I zipped my black puffer jacket and stepped off the porch into the air. It was cold, not bitingly so, yet I felt its promise. My knees stiffened as a I moved, thirty-six and already negotiating with cartilage. Frost thinly layered autumn leaves like sugar on glass as they crunched beneath my feet. I walked the long winding road into the woods, past the tree line, out toward the dairy farm where brown-spotted calves and their mothers raised their heads in slow bovine curiosity, then returned to their chewing once I passed. My knees and the rest of me loosened as I plodded along into the gray of evening. The light felt bleached of warmth and the sky hung low, like wet wool stretching across the trees. Surely you know this faceless weather. How it can numb your fingertips before you notice, settle in your lungs like a damp fog, where every exhale turns visible, and every inhale reminds you it’s going to be like this for a while.

This time of year, it takes effort to layer up and step outside. The sun disappears earlier each day, and some part of me wants to follow it. This is the season when I start searching flights to Florida or wondering if there’s still time to slip away to Spain. Some years, I go, boarding a quick flight thousands of miles away to trade one season for another. A kind of luxury, yet I am no longer sure I want to indulge that reflex so easily.

When speaking with two friends this past week, each shared how they were taking a different approach to winter this year. Anastasia was looking forward to settling into her “den” in Colorado for the season. Johnnie said he would welcome the shortening of daylight in Cambridge and mirror nature’s rhythm.

They made it sound almost sacred. Winter as something to honor, not merely endure.

I paused, as that’s not how I’ve known winter. I’ve mostly treated it as something to duck. Slip past. Schedule my way around. For the gray makes me solemn. And the cold makes me restless. Still, I’m listening to them now, because something in me has sparked. Something in me is wary of running toward warmth like it’s a god-given birthright.

Over the last several weeks I’ve been reading the Showings of Julian of Norwich. She was a 14th century mystic and the first woman whose writings were presented in what we now call English. Remarkably she had such a disregard for her own ego that we do not even know her real name, as she never signed it at the end of her writings. “Julian” was the name of the church where she asked to be enclosed in an anchor-hold—a small stone cell built against a church wall. She chose to live inside there for decades, with only a window to the sanctuary and another to the street, no door. Yet she did not choose this home as self-inflicted punishment, or end up going mad. Something else happened. She descended within.

Julian once wrote, “God is not outside.” And while she meant this in a mystical sense—that there is no separation between the divine and the created—I’ve been thinking of it another way. If I can’t go outside as easily, what might I find within?

What if winter is not an obstacle, but an architecture? What if settling in is not resignation, but formation?

I am wondering now if winter might be an anchor-hold for those of us who’ve often regarded it as a mood-killer. Maybe it could be a context to lean into rather than a season to shortcut. An opportunity to embrace stillness.

Writing in the silence between stone, Julian described her understanding of the human soul: it was “oned” with God, united by a knot so subtle and so mighty that in it we are made endlessly holy. While that may not be language we use now, something about that image—being knotted into the divine, bound not by pressure but by presence—stimulates me.

If I can’t see the sun, or travel to chase it, can I trust that I am still wrapped up in something radiant?

We all know what it is like when the sun hits our faces. We come slightly more alive. It is one of the most liberating sensations: to feel a star light us up, warmth stretch across our achy skin, thaw us out. And yet in some seasons and places, nature seems to be telling us, “You cannot have sun whenever you want. You cannot be warm whenever you’d like. In the gray and in the dark, will you still come alive?”

While our choice to spread wings and fly to Florida or Spain or an easier pasture to flee discomfort may not be a failure of spirit, it might denote restlessness. Yet to Julian, even that restlessness would be “behovely,” as she put it in her Middle English.

“Sin is behovely,” she wrote. A word that means “necessary, appropriate” or “part of the pattern.” In her world, sin or failure wasn’t a problem to be solved but a path to tread and learn from—a provocative idea for our time, let alone hers.

Julian believed that nothing—not restlessness, not doubt, not even sin—could separate us from God in the slightest. She said unfailing union with God— “oneing”—was not only real, but the truth behind all appearances. That the love of God creates such a oneing that no person can be separated from another. That in God’s sight, one person is all people, and all people are in one person.

Whether or not you believe in the divine, what kind of winter might it be to believe that even in the most withdrawn and quiet months, you are still bound to everyone, everywhere?

Honestly, I’m not settled in yet. I’d love nothing more than to shoot off to a merrier terrain. Maybe I will. But I’m circling the idea of an anchor-hold. Perhaps this winter will be less about getting through and more about being reshaped by its starker contours.

Maybe, like the anonymous author from Julian of Norwich, we don’t need to flee our enclosure or always seek the kiss of the sun. Maybe, instead, we are being invited to stay long enough to see it is not the sun we are missing, but our own glow in its absence. It is there, whether our name is remembered or forgotten. Our light burns within the long night.

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in.

Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into deep waters.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

If you want to do this kind of work with your own story, with someone sitting across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable, that’s what Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for. A guided memoir experience for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying.

Turn your life into a lasting story

All of my work is in service of ushering in a New Renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution. They are the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for. If you’d like to support this work, consider joining my Patronage Circle.

Facilitate the New Renaissance

To get every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Or become a founding subscriber and receive a complimentary ‘deep cast’ session. If you feel something in your life pulling on the line and don’t have words for it yet, we can sit together on Zoom, pour something worth drinking, and fish.

Upgrade your subscription

I always wanted to be one of those guys who hiked up rugged mountains, camped by nightfall next to flickering fires, caught fish with his bare hands.

Domesticated rhythms of work and life meant I never gave myself permission to try.

When I moved to Spain two summers ago after getting divorced, Rob and I set off one morning into Sierra de Gredos, a mountain range in the central region of the country.

We walked for what felt like miles through a thick, dry forest on a steady incline.

I was young and fit by most accounts, but none of that prevented my breath from feeling deranged in the heat of afternoon.

Meanwhile, Rob breathed just fine. Which surprised me (and, I admit, injured my pride a little).

Rob was pushing sixty with an average build, yet traversed the woods with the same ease that he did his frequent travels between the Saïd Business School and Arenas—not a straight-line commute.

Rob’s steps were sure and steady. He might as well have been Spanish, given how much time he had spent here the last twenty-five years. He knew the terrain. And it knew him back.

I trailed him with a kind of wistfulness, seeking solid ground amidst my life’s shifting landscapes.

Generative artificial intelligence had spurred onto the news scene at the time of our hike. As Rob and I caught up with each other, we explored the immense hype around AI, and looked for pertinent connections between it and my research into hurry.

We walked another mile uphill. “Where are we going?” I asked. I don’t recall whether I was questioning where AI was taking the human race or the overgrown trail ahead.

Then, as if he had noticed something, Rob stopped. Took a step off the beaten path. Bent his knees toward the ground. Scooped a pile of dirt into his hands. It spilled between his timeworn fingers.

“There is more complexity in a spoonful of this soil than all of New York City,” he said.

At first I didn’t know if he was being serious or hyperbolic or what this might have to do with AI. But I shut up and listened.

“Take a human body, for instance. There are as many non-human cells in you and me as our own human cells. Around thirty trillion are our own. Thirty trillion belong to microorganisms that affect health and mood. Each cell is as complex as New York City. So, if we have thirty trillion cells… that’s thirty trillion cities.”

He then pointed from the tip of my pinky toe all the way to the crown of my glistening forehead.

“From the perspective of two single cells on a relative scale between the farthest reaches of your body, they are near equivalent to the distance of any human being—right now—to the edge of the observable universe. As far out as our most sophisticated telescopes can detect: forty-six billion light years away1.

“So, you are a universe. I am a universe. ‘I am large. I contain multitudes2.’”

I took a moment to process his words, the minutiae of microbes and soil muddled with the grandeur of mountains and men and space. Slowly, I felt my chest rise and fall, recovering a steady cadence. For the first time in what felt like a long time, air deeply filled my lungs, dispersed to every last inch of my flesh. “Then we are birthing new universes all the time,” I said. “Since the cells in our body regenerate frequently.”

Rob formed a small smile. Further spun his web of thought. “To say that AI in anyway comes close to resembling that is… misleading. It massively underestimates the glory of God. A phrase that’s helpful for humility whether you consider yourself a believer or not. The idea that we are human beings and therefore can do anything is hugely dangerous. Coming into a landscape like this can help us remember that.

“For decades I’ve hiked these trails. When I come here on a day after it’s snowed, I haven’t got an idea where I am or where to go. All my cairns are covered. Meanwhile, the squirrels and mice don’t bat an eyelid.”

I noticed a cairn nearby, piled with five or six stones in semi-orderly fashion, marking out the next trail. “We think we know,” I said. “We don’t pause long enough to understand what we already have. So eager to use AI to enhance every facet of life, because that’s what everyone else is doing, because that’s how we’ll increase our margins.”

“Sometimes the problems we want to solve aren’t problems at all,” Rob said. “Which only brings about more problems.”

I looked, and the dirt had finished spilling between his fingers. He closed his hand and lowered it to his side.

“Careful. Prudence. Context. Caution,” he said.

We proceeded on our hike, and drank cold, clean water from a river.

Later, we would notice an ibex in the distance, which had already noticed us.

When we finally emerged from the forest line at a higher elevation, I witnessed great big rocky white peaks that told me a story about my smallness and their trustworthiness. We sat down on a clearing of ground, and Rob pulled a loaf of bread from his backpack, tore off pieces, and lined them with slices of smoked salmon and Manchego. We ate until full. Then each of us chose a patch of ground, laid down our tired bodies, and took siestas beneath the shadow of the sun.

All we had was all we needed.

Behold, the glory of God.

I selected this chapter from my forthcoming book The Urgency of Slowing. I intend to publish next year. If you would like to provide feedback on chapters as I write them and commune with a small group of people from around the world making a slowing down, you can apply to join the Porch Sit Revolution.

Join my book reading group

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in.

Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into deep waters.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

If you want to do this kind of work with your own story, with someone sitting across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable, that’s what Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for. A guided memoir experience for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying.

Turn your life into a lasting story

All of my work is in service of ushering in a New Renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution. They are the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for. If you’d like to support this work, consider joining my Patronage Circle.

Facilitate the New Renaissance

To get every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Or become a founding subscriber and receive a complimentary ‘deep cast’ session. If you feel something in your life pulling on the line and don’t have words for it yet, we can sit together on Zoom, pour something worth drinking, and fish.

Upgrade your subscription

On most mornings, I roll out of bed, wipe the sleep from my eyes, pull on a pair of sweatpants and throw on a long tee, meander into the kitchen, grind two tablespoons of dark espresso beans, pour my latte, and wander to the porch to sit. There, I sip from a stone mug and glimpse more of my foggy breath in the cold this time of year. The porch offers me a view of the woods. Leaves lightly rustle on branches in the wind, fall to the ground here and there. Squirrels gather acorns. A female cardinal chirps, flies, and lands near its partner. My mind drifts to another place, and when I notice it has, I return my attention to the ordinary glory around me. I sip some more, then again, and abide there until I’ve both finished my coffee and remembered I come from nature and can always return to it. It is an illusion that we are ever disconnected.

This is the most precious part of my day, and it is a time hidden from anyone else. I take no phone or book or stimulation to the porch (except for my coffee). Porch sits ground and activate my senses in a slow, mostly effortless manner. I need only bring my body.

Today, we live in an age where the loudest, most impatient voices dominate our senses. We are bombarded with how-to content, bad news, and distracting reels. Many of us feel a pervasive need to be plugged in, switched ‘on’—perhaps under the premise staying digitally connected means we are “in touch” and, from there, can make a difference.

Yet when I am unplugged, I feel most connected. It is the unhurried acts that gently cleanse.

I like to remind myself that I can be alone with me. To do nothing, and that nothing is quite something. My morning stillness is not without any effort: the most fruitful occasions are whenever I sit there for longer than I want. That is a discipline in itself. To unplug, to wait, until I find myself lost in now.

This quiet ritual has revealed to me that many of the important experiences I have will remain largely unknown. There will be no fanfare or accolades. Alone, I witness myself during a porch sit. Much of our lives is unseen by others—what we think and say and do often remains obscure.

Are you content to witness yourself?

In a world trained to react, choosing to be still can feel radical. Yet the shape of the world reflects the shape of our collective attention.

Giving our attention to reality TV and constant distraction on social media, for instance, may have facilitated the rise of a former-reality-TV-star-turned president, a person who is loud, inflammatory, and demands attention. For him and other leaders like him, I would argue their rule requires our giving them attention, lest they lose their foothold.

And so, as certain leaders rage and divide and we continue to bend our ears, we give them what they want.

The author Italo Calvino once reflected it is not the mouth that shapes the story, but the ear1. Tyrants in the digital age benefit from our attention: from our incessant scrolling on apps and purchases from companies backed by their allies, to our consumption of incendiary remarks on news feeds that feed on fear. Being loud sells. And with our ears, they shape the story of humanity.

Could sitting on our porches doing nothing spark a rebellion? We know there are different forms of protest, many of which are useful. In a digital age, one less tried may be to boycott who and what we give our attention to. To unplug, which is not the same as sticking our heads in the sand, may be one of the most radical forms of protest available to us today.

Unplug. Unwind. Undermine.

Perhaps more than ever, we are in need of finding and giving our attention to still, small voices amid the cacophony. It may be difficult for our ears to distinguish them at first, as we may be accustomed to engaging with those who lead by banging about. But still, small voices have not become too small. They are there. Rustling leaves. Chirping birds. Running streams. Ordinary people doing hard, human work. And… the still, small voice humming through every fiber of your human being is there, too, where it has always been.

When we scroll, we chase what’s trending. But when we are still, we begin to notice what endures. You can always choose to tune your frequency to the soul of the universe. By lending your ear and, at other times, withholding it, you can reshape the story humanity unfolds.

What will you listen to today?

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in.

Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into deep waters.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

If you want to do this kind of work with your own story, with someone sitting across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable, that’s what Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for. A guided memoir experience for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying.

Turn your life into a lasting story

All of my work is in service of ushering in a New Renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution. They are the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for. If you’d like to support this work, consider joining my Patronage Circle.

Facilitate the New Renaissance

To get every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Or become a founding subscriber and receive a complimentary ‘deep cast’ session. If you feel something in your life pulling on the line and don’t have words for it yet, we can sit together on Zoom, pour something worth drinking, and fish.

Upgrade your subscription

A few days ago my close friend Ashok and I were meandering through the unpretentious yet charming town of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, when I felt a small stir atop my head.

Thinking little of it, I reached a hand to pat my curly mess of hair for whatever had lodged itself there. Perhaps it was an acorn or tiny piece of stick that had fallen from a tree. (It was fairly windy.) When I grabbed at the fleck of matter, I found it resisted, buzzed—and the next thing I knew—drove its stinger into the index finger of my right hand.

“Ouch!” was followed by a swat that might have missed and surprised laughter. Ashok and I looked at each other the way we goofily do—ours eyes widening twice their size—and chuckled some more. The pain surged here and there, and a few curses spilled from my lips. A drip of blood oozed from my finger, along with it the realization I’d been stung by a dastardly bee.

It was twenty years ago when I was last assailed by such an insect. Afterward, I continued bouncing on the trampoline in my backyard for another hour until I felt itchy all over, and in sensitive areas. By the time we reached the hospital in my parents’ red Chrysler van, my throat was beginning to swell. Epinephrine in one butt cheek and a steroid in the other fixed me right and dandy. It was on that day that I learned I was allergic to a yellow jacket’s venom.

Ashok and I continued our stroll through the neighborhood past a home’s entrance adorned with pumpkins and ghouls and piles of hay. My finger swelled thick enough that I could no longer bend it closed, and without an EpiPen, I wondered if I might need to make a trip to the urgent care.

Eventually we dropped into a coffee shop, and I fumbled my way to ordering a flat white, still fretting as to whether I might be at risk of an allergic reaction.

We sat down in two comfy chairs and sipped. It had been a year and a half since I’d seen my old buddy from college. Much had changed for us in recent years. Both of us had grieved the loss of marriages, looked within to grow, relocated across the country, and started new work opportunities. We connected easily as always, yet it was evident our worldviews were branching in somewhat contrasting directions. He was pastoring a Seventh-Day Adventist church, firm within the faith we grew up in, and my theology was… well… floating.

After hours of good conversation, we hugged goodbye, and I opened the door to my Jeep. Gripping the steering wheel, I noticed my finger was all that ever did swell. In the twenty-year lapse between stings, perhaps my body developed antibodies to a yellow jacket’s venom; or perhaps I was stung by a different bee species; or maybe I just got lucky that day. Regardless, our bodies do not always repeat themselves1.

We are never really the same, are we? Bodies change. Perspectives change. The seasons change us, along with our environments and people and decisions. We can hardly begin to conceive all the ways we are not what we were. Same, yet different. Different, yet same.

We are, as the philosopher Bergson suggested: process. We change without ceasing. Our existence itself is nothing but change.

“There are changes, but there are underneath the change no things which change.”

It might provide us some encouragement to know we can—for all our mistakes and quirks and circumstances, whether we be young or old—choose to begin again at any moment. Your mind and body and the richness of life all around you is already engaged in this alchemical process of becoming and unbecoming and becoming again.

Take the bee from Berkeley Springs who may have died stinging my finger in preservation of its colony. It now flies in the vehicle of a story. Alive, in another form.

I think I’ll call him Burt2.

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in.

Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into deep waters.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

If you want to do this kind of work with your own story, with someone sitting across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable, that’s what Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for. A guided memoir experience for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying.

Turn your life into a lasting story

All of my work is in service of ushering in a New Renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution. They are the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for. If you’d like to support this work, consider joining my Patronage Circle.

Facilitate the New Renaissance

To get every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Or become a founding subscriber and receive a complimentary ‘deep cast’ session. If you feel something in your life pulling on the line and don’t have words for it yet, we can sit together on Zoom, pour something worth drinking, and fish.

Upgrade your subscription

A year and a half ago, my grandmother passed away, whom I affectionately called “Gram.”

At her funeral, I remember the church walls were mostly bare, the air was void of any discernible scent, and the varnished pews felt cold and rigid against my back. A knot had steadily tightened in my stomach and was now tugging at my throat. Then, my mother walked up to the podium and unwrapped a creaky leather journal, its pages alive with her ink, and began sharing stories about Gram that I’d never heard before. In an instant, she had us all laughing. Then crying. Then laughing again. My jaw ached with joy. My cheeks were salty with tears.

Perhaps you’ve had similar experiences at funerals, where someone gets up to speak and suddenly a person you thought you knew is revealed in surprising, colorful contours, rich with layers and contradictions and moments you’d never conceived.

I always thought my Gram was feisty and hilarious. I never knew quite how funny she was. I knew that her difficult childhood had helped shape her into a remarkably compassionate person… except when speaking to telemarketers. Her voice would click into place like a rifle bolt, and those poor callers surely rued the day they ever dialed her number. I also knew she loved us grandchildren more than anything. What I didn’t know was… so much else. Turns out, it wasn’t just me.

After my mom finished speaking, several people came up to her—from siblings to cousins to my Gram’s closest friends—and said, “I didn’t know that about her!”

And now, a year and a half later, I forget much of what my mom said. I presume others who attended the funeral have forgotten too.

My mom is one of a handful of people who still carry pieces of my Gram’s life wisdom, because she had the foresight to ask her to tell stories during the last year of her life, while my mom cared for her. The rest? Forgotten.

And this is true for all of us:

Your family and friends don’t know your life story as well as you think.

They only know the headlines.

Your children missed your life before you turned thirty.

Old friends have moved away. New friendships began at, say, forty-five?

Even your spouse may not know what most of your workdays actually hold. And likely even you haven’t thought about meaningful moments from long ago in quite some time. It’s possible you underestimate the mythic quality embedded in your own ordinary life.

According to research by Age Wave and Merrill Lynch, nearly seventy percent of adults say they want to pass down wisdom and memories more than money1.

But most don’t. No one ever asked them to share it. Or they assumed their story was too mundane to matter. Or they didn’t know how to unearth what was buried deep inside.

And so their stories, like so many others, are quietly lost to time.

The tragedy is not that we die.

The tragedy is that our story dies with us.

In many African spiritual traditions, this might be called the final death, or what I’ve come to think of as the shadow death. In Yoruba, a poetic phrase captures it: Òkú láìní ẹṣin (pronounced aw-KOO la-ee-NEE eh-SHEEN)—literally, the forgotten dead, or the dead with no horse. No carrier. No transition. When everyone who ever knew us also passes on, and our story has no one left to bear it forward2.

This is why Samir Selmanovic and I created Your Epic Ordinary Life. Not to solve this, exactly. But to sit with someone and help them say what they’ve been carrying before the chance passes.

Because the antidote to the shadow death is not complicated and almost embarrassingly simple. Ask someone to witness your story. To listen for the deeper threads running through your life—the turning points, the patterns, and what they reveal. So you can be met without being managed. Yet most people have never been asked to tell their story to someone whose only job is to hear it.

Your story matters more than you know.

It would be our honor to help you tell it.

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in.

Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into deep waters.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

If you want to do this kind of work with your own story, with someone sitting across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable, that’s what Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for. A guided memoir experience for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying.

Turn your life into a lasting story

All of my work is in service of ushering in a New Renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution. They are the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for. If you’d like to support this work, consider joining my Patronage Circle.

Facilitate the New Renaissance

To get every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Or become a founding subscriber and receive a complimentary ‘deep cast’ session. If you feel something in your life pulling on the line and don’t have words for it yet, we can sit together on Zoom, pour something worth drinking, and fish.

Upgrade your subscription

In this video, I read a piece of prose from my Substack. May you sit quietly and imagine wandering into the desert yourself.

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in.

Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into deep waters.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

If you want to do this kind of work with your own story, with someone sitting across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable, that’s what Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for. A guided memoir experience for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying.

Turn your life into a lasting story

All of my work is in service of ushering in a New Renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution. They are the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for. If you’d like to support this work, consider joining my Patronage Circle.

Facilitate the New Renaissance

To get every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Or become a founding subscriber and receive a complimentary ‘deep cast’ session. If you feel something in your life pulling on the line and don’t have words for it yet, we can sit together on Zoom, pour something worth drinking, and fish.

Upgrade your subscription

If you’re fishing in a place where no fish may exist, is casting your line futile? Absurd, even?

Maybe others are certain there is little point to your creative act, and you are unsure of it yourself. Will you stop? Should you?

What if what feels like the most important work you could ever do doesn’t bring much return, and likely never will? Ought you primarily focus your efforts on more ‘practical things’? Follow the money? Reposition yourself to fish in the rivers and ponds and lakes and streams where there’s pisces aplenty?

Perhaps.

But those banks… are so very crowded. Aren’t they?

Look around and you’ll see all the other fishermen following their best fishing practices they were taught at Best Fishing School. Straining—one after the other—toward the great haul. Or the modest find, the predictable one. And, of course, anyone who catches here must pay their tax—their very fat tax—to the very fat man who sits atop his very expensive boat, eating more fish than everyone else. Yes, even those who do all they can just to scrape the bottom of the refuse barrel must pay their due.

And yet, despite this scene, few ever toss their bag over their shoulder, pick up their tackle box, and set off to a more remote wilderness, where the catch is less sure.

“How would we survive? Plus, everyone we love is here.”

Fewer still—only the most haphazard, flippant fool—would ever wander to where the lush runs out, turns into waterless sands of desert; wait until the sun gives way to a black sheet of night, the stars unveil themselves to dance in place. And with them as his witness, cast a line into the universe.

For what can be found in the desert but death? In the nothingness. In the silence. Where the weary winds are ghosts that pass from forgotten to forgotten.

In these dark, uncertain times, when many still cling to their best fishing practices on familiar banks, I’ve chosen to make a fool of myself.

With my faithful rod and trusty tackle box, I’ve wandered into the desert, to see if I might reel in something alive in the unlikeliest of places.

You see, I was born in Fishertown. My mother’s maiden name is Fischer. And while I was given my father’s name and became a Soliday, I was named for ‘soul’ and ‘sol’. From the womb, I was bent toward inner and outer light.

It would only seem fitting, then, all these years later, that I become a fisherman in the night. And like a madman, cast my line into the cosmos, fishing the infinite with a tackle box of stardust. Choosing to be patient, to wait longer than I want—for the sheer thrill of seeing whether anything wants to come back.

Out here, there are no fish.

But—if I’m lucky—I just might catch a glimpse of myself. A momentary fragmentation, shooting across the sky like a disintegrating star. Maybe—if I’m luckier still—I’ll look down and have caught sand between my toes, confessing truths about stories so ancient, they shouldn’t be knowable; or feel the particles slipping through my fingers, like fleeting moments, somehow never lost.

And maybe, just maybe—if I’m really lucky—the void I’ve wandered into will finally reveal itself.

As Itself.

All along, absence has never meant ‘alone’—it has only ever been concealing Presence.

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in.

Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into deep waters.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

If you want to do this kind of work with your own story, with someone sitting across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable, that’s what Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for. A guided memoir experience for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying.

Turn your life into a lasting story

All of my work is in service of ushering in a New Renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution. They are the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for. If you’d like to support this work, consider joining my Patronage Circle.

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