Radical Eros

This will be the last letter for this year. I'm leaving for the Amazon in a few days where I'll be on a plant diet in an isolated community. I'll miss a few festivities while I'm gone, as this is the time of the year to celebrate. So, my last letter of the year is about ceremony. It's 5 AM on a Wednesday in the Sacred Valley. We are jolted awake by a PA system blaring through our neighborhood. Some guy driving around announcing something in Spanish I'm still half-catching through sleep fog...

It's the last night of our earthwalk. October. Ten days deep into the wild, and eight of them rained. Rain that makes you question everything - your gear, your choices, the sanity of voluntarily sleeping on the ground when you could be in a bed somewhere warm. Four of us made this trek. Self-selected, in a way. The kind of people who sign up for discomfort because something in us knows we need it. We're sitting around a fire. The night before, we had a heart circle. One woman talked about her...

It's evening time here in the valley. The collective buses are filling up with families - kids, parents, grandparents - heading into town. Not because they need anything. Not because there's an event or obligation. They're going to the plaza, to the streets, to meander through life together. I call it purposeful meandering. The purpose is simply to be with life. I didn't know what I was missing until I gave up my conveniences for this simplicity. You know that saying - you don't know what you...

There's a reason the buffalo heads toward the storm. Not around it. Not away from it. Through it. Because they know this: the shortest path to the other side isn't the easiest one. It's the most direct. I'm sitting here in the Sacred Valley, watching how people live. Really live. Not the Instagram version. Not the retreat center fantasy. Just... living. Sitting around. Being with each other. Being with themselves. None of them are out there chasing ceremonies every weekend. They're just here....

I'm writing from a small casita in the Sacred Valley of Peru, tucked between Urubamba and Pisac. Kids are playing next door. The mountains rise directly in front of me. Behind the house, I hear a waterfall that never stops. This is my third time here in four years. There's something about these lands, I keep telling people. Simplicity - not by choice, but by necessity. Abundance - not of money or convenience or luxury, but of laughter and joy and a oneness. A rootedness and connection to...

A year and a half ago, I wrote to you from this same terminal. Terminal M at Vancouver International Airport. You can read that letter in the archives. It was my second time writing from this departure gate in four years, and somehow, it's become a ritual. A rite of passage. This is where I leave for Peru—a place that holds my deepest healing, my most sacred transformations. In four days, I'll be walking through this terminal again. But this time feels different. What's Changed Since Last...

It's Saturday morning. Rain hammers my window on the wet coast. Wind tears through the trees. A bald eagle hovers outside, suspended in the storm, completely still in the chaos. I'm feeling my wound extra big this week. My biggest wound is that I'm never enough. That no matter what I do, I'll never be enough. I've done the work around this. Years of it. I've invested every dollar I've ever made into my own healing. Not counting, but if I'd kept all that money, I'd have enough for a down...

Reader, “You say that you are sometimes experiencing the great silence and immensity of being, and you would like to always be in that experience. But the truth is you are the great silence and immensity of being in whose vastness the sense of someone dreaming about discovering and remaining in the immensity of being is appearing.” — Mooji, White Fire. Today, I'm going to share with you about Ho’oponopono, a Hawaiian spiritual practice of reconciliation and forgiveness that will crack you...

Reader, From one sunset to another. Another year around the sun. I turned 37 three days ago, in the South Chilcotin Mountains of British Columbia with 12 centimeters of snow on the ground, 1400 grams of pemmican in my pack as the only food source, and with no idea of what I was doing. Nine days. No tent. No modern camping gear. Just a blanket pack and four other people who actually knew how to survive in the wild. I was the new guy. The imposter. The one who didn't belong. And it was my...

Reader, We're in the final stage before collapse. And it's not what you think. In his research on "The Changing World Order," Ray Dalio identified the cyclical nature of how empires rise and fall. Not through dramatic external conquests, but through predictable internal deterioration. Six stages that repeat like clockwork across centuries: New Order Emerges (post-war reconstruction) Peace and Prosperity (economic boom, innovation) Financial Strain (debt accumulation, overextension) Internal...