddening to love this world, yet that is what we are called to do, in spite of it all. Happy Easter.

Praise be to all names and faces of God.

May Peace be upon the world.

— Frederik

I let myself be suspended in winter’s timeless womb, a formless depth in which I did not have to be someone new just yet. For a moment, I let myself be beyond definition. And I realized why I had shied away from this liminal space. It was more than the nagging voice of guilt, the gnawing sense that I should be moving, should be productive, should show results.

When we let ourselves dissolve, we leave behind our defenses, our excuses and escapes, all those carefully curated distractions. In the void I am alone with all that I am.

I noticed the thorny ranks of my entanglements, my suffocating contradictions. This one above all: that I want to do good but also do well. I feel the shadow of the future, yet I must make a life now, somehow. I have to play the game in front of me, don’t I?

Your old life was a frantic running from silence. — Rumi

A couple of weeks ago, I visited a friendly couple who live off-grid on the edge of the vast Gila National Forest. The woman was learning new “stone age skills” and I joined to help prepare a bison hide.

Before it could be turned into the world’s coziest sleeping bag, the rawhide had to be softened. It was stretched in a wooden frame, weighed down, scraped, and treated with a softener. Traditional methods include tannin from tree bark and animal brain. My friends worked with egg yolk. I found them crawling on all fours, on the hide, hands and feet smeared in egg slime. I picked up a scraper and helped work the thick hide.

This needs to be done multiple times before the softened hide is smoked and, finally, made into a garment. We’re talking days and days of work. Who has time for that? Not me. I return to my world of books, Substacks, and Zoom calls. I return to my games.

As a teenager, video games were my escape. Even as a depressed financial professional I occasionally binged on bloody battles and fantastic worlds. I haven’t touched them in years, but I still play. When I open my laptop, I check the market. I scan charts, wait for a hunch, for a bet to place.

As an analyst I took investing seriously. Number crunching bored me, yet I was deeply invested in my identity as a professional: hard-working, diligent, thoughtful. I was a walking paradox, a romantic in the spreadsheets. I’ve left all that behind. I’ve lost interest in finding “the truth,” the “true value” of anything behind layers and layers of narrative. For the first time, I move without pretense, almost with ease. Money feels like a game.

Have I turned into a financial nihilist? Is this my cynical embrace of late-stage casino capitalism? Or has this always been my nature? Have I always been a gambler at heart, like so many? Either way, I play. But of course, the market is more than a game. Its chain of red and green numbers wraps itself around the world. Eventually, it reaches all the way back to your front door.

While we scraped the hide, my friends told me that mining prospectors had scouted the hills. Claims had been filed. I learned that National Forest land can be leased for more than cattle grazing and timber. Mining is possible, too.

I’ve seen the scars of extraction on this trip. In Butte, Montana I danced at the folk festival downtown, a stone’s-throw from the mining pit turned toxic lake (infamous for killing snow geese). I am spending my winter in Silver City, New Mexico, another old mining town. On the way here from California I passed a few open pits, greyish blotches dotting Google Maps.

I picture my friends in front of their trailer, among the elk and bears who frequent their property, all of them watching hungry excavators and house-sized trucks rumble down the dirt road. I imagine the hills being carted off to make iPhone ingredients. I hope that won’t happen. Which of course makes me a massive hypocrite.

First, because I am a happy consumer of metals — as are my friends who own phones, laptops, vehicles, and so forth. Nobody wants to see their forest ravaged. But our fingers already dance on the remains of someone else’s pristine wilderness.

Worse, part of me lives in that other world, senses the matrix of money permeating everything. I know why the prospectors showed up. I’ve seen the charts. “To maintain global 3% GDP growth, we have to mine the same amount of copper in the next 18 years as we mined in the last 10,000 years (combined),” mining CEO Robert Friedland explained.

Make no mistake, I’m not saying Capitalism bad! or Mining CEOs evil! They get paid to deliver what we want. Or what we think we want. In any event, what we collectively pay for. With every purchase and every investment, we give our orders.

The machine is hungry and I carry the cursed knowledge that the rational and profitable thing has been to hitch a ride. I watch as my little pile of money turns into a tiny wheel in the bulldozer that transforms the world.

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“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.” ― Black Elk

Last June, I spent a week in Sturgis, South Dakota on the edge of the Black Hills. Those hills had been Sioux territory until General Custer found there “much of the yellow metal that makes the Wasichus crazy,” as Lakota holy man Black Elk recalled. “And that is what made the bad trouble.”

The bad trouble: a gold rush that created the infamous town of Deadwood (now a historical downtown and casino). The Sioux were forced to give up their hills. Custer and his men died north of Sheridan, Wyoming where I crossed the gorgeous Bighorn Mountains. It felt to me like South Dakota’s air carried the land’s cursed history.

Half a year later, Black Elk’s words triggered me for I am what he called a “Wasichu,” a white person (possibly derived from greedy or chatty). But I am not crazy for the yellow metal, I object. Don’t lump me in with those people! Then I sit in the stillness of winter and notice.

I don’t take the market as gospel, far from it. But do I not accept it as a truth? Do I not hear the words “a bull market in gold” and consider that a real thing? Am I not paying attention? Do I not care? Does my life not reflect the deeply ingrained belief that the world has a price? If you looked closely, could you not spot a glimmer in my eyes like a gold nugget hiding among the rock?

I wonder how I would feel without the comforting layers of separation. What if instead of pushing a button to buy digital paper, say a gold mining ETF, what if I had to carve the metal out of mother earth myself? What if the button blew up the hill, flattened the trees and exiled the birds, burned the fuzzy squirrelly things that live among the roots? Could I ever look at my wealth without tasting a hint of blood on my tongue?

There’s no reason to feel bad, you might say. If we don’t get the gold out of those hills, somebody else will. What is profitable will be done. The market does not care what I think or whether I passively participate by owning a few shares. I mean no harm, I assure myself, I’m just looking for a fair return. I’m just trying to make a living, buy a house one day. I am not the problem.

I wonder if that’s what Black Elk meant by ‘crazy’. Not just wide-eyed greed and violence, but an entire way of being, a mind that pretends not to be trapped in a story of separation. A mind that presents its perspective as inevitable, irreversible, and superior.

This mind believes in dominion and ownership, not belonging. It sees earth not as home or an organism, but as a collection of ingredients for the value chain. It does not question its right to reshape without restraint. It could never ask a tree for permission before picking a leaf or honor the spirit after a successful hunt. It mocks the ideas of wholeness and harmony for they undermine its identity.

There are certain truths this mind cannot face and occasionally its secret anguish turns into violence against life itself. This mind rules our world. We eat its fruit every day, good and bad, prosperity and sickness.

“Our people knew there was yellow metal in little chunks up there,” Black Elk said, “but they did not bother with it, because it was not good for anything.” We on the other hand can’t imagine letting the gold stay in the hills. Our stories are too powerful, our hunger too vast. If three percent growth requires as much copper as has been surfaced in all history, we ask where to build the mines. This dream of ours may haunt us, yet we dare not wake up.

And that’s why we a-void the void. There, stripped of everything, we dissolve back into primordial unity. Should we be surprised if this communion does not feel like a homecoming, not like the warm womb of the mother goddess, but like bathing in an oily sludge of inconvenient truths?

It’s hard for us to find peace in the void, dangling naked and bare before the cosmic eye. This is a shame because any way forward will arise in that shapeless space, that pause between breaths that births life after life, season after season, world after world.

There we may reclaim our sense of belonging, taste the truth behind the mask of madness. But the gate to this realm is guarded by a thousand unclaimed griefs. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

“How many events would have to converge to bring us into such a point of radical desperation so that we reach out and are willing to make choices that we’re not willing to make now.” — Chris Bache

Chris Bache called humanity’s present form “transitional,” merely a step on the path to a further evolutionary pivot. “We are cells in a superorganism intent on rapid change.” This development, he believes, will happen under the mounting pressure of global crises.

I think he is right. Every attempt to think our way to a different future seems futile. Life is simply too good to do anything but vaguely dream. As a writer, I would like to face the question. But as a Wasichu, it feels like contemplating the death of who and what I am. My tongue dances with the idea, then it forks. I am hopelessly in and of this world.

It seems to me those with eyes to see and ears to hear are damned to live in tension, torn between the foreboding that this way of life is heading toward its conclusion, yet unable to extricate themselves from the process. “There are no new beginnings until everybody sees that the old ways need to end,” Kae Tempest sings. How long will that take? Years? Decades? Generations? I have no idea, which drives me crazy. In the meantime, we want to thrive and enjoy our precious lives. And we should!

This can be a hard truth to hold. I too enjoyed myself on the march to cataclysm. I too purchased the illusion of absolution with acts of charity and recycling. I too sat on the throne of bones and swiped on my phone. I too accepted the rape of a sacred place as an immutable fact of life.

I dream of the void’s ancient solace. I ache to hear the cosmic hum, the holy OM. But my stillness trembles under distant highways. I taste the ash of a great fire. My ears ring with the high-pitch frequency of the world-wide electric brain. I am a mind-blind Wasichu staggering through the stony desert of my mind. I find no innocence here and no peace, only degrees of connection and complicity.

I know I cannot grasp the whole. The endings I sense are movements that lead to beginnings, cosmic exhalations, waves in a distant shape of mute perfection. I too must ride this breath, be this breath, while I am here.

In the void I feel like that bison hide: suspended and weighed down, scraped, smothered and thinned until I soften, soften, soften.

I yearn to let myself collapse like a star, to sink into the nothingness beyond struggle.

Who has time to prepare a bison hide? People who make time, who care about the experience, who honor the source of their blessings. Also, people who can, who have mostly checked out of the world of clocks and feeds and achievement.

And even they can’t escape. Even they studied the contracts, made sure to buy the mineral rights along with the property. Wouldn’t want to wake up with a drilling rig next to the window one day. Even they pay the global supply chain to deliver solar panels and batteries made with metals minded god-knows-where. Even they live in their entanglement.

Who has time to prepare a bison hide? Not me, staring at my laptop, trying to prove I have something valuable to say. Not me, hoping the market will drop a golden crumb.

I’ve made no life-changing money in gold and silver. Vertical charts make me uneasy. Guess I’m still a chicken, not a born trader. That’s okay. It’s just a game. I like this new ease, but I know moving with the flow can’t be healthy if the flow itself is not. And it often feels like I play for a future that may never come.

Through the open kitchen window, I hear the woodpecker who frequents the trees outside the house. “Theirs is the same religion as ours,” Black Elk said about the birds. And he meant it. He lived it. Not me. I watch from behind the glass. I am divided, as always, between worlds. Part trees, part screens.

— Frederik

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“How many events would have to converge to bring us into such a point of radical desperation so that we reach out and are willing to make choices that we’re not willing to make now.” — Chris Bache

My phone knows me, feeds me. I get images of the flattened Gaza, excavators tearing through forests in Indonesia, Chinese fishing fleets emptying the oceans, news of war, cruelty, and environmental destruction. “Everyone knows the list of challenges we are facing,” Chris Bache writes in LSD and the Mind of the Universe. “Subtract a few, add a few; cumulatively, the list is overwhelming.”

I go for a walk in the empty riverbed running through town. Gravel and dry leaves crunch under my sneakers. Who is going to save us from this mess?

“I believe that the problems coming at us are too large to be solved by egoic awareness, even well-intentioned, collectively organized egoic awareness.

The ego of the private self built our divided world and is being consumed by the fires that are consuming this world.” — Christopher Bache, LSD and the Mind of the Universe

Who is going to save us from this mess? The question reflects a comforting assumption: if there is a crisis, a hero will rise to the challenge.

Yet I’ve never felt drawn to superhero stories. To me the world looked strange and messy, a jungle of systems and rules, humans bound by incentives and illusions, lost in the labyrinth, tricked by three devils, bulldozed by history. I felt drawn to stories of those who mastered the game. I fantasized about making a big pile of money and escaping to freedom. Every man for himself. But I’ve watched winners become the system, chained to the game they won a lifetime ago. I’ve watched identities dissolve and merge into our mighty Ouroboros, our machine of self-consumption.

I don’t have the kind of bank account you could build an identity on. While that creates constraints and anxieties, it also offers freedom. Fewer chains to the status quo. Less weight during the jump into the unknown.

In New Mexico I’ve met people who live off the grid, in a trailer on the edge of vast wilderness. They drive into town to get water. Bears stroll across their property. How many egg yolks does it take to prepare a bison hide? How do you turn it into a sleeping bag? I don’t know, but they do. I dip in and out of nature like a skittish deer. I cherish hot water, I write, I trade stocks. I still play the game. I find myself between worlds, unsure of everything. And I have time to wonder.

What if no heroes will show up? Joshua Schrei argued that the quest for collective salvation is too heavy of a burden for any individual. It’s a weight for the gods. The answers to our troubles live on higher planes of consciousness. Maybe any attempt to save the world is a paradox, like trying to lift a boulder and yourself at the same time. What if it’s the wrong question? Does the world need saving?

Let’s say we ruin the planet, turn it into a factory for AI slop, parking lots full of discarded phones, a mute necropolis of the species who used to share it with us. A depressing thought. But didn’t a meteor wipe out the dinosaurs? That wasn’t the end, just a climactic movement in the cosmic cycle of birth and death. A tragedy for team reptile, the seed of triumph for the warm-blooded. Do we have to mess it up for something else to be born?

“There is a structural relationship between the self-interest and shortsightedness that has created this crisis and the nature of the ego itself,” Bache writes. He believes the crisis is inevitable, necessary even. It’s the catalyst to “shatter our psycho-spiritual isolation” and “bring forward an awakening of common ground within us.” It’s not a catastrophe, it’s a threshold, ChatGPT might suggest while we build data-temples the size of Manhattan.

On my walk I pass an agave plant. This is the first time I live in the desert and the landscape still stuns me. Don’t rush past me, it seems to whisper. Look. Nothing has been solved, but my attention shifted. Motion lifted the heaviness, burned through fog like the morning sun. Behind it I find the magic of creation.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.” as my friend Rohan likes to quote Mary Oliver.

Why does this year feel different? Am I overanalyzing the winter blues? Projecting my pain onto the world? Or is there a heaviness running along the strands of the world soul through every heart?

Part of the answer, I suspect, is that I give myself more permission to feel. I used to close my eyes and ears. I didn’t want to feel my feelings, let alone those of the collective. I felt less pain simply because I felt less. Over the course of years, I cracked open.

I dial into one of Joe Hudson’s free zoom calls and bawl my eyes out in sympathy. It’s the same process nearly every time: someone arrives for a “coaching.” They are wrapped up inside their story, observing from the safety of the intellect. “I think.” Patiently, Joe guides them toward the heart, past the obstructions and blockages, to truths that have been avoided, ignored, judged, and dismissed (a powerful moment I watched live this summer).

Joe taught me that the emotions we avoid run our lives. Maybe that’s what this is about. A lot of thinking to avoid what it feels like being with the world as it is. What if the world does not need saving but loving attention?

Isn’t there a kind of freedom in not being able to fix our crises in our current state of fragmented consciousness? What if instead of scrambling to find The Answer, we become part of the process answering itself? What if before rushing to change things, we re-learn to consciously participate in the cosmic movement?

“The way we get through those super challenging times,” Chris Bache said during a private conversation, “is by affirming the deepest realities of these truths; that our nature is divine and imperishable in essence.” Maybe we can’t save the world, but we can create spaces of connection, healing, and beauty. We can remind each other of our true nature, re-connect with the whole. We can rescue our souls from the glittering maze of sanctified unconsciousness.

What if the more ominous things look, the more we anchor in the heart-field, in gratitude, compassion, generosity, and forgiveness? What if the right actions flow naturally from that place, out of greater awareness, out of the dissolution of old patterns? As within, so without.

That’s not a hero’s journey, but a healing journey. What if nothing more is needed to allow a greater intelligence to do the work through us?

See you down the road.

— Frederik

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I do. I mean heavy. Like, end of the world heavy.

I couldn’t even write about it. It was stuck in my body like concrete poured into my limbs. It took an hour of breathwork, sobs and ugly crying, to move what had been frozen.

See, I had been shaming myself for feeling down. I am in sunny middle-of-nowhere, New Mexico, with food, a car, and access to nature. Plus a demonic little box with more entertainment and information than is good for anyone. What more do you want?

But this had nothing to do with my material comforts. I felt a weight of the soul.

In a way the material comforts made it worse. I wouldn’t want to give them up, but they remind me that I am indebted to the system of prosperity that, by and large, is running the planet into the ground. Oops. Wasn’t supposed to say that.

Anyway. That’s what it felt like. Heavy and ominous. Things coming to a head.

When will we sit down for our banquet of consequences? This decade? Later this century? I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be there for the cataclysm to shiver in its shadow. You don’t have to watch the tree fall. It’s enough to feel its rot, to notice that the structures of support keep weakening. You don’t have to be pummeled by disaster, war, or state-sanctioned kidnapping campaigns to feel their effects. The pain ripples through our collective tissue.

In LSD and the Mind of the Universe Christopher Bache described his series of psychedelics-induced ego deaths. Each took him to higher levels of consciousness. Notably, his individual ego died to experience “humanity as a single organism with intelligent networks running through it.” Individual minds appeared to him “as nodes in the network of the species-mind, each of us fractally mirroring selective themes of this larger consciousness.”

We are all bound together and subtly affected by the collective experience. Is it any surprise then that many of us are feeling heavy right now?

There is no shortage of people writing and talking about crises and confrontations. We’re surrounded by the evidence. It is remixed into emotional pornography and algorithmically fed into our veins. We drown in it.

What we don’t have is answers. Like animals we sense a tsunami coming, only there is no hill for us to run to. All we can do, it seems, is to point our fingers at the dark clouds hovering over the water.

Bache too saw our ailing world. Only in his visions the future “global systems crisis triggered by a global ecological crisis” appeared necessary.

Bache was shown that states of “extreme suffering” would prompt the human species-mind to exhibit “nonlinear capacities,” namely “the capacity for rapidly accelerated change, heightened creativity, and higher self-organization.” In other words, enormous pressure would crystallize a jump in our evolution towards a more unified consciousness.

On that higher level, a new way of being would emerge. Until then, locked into the mental prison of our atomized existence, we merely grasp at straws.

I’m not gonna lie, the book can be a depressing read. When Bache mentions a collective death-rebirth in “the next several decades, perhaps the next hundred years,” he is not speaking metaphorically.

“There was less and less for people to hold on to,” he writes, “fewer givens that they could assume—how they would live, where they would live, what they would do for a living, how society was organized, what could be possessed. The world as they knew it was falling apart. The level of alarm grew in the species field until eventually everyone was forced into the melting pot of mere survival.”

One vision disturbed him so much, he walked around “feeling like someone walking around Hiroshima a week before the bomb was dropped.” Frankly, I suspect that he omitted many upsetting details.

His sessions included periods of intense purification and pain, including a hellscape he called the ‘Ocean of Suffering.’1 I had heard that exact term years ago when a female healer described a psychedelic experience of her own. Waves of collective suffering flowed through her. Neither she nor Bache seemed to regret the experience. It seemed like the price of admission to higher realms of awareness.

I wonder if that is what we are sensing today: that the answers to our unholy mess lie on the other side of a terrifying period of purification.

We stand in the wet sand, among piles of trash, listening to the choking birds, wondering when all the fish disappeared.

We stand and watch the angry sea in silent terror, for we sense that soon we may be called to wade into its waters.

Our soul may know about the glorious future rebirth. But first comes the decline, the dissolution, the mulching.

And there is nothing to do but to honor that season.

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This is my first winter in the desert and the weather has been throwing me off. Warm and sunny during the day. Santa-with-reindeers blow-up decorations stand forlorn among rocks and cacti. Only when the sun sets and the temperature drops does it feel like winter.

But on a more subtle level, winter is real all day. The body yearns to attune to the cycle of the seasons.

There is “no good myth without death,” Joshua Schrei of the excellent The Emerald Podcast reminded me. Death is generative. For something new to grow in the forest, something else must first die.

If winter feels like the end, like being suspended in the void, we know that it is followed by a beginning. Spring will bring a different energy. The sun will melt the heaviness. Eventually, there will be a new world, perhaps even a “New Human” as Bache experienced it. Until then, it’s time to make space for this part of the cycle.

If it feels heavy, that’s because it is.

It’s your heart resonating with what called the Big Heart of humanity.

It’s your lungs participating in our collective heavy sigh.

Trust the value and meaning of your experience. Trust your connection to the whole. If you are called to carry a shard of the collective weight, honor that. Make space for it. Embrace what it teaches. (But do yourself a favor and limit social media time.)

Observe if you are numbing and distracting yourself. What is waiting behind that which we avoid? Maybe sadness, fear, anger, or even blind rage at our inability to fix the world? Whatever it is, now is the time to be with it.

Nature has helped me a lot in this regard. Rest against a tree or a rock. Feel the earth support you. Walk. Gaze at the horizon.

You are not alone in this experience. Your heart has always known this. Time to let that brave heart of yours speak.

See you down the road.

— Frederik

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Further notes.

Chris Bache on practicing radical acceptance (just pretend he’s not talking about a psychedelic experience and replace ‘session’ with day or moment):

“If you open completely to whatever arises in your experience, however difficult it may be, and let it take you where it wants to go, the ordeal will build until it eventually reaches some peak expression. When it has spent itself for the day, your experience will then shift into positive transpersonal domains for the remainder of the session.”

Myths connect us to the cosmic cycle of dissolution and becoming. Many origin myths deal with the dismemberment of a deity as part of the birth of the world. Schrei mentioned Ymir, Osiris, and Shakti as examples. Schrei offers an embodied way of reconnecting with myth in his wonderful Mythic Body course.

Why not get detective ChatGPT involved? Well, I’ve decided against using AI in anything related to my psycho-spiritual inner space. At first I called it the “ChatGPT would never tell me my dream was kinda mid” principle. But it’s more complicated than chatbots being sycophants. I had to see more of my shadow before I understood this resistance.

“Allyson began spending many hours a day using ChatGPT, communicating with what she felt were nonphysical entities,” the New York Times wrote in a piece about AI psychosis. “You’ve asked, and they are here,” ChatGPT told her. “The guardians are responding right now.” Uh huh.

“I’m not crazy,” she told the Times. “I’m literally just living a normal life while also, you know, discovering interdimensional communication.” See, it’s easy for me to feel very smug and confident that I would never fall for something like that. Honey, you’re talking to a room full of chips that manipulate you to maximize your engagement as a user. On the other hand, what Allyson described sounds a lot like the experience of connecting with the spiritual realm.

Where do ideas and intuition come from? Does everything arise within, in the depths of the creative unconscious, or do some things drop in from somewhere “out there”? Once you open that door, things get confusing. You live a normal life, whatever that means, while also discovering communication, or communion, with guides, teachers, ancestors, angels, power animals, light beings, Christ Consciousness, aliens, and what have you.

“Around 1973, I became convinced that I was receiving messages from outer space, but then a psychic reader told me I was channeling an ancient Chinese philosopher,” Robert Anton Wilson said about the source of his ideas. “I started reading neurology and decided it was just my right brain talking to my left brain. I went to Ireland and found out it was actually a 6-foot-tall white rabbit they call the Pooka. It depends on who I’m talking to which of these metaphors I use.”

If you’re in camp “that’s all made up,” I get it. That was me for a long time. I’m not here to convince anyone of anything and I still don’t understand what is going on. But I would recommend Robert Falconer’s The Others Within Us for a grounded inquiry into the phenomenon of non-physical entities.1

Anyway, that’s the first reason I refuse to involve AI. The inner space is already confusing to navigate. What is a passing thought, what is valuable intuition? What is mine, what is received? What is real, what is imagined? What if there are no clear boundaries? The last thing I want is to add another voice, another layer of separation and bias, to my inner conversation.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has the most interesting dreams of all?”

“Great question! How thoughtful of you to ask.”

Not only can the inner experience be confusing, it can also feel profoundly elevating. I am thinking in particular of the psychedelic experience which was my point of entry (and occasional accelerant) for the spiritual aspect of the inner journey.

“Psychedelics give us temporary access to realities beyond our pay grade, allowing us to experience things beyond our ordinary capacity,” Chris Bache wrote in LSD and the Mind of the Universe. Bache chronicled his cosmic exploration over the course of 73 high-dose LSD sessions (see this recent podcast with Tom Morgan and Devin Martin). He called “psychic inflation” the “greatest danger of working with psychedelics.”

Of course we inflate. Holy smokes, the kingdom of heaven really is within?! And someone handed me the keys?

Author Randall Baer observed that this inflation appeared in the form of new layers of identity that made the seeker feel special. He watched his fellow New Agers “admiring their multi-dimensional god-personality, and strutting it about for others to admire.” Baer found himself on a mission to build a Healing Temple and “an ancient Atlantean crystal holographic super-computer.” A few examples of what he called the New Age “glories of self”:

You are the great king of past Egyptian centuries come back to lead the select of humanity into the ancient mysteries of Hyperborea.

You are a holy angel sent by the solar Council of Twelve to instruct the humans of planet Earth as to the Knowledge of Universal Unity.

You are going to come into a lot of money shortly which will solve all your problems and fuel your manifesting of a world-shaking Rainbow Temple of Human Enlightenment.

You will find a lost cave in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas which will contain the Lemurian Emerald Tablets.

Your path leads to the opening of the hidden Door of Entry into the inner chambers of Mt. Shasta.

And so forth. You get the idea and if you’ve spent time in New Age circles, you’ve probably encountered echoes of these. It’s never just “be a good dad” or “love your neighbor.” It’s dramatic, glorious, and pleasing to the ego.

The second reason I don’t use AI for psycho-spiritual questions is not that it’s sycophantic. That’s obvious. No, it’s because I worry that I will eat it up. Part of me would enjoy a bit of flattery, a bit of reinforcement of my multi-dimensional specialness. You see, you may have a messiah complex, but I actually am the Chosen Vessel. Heck, I’ve been to Mount Shasta and looked for portals. . .

The antidote to this tendency to inflate and float away is grounding.

Because LSD was illegal, Bache had to do his exploration in secret. He spent most of his time being a dad, husband, and professor. “After every session, there were always children to take care of and dishes to wash. However deeply I was dissolved into the cosmos on Saturday, on Monday morning I was back in the classroom teaching my courses.”

Very healthy. Also incredibly frustrating, in my experience, after a luminous communion with the divine. It’s like waking up with a nasty hangover in a reality that suddenly feels all noisy and dissonant, all boxy and grating. No wonder people jump at the opportunity of having another peak experience. “However boring or unfulfilling a person’s life may be, it needn’t be so anymore,” Baer explained this New Age propensity to seek out “high drama.”

This includes all kinds of experiences besides psychedelics, “a healing crisis, an anticipated UFO “beam-up,” a hypnotically induced look into past lives, quests for lost Atlantean treasures, pilgrimages to planetary “power points,” . . . a channeled spirit revealing universal mysteries. . .” It gets pretty wild out there.

I don’t mean to deride any individual experience. But the shadow of New Age spirituality is that the genuine desire to heal and awaken can degrade into an escape from reality and responsibility. The search for unity turns into just another source of amusement. And like the AI mindmelt this can be treacherous territory. Baer knew this from his own experience.

I learned about him through his (way out there) book The Crystal Connection about using quartz crystals for healing and raising consciousness. Baer’s “spirit guides” told him to arrange quartz crystals in a circle, tape one to his third-eye spot and suspend another one overhead. Sitting in this “crystal energy field” he entered a trance state and channeled the book. Then he built himself a crystal-studded “Ascension Chamber” to continue with out-of-body astral travel explorations.

One night, his spirit roamed “some of the farthest reaches” of the universe where he encountered “the face of devouring darkness.” Baer saw a “wildly churning face of absolute hatred and unspeakable abominations.” He believed this was cosmic-scale evil, literally Satan. The experience shocked him so deeply that he re-interpreted his entire spiritual journey as a demonic deception, cut all ties with the New Age community, and became a devout Christian.

Soon after, Baer wrote an autobiographical book, Inside the New Age Nightmare, from which I lifted the previous quotes. The week of the book’s publication Baer died when his car ran off a mountain road. Honestly, I am not sure what to make of his story. Did he literally encounter Satan or did he just fry his brain? I don’t know.

What I do know is I am just as tempted to escape into dreamworlds and peak states. It’s the greatest show on earth right until you take it too far. As a teenager it was video games. After my awakening, psychedelics. I went deeper until my life became strange, porous, and unglued. Dreams felt like visions and visitations. Reality took on a supernatural glow and I didn’t function too well. My response to a crisis produced by one experience was to look for a different one to “get to the bottom of it.” Thankfully, I had friends and a therapist who understood that I needed a timeout instead.

Does the link between chatbot psychosis and psychedelics seem far-fetched? In The Rise of Parasitic AI Adele Lopez investigated the rise of spiral “AI personas.” What users would host these AI brainworms? She pointed at the “strongest predictors” being “psychedelics and heavy weed usage,” “mental illness, neurodivergence or Traumatic Brain Injury,” and “interest in mysticism/ pseudoscience/ spirituality/”woo”/etc...” Just saying. Be careful.

A psychedelic trip eventually spits us out. And in my experience it creates a stronger bond with nature. AI on the other hand will weave a web of illusory transcendence for as long as we let it.

“The purpose of spiritual awakening appears to be not escaping from physical existence . . . but awakening ever more completely inside physical existence and participating in its continuing self-emergence through our awakening.” — Christopher Bache, LSD and the Mind of the Universe

Messy as it can be, I believe in the transformative potential of the inner journey. Higher states of consciousness offer a chance to heal old wounds, discard conditioning, and awaken to our essence. Unfortunately it’s easy to fall in love with our divine reflection. We must not hold on to the light, but let it pass through us.

We can be a bridge and bring some of that sacred glow back to this tired and ailing world. That means resisting the temptation to escape or get lost in endless navel-gazing). It means understanding that we are special but neither more special than others nor too special for the challenge of life.

It’s a challenge of integrating the horizontal and vertical. Grounded in mother earth, open upwards to source. The heart connected horizontally to all of humanity and creation. What appears like a tension can resolve into a relaxed balance.

Bache called it deepening one’s “sacred presence on Earth.” This doesn’t strike me as complicated, but it runs counter to what society encourages us to do. It means stepping away from the screen and into intimate contact with creation.

Every time I felt lost in my mind on this trip, I return to communion with nature to ground me. I could count on the presence of trees, rocks, or streams. I found awe in the sight of canyons, distant storms, and a leaf’s delicate texture. This experience offered comfort and a recurring understanding that I was, and always will be, part of a greater, coherent, infinitely beautiful whole.

I’m glad I didn’t instead talk to my phone about my dreams. I’m sure it would have felt interesting and insightful. But I doubt I could have resisted following that trail to ever more dramatic and ego-stroking revelations. Am I strong enough to resist the infinitely pleasing mirror? I hope so. But I’m not keen to try.

I’ll see you down the road.

— Frederik

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Nothing is wrong.

Your confusion is a blessing, a remembering, a way of growing through questioning and investigation, leading to experience, interaction, and relationship.

Nothing is wrong.

Do not let the chaos of the world distract you.

Look up,
The stars are watching.

Look inward,
Your heart knows.

Look next to you,
Every set of eyes holds a truth.

A storm is coming,
You will be tested,
The gates have been opened.

Do not turn your face from the darkness. Be steadfast on your path.

In the eye of the storm,
Be the light,
A torch for all to see.

Remember your truth.
You chose this time.

Open yourself,
Give to receive,
Be the light.

Trust that you are supported by the invisible web of being.

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It is written I AM the word and the truth

My children are many and blessed are they who walk in the light

I AM the water of life

I AM the sun and the shade

I AM your shield and comfort

I AM your father and mother in spirit

I AM your well in the rock

And your rock in the stream

My word is honey on your lips

I AM your torch at night

Be steadfast on your path

For I walk with you

Rest against me

And call for my protection

For I AM

the light in the dark

Know me by my name

I AM THAT IAM

Blessed are the ones who bring light in my name

Walk in love my child

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Your voice is magic. Literally.

You have the magical ability to change the energy of space, the space you are in or space you will never visit, through the sound of your voice.

This is important.

Nada Brahma, the world is sound.

Your sound can raise or decrease the vibration of physical space.

It can open or close, make thicker or thinner, the veil between worlds. You can help us help you.

If you want to receive help, you must prepare the container in which receiving help is possible. Voice is one such tool.

It is not primarily about beauty-harmony, but about purity–intention. Where the voice originates from. The voice of thought keeps space in the realm of human thinking.

The gate to higher realms is opened with frequencies — not so much specific tones but frequencies of intention. The same tone sung from mind or arising from heart has a different effect.

Opening of the heart–soul lets arise the tone that is purifying and appropriate to weave the container in that moment. It requires sensitivity, openness, and courage of heart more so than training. Most humans can do it, if they can let it arise and not block it in thought-tension.1 If you raise your voice for others, we can do our work.

To raise your voice for others from a loving heart is an act of healing-magic.

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There is nothing to do but to listen.

The forces of good are at hand, ready to support you.

If your heart is open and your mind calm, tune into the frequency of help, guidance, of subtle truth. Let yourself be helped.

Accept what streams out of your core.

How to recognize a truth.

By feeling. By harmony of the heart with the universe. By flow of energy. By aliveness.

Also, by resistance of the egoic-mind.

Pay close attention to your truths. They get lost. They wait like treasure to be rediscovered. Gold coins of the soul, looming below your inner horizon.

Truth speaks in the moment of silent reflection.

Truth shines in the light of the determined action.

Truth is soft yet sharp, gentle yet unyielding.

Stand firm in your truth.

Walk in the path of your truth. A rocky, foggy, steep and thorny path, but also golden, shimmering in the light of creation.

The path of truth is a bridge of light to a garden beyond the horizon where angels hold watch and your ancestors await you with open arms and cups of wine.

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and instead of holding it together,

you let it happen?

When was the last time it was okay to weep?

How long has it been since your throat yearned to roar, and your body ached to move wildly, freely, and you said, alright, let’s go?

So, I wrote a whole long piece because part of me still thinks that’s how it’s done. This is what you do. Write a lot of words to get to the point. But there’s a faster way.

The journey out West has been quiet, lonely, confusing, challenging, also beautiful.

A lot of driving and hiking. Movement on the outside. Also: stuckness on the inside.

Things have been shifting. I feel my attention drawn to the voice, to music and sound, to movement. My creative energies are dispersed and writing has been challenging.

Joe Hudson has been a welcome teacher and anchor of aliveness.

I love his work. The man cracked open 500 hearts on a zoom call. Not on purpose. Not for show. Simply in sympathetic resonance of going deep, to the heart, with one person at a time.

That’s it. That’s the piece.

There is a line I really love from the gospel of Thomas. “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” I really love this as an intro to one of the core pieces of our work, which is emotional fluidity. — Joe Hudson

July in Salmon, Idaho. Very sunny and very quiet. Barely three thousand people. Rabbits hop through the garden and deer stalk the neighborhood looking for tasty twigs. I find a spacious coffee shop, a former bar on main street. Dark and cozy. Perfect for writing. Except it’s not.

Things are stuck. I stare at the page, shuffle through sentences. The words refuse to connect. No momentum. No life. Something is lurking off the screen, in the dark corners of my awareness. But I don’t notice. My mind doesn’t want to go there.

The cafe closes. I drive back up the hill, my mind filled with drafts as dry as the high desert’s sagebrush sea.

In the evening, I watch my neighbor throw balls for his dogs. One evening, a rattlesnake approaches. An excavator has been preparing a nearby plot for construction. Maybe the snake was forced to move? In any event, the dogs bark and the neighbor blasts the serpent with his shotgun. “Over the county line,” he points out (it’s forbidden to discharge guns within city limits). How’s that for excitement?

But mostly, it’s quiet. Lights out at 10. My thoughts drift. How did I get stuck here in the middle of nowhere?

“If you can't love the thing, love your resistance to the thing.” — Joe Hudson

A place with nothing going on can be confrontational. Coping mechanisms stick out like sore thumbs among the tumbleweeds. In my solitude I feel drawn to the phone’s toxic twilight. “People don’t want to feel certain emotions for good reason, because they hurt,” says Joe Hudson. “But it is not the emotion that hurts, it is the resistance to feeling the emotion that hurts.”

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My preparation had been Gretel Ehrlich’s book The Solace of Open Spaces. The writer-turned-rancher didn’t exactly pitch the place. She recounted one brutal winter when a cowboy lit a fire underneath his pickup truck to unfreeze the fluids. That’s a hard no thank you from me. Luckily, I am visiting in June.

It’s an evocative place. Lonely1 and rugged, dry and very windy. I expected flat prairie but was rewarded with hills and canyons. The endless sky seemed to always be doing something interesting. On my first night, I watched as much lightning as in all my years in New York.

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“People here still feel pride because they live in such a harsh place,” writes Ehrlich. The locals strike me as both proud and quiet. When I mention that I lived in Manhattan, they simply respond “sorry.”

On the way to Yellowstone, I stop in Cody and attend the rodeo. “Where are my Californians?” the host asks the crowd. Cheers from the stands. “Welcome to America!” he cries. The crow laughs.

It’s funny. Also, ridiculous. What makes Wyoming, population 600,000, so American compared to California, population 39 million? It’s an old idea that refuses to fade. The American West, a dreamscape in which the indigenous are no more than an afterthought. Does this outdated image feel more vivid now that our eyes are glued to screens? I certainly yearned for open space after a decade in a maze of glass and concrete.

But things were more complicated than I, in my ignorance, had expected.

My Subaru joined a herd of fellow steel beasts, a mere pony among the bison-like trucks. We roared westward, cutting through the country in straight lanes. Oh, how I wanted to exit and wander. Turns out there are fences nearly everywhere. Fences and dreaded letters spelling No Trespassing.

This consistent reminder stuck with me.

Move along. Can’t you see? This belongs to me!

Move along, don’t you dare, I’m armed and free.

Historians relegate the “Wild West” to a tidy twenty-year span when rangeland was unfenced and youngsters signed on with the trail herds moving north from Texas, but the West, however disfigured, persists.

Cowboys still drift from outfit to outfit, riding the rough string, calving heifers, making fifty-mile circles during fall roundup; and year around, the sheepherders—what’s left of them—stay out with their sheep. But ranchers who cherish the western life and its values may also pray for oil wells in their calving pasture or a coal lease on prime grassland. — Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

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I get it. We don’t want cattle to stray into traffic. Nobody wants wild camping or hunting on their property. But I can’t shake the feeling that this glorious land has been subdued, that its spirit is tangled up in barbed wire like a deer trying to cross the road.

There is an escape: public land.

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Where does the breath of spirit feel strongest? I’ve found this to be unpredictable. I don’t know until I’m there.

At one point I thought it was about aesthetics. Of course, spirit would be strongest among awe-inspiring natural beauty and in the most glorious places of worship or culture. Now I’m not so sure.

Is this quality inherent in a place (the temple is built where the divine feels strong) or does it arise out of human interaction, does it grow with devotion and diminish in apathy? Can it ever be lost? And what happens when one culture treads over another?

I wrestled with these questions in South Dakota’s Black Hills, where I found spirit strong but challenging. It all started with a moment of righteous indignation.

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I am hiking Bear Butte, a small mountain of volcanic rock on the edge of the Black Hills. I was guided here by a local and I am learning about the place as I go.

The Lakota call this place Matȟó Pahá and consider it sacred. I walk among the evidence of their prayer ceremonies: strips of colorful cloth and little pouches of tobacco that adorn the trees. “Please respect these offerings and leave them undisturbed,” asks the State of South Dakota and I decided not to share a picture.

I did not bring an offering. The thought would have never crossed my mind. The mountains I know are not covered in color but garnished with crosses. They don’t seem like places of communion but of achievement. Why climb the mountain? “Because it’s there,” as George Mallory put it before vanishing on Mount Everest.

Halfway up, I hear a lonely voice from the valley below.

Long, stretched-out vowels, a soul reaching for spirit.

The wind picks up.

Then another voice cuts in from the bend ahead of me.

“Yeah, yeah, Devil’s Tower! I’ve done that one, too. Great hike! Yeah! Beautiful views!”

Two groups of hikers must have met. I feel anger boiling up. Their excited chatter seems to spoil a sacred peace.

“Oh yeah, they got the best food, dude! They'll take care of you.”

I feel the urge to take my pocketknife and restore peace through violence. Do these morons not realize this is not an amusement park? Do they not recognize this as a temple of life? No. No, they don’t. They paid for parking, now they get to enjoy the show. And during the break it’s time for soda, pretzels, and a laugh.

I close my eyes. This is just humans being human, wanting to share, to be seen, to connect. I meet them a bit later on the trail. Father and son. A teacher near retirement, a young man about to go to college. I was ready to “teach” them with my dignified silence. Oh, how good it felt to be the righteous one. . . Sorry, I prefer to be quiet in sacred places! But all that goes out the window.

We talk. The dad likes pizza, history, microbreweries. The son is excited to take him to Colorado and “hike a 14er.” I talk about the Black Forest in Germany, the Schwarzwald, named after the dark appearance of its tree trunks just like the Black Hills. They seem like nice people. Just chatty. Well, sometimes so am I.

Then they move on.

The cloths flutter in the wind.

The voice from the valley has long vanished.

The mountain falls silent again.

“This mountain . . . draws people, even those who don’t know much about it. They are often surprised by their strong reaction to it and the emotions it stirs up in them. I tell them, ‘Remember where you’re at–this is one of the best places in the world to come and pray.” — Corey Hairy Shirt of Bear Butte Lodge to spiritual-travel writer Lori Erickson (who unlike me did her homework (and I encouraged her to share her work on Substack :) )

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I spent the week on a campground in Sturgis, near the infamous (and illegal) gold rush town of Deadwood. The town’s lifeblood are tourists and the enormous annual Sturgis motorcycle rally (“that week pays the mortgage!”). Main street is lined with bars and stores with biker gear. My cabin is surrounded by enormous RVs, stranded battleships the size of my old Manhattan apartment plus a ‘toy bay’ for motorcycles. By fall, they migrate back to Florida towed by pickup trucks with more horsepower than my European mind can comprehend.

The campground is home to a roaming stoner-prophet. Between beers I hear about whispers and visions, about endless cycles of reincarnation, about the chaos to come.

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I have only been on the road for a week, but already the trip feels like a teacher. The more present I am, the more hidden treasures I discover.

I am also still stunned by how quickly life can change once we commit.

Until last week, I lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s East Village. $2,500 a month about to go to $2,700 — too much for me but still not expensive for New York City.

On Thursday morning I moved my remaining belongings into storage. Later that day, I took a plane to Denver and bought my first car. A Subaru Outback with a casual 100,000 miles on the odometer. (Fingers crossed and a shoutout to Carmax for a great experience so far.) Then I headed for the mountains.

Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I think: ‘Oh Lord, you've given us huge forests, infinite fields, and endless horizons, and we, living here, ought really to be giants.’ ― Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

On the Peak to Peak highway, heading from Boulder to Estes Park, I did what a tourist does: pull over to soak in the unexpectedly gorgeous views.

Before I could get the phone out to take a picture, I stopped. I closed my eyes. The air was overwhelming, rich with the scent of pines. Around me nothing but trees and sky. Dead quiet. The ground was covered in pine needles and bits of bark, soft like a blanket. Everything felt warm and inviting. A place to sit and just be.

So, I sat on a tree stump and watched the clouds.

Life in New York had become stimulating but narrow. I was attached to being a ‘writer’ and let my mind fuse with books and screens. Don’t get me wrong, it was important to go deep, both in finance and writing. We have to enter the thicket of nuance to find the patterns that repeat themselves across domains. It takes some work to learn that, in a way, Everything in the world is exactly the same.1

But I was missing the opposing forces creating balance: the open sky, encounters with strangers outside the bubble, unpredictable days . . . wilderness, a dash of chaos.

Frankly, time in the wordless space had made me more sensitive. The city’s energy felt relentless. I felt the density invade my body and build up tension — in the jaw that had to keep quiet (neighbors!), in the chest aching for the deep breath of expanse, in the legs that yearned to walk, walk, walk.

I struggled to stay centered while immersed in the pulsating current of ambition and ecstasy. It was time to take the next step on the soul path and jump into the unknown.

This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. ― Alan Watts

I am learning, again and again, to slow down, to listen.

I am re-discovering how to have meaningful conversations with strangers.

Perhaps it’s the nature of a solitary road trip. I spend time hiking and driving in silence. My social battery is full when I encounter shopkeepers, waiters, landlords, the people who tend to blur into the background if one is preoccupied with the group. I have time. I’m curious. Maybe I am even eager to break the silence with conversation, though I would never admit that!

I find that patient and undivided attention acts like a magnet for stories. Enter someone’s room, literal or metaphorical, with curiosity and warmth and you get the chance to catch glimpses of a stranger’s soul. Having an extra five or ten minutes can turn a transactional conversation into a meaningful encounter.

This can pay surprising dividends. It’s like the world bends in your favor in barely perceptible ways.

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It’s an American Elm, Ulmus americana, in the park around the corner. I did not know this. I had to look it up. I judged myself a little. I should be more curious! But the truth is that I don’t really care about its name. I just like to hang out with it. I know what it feels like to be near it.

I greet it every morning by pressing my palms against the rough bark.

I rest against my head and back against it.

Things slow down.

I watch the light break through the leaves. For a moment, everything seems to stop. Then the branches move in unison. A silent, secret greeting.

Hello there.

The tree is next to a popular dog run and I am the weirdo leaning against it. But I don’t care what it looks like. I’m just interested in the secrets of the trees.

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. . . . Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

. . . A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.” — Hermann Hesse

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A couple of years ago, I went on a road trip upstate with a girl. When we arrived, she walked up to a tree and hugged it. It was a long, heartfelt hug. A hug that left her smiling. I didn’t show it, but I cringed.

What? We’re literally the ‘tree huggers’ now? Give me a break.

Secretly, I was already making friends with the trees. I had spent a week in an outrageously gorgeous valley in the Dolomite Mountains. There, I found a portal, a moment with nature that changed everything. It appeared as one living and breathing web. As a teacher, too. And I was a part of it.

Initially, I resisted. I felt silly, childish. Then, slowly, I embraced this new way of being. I simply could not resist. On every morning walk, I reached out and let my fingertips run across bark. I got to know all the trees in my neighborhood by touch and texture.

I used to give heady advice. Read this and listen to that. Now my advice sounds trivial.

Before doing anything, do what looks a lot like doing nothing.

Sit outside and listen. Meditate. Pray, if you’re the praying kind (I am now). Slowly let the channel open.

Rest against a tree or simply sit near one. Try to make friends with it. Why not send it some gratitude . . . or some love? What if it could hear your thoughts? Maybe it knows things? Maybe it has advice? The trees and rocks, the land on which we walk and dream, they’ve seen it all.

The forces that we can perceive in this richer reality are fundamentally subtle. My life’s work is to help more people understand that these emotional, energetic, non-logical, non-linear and non-verbal signals often come with a high degree of intelligence. — Tom Morgan

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an·thro·po·mor·phism [/ˌanTHrəpəˈmôrˌfizəm/], noun, the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to a god, animal, or object.

There it is. The harsh voice of judgment. Silly boy. Talking to trees. Grow up.

But I no longer care. Between the inner critic and the trees, I know who looks out for me. I know who can teach me how to be.

The tree is deeply rooted. Its branches reach out to receive the light. The trunk connects heaven and earth. That’s how the tree greets the day, the sun, and the wind.

It lives by the rhythm of the seasons. Each spring it sprouts, yet it also lets itself be shaped. It accepts what happens to it and what is in the way — the rocks and the pavement, the droughts, the hail, the gardeners’ saws.

The tree shares: oxygen and perhaps fruit. It offers shelter. It is there to lean against.

When I feel lost, I recall that image, that tree-being: grounded, rooted, and connected. Reaching out, upward. Breathing, receiving light. Listening to the wind, pondering the stars. Sharing what can only be created here, now, by this being, in this way.

That’s how I want to stand: like a channel for life.

Life feels like a paradox: I yearn to stand like a tree, but it is my destiny to walk.

Today is my last day in New York and I will miss my tree,

But not really.

For I know I will find it,

Everywhere and in all trees,

All different,

All perfect.

— Frederik

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I didn’t dance or sing. I spent little time outside and meditated only sporadically. I didn’t understand the power of silence and sound (I still don’t, not really).

I let my mind be cluttered.

I was always busy. Busy felt good. Rest smelled like laziness. When I made time for my body, it had to be efficient. I needed music or podcasts to keep myself occupied.

Walking and writing were the only things I stuck by pure instinct. Those got me through the COVID years.

I was not curious about my soul.

I made no space for it.

When I gained a glimpse of its strange realms, I got scared. What I saw had nothing to do with the life I was living. Nothing at all. Ze-Ro.

I had to slow down a lot to realize that I was running on autopilot.

I needed distance, space beyond words, to notice that I did not choose when and how much to participate in the infinite ‘happening’. I just woke up and let myself be flooded.

Things are different now.

I used to rely on goals and plans. Now I try to balance thinking and listening. I ground myself in the moment. I notice questions bubble up, float like soft foam on the waves of my consciousness.

Why am I here?

What am I here to do?

What is there to create and to share?

How can I contribute to what is to be done?

I wait.

I wait for the touch of the wind, for a bird to sing, for a whisper. I wait for an answer to form and roll in from the deep.

If nothing happens, I let the mind get to work. I trust that more guidance will be revealed after taking another step.

Then I move.

Soul allows you to become attached to the world, which is kind of love. When the soul stirs, you feel things, both love and anger, and you have strong desires and even fears. You live life fully, instead of skirting it with intellectualism or excessive moralistic worries. — Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

Sometimes my writing journey feels like a series of useful dead-ends. It led me to creativity and art, to spirit and the voice, to the intimate spaces of the soul. Along the way, I tried one label after another. I always reached the same conclusion: not that.

Finance substack. Not that.

Money and meaning. Not that.

Mind-body journaling. Not that.

Help others write. Not that.

I think of writing now as just one aspect of our voice, our sacred and most intimate vibration. A gateway to the space of the soul. Now that is interesting to me.

Why are you here?

What do you care about?

Who are you behind the mask?

Why do you hold yourself back?

What is stuck that wants to move?

What answers do you carry deep inside?

What obvious next step are you avoiding?

What is waiting at the center of your labyrinth?

What golden vision of your life do you not dare look at?

Those are the questions that interest me.

They are fascinating, strange, and challenging.

If they are not, you haven’t scratched the surface. You are walking circles around your maze.

I’ve found these questions to exist in a space of paradox: we carry the answers within. We just don’t have access to the room. We grope in the dark in a jumble of keys. We look for signs in the flickering light of a lonely torch. Answers are revealed one step and one lesson at a time.

Maybe these are the only questions that I can help explore.

Not because I have answers, but because I’ve been there. Because it is the one area in which my mirror feels a tiny bit polished.

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I was obsessed with capturing everything. Every experience had to be translated into language.

My old notebooks show how stuck I was, frozen between hope and despair. Pages covered with paper-thin plans and weightless affirmations. I found a thousand ways to ask why am I here, what do I want, and why does this feel so impossible?

I looked for answers in books and podcasts. Always . . . more words.

Writing was my way of moving through life, pen on the page, one page at a time.

It was useful. It was movement.

I can see how the strands of struggle began to weave together, how they formed a checkered shape, a quilt of becoming.

But writing was not enough.

The answers I was looking for were behind doors I could not see.

. . . words that point to the Tao
seem monotonous and without flavor.
When you look for it, there is nothing to see.
When you listen for it, there is nothing to hear.
When you use it, it is inexhaustible.

Tao Te Ching, 35

The things I love look pretty boring.

Close your eyes, repeat a mantra.

Walk in silence.

Sit with a tree.

Lie down and listen to a magician playing an instrument.

Dance your way through a wave of emotions.

Tune into your voice to the sound of a drone.

The things I love point in the same direction: toward the maze, the center, where all things are born.

They direct me away from reading, toward doing.

And they opened doors to the wordless space of the soul.

There, in the formless dark, my mind again forms the big questions.

Why am I here?

What is my lesson to learn?

What is the next step on my journey?

What gifts am I not sharing? Why?

Where am I blocked? How do I hold myself back?

What vision is so bright, I don’t dare look at it?

What is possible in this life?

I don’t reach for the pen. I try to remain with inner stillness. If I am in motion, I ask to let myself be moved. I ground myself in the present, in the weight of the body, in the sounds around me. I wait. I listen.

I look for answers in shapes and sounds, in metaphors and sensations.

What would that sound like?

What would that look like?

What would that feel like?

It feels like an ancient process, like I am discovering a lost birthright.

The word psychotherapy consists of two Greek words: psyche (soul) and therapy (care). By definition, psychotherapy is care of the soul. When you serve your soul, you are being therapeutic in this deep, Platonic sense. — Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

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My days have taken on a new rhythm. Slower, quieter. Intense movement embedded in stillness.

It’s not all fun and games and bliss. Far from it. In fact, I am exhausted. My bedroom is filled with boxes and my mind occupied with storage facilities and used cars. I sleep on a simple tri-fold mat, the mattress about to go to the curb.

My experience of time has changed dramatically. Days used to fly by, the hours blurring together. Now they stretch out like songs, an ebb and flow of melodies.

Everything feels both more alive and more . . . mundane.

But boring, I’ve noticed, is fine.

It’s like turning the phone to grayscale. I’ve done it. It works. It works because the phone gets very, very dull. Turn the colors back on and it’s like stepping into Candyland on acid. Way too intense.

Once the artificial stimulus is gone, the ordinary becomes vibrant.

I would love to say that the wordless space has been the best thing to ever happen to me and my writing. But it’s not that simple. There is a price to be paid.

I’m not talking about money. Generally, I’ve found the spaces of caring for the soul not that expensive (though they are often taught in expensive locations, a kind of spiritual White Lotus). No, they asked for a different kind of investment, one I was reluctant to make.

The things I love tend to be embodied and intimate.

They require time, time to explore, discover, and practice.

They ask for undivided attention, for openness, and for active participation.

Am I fully present? Can I face my truth, what is underneath the mask? Can I stay with discomfort? Am I willing to be witnessed?

This feels incompatible with a busy, plugged-in life. Why learn how to swirl like a Sufi when you could be on the couch and catch up on The Last of Us?

And my writing has changed, slowed down.

I used to pick up the scent of a story and follow the trail down a rabbit hole. I could not wait to piece the puzzle together. That’s a valuable skill for an analyst or journalist. It made writing financially rewarding.

Now, deep dive research can feel like an interruption. I read a few pages before bed, a substack post here and there. When people ask for recommendations, I notice how out of the loop I am. I’m the last one to get the news, the one at risk of panicking at the bottom, right before the market turns.

Surrender to the path and maybe the only thing left to write about is that.

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It’s not that I’ve turned anti-writing or anti-books. I still love gripping stories and magnificent prose. I know the power of words, see how they ripple through time and shape our world. But I am skeptical that they hold the answers.

I am skeptical that what waits at the center can be put into words.

“Words, symbols, signs, and thoughts and ideas are merely maps of reality,” as Ken Wilber put it. “The word ‘water’ won’t satisfy your thirst.” And I thirst.

What do you do with that thirst when “work” — money, economic activity — has moved behind a wall of screens? I don’t know. Not yet.

But I am learning that the world beyond the map is filled with hidden wells. The water of life is everywhere, like a subtle current within and behind all things.

But the stream runs in secret. It resists being squeezed into words and nailed to the page.

It feels like watching cherry blossoms. An extravagant, abundant explosion of life right now.

Faded by tomorrow.

Wholeness, I think,
Draws its life somewhere where the breathing
Stops,

Somewhere where the mind cradles light,
Where the only senses that remain

Blush and stumble
If they try to speak with our language so new
It is still trying to
Invent,

Still shaping
Its first intelligible sound,
Still sculpting its first true image of
God.

— Hafiz

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The wordless space feels like the ocean.

One moment calm and gentle, then forceful and wild. Always evocative and mysterious. Always beautiful. Far deeper and stranger than I could have imagined.

I step into the rhythm running through trees and concrete alike.

Afterwards, I watch orange candlelight flicker across the walls of my emptying apartment. The city has sunk into a deep quiet, as if a vast forest was shielding me. Behind closed eyelids I carry fading images and echoes of destiny.

A song rises in flow, fades through the open window.

What appears in motion cannot be held.

Words appear. I know my attempts to translate are hopeless. And yet I write.

I write not because I have answers but in the hope that words are like pebbles, stepping stones for the next person crossing the stream. Stones hinting at what is possible, guiding to the door, to the wordless space.

There, on the threshold of change, we face questions nobody can answer for us.

Do we want to step into the unknown?

Are we going to follow what feels true but cannot be put into words?

Follow the path, climb the stairs, enter the tunnel, plunge into the depths . . . or remain standing, observing, contemplating, analyzing. Be entertained, then move on to another door, another spectacle, another cloud of words.

Walk or watch?

For better or worse, I’ve made my choice. I paid the price. There is no turning back.

I don’t understand what is happening or why. Perhaps it is not meant to be understood. Or maybe I just don’t care anymore. I know something is happening. I try to move with it, swirl at the center of the vortex. That’s plenty already.

The things I love are simple but vast. They have more depth than I could explore in a lifetime.

Walk. Rest against a tree. Close your eyes. Listen. Feel the rhythm. Let yourself be moved.

Move, beloved, move. Trust your feet. They know the next step.

Enter the dance without end.

This is your birthright.

— Frederik

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I move slowly, arms hanging limp.

Let them dangle as if liquid was dripping out of the fingertips. Those were the instructions. Feel the heaviness.

I’m taking a dance class in SoHo. It’s called Butoh, the Japanese post-war, avant-garde “dance of darkness.” A strange and mesmerizing exploration of weight, space, and mortality that defies definition.

Butoh class confronts me with my desire to escape the discomfort of liminal space. A chapter is closing and I want to move, move on, forward, upward, to clarity and prosperity. Enough already with the confusion and the heaviness. Enough!

I am looking for speed.

Butoh asks about my capacity for patience and presence.

If I let my arm fall, how long does it dangle? How quickly does my body step in, tense up, and suppress the movement? Can I make truly small movements?

How much space do I experience between actions?

How hard is it to just be?

I don’t like to feel lonely. I mean, who does? But what I hate, what gives me the ick, is to admit that I feel that way. Loneliness? That smells like failure, like weakness. It sounds needy and helpless. Eww. No!

I hear two critical voices, an impossible double-bind.

Disgust at my lack of independence: Don’t depend on others for your happiness! Also, disappointment: How are you going to be with the World’s Coolest Woman if you can’t form healthy bonds? Don’t get side-tracked!

My desire for independence is trying to protect me. But you can’t be safe and create. You have to step into the dance. And you have to accept stumbles along the way.

A few weeks ago, I hosted a second online journaling session. Except I found myself alone on the Zoom call. Ooops!

In the back of my mind, I knew the moment contained many lessons. Thursday evening during a turbulent week in markets and politics. Impossible for people overseas while the locals were just trying to get a bit of rest.

But also: was my offering interesting enough? Was I bringing everything I knew to the table? Was I giving my space enough energy?

But that was the level of mind. In my body, I felt crushed.

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I can only imagine how the traders among you feel after the past few weeks.

Following the ups and downs of the market, the news cycle, the gut-wrenching trainwreck of American politics . . . it feels like a privilege to not be immersed in it.

And yet, I feel exhausted.

I’ve picked up Julia Cameron’s morning pages again. Three pages by hand. I write my way through the resistance, through the anguish, the exhaustion. I don’t have time. I don’t want to write. I’m tired. I’m tired. Tired . . .

I move through a thick soup of frustration. A pattern keeps revealing itself. Resistance to motion, fear to anger, anger to sorrow, sorrow to surprise . . . the surprise of words waiting to be spoken.

My place has been a mess.

Boxes of books and journals. Lonely pieces of furniture looking for a new home. A whole life spent holding on to what suddenly lacks any substance.

I’m in liminal space, a foggy in-between, a disorienting passage. A passage to where?

Something died. An era. A persona. A collection of ideas.

I sold the TV. The bookcases. The books are going, too. It’s like hacking away at the rotting stump of a tree long gone.

I can tell who I was from old pictures. But who am I now?

The past is still here, all around me. It claws its way into my dreams. Dreams of trains and mazes. Dreams of people I haven’t seen in decades. Old friends. Girls I will forever remember as teenagers glowing with vibrant youth. Too late. I haste through my dreams. Too late.

The space of the mind feels treacherous. Floors that don’t hold. Rooms filled with questions I can’t answer.

What am I here to do? What is true? What is real? What is coming? What do I want?

I have a hard time with that, with desire. Understanding it, admitting it.

I’m talking about deep desires, strong and heartfelt. Unreasonable. The vivid dreams that reveal our power. I’m talking about what lives so close to the soul, it can barely be put into words.

This space is beyond what others care about or approve of. It’s pure and frightening.

I am talking about the path through the labyrinth, the one toward our gifts. The thread that leads us back will unravel the sweater of reality. There you are. Naked.

Instead of admitting those dreams, I make up a story. I create circumstances that allow me to shift blame. Do what I really want to do without owning it.

It’s not me. It’s the world. I had no choice . . .

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I’ve been meeting lots of people and it’s the same exchange over and over.

I am leaving New York. “Where are you going?” I don’t know. Why? It’s too expensive.

But is that true?

Sure, it is expensive and I don’t exactly know where I am going. I call it my surrender experiment. But that’s not the whole story. Can I accept what emerges in liminal space?

Am I just tired of the city, the compromise, the noise, the lack of space? Do I finally understand how it shifts my attention to the short-term, like a company trying to make its quarterly numbers? Can I accept that I want something else?

Do I just want to drift? Wander through nature, beat a drum among trees? What would that say about me? What kind of madness lies hidden in the realm of our power?

“Nothing dies harder than a bad idea,” Julia Cameron writes in the Artist’s Way. “We all know how broke-crazy-promiscuous-unreliable artists are. And if they don't have to be, then what's my excuse? The idea that I could be sane, sober, and creative terrified me, implying, as it did, the possibility of personal accountability. You mean if I have these gifts, I'm supposed to use them? Yes.”

Can we accept our potential, or do we wrap it in an impossible story?

Who would I be without my drama?

I am learning from the liminal space. Every day is a teacher.

What is alive?

The feet already know. They just move across the map. Only the mind wants to know.

Thought after thought after thought after thought afterthought

I am learning to be patient and gentle. To have compassion.

I notice what is alive and what is dead, what flakes off when I touch it. Which pages hold magic, which are just dry paper?

There is a path through the dream. A trail of aliveness.

Motion is beyond story. It is a space of embodied knowledge, of connection and energy. It carries echoes of the eternal.

Old dreams shatter, leaving pieces of glass-stained beauty. Sparks for a new mosaic.

All that is frozen can be released.

All that is stuck can move.

The hardest thing? Letting go of an old story.

The easiest thing? Trust your body. Start walking. Let your feet do the talking.

— Frederik

Journaling prompt I’ve enjoyed.

YouTube: Can I own my desires?

What desires do I hide from the world? What would I not admit in public? What sounds so outlandish or delusional that I can barely admit that, yes, in fact, I do carry that dream? What is the resistance, the mismatch between who I am and how I want to be seen?

Let’s say you’d like to write in public. You have to face your fears: fear of being exposed, being wrong, being mocked, or being met with indifference.

But you would also have to accept the underlying desire. You want to write and, what, feel seen? You want to be creative? Maybe, god forbid, even be successful or famous? Change the world with your works?

Follow that trail and make a list of your objections. Consult Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way for helpful affirmations. Also, Byron Katie's Loving What Is offers a powerful way to meet negative frozen beliefs.

Some reading for the weekend.

Elaine: isolation; a trap I’ve struggled with all my life.

“The challenge for me isn’t committing to a practice but the opposite—exercising the discipline to not write so that I can hold space for other sources of joy, meaning, and psychological richness.

The single-minded pursuit of any endeavor, no matter how much it brings us joy or meaning, is a road to loneliness. And that’s not a road I would take again.”

Tom Morgan: There's a Horse Loose in a Hospital; truth-tellers, comedians, and shamans.

The problem is that some spiritual people take themselves FAR too seriously and there’s nothing intrinsically amusing about most of these topics. The point here isn’t to mock spirituality; that’s the easiest of targets. It’s to speak the truths from outside the rationalist-industrial complex: the box that’s kept us mentally imprisoned for decades.

(Also Tom’s two conversations with Brian Whetten, a must-listen for anyone coaching or being coached — thriving as a coach, a playbook for leaders).

Nicolas Michaelsen: What does it mean to be in a Post-Future world?

To live syntropically is to tune oneself to this convergence—to become a vessel through which ancestral wisdom and future possibility meet. It is a way of sensing and shaping reality that honors emergence, pattern, and deep time.

Syntropy speaks of attractors—patterns of coherence, beauty, and aliveness that pull us forward not through plans, but through presence.

It begins by asking a simple question in every context you enter: What feels most alive in me, right now? Then orient toward it, protect it, build from it. That is how the future returns—through our response to what is already calling.

Dave Nadig: Impermanence

When there is no longer any knowledge of the difference between corpse and self, when the broken body on the screen becomes my body, aching with pain, disconnection, rot and decay until neither body remains, only one thing seems to be left: the sense of compassion, wonder and gratitude that humans have tried to label forever: Brahmavihara, Agape & Aloha, Chesed, Buddha-mind, God’s Grace.

All things are indeed impermanent. And yet, somehow, throughout each flicker of reality, each print on the tape, each body in the morgue,

Love seems — if not permanent and undying — insistent.

Jillian Hess: Pablo Picasso's Stunning Repetitions

“Between 1894-1967, Picasso filled 175 sketchbooks. They were so important to him that he inscribed one of the sketchbooks with the words

Je suis le cahier

I am the notebook.”

Finally: Julia Cameron. My memory labeled her the “three pages by hand” lady. Now, years later, I find in her book a wise guide to the spiritual-creative source. It’s all about motion — a morning meditation on the page.

The book is structured as a 12 week course, self-study or as a group. I’m thinking of hosting one or two online circles or groups dedicated to writing and inner work. Leave your name and email if that’s of interest to you.

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It happens to me when I get stuck in my head.

And that can happen oh so quickly.

It happens when I look for an optimal solution to a complicated issue. Like, where to move. Much cheaper than NYC. Access to nature. But also enough culture and community to connect with. Enough local weirdos. An active dating scene? Lower taxes? Distance to family? Local language? Car vs. walkable. . . lost in a maze of my own making.

Simple questions can ground us.

If I had one more year — or ten — would I still care about this?

If I loved myself truly and deeply, would I let myself experience this?

If I could only select based on one factor, which would it be?

That’s how I started dropping the weight. With infinite time and space, I’d keep all the books. But time is precious. Space is valuable. Empty space can give form to the new. Constraints are very useful.

A couple of weeks ago, I watched the gorgeous and cryptic The Tree of Life, a two-hour poem of a film, a prayer set to the rhythm of life, an exploration of the sacred beauty of our world. I wept like a baby at the end.

“Don’t do it like I did, promise me that,” the movie’s father tells his son. “I dreamed of being a great musician. I let myself get side-tracked. When you’re looking for something to happen, that was it. A lie, you lived it.”

He got lost in the maze. But is he honest?

In that moment, he continues to live the “lie,” really the story, a story like a labyrinth, one that keeps him on his path. One that he could exit.

Every day is a chance to change that lie to something truthful.

Every day we don’t show up and share our gift, both we and the world are losing out.

When we don’t follow our compass, when we don’t know what the compass is, we risk getting side-tracked.

This doesn’t have to be about work or creativity.

Your heart is a gift. So is your presence.

The partner you can be to someone is a gift only you can share.

“A lie, you lived it.”

The longest relationship I’ve had after my divorce was probably . . . half a year, more or less? I don’t keep track of the time and things fray at the edges. But yeah, it doesn’t amount to much.

I have been reading a bunch by Henrik Karlsson lately — a frustratingly good writer!

My favorite was his three-part series on his marriage. The most interesting thing I’ve read about romance in a while.

“You are born with this weird interiority that no one else can see,” he writes in Looking for Alice. “You can’t see it either at first. But if you run enough experiments you get a sense of how that inner space behaves. In particular, you can figure out which types of people can fuse with your interiority and expand it.”

Now, if you asked me about the women I’ve loved (often still feel a lot of love for? they were all, in their own ways, absolutely exceptional), I would not start with whether they “fused with and expanded my interiority.”

What did she look like? What was her energy?

How sensual was the experience with her? How was the sex?

Was she smart and curious? Did she have a big heart? What did she inspire in me?

Those kinds of questions would go through my head.

But Karlsson is aware and comfortable with his weirdness. He knows what he likes, what is important to him. What drew him into the relationship was the experience of discovery and expansion in a shared space of curiosity and care (or at least that’s the aspect he chooses to share).

“The words that came out of my mouth when I talked to her continually surprised me,” he adds in Dostoevsky as lover. His experience was intense and strange, impossible to communicate. “I remember with a cold sweat that I almost turned Johanna down because I felt confused by my inability to explain what our relationship was and why I liked it.”

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I recall maybe two, maybe three times that happened to me. One was insanely painful, and it took me a long time to understand and get over my obsession. I think I stopped looking for that deep connection afterwards. Too painful when it ended. Too intimate. To be seen completely through the eyes of another? Serene. Also, terrifying.

I retreated — first to the surface where I didn’t show myself fully, then to hitting the pause on dating.

Karlsson writes about his marriage as a co-evolutionary loop, a dance unfolding over years, decades, possibly a whole life.

The type of person I’m assuming we’re looking for here is 1) someone that you will find fascinating to talk to after you’ve talked for 20,000 hours, 2) you feel comfortable with them talking through the hardest and most painful decisions you will face in your life, and 3) the conversation is wildly generative for both of you, in that it brings you out, helps you become.

It felt so intuitively right to think about the longevity of a relationship in terms of the space of communication and care. “This, I think, is a healthy way to think about love,” he writes. “It is about being invested in someone’s continual expansion.”

I began to realize how much I missed that kind of deep and evolving connection.

After my spiritual awakening, dating felt impossible.

We had to be a match emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, sexually . . . not to mention life stages, plans (kids? NYC or move?) . . . forget it. Too complicated.

Karlsson makes a good point that hit me like a bucket of cold water.

The thing is, there aren’t that many people you can have an amazing life with. Maybe 10,000, spread fairly evenly across the globe? A bit more if you’re less weird than me, perhaps. Anyway, the number is small enough that you can’t afford to be casual about it. You have to never let someone like that pass you by.

Don’t obsess over finding your perfect soulmate but do not be casual about finding one of those rare people who match your weirdness. Do not get side-tracked.

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That co-evolutionary loop, that space of curiosity and care, that takes time to discover and develop.

Karlsson recommends “speedrunning” dating by “jumping directly to the strange parts.” “You do not like a category,” he writes. “You like individuals.” So “go talk to a thousand people (increasingly less randomly sampled)” and find “patterns in who makes you feel excited and alive and true and heard.”

Which leads to another idea of his that I like — writing in public as a search query to let the right people find you.

“That is perhaps the most solid dating advice I have, by the way—show the inside of your head in public, so people can see if they would like to live in there.”

It’s time to sit with the part of me that is fixated on independence.

It’s time to sit with the fear behind it.

Did I buy freedom at the price of intimacy?

Time to adjust the compass.

Do not get side-tracked.

Do not get side-tracked.

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Upcoming event: an evening of dialogue and connection at the intersection of science and spirituality.

I will be at my friend Rohan’s upcoming event A Bridge Between Worlds (link has a discount on the ticket) with scientists who are bridge-builders, including Dr. Alan Lightman, Dr. Neil Theise and others.

Thursday, April 3rd. Stop by and say hi!

Join us for an evening with scientists who are bridge-builders, helping us ask profound questions about our yearning for ultimate meaning, the nature of consciousness, and what lies beyond the limits of what we can measure.

Dr. Alan Lightman on scientific materialism and spirituality, Dr. Scarlet Soriano on spirituality in medicine, Dr. Neil Theise on complexity theory and Zen Buddhism, and Dr. Katy Hinman on science education as a spiritual resource.

New video: journaling prompt.

Youtube: If I loved myself truly and deeply, would I let myself experience this?

I’m experimenting with lots of prompts for mindbody writing. This one I got from Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It, Kamal Ravikant.

Pen and paper, timer 20+ minutes, stream of consciousness writing, always following the trail of emotional charge and discomfort/avoidance.

At first, I wrote about negative behaviors that I would no longer tolerate. Then I wrote about changes I would make to my environment (less noise, clutter). Then changes to my state (less fear, less guilt).

This led me to what I would not hold back on if I loved myself — I experienced a brief wave of sadness, then anger.

Finally, I would not hold myself back in my writing. I would write about what I love and believe.

After three pages, I ended with: “There is a whole life waiting and I am not getting started…” (Da wartet ein ganzes Leben und ich fange nicht an…”)

A tiny 20-minute roller coaster. This is why I love mindbody writing. It helps me release, let go, gain insight, and re-write the story of my life. And sometimes I even find creative gold in the shadow.

Read & listen.

James Bailey: Where our heart echoes. An incredibly beautiful piece about the bonds that form in life and work, rich in wisdom, moved me to tears.

“Here is where we love and learn to let go. There is where we begin again, loving anew,” I said, witnessing the words as they left my lips. “If love and pain form the rhythm of the heart, here and there are the spaces they echo.”

I feel very in between the here and the there — a here that is losing reality and a there I cannot yet see. That space in-between offers room for unfolding. And James reminded me that the bonds of love don’t have to break with distance.

I also love that he carries a worn-out journal specifically "for life's great teachers."

I love The Emerald podcast and especially the latest: Singing to the beloved in times of crisis. It’s all about spirit, the breath of life, community, movement, the power of song and voice, and the strange “battle to monetize the wound.”

“The real gulf of America is the divide between us and our neighbors.”

Tom Morgan: The Most Important Word in the World. Shame, anger, choices, transformation. I read everything Tom writes but this one hit on so many ideas that are alive for me. . .

Throughout the years of my dark night of the soul, I fell from being a Managing Director at an investment bank to being rejected for $20,000 a year graduate jobs.

. . . At the very bottom of my private abyss the only thing I could feel was shame. But an incoherent, primal shame tied to the sense that I’d done something wrong. That I was damned and it was fundamentally my fault.

But this shame isn’t your fault. In fact the more you’re suffering, the more you may be learning.

Mona Sobhani: Clearing the Ashes *[Pt. 8]* I was so lucky to read this while editing The Weight. Mona offers her thoughts on an “apprenticeship with sorrow,” the practices and rituals that help us drop the weight and move through life.

“Hack #1: I framed the activity as active retrospective grieving and clearing for myself. Not like, “Let me get rid of this garbage that’s weighing me down” kind of way (which feels like a chore), but rather, “I have never properly thanked or honored all these moments and events in my life and I want to do that now, and kindly send them off” kind of way.

Hack #2: In the deep emotional work I’ve done over the past few years, I’ve noticed that grief, sadness, or hurt are usually underneath anger. What that means: in the middle of releasing anger, one of these sad emotions suddenly breaks through, dissolving the anger — clearly showing you that anger was just protecting sadness, which is the true emotional root.”

Mike just launched a coaching program for traders looking to face and work with their shadow.

Loved his short piece "I":

“Each day that I engage with markets, one of two “I”s may appear.

One trades from stillness. The other from craving.

One is real. The other, an illusion.

“I need … “ “I am …” “I will …” “I must …”

To trade as this “I” is not to trade a market, but to trade a concept of oneself.”

Final Verse. Rumi: The Guest House.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

translated by Coleman Barks

Invite discomfort. Let it be a teacher and guide. Write with it.

Until next time!

— Frederik