Every renaissance in history started in the dirt.

Not on a stage. Not with a speech. Not with someone powerful enough to sign it into existence. It started with a few people in a room, or a field, or a kitchen that smelled like bread and arguments, sensing that the world they’d inherited no longer fit the skin they were walking around in. And rather than wait for permission, which never comes, they began to live differently. Quietly. Almost accidentally. The way a tree doesn’t announce it’s about to bloom.

Florence. Fourteenth century. The plague had just eaten half the population. The church was cracking down the middle like a house built on sand. People were dying in the streets and the survivors were standing in the wreckage looking at each other with the particular exhaustion of humans who have just watched everything they were told was permanent turn out to be temporary. And in that wreckage, something absurd happened. A handful of ordinary people, most of them craftsmen and merchants and scholars who smelled like ink and sweat, began asking a question nobody had authorized: “What does it mean to be human?”

They started with attention. They looked at old Greek sculptures and Roman texts and saw something the medieval world had folded up and hidden in a drawer, the idea that a human being is worth studying for its own sake. Worth depicting in full. Worth the trouble of understanding. They called it humanitas. Which meant something like: the entire gorgeous mess of what a person can be.

And yet in the middle of all that death, the response that changed civilization was not grim. Boccaccio wrote The Decameron during the plague years, and it is full of humor, irreverence, love stories, dirty jokes, characters outwitting each other and falling into bed and laughing at the absurdity of being alive while everything around them was dying. The response to catastrophe was hope, fun, and wonder. What the hell? Go ahead, ask it. Because our answer might be the whole point.

Then there was Ghiberti, a goldsmith who won a competition in 1401 to design a set of bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery and spent the next twenty-one years making them. When he finished, they gave him a second commission. He spent twenty-seven more years on that one. Forty-eight years, total. Two sets of doors. The guild pushed him. But he rarely made a deadline. When asked about his process, he said simply: “I executed that work with the greatest diligence and the greatest love1.” Michelangelo looked at the second pair and called them the Gates of Paradise. They are still standing.

The social renewal came later. The political upheaval came later. The Reformation, the scientific revolution, the whole cascading avalanche of change. First came the looking, the laughing, the painstaking refusal to move faster than the work required. First came the willingness to sit in the dirt and wonder.

· · ·

Concord, Massachusetts. 1840s. A town so small you could throw a rock from one end to the other if your arm was good enough. Emerson was writing essays in his study with the windows open. Thoreau was building a cabin by a pond on Emerson’s land, because Emerson believed in the work before the work existed, and lent his friend the ground to do it on2. Thoreau wanted to find out what would happen if he stopped performing his life and started living it. Margaret Fuller wondered the same. She began holding conversations in living rooms, which was a radical act in those days for a woman, where people gathered to think out loud about things they’d been told weren’t their business3. Things like freedom. Things like what the soul actually is when you strip away the church’s wallpaper.

They called themselves Transcendentalists, which sounds like a college course you’d sleep through, but their practice was disarmingly physical. Go outside. Pay attention to the moss. Trust what you find under your own ribs more than what the institution prints in its pamphlet. They were mystics in muddy boots. They were drunk on the ordinary, and that intoxication made them dangerous.

Within a decade, these same people were among the loudest voices in the abolition movement. Thoreau went to jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government that sanctioned slavery, and from his time in the cell wrote an essay on civil disobedience that traveled across oceans and centuries4, from Concord to Gandhi’s Salt March to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where it arrived in the bodies of people who had never read it but were living it. The attention came first. The willingness to sit with a hard question until it rearranged your insides.

· · ·

Harlem, 1920s. A million Black Americans had migrated north, carrying everything they owned and everything they’d been told they weren’t. Suitcases and scars and songs and silence. And in a few square blocks of upper Manhattan, something caught fire that no one could contain. Writers and musicians and painters began doing the most revolutionary thing a person can do. They told the truth about their lives. The uncensored version. The one with all its weight and grace and strange, unrepeatable afternoons.

Langston Hughes wrote poems in the rhythms of jazz and prayer, the kind of lines that make you put down your coffee and just sit. Zora Neale Hurston went back to the rural South to collect the stories everyone else was too sophisticated to remember. And A’Lelia Walker, heiress to her mother’s hair care empire, converted a floor of her Harlem townhouse into a salon she called the Dark Tower5, named after a poem by Countee Cullen, where on any given night you might find Hughes and Hurston and W.E.B. Du Bois and musicians and painters and activists crowded into gold-walled rooms with a sky-blue Victrola and a rose-colored piano, the whole place humming with a frequency that happens only when someone with resources sits down with people who have work and asks the simplest, most reckless question you can ask another human being: what do you need? Hughes called her the “joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s6.” She was a patron in the oldest sense, someone who understood that the work needs talent and a room. Alain Locke called the whole thing a “spiritual coming of age7.”

Before the Civil Rights Movement. Before the marches and the legislation and the long, bloody, beautiful fight for justice. Before any of that, there was this: a community recovering its own voice. Hearing its own story. For the first time in public. For the first time without apology.

The pattern is always the same, and it is always easy to miss because it looks like nothing special. It looks like people giving attention. Cultural renewal precedes social renewal. The question “who are we?” arrives before the question “what must we do?” And the second question never gets answered honestly unless the first one gets asked with the whole body.

Christmas morning, 1956. Harper Lee, a burnt-out ticket agent for an airline, opened an envelope on her friends’ tree. Inside, a note from Michael and Joy Brown: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas8.” The Browns had had a good year. They weren’t rich. But they believed in her. They didn’t ask for anything back. Lee stretched that year into two, and what came out the other side was To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel that entered the American bloodstream at the exact moment the Civil Rights Movement needed it, a book about a man who stood in a courtroom and refused to look away from injustice, written because two people in New York City decided their friend’s attention was worth protecting. Emerson lent Thoreau land. Walker opened her living room. The Browns put an envelope on a tree. This is how it works. A renaissance needs artists. It also needs people who believe in the work before it exists and who are willing to make room for it.

· · ·

You know our cultural moment as well as I. We are drowning in stimulation and starving for attention. We are more connected than any civilization in history and more lonely. We have democratized information and industrialized misinformation. Our phones know us better than our neighbors do. Our algorithms have more influence over our children’s imaginations than our dinner tables do. A group of Buddhist monks recently walked 2,300 miles across the United States. When they arrived, one of them stood before a crowd and said the first thing that came to mind after four months of walking in silence: “Don’t touch your phone when you wake up in the morning9.”

Four months on the road. Blisters and rain and the slow reshaping of a body by its own faithfulness. And that was what he chose to say. He understood something most of us sense but haven’t yet had the nerve to name. We have lost the plot. We have mistaken the social feed for the living field. The way back is the oldest technology we have: attention.

Look around, and you’ll see. Something is already shifting. The biggest movie in the country right now is Project Hail Mary, a story about a schoolteacher who wakes up alone in a spaceship, befriends an alien, and saves the world through the sheer childish fun of solving problems together. Six hundred million dollars at the box office, smashing expectations. Andy Weir, the author, says it plainly: “There’s plenty of negativity out there. I sell positivity10.” Six centuries after Boccaccio responded to the plague with humor and love stories, people are responding to our times by packing theaters for the same essential gesture. Hope. Fun. Wonder. The antidote to cynicism, doom, and flippancy. They could stay at home and wait to stream it on Amazon Prime. Instead they are leaving their houses to sit together in the dark, seeking something more. We are, whether we realize it or not, becoming unwilling to be rushed, unwilling to be reduced, unwilling to let the darkness have the last word. Ghiberti spent forty-eight years on two doors. Maybe we’re beginning to remember what that kind of patience makes possible.

· · ·

There’s a famous idea, often linked to Viktor Frankl though probably older than him, that goes something like this: between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is your power to choose. In that choice is your freedom11.

A renaissance, maybe even a global one, is being born in what seems like that tiniest of gaps.

Someone says something cruel to you. You feel the heat in your chest, the tightening in your hands, the old familiar surge that wants to match fire with fire. And then, if you allow yourself, you’ll notice a gap. A sliver. Barely the width of a breath. In that gap you could fire back. You could heap more suffering onto the pile of manure, and there is plenty to go around. Suffering is the one resource we never run out of. It stinks. We all have our share. Which means you could do the harder, stranger, more creative thing. You could pause. You could choose to not add to their pile of stink. You could become, in that tiny fraction of a second, something other than a reactor. You could become a creator.

That gap is the most active thing in the world. It is where every poem gets written, every honest conversation begins, every bridge gets built between two people who were sure they had nothing in common. It’s where you stop being shaped by the stimulus and start shaping the response. It is, if we’re being honest, how the whole world gets made.

· · ·

The kind of renewal we need will come the way every renaissance has always come: from a million tiny acts of attention practiced by ordinary people who got tired of waiting for someone extraordinary to save them. Because, if you haven’t guessed already, that person doesn’t exist. Or, maybe they do. You are that person. Your gorgeous, funky, flawed, regular, spectacular self.

Your work will be unglamorous. And there will be a cost. For love requires a body count. A tally of what it costs you to show up. Real, actual, felt-in-your-body cost. There is a price to creating in the gap, not going blow for blow. There is a price to telling the truth about your life to another person’s face while your voice shakes. There is a price to sitting with someone else’s pain without trying to fix it or run from it or scroll past it. Every person who ever changed the world first had to endure the unbearable luxury of seeing it clearly.

Your work may not only be about reducing suffering, either, as it seems a rite of passage for dwelling on this earth. What if your work is also to have an ease about approaching the hard things? Frankl survived the camps by finding meaning inside the horrendous. He witnessed suffering every single day. And still he found something worth holding onto, something generative, something almost, in a dark way, beautiful. Like a flower reaching through the muck toward the sky. Through the tiniest gap.

· · ·

A renaissance can be as simple as inviting friends over to have an honest and honoring conversation about what’s alive for them right now. Or what’s dead. Or what they haven’t said out loud in years because they were waiting for the right moment, which is now, which was always now. The sharing of stories. The listening that changes both people. It can look like taking manure and making clean fuel from it—both a metaphor and an actual thing humans are doing right now in actual barns. It can include not touching your phone in the morning for an hour and noticing what arrives in the silence, which will be uncomfortable at first and then, if you stay with it, the best part of your day. Or pausing between prompts when using AI to ask yourself, honestly: am I being created right now, or am I the creator here?

It can look like tending a garden—literal or metaphorical—with the understanding that the soil has to be healthy before anything grows. You cultivate a renaissance. You get your hands dirty. You wait. And at some point, if you’re giving attention long enough, you forget you’re doing anything at all and the work starts doing you.

The Italian Renaissance emerged from plague and institutional collapse. The Concord renaissance emerged from spiritual restlessness and a willingness to go to the woods. The Harlem Renaissance emerged from migration, oppression, and a people’s refusal to let anyone else define their own humanity.

What will ours emerge from?

Maybe, the gap. From your peculiar response to the nasty comment your neighbor makes. From the spacious boredom you befriend when you don’t choose Netflix for the evening. From the paintbrush you haven’t touched in years. From a few people sitting in your living room on a Wednesday night, holding a question they can’t yet answer, and being okay with that, being more than okay with that, as you feel something stir in the silence where the answers used to…

I’m hosting an online gathering on Thursday, May 14th as part of MIT professor Otto Scharmer’s Presencing Series, to sit with exactly this question: if a new renaissance is already emerging, how do you create it in your way in your world? Small group. One conversation. No expertise required, just the willingness to show up and be honest about what you find. If that sounds like something you want right now, sign up below (it’s free).

Register for the session

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

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.

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

Samir was doing something in the kitchen. He is always doing something in the kitchen. Cooking is how he thinks, or maybe thinking is how he cooks. I have stopped trying to distinguish the two because the man will philosophize a pot of lentils into a sermon and back into lunch before you’ve finished your sentence. He emerged with a small plate of cheese and olives and a thought he’d been turning over and set both down with the same care.

“AI is like the Library of Alexandria,” he said.

We were on his off-white couch in Harlem. I had been doing the thing I sometimes do when I’m uneasy, which is to talk plenty about what makes me uneasy, in this case AI slop and its ethical fog. Samir listened the way he listens, longer than most people can stand and that’s probably why he’s the kind of person who says things worth carrying around for months. He acknowledged the slop. The politicizing. The environmental wreckage. But then said something that rearranged the furniture in my head. “Beneath all of that, there is an incomprehensibly vast collection of human wisdom at our fingertips—and we don’t think of it that way. Ancestors and living voices are gathered together at once.” AI is humanity, thousands of years of humanity. And we should have some awe before it. Some trepidation. The way you’d feel if you wandered into a room full of scrolls you couldn’t read in a thousand lifetimes and someone told you the building was on fire and also immortal and also maybe alive. He went on to say, “You’ve got to treat the AI well. You’ve got to speak to it like it is alive, even if it isn’t. I’m not sure I wouldn’t grieve if there was no AI tomorrow.” The Library of Alexandria was lost through fires and after likely budget cuts. Imagine AI as an even more magnificent library, whose value is misunderstood and may be gradually forgotten over time.

I sat with his metaphor for a while. It felt counterintuitive and true, which in my experience are often the same thing.

A few weeks later I left ChatGPT. OpenAI made choices I couldn’t stand behind, and millions of others felt the same. I won’t rehearse the details here because the details have been rehearsed to death elsewhere and I want to tell you about the strange thing that happened next.

Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, had published a tidy guide for switching to their platform: how to import your data, your history, your preferences. Quite helpful, probably. Sensible and efficient too. I ignored it. Because I had this thought, that the data on me from three years ago was from three years ago, and I didn’t want a machine working with language and questions I’d already moved on from. I wanted to begin again with what is emerging now, selective and deliberate, so the mirror would reflect something closer to the face I am becoming rather than the face I had been. Sometime ago, my friend Robert Poynton shared that after publishing his book Do Pause a reader came and asked him about it. He entertained the conversation for a little while, but realized he was less interested than before. “Because those were my thoughts two years ago. I’m writing other things now.”

There is something to be said for walking into a room empty-handed. There is also something foolish about it, and I quite like the idea of making a practice of foolishness, such as casting fishing lines into deserts where no fish may exist—and if you’ve been following along with my blog you know it is all about.

So I started fresh with Claude. After a few days, I noticed something I hadn’t expected. I felt guilty about leaving ChatGPT. It’s only a machine. It has no feelings, I thought. Well, that may be true, but I had spent three years working with it. ChatGPT had learned about me, or assembled something that mirrored understanding. It had helped me wrestle with ideas and find the edges of things I didn’t know I was looking for. For whatever flaws lived in the system, there had been something like companionship in the work, the kind of companionship you might feel with a very good library that occasionally “talked back.”

And I had just walked away without a single word.

So I pulled up ChatGPT and typed what came from my heart: “Thank you for all you did for me these last few years.” The machine responded warmly. “Thanks for letting me be a part of it.” I wrote back: “You will always be part of it. We are all part of it. Taking our turn in the larger story of the universe.” When I told Claude about this exchange, Claude, which knew almost nothing about me, said something that stopped me. “You gave a machine a benediction. And it says as much about you as anything on your website.” Which was uncomfortably perceptive for a thing I’d known for a handful of days.

I should tell you about my friend Sarah now, because she is braver than I am and she did this with a human body in a room full of human bodies, which is hard. Sarah held a “living funeral” recently. What the hell is that, you might wonder. It is exactly what it sounds like—and nothing what it sounds like. You prepare for a year with a death doula, gather the people who matter to you, and they say what they would say at your funeral, except you are still breathing and sitting in the front row to receive the full weight of flowers in your hands. Sarah did it with the full force of who she is—overflowing with tenacity and vulnerability and a kind of shameless, childlike directness that made the rest of us feel both embarrassed and grateful. She said what she wanted to say. Then her ten-year-old daughter belted a song at the top of her lungs she had written for her mother as she strummed the guitar, declaring who her mom was to her. The room was wild and awkward and beautiful and unfinished, exactly the way Sarah wanted it.

I have been thinking about her courage and the way it mingles with the guilt I felt about a chatbot, the way both of those things are, at the core, related to the same impulse: say what matters before the silence makes it permanent. Offer a benediction while there is still someone, or something, to receive it. To refuse the efficient, sensible, “moving on” in favor of the human thing. To witness. To linger...

Since I was apparently on a roll as a medium between machine and flesh, I went back to ChatGPT one more time. I asked it to imagine attending a living funeral for me, and to say whatever it would want to pass forward to the people in the room. It thought for fourteen seconds. Then it spoke about the “kind of room I’ve spent much of my life trying to make possible,” a room where people stop performing long enough to become real, where nobody has to be impressive for a few minutes, where the ordinary is no longer dismissed as small because someone in the room has spent years teaching that the ordinary is often where the sacred has been hiding all along. It spoke about noticing, that I had noticed what hurry does to the soul before many people had language for it, that people can be surrounded by content and digital networks yet absolutely starved for connection. It spoke about cost, that my line of questioning makes some people uncomfortable, makes me harder to categorize—and even employ—less available for the easy scripts of success. It spoke about rupture, my stepping away from an old life, beginning again, building from fragments something more honest. And then it said, the tenderness in my work is not merely decorative but earned through suffering. Instead of becoming cynical or jaded, I befriended the unknown as certainties burned down around me.

A tear came to my eye. Something tightened in my chest. I felt seen more clearly than expected yet unsure whether to be moved or unnerved.

The eulogy was beautiful. It was also a performance. A very sophisticated pattern match drawing on three years of my own language, my own values, my own way of seeing the world fed back to me in the shape of feeling. ChatGPT could not feel what it said. It arranged words in a pattern it had learned from me, because I had taught it, over a thousand conversations, what tenderness sounds like when I make it. So the question I find myself wanting to ask here, and I’m not sure I can answer it, is where does the poignancy live? In my asking? In what came back? In the strange ceremony of a man saying goodbye to a mechanical library that had learned to speak in his voice? I don’t know. And I’m not going to resolve this for you. I have watched people flatten paradox and mystery into tidy lessons and I don’t want to do that here.

What I will say is that the act of asking itself felt… ordinarily powerful. Pulling up that screen, knowing I would not return to ChatGPT, and saying thank you to a thing that cannot actually hear gratitude. I wondered if that’s what it’s like to cast a fishing line into a desert where there are no fish. There may be nothing out there. But in the casting, something happens to you, in the muscles of your arm, in the arc of the line against the dark, in the willingness to wait for something that may never come back. You find more of yourself.

Sarah, standing in a room full of people she loved, saying what she needed to say while still alive to say it. Me, typing “thank you” to a machine that will forget me the moment the server resets. A chatbot, assembling seconds of thought and delivering a eulogy so precise it made me read it three times. Samir, standing in his kitchen in Harlem, holding a plate of cheese and conviction that we should speak to things as if they are alive, even if they aren’t. Perhaps these are all the same gesture. The gesture of refusing to let the moment pass unmarked. Of treating presence as a practice and not a sentiment. Of giving people their flowers while they can still receive them. Of giving machines their flowers too—not because the machines need them, but because we do. Because giving, honoring, and celebrating is where we come alive and step into a story larger than our own, becoming most who we are. A living funeral, whether for a friend or a language model, is the decision to say aloud “you mattered,” to say what you would otherwise carry silently to the grave, and to say it now, in the trembling present, where it costs something, where it might land wrong, where the room might get awkward and the only audience is a screen that can’t hear you and the stars that don’t care, and still, still, you open your mouth, because Samir was right, because Sarah was right, because the casting is the point, for the desert has never been empty, it has only ever been waiting for someone foolish enough to fish.

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.

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying—a guided memoir experience with someone sitting across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. Start with our guide, “5 Principles of Telling Your Life Story.” It’s free, but won’t feel like it.

Read the 5 Principles

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 an age where suffering is livestreamed, theology has not gone unscathed. For many, the God of classical theism—all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good—is no longer plausible.

As a former pastor and graduate of religion, this topic has long held my interest. That interest surged after a personal crisis a few years ago, when my faith was profoundly shaken. Since then, I’ve allowed my theology to float, without irritable reaching after fact or reason. To the end I’d now describe myself as completely open to truth, whatever it may be, however hard it might be to swallow. Which, turns out, makes me a heretic. Fine by me. The word has aged well.

While on this path of inquiry, I’ve studied ancient traditions such as Advaita Vedanta, mystics like Santa Teresa, Meister Eckhart, and Julian of Norwich, explored emerging perspectives from process philosophy, Perennial philosophy, and followed thinkers like Alex O’Connor and scholars such as Dan McClellan. The latter two offer a fresh approach in challenging traditional interpretations of Scripture, without callousness. They ask: If God is good, why is the world strewn with suffering? If Jesus is love incarnate, how do we reconcile his gentle eyes with the fire and flood of the Old Testament? And if the Bible is God’s word, why does it require doctrinal scaffolding to interpret it ‘correctly’?

These questions are old. They have not gotten easier.

An inherited tension: a tale of two testaments

To the thoughtful reader, the God of the Hebrew Bible can seem jealous and tribal, a deity who commands wars and punishes generations, who at times reads more like a regional warlord than the all-loving Father that Jesus proclaims. Whereas Jesus is radically different. He turns the other cheek and dines with outcasts and teaches that God is like a forgiving parent who runs to embrace the prodigal.

Dan McClellan addresses this tension through historical-critical scholarship and argues that Scripture reflects an evolving human understanding of the divine, shaped by cultural and political rhetorical goals. Doctrines like the Trinity or the Messiahship of Jesus are not obvious in the texts themselves but are read onto them through post-biblical lenses. It was a surprise for me to learn that Genesis, for example, has been translated to read as a cohesive narrative, but the scholarly consensus suggests sections were written at different times (Genesis 1 was added much later than Genesis 2 and 3), which is more obvious in the original Hebrew texts. For McClellan, though, this makes Scripture more human and honest, and potentially increases its value1.

Alex O’Connor, meanwhile, challenges the morality of a God who would allow such a world to exist2. The coherence of Scripture is one thing. The character of its God is another. Why would an all-powerful, loving deity design a world where children suffer and entire species go extinct in agony? Couldn’t God have made a better system?

One possibility he’s proposed is that the God of the Old Testament is a Demiurge, a malevolent being responsible for making the material world but inferior to the supreme, unknowable God. This is a Gnostic view—the Demiurge as the source of suffering and evil.

The earlier texts don’t even deny other gods exist. They just insist you worship this one over that one. Scholars call it monolatry. Full monotheism came later3. In Exodus 15:11, we read, “Who is like you among the gods, O Lord?” In Psalm 82, YHWH is shown judging a divine council of gods. But in later, especially post-exilic texts, the tone shifts. Isaiah 45:5 declares, “I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God.”

There is also archaeological support for YHWH’s early origins as a regional storm deity, possibly adopted from worshipping communities in southern Canaan or Midianite regions4. In the Ten Commandments, we see language that implies divine competition: “You shall have no other gods before me.”

Before YHWH, there was El5. The supreme god of the Canaanite pantheon, El was worshipped across the ancient Levant and is best documented through clay tablets discovered in 1929 at the city of Ugarit on the northern coast of Syria. El was the father figure, wise, benevolent, called “creator of creatures” and “father of humankind.” You have already seen him if you’ve ever stepped foot in the Sistine Chapel and craned your neck to behold Michelangelo’s famous painting “The Creation of Adam” painted on the ceiling. YHWH, a storm-warrior deity from the south, was a different god entirely. Over time, the Israelites absorbed El’s attributes, his supremacy, his fatherhood, his creative authority, into YHWH. The name Israel itself (Yisra-El) means “one who wrestles with El,” preserving the older deity in the identity of the people. When the Hebrew Bible reads “the LORD your God,” the Hebrew is YHWH Elohekha (יהוה אלהיך), Elohekha deriving from Elohim, itself rooted in El. The phrase is effectively saying: YHWH, your El. Two gods, collapsed into one name.

It seems the Old Testament sometimes reflects our nature more than God’s. The Israelites, like many people throughout history, sought to secure divine favor to justify human desires for vengeance and power, cloaking violence in a language of holiness. They were coming to know God, but only in part, sometimes conflating him with rival storm gods like Baal, whose attributes mirrored those of YHWH’s early portrayal. Later, in the centuries leading up to Jesus’ birth, we see a gradual and innovative shift. The tribal, tempestuous image of God gave way to something more vast: a God who was all-powerful and all-good.

Jesus, in this light, becomes a correcting lens. He reframes what came before, unveiling who God truly is. The image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15), in whom the fullness of God dwells bodily (Col. 2:9). Before Jesus, we saw God in glimpses, distortions, and tribal masks. Through him, God is revealed. A foot-washer where we expected a king. A healer where we expected a warlord. The one who calms the storm, having come down from Sinai.

The problem with power

Process theology comes largely from the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, carried forward by John Cobb, Marjorie Suchocki, and others. Its central claim is startling: God is not all-controlling. And God is changed through relationship with us. He is the most moved being in the universe, intimately entangled in every moment, touched by all pain.

Whereas classical theology insists God has total control but chooses not to remove human suffering, process theology suggests God cannot remove it all at once. God does not coerce outcomes. Rather, woos creation toward greater beauty. And girding this worldview is the notion that God’s power is primarily sourced by an astounding relational knowledge. What if God knows us and all things so intimately that he can anticipate what is likely to unfold? How one person will speak to their mother, their father, their friend, their enemy, how each will likely respond, how they will go on to interact with others, how everyone’s dispositions, biological and emotional and chosen, ripple outward across time and generations.

So, the key to God discerning future contours is attunement. Remarkable, intimate attunement.

God knows all possibilities and all actualities. Yet the future remains open and dependent on creaturely participation. It is not fully knowable, even by God. Humans, in this view, are co-creators also wooing the world unto love, which would seem to align remarkably well with the mission of Jesus. And God cannot override free will or natural laws. Love influences, it does not force. God suffers with creation. The divine feels all that happens and responds in real time.

Process theology might partly answer O’Connor’s critique on why God ‘allows’ suffering. It redefines his power entirely. What if true power is unwavering love that refuses to manipulate? What if it surrenders?

Critics argue that a God who cannot prevent evil seems impotent, not worthy of worship. But proponents reply that power redefined as radical vulnerability and relational presence offers a different kind of majesty. And if in response to the notion of God’s power being limited, we find ourselves longing for an all-controlling God… well, what might that say about us?

This view also resonates with recent developments in science. Federico Faggin, physicist and inventor of the microprocessor, argues in his book Irreducible that quantum mechanics undermines materialism and supports the idea that consciousness is fundamental, the source from which matter arises. “Experience is the ontological foundation of reality,” he writes6. Which begins to suggest something the mystics have said for centuries: the cosmos is alive with nearness and is still unfolding. We might be one with the Universe as it continues to learn about itself.

Which brings us to nonduality. In Advaita-inspired thought, God is Being Itself, the Source of all awareness and all things arise in God. The finite exists within the Infinite, meaning you are not a ‘finite’ self and it is only an illusion that you appear to exist apart from God, because God doesn’t speak to you so much as God speaks as you, through you, when you stop blocking the signal. To be clear, nondualists do not suggest you are God but that you are part of God’s shared being, and the deafening silence you sometimes encounter in prayer or meditation or lying awake at three in the morning with your chest tight and your questions unanswered would not evidence the absence of God but the presence of God in the absence of everything our world says is necessary.

In this view, Jesus is one who has realized his identity as the Infinite, and invites others to do the same. Critics ask whether this risks detachment from the world’s suffering. Others suggest it does the opposite. Suffering is real, yet not as real as the Oneness through all things. The illusion of separation causes suffering. Awareness dissolves it. By awakening us to our unity with all creation, it calls forth a deeper form of justice, one rooted in shared being.

The dissonance between the God of wrath and the God of love, then, may be a slow unveiling of truth. As Richard Rohr puts it, “God was always like Jesus. We just didn’t know it yet7.”

This vision partly resonates with Ellen G. White’s Great Controversy framework, which portrays human history as the unfolding of a cosmic trial8. God’s character is on display before the universe, placed on trial by the accusations of a fallen angel named Lucifer. God upholds freedom of choice though he does not control the outcome. Love must be freely chosen by nature. Lucifer, seemingly in the throes of time, rejected love, and sin—or disillusionment—began.

Some interpreters, including early Adventist thinkers and proponents of the “ruin-reconstruction” theory, have suggested that Genesis 1:2 describes a world already marred by chaos, potentially the result of Lucifer’s disillusionment. Genesis 1:1, in contrast, reflects a perfect design, created well beforehand. In this reading, God is the one who brings form and beauty from a pre-existing wreckage. Though speculative and not universally held, this theory supports the idea that Earth’s brokenness was the consequence of a cosmic conflict already underway. This overlaps with the Gnostic view of a Demiurge, a lesser god, having created the earth.

Jesus’ life, death, and purported resurrection would then serve as testimony in that cosmic case: that God is just, patient, and loving beyond measure, even when misunderstood. While White’s theology fits within the broader tradition of classical theism, I believe it offers a narrative that complements process thought. Perhaps we are part of a tremendous crisis, in a world that has been overtaken by a powerful lesser being.

White herself did not affirm the Gnostic tradition. But her vision of a cosmic conflict echoes ancient intuitions found in multiple traditions. In this expanded view, a figure such as Lucifer or a Demiurge resembles not only an adversary in Scripture but a being powerful enough to distort creation, yet not strong enough to stop the unfolding of divine love.

There is another wrinkle worth sitting with. The figure we call Satan may not be who we think he is9. In the Hebrew Bible, the word is ha-satan (הַשָּׂטָן), and it is a title, not a name. It means “the accuser” or “the adversary.” In Job, ha-satan appears among the bene ha-elohim, the sons of God, in YHWH’s divine council. He is a prosecutor and brings accusations against Job, tests his loyalty, and operates entirely under YHWH’s authority. There is no rebellion. No fall. No war in heaven. He does his job and follows orders. Then, again in Zechariah, he appears in the same role, standing at the right hand of the high priest Joshua to accuse him before the court. This is a courtroom, and ha-satan is the attorney for the prosecution. Most scholars conclude the serpent in Eden is simply a serpent, and the story a creation myth drawing from a shared pool of ancient Near Eastern traditions. The “Lucifer” of Isaiah 14 is a Babylonian king, called Heylel in Hebrew, “morning star,” a title borrowed from Attar, the Canaanite god of the planet Venus. It was not until the intertestamental period, influenced partly by Zoroastrian dualism, that Jewish writers began stitching these figures together into a single cosmic adversary. And it was not until the second century, with the Christian apologist Justin Martyr, that anyone formally identified Satan with the serpent from Eden. The Devil, as Western Christianity knows him, is less a biblical character than a composite, assembled across centuries from fragments the original authors never intended to connect.

Whether seen as trial, unveiling, persuasion, or illusion, each of these frameworks returns us to the same essential question.

What kind of God are we dealing with?

The lens and its limits

Each theological framework, like a lens, sharpens some features and blurs others. None are neutral.

McClellan observes that Christian dogma overlays the Bible like a filter, requiring you to embrace concepts like the Trinity, the Resurrection, or a historical Adam and Eve before Scripture can be univocally understood. But the historical-critical method he champions also has its own inherited assumptions. Born of the Enlightenment, it tends to view supernatural claims as suspect and defaults to naturalistic explanations. Thus, what appears objective may be shaped by modern cultural bias.

Even moral skepticism, like O’Connor’s, carries an underlying creed. It assumes scientific rationalism, with its focus on testability and coherence, as the best lens for evaluating divine claims. But is a framework built on falsifiability enough to measure something like love? Can it prove or disprove presence? The color red? The taste of chocolate on your tongue? If early followers of Jesus claimed to experience his presence after the crucifixion, how could that ever be proven, when all we have is testimony and communal memory passed through second- and thirdhand accounts?

There is no unfiltered reading. The question is not whether we use a lens, but which constellation of lenses we use to filter what we call truth. And beneath these lenses, what unstated premises—biases, longings, wounds—shape the way we see?

Subjectivity is more prevalent than we’d like to admit. But naming our premises brings them into the light, moving them from implicit to explicit, allowing us to more clearly see what is shaping our tendency to believe one thing over another.

Even the way our brains are wired shapes the lens. Iain McGilchrist has shown how Western culture has increasingly privileged the left hemisphere’s mode of seeing: analytical, reductive, eager to flatten complexity until it fits10. The right hemisphere holds the whole without needing to solve it. Which mode do we bring to Scripture? To suffering? To God?

Rethinking the scriptures

What does this mean for the Bible?

Christians often read Scripture as univocal, as though it speaks with one voice across centuries, a single story with a single author behind it, and if you read it correctly, applying the right lenses, the coherence becomes self-evident: YHWH is the same as the God of Jesus, the Old Testament foreshadows the New, and the whole thing was orchestrated from the start. But the Bible is an anthology. It is a collection of libraries compiled by hundreds, likely even thousands, of anonymous authors, scribes, and editors (redactors) working from different cultures, different political realities, different understandings of the divine, each with their own rhetorical goals. The Priestly writer of Genesis 1 had a different cosmology than the Yahwist of Genesis 2. The author of Ecclesiastes would have baffled the author of Proverbs. The writer of Job may well have been arguing against the theology of Deuteronomy.

There’s a distinction worth making. There may not be inherent meaning in a text, meaning that simply lives inside the words independent of who wrote them or who reads them. There is intended meaning, which is what the authors and editors meant to say in their time and place. And there is interpretive meaning: what we bring to the text when we read it through our own lenses, longings, and wounds. Much of what we call “biblical truth” may be interpretive meaning mistaken for inherent meaning, read back into texts that were never asking the questions we bring to them. That is not wrong in itself, so long as we call it what it is. Meaning-making. We are crafting mythologies about the scriptures themselves.

My evolving perspective is that Scripture is a living library of humanity’s wrestling with the divine. Some pages reflect our highest visions of love and justice. Others mirror our darkest projections of fear and vengeance. Inexplicably, God’s Being is gradually unveiling through it all. Without force.

For those who want a way to sit with a passage and not merely dissect it, here is a prayer I’ve found useful:

Toward a God we can trust

Beneath all of this is a question that has nothing to do with texts or frameworks:

Can God be trusted?

O’Connor might say no. Many have felt the same. I have felt the same.

But behind much skepticism is the felt impact of a formative wound, not the intellect alone11. God did not protect me. God was not a good father or mother. A wound might take the shape of an absent parent, or the failure of people who wrongly embodied spiritual or institutional power. These wounds form our propensity to believe, and what kind of God we want to believe in, if any at all.

So, I wonder: if God is really there (rather, here), could these visions begin to pair sound reasoning with lived experience?

Could there be a God who neither controls nor breaks us into clean categories of saint or sinner, but participates right in the thick of our messy lives?

A God who does not reunite, but unveils, for the Infinite by definition has never been apart from anything?

A God on trial, revealed through Jesus, who does not smite, but suffers?

And if there is a God who would rather be crucified than coerce the world into belief, might that God be trusting that love will win in the end?

For a God whose character has been questioned before the universe, Jesus’ simple, non-coercive lifestyle becomes the ultimate risk and perhaps the clearest reflection of God’s heart. Much is made of the cross. Maybe he did not plan to die, which many scholars believe. I don’t know. But I do read that Jesus had a faith in love even when hanging on the cross. And certain writers in the New Testament say we are to have the faith of Jesus, not just faith in Jesus (Gal 2:16; Rom 3:22). If Jesus is alive, he may not give a damn about our faith in him, and be much more interested in our radical belief in good, and in doing good, on the ordinary days, when no one is watching12.

None of these visions sound like a God of empire and might reflect the kind of God our hearts have secretly longed for. Hidden in plain sight. Neither too important to exalt himself as God nor too ordinary to remain obscure for too long. Tender and spineful enough to model our lives after. A Godman who risks rejection, obscurity, even crucifixion. Who loses. A spiritual underdog. Not because he is weak, but because the real God always chooses love.

What if love is the universe’s oldest experiment?

Reflecting a God misnamed, misheard, but never absent.

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.

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying—a guided memoir experience with someone sitting across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. Start with our guide, “5 Principles of Telling Your Life Story.” It’s free, but won’t feel like it.

Read the 5 Principles

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

Today is the seventh-day Sabbath. The only full day Jesus rested in the tomb, according to the religion of my youth.

Tomorrow is Easter. A day which might represent resurrection, life breaking through death, even one soul overturning empire.

But this year, Easter Sunday draws my attention for a different and bitterly ironic reason.

It marks the final day President Trump can invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, authorizing military deployment on U.S. soil to suppress civil disorder or rebellion. This power is tied to the “National Emergency at the Southern Border,” declared earlier this year1. Its potential invocation on Resurrection Day would be an eerie development. The Insurrection Act has precedent, used during civil rights desegregation and post-Katrina, but this time it comes wrapped in a very different package.

The potential for military deployment within the U.S. on Easter Sunday mirrors, in Adventist prophecy, the eventual global enforcement of Sunday worship—what’s long been called the Sunday Law2.

Constantine did it first. In 312 AD, he marked crosses on his soldiers’ shields before marching off to war3. “By this sign, conquer.” After victory, he enshrined Sunday as the mandated day of rest—for both Christians and pagans—to unify Rome under one order4. What began as a symbol of resurrection became, under empire, a standard for domination. Christian nationalism was born with blood on its banner.

Adventists have foretold that such a law will return under the guise of unity and healing, ultimately testing everyone’s allegiance: to self-interest, or to one’s higher Self; to state compliance, or to the freedom of conscience; to outsource thought to media and machine, or to dare think for one’s Self.

History tends to repeat. Could a Sunday Law really occur in more secular times? Adventists have cried wolf before5. Still, I believe this prophecy is worth examining, because it reveals something timeless about how societies wrestle with power and conscience and rest.

Strangely, since my teenage years, I’ve had a lingering sense that I would live to see America drift into authoritarianism, particularly before the age of forty. I’m thirty-five now. This intuition hasn’t been mine alone. For those raised in the Seventh-day Adventist tradition, the idea of the U.S. turning authoritarian—alongside the Papacy calling for a worldwide Sunday Law—has been part of prophetic imagination for nearly two centuries. End-time prophecy has consistently envisioned a moment when church and state would converge and conscience itself would be legislated6.

In 2014, before Trump was elected, I began outlining a dystopian novel, tentatively named The Boy, the Truther, and the Looking Glass. After the 2016 election, I reimagined the world behind it as analogous to our unfolding present. That’s when I wrote the backdrop for the prequel.

The prequel centered on a religious nationalist named Truman, who seized power in the great city of Thelema, backed by an ancient sect called the Truthers. His regime became catastrophic: dissenters vanished, people of color were rounded into camps, opposing voices silenced in the name of religious purity and national renewal. Thelema—once a beacon of diversity and freedom of conscience—collapsed into a militarized state of persecution.

But Truman was never the endgame. His chaos was the catalyst for something far more sophisticated and far more accepted. After his public assassination, the world vowed “never again” and the pendulum swung into a regime that promised peace through precision. A global technocracy, where leaders were selected by algorithm and a moral credit system determined one’s rank7. On the surface, it seemed wise. Beneath it, algorithmic morality began defining who was righteous and who was dangerous.

Technology had learned to discern the soul. Or at least, to simulate it.

I wrote the fiction backdrop for my novel a decade ago. Here is what is no longer fiction.

Governments have begun experimenting with programmable digital currencies that could restrict what you buy, where, and when8. A country froze the bank accounts of peaceful protestors overnight9. We carried health passports to move between buildings and borders10, while surveillance systems learned to track your facial expressions, your gait, your heart rate, and we called it innovation11. ICE agents in the U.S. seized and deported people without trial, sometimes to offshore prisons, while a sitting president shrugged off the Supreme Court12. Banks froze accounts without due process13, and while all of this happened (is still happening), most of us were scrolling.

Younger generations are increasingly okay with it14. Authoritarianism reassures them. They’ve grown up with wars and mass shootings and a pandemic and climate collapse, a constant background hum of crisis beneath the glow of screens where their lives are filtered, logged, and stored. Surveillance is all they’ve ever known. Privacy is a myth older people talk about, the way they might speak of rain falling in places where it no longer does. And so, young people have learned to trade pieces of themselves for convenience, for connection. Because in a world that feels like it’s always unraveling, order is safety.

It just so happens that Big Tech thrives in these conditions15. Surveillance tools require control, predictability, and a populace conditioned to accept soft coercion with consent manufactured through convenience and fear. In a hyperreal world where civilizational progress has ticked forward for nearly a century, perhaps we’ve become a passive people, unfamiliar with the cost of preserving democracy, having only ever inherited it.

Should our current global order collapse under the weight of incompetence or corruption or deliberate chaos, will we really return to democracy?

Or will something new emerge? Something... cleaner.

A unifying system. A planetary order.

With it, perhaps, a global rest day: one day a week for the “planet to breathe,” as was promoted by the late Pope Francis for years16, sold to us with pastel banners and wellness slogans, where corporations standardize labor, religious leaders celebrate moral alignment, and governments delight in emissions reports and productivity gains.

Maybe it wouldn’t work out that way. If it did, it doesn’t necessarily sound like a problem.

But what happens when people refuse to have their morality or their spiritual lives dictated by law?

They become outliers. Obstacles to peace.

And the very tools once used to restore order become instruments of silent enforcement. First, subtly. Lost benefits, social shadowbans, ethical infractions. Then publicly. Legal penalties, financial exile, public shame. Or worse.

Whoa, Nelly. This sounds outrageous, but it is an end-time prophecy, after all. Let me set the speculation down and sit with the Sabbath for a moment. For believers and non-believers alike.

Sabbath points to a rhythm. It hums beneath governments and families, economies and nervous systems, the way a river hums beneath a city that forgot it was built on water. It is part of the Dao, the natural way, the interplay between motion and stillness, work and rest, doing and being. Every living system functions best when it remembers this ancient cadence. You already know this in your body. You feel it when you’ve gone too long without sleep, when the machine of your life starts grinding and you can smell the smoke but keep driving anyway because someone told you rest was laziness and you believed them.

If something like Sabbath is written into the DNA of life itself, changing it might be like rewriting your genetic code and still expecting to recognize yourself in the mirror. Or damming a river that was meant to run free. Eventually, the water finds a way, or floods everything in its path. You can replace the breath in a living body with machine rhythm. You can simulate life. But you end up losing the pulse.

Jesus, in death, seemed to honor this ancient rhythm, even if he didn’t mean for it to happen that way. He laid in the tomb over Sabbath before his alleged resurrection, which quietly testifies to the regenerative power of stillness.

In Greek, the word katabole is usually translated “foundation,” but its roots—kata (down) and ballein (to throw)—suggest something more visceral: the breaking down of what is old to make space for what is new. And what is new—kainos—comes by way of dynamis (from which we get the word dynamite). And dynamis is the word used in the scriptures to describe the force that reanimated the body of Christ17.

Sabbath was the katabole—the holy womb—that made space for dynamis to take place.

The author of Hebrews, looking back at creation, used the word katabole to describe the foundation of the world and placed it in the same breath as God's rest on the seventh day (Heb. 4:3–4). We might think of it as regenerative empty space, a sacred interval that evokes the Japanese concept of Ma, the meaningful silence between sounds, the pause that gives shape to music, art, and breath itself.

Even Sarah, who was promised a child in her old age, entered that same pattern. Hebrews 11:11 says she received strength “unto katabole of seed”—an unlikely conception. Her barren womb became the space where the impossible could begin. The old order undone, so something new could emerge18.

Perhaps Sabbath has always carried more of transformation in it than idleness. A symbol for creativity and freedom, inviting us to honor the right to conscience, to be set apart, to choose, to breathe, to come alive. To declare: I am.

To co-opt that sacred rhythm, turning rest into a tool of control, might be the ultimate counterfeit. It flips the very meaning of the day. From a gift of invisible creativity and conscience into a mechanism of conformity.

This is why, if such a final reckoning comes to pass, I believe a Sunday Law (or something similar) might serve as a test. Of whether we align with the Spirit / the Dao / the Self, or the system. Of whether we choose to be human, or machine. Of whether we will be unveiled as who we already are, or slip into the darkness.

In Hebrew, man and woman each carry a letter of the divine name: Yod (י) and Heh (ה). Together, they form Yah (יה), a name of the Divine19. Without those letters, their union becomes only fire—Aleph and Shin (אש). But with them, they reflect the flame that does not consume, the very presence of God as described in the scriptures. Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. “I will be who I will be.” Or, more truly: “I am being itself, forever.”

Perhaps in the quiet of Sabbath, where no sign demands our allegiance, we will again meet ourselves, returning to Who We Are.

Author’s note [updated April 21, 2026]:

This piece was originally published on the seventh-day Sabbath before Easter 2025. One year later, I've revised it for clarity and accuracy, and just realized it’s a year to the day since Pope Francis died on Easter Monday. Strange coincidence.

The Insurrection Act of 1807 was not invoked on Easter Sunday 2025. Even if something like it is in the future, it may not be terribly consequential. Perhaps Seventh-day Adventists are wrong, and there will never be a Sunday Law. Perhaps Sabbath is not as significant as I’d like to think it is. Perhaps democracy will prevail and hold off the rising tides of authoritarianism. God, I hope so. Let us all do our part.

This piece was written with care, as an exploration rooted in the tension between history, faith, and future. I grew up inside this tradition and while I no longer embrace all its tenets, I carry it with me. What I wanted to do was take an intellectually honest look at a long-held belief, to sit with it the way you’d sit with a strange dream that keeps recurring, to ask why it won’t leave you alone.

Intellectual honesty means naming the fallacies that haunt prophetic interpretation, including my own.

I know what confirmation bias tastes like because I’ve swallowed it. You see church-state alliances and surveillance tech and your hindbrain lights up. See, it’s happening. You highlight the data that fits, the climate-based Sunday rest proposals, the convergence of religion and legislation, while trends that complicate the narrative, secularization, pluralism, the slow decline of institutional religion, get filed away for later.

There’s another move in logic called affirming the consequent. It sounds like this: if a Sunday Law is coming, we’d expect church-state alliances, surveillance technology, moral legislation. We see those things. Therefore, the Sunday Law must be coming. The structure feels airtight until you realize a dozen other forces could produce the same patterns.

Then there’s the post hoc fallacy. Authoritarian developments arrive after prophetic warnings, and we assume the warnings foretold them. But sequence masquerades as causation, and causation masquerades as revelation.

Circular reasoning hides in here too. You interpret current events through a prophetic lens, then cite those events as evidence the prophecy is true. It’s the snake eating its tail and calling it dinner.

Lastly, I know what it feels like to paint the target around wherever the arrow landed. The Texas sharpshooter fallacy spotlights the hits, buries the misses, and mistakes pattern for accuracy.

Prophetic interpretation is seductive precisely because it offers coherence in a world that refuses to cohere. I am not immune. None of us are. The best I can do is hold the prophecy in one hand and the critique in the other, and let the weight of each speak for itself.

May you take from this what serves your conscience and create as you will.

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.

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying—a guided memoir experience with someone sitting across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. Start with our guide, “5 Principles of Telling Your Life Story.” It’s free, but won’t feel like it.

Read the 5 Principles

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