One morning not so long ago, I found myself seated in a circle of strangers, meditating on world peace.

Breathe in suffering, said our facilitator. Breathe out peace.

The prayer practice was part of a new initiative called Prayers for Peace started by a friend and based on coastal Maine, where I’ve been holed up this summer. The idea of it is to get thousands of strangers around the world to all commit to a weekly peace-based prayer practice, so at all times, someone somewhere is praying for world peace.

I’d arrived anxious. Scattered. Afraid of so many things. So much suffering welled up in me when I took those first breaths. Suffering that felt both internal and external — connected to my own life and also to the collective pain so many people across the earth are experiencing.

It built up to a crescendo.

And then something happened. The pain shifted. Then it lessened. Peace started to grow stronger within me.

I spent the rest of the afternoon on a high. The woods had never looked so luminous and soft. Everyone in my life seemed like an angel. I couldn’t believe I’d never seen it before.

I’ve spent a lot of time meditating, and have even completed a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat, but I think what gave this practice so much potency is that it was a collective effort based on a collective intention — peace — manifested through the power of group prayer.

People have been praying together since time immemorial, so clearly something in us is drawn not only to pray, but to gather people together in prayer, and to make our prayers heard in front of others.

Of late, there’s been a lot of research on the power of collective prayer. Public figures like Joe Dispenza have used this research to popularize the concept of a field of intention that responds to our internal wishes, desires, and vibrational states.

According to this school of thought, by aligning ourselves with the vibration of what we want, we can better attract it. Ergo, multiple people all aligning themselves with the same vibration is more likely to call in what we want even more powerfully.

This may sound like spiritual gobbleygook to some, but there’s a lot of science behind it. Quantum physics shows us that we do live in a world of interconnected particles that respond to other particles, even those separated by vast distances. It also shows us that by simply observing a particle, we change it. This might help explain why simply observing anxiety and fear can help transmute it, and why focusing on peace can help call it in.

Quantum physics has also identified the existence of a unified field — a web of interconnected particles all interacting with each other, coming in and out of existence. This field sounds quite similar to concepts of the Akashic Records, the Tao, or even of God in some traditions — an endless, ever-changing field of energy that responds to our perception of it.

It’s difficult to quantify or study all this, of course. But people have tried. In short, and in lieu of coughing up a bunch of facts here, I will say that the studies have all been inconclusive. Some have seemed to prove that collective prayer is effective, and others have proven the opposite.

There is a part of me that honestly isn’t sure all this works. There is a part of me that doubts the power of prayer — at least when it is not connected to greater actions or tangible changes.

Yet there is a greater part of me that truly believes prayer and spirituality have a major role to play in the transformation our world is undergoing. Perhaps science has yet to catch up to it, but this is where science fails and intuition begins to reign.

Of course by coming together and meditating on peace, we can help create it. We create our reality, after all. And if we focus more on peace than violence and love than hate, we will start to see more peace and love in our world. It’s basic Law of Attraction stuff. I really do want to believe this.

The world of spirituality, prayer, and trust in the divine could also probably use a bit more grounding in global issues, and the simple reminder that the whole point of all this was always to love our neighbors a little bit more, and to be a little kinder to all beings on this planet. Spirituality and activism desperately need each other. Magical thinking without external change is always going to land us back where we started.

Of course we need to come together and sing freedom songs, now more than ever. We need more grounded, loving communities to shape our future, not terrified, enraged, divided masses. We also need tangible systemic change. Research. And luck. It all winds together. This is how change happens.

We need collective intention and collective prayer, not because science says we do, but because our hearts say we do. Because humanity has always known that what we really need to do, especially in the most difficult times, is gather together and hold each other and pray. And then begin the great work of caring for each other, and our suffering, metamorphosing world.

Get 20% off forever

I spent the last 6 months in Guatemala mostly removed from American politics and current events at large. Of course, they still wove their way into my psyche — I somehow always knew what was going on in the headlines and my mind and heart were never far from the violence, wars, and ecological destruction my world was going through. In some ways I felt I could more deeply connect to these issues without the constant barrage of apocalyptic American news dominating every conversation. (I realize there is immense privilege in being able to opt out, which is another topic for another essay).

But one thing that was very much not removed from my field was ChatGPT. Even on a remote farm on a lake nestled between dormant volcanoes, everyone was talking about it. Friends were using ChatGPT to write their captions. To structure their retreats. To co-create projects. To give them astrology readings. The career coach I aspirationally hired told me that learning about AI is her top recommendation when it comes to any skill — literally any skill — I ought to acquire to prepare me for the future. If you don’t start using AI, she said, you’r going to be left in the dust.

(She also staunchly discouraged me from even attempting to return to my old career in journalism, which has inspired me to pursue creativity coaching, voice coaching, and songwriting instead — another story once again).

The problem is, part of me cannot stand AI. There is truly a part of me that balks at it. I often see essays on Substack that contain fragments of ChatGPT’s trademark linguistic stylings — yes, emdashes, but also a certain cadence I can easily identify. Once, in a particularly horrifying moment, I even caught myself writing in the style of ChatGPT — I tend to pick up aspects of whatever writing style of whatever I’m reading at the moment, so I guess it’s not that surprising, but this one hurt.

Then again, I can also very much see its benefits. It’s amazing at editing and compiling transcripts, and the only time I’ve used it on this blog is to edit transcripts of my podcast interviews so there are fewer errors and I can share them for those who’d prefer to read rather than listen. It also appears to be quite encouraging and rational, if simplistic, when it comes to giving simple life advice. Then again, it has of course misled many people in very dangerous directions, which is, again, another story.

Back to the topic at hand — the love of my life, which is, always has been, and always will be writing. Personally, I’m committed to never using AI in any context to write. Writing is a sacred act for me and has always felt like a way of interfacing with the divine. Using an algorithm to do this feels sacrilegious, not to mention deeply disrespectful to the readers who I’m writing to. It breaks my heart a bit to see those little tell-tale AI giveaways, especially when I’m reading something that means a lot to me.

We live in a strange new world, though. How many strangely well-written texts from that Tinder match have been filtered through AI? How many episodes of mindless TV? What does it even mean to be human, in a world where anyone can become anything?

How many viral Substacks are just AI, truly? Sometimes I genuinely wonder. And it hurts. It hurts me as a writer. As a human. As someone who believes in integrity, and who has devotedly returned to this Substack over and over to write with my own hands and heart and mind. It hurts to see that distinct ChatGPT cadence in Substacks that have garnered thousands of subscribers, while mine stagnates. I can’t lie. I, like so many other writers on here, do dream of a vast devoted audience. I understand that this desire is what draws so many people to use AI in their essays. I get it. I just can’t condone it.

I also understand the reasoning of those who advocate for AI. It can be used as a tool. It can enhance our work. It can edit and fact-check our Substacks, just like human editors used to do, improving our overall accuracy and readability. It can be a powerful organizational tool. It can level the playing field, making it easier for self-funded creators to emulate and produce visuals or copy that only major corporations could have in the past. It’s a tool, like every other form of technology, like every weapon, like every moment. We get to decide how we use it.

I personally feel that it is morally reprehensible to use AI to write your essays. But where is the line between writing and editing? Is it reprehensible to write an essay using a topic an AI has generated, for example?

It’s my turn to be honest. I was inspired to write this essay after I went on ChatGPT and asked it for ideas for this very column, my series about unanswered questions, which I’ve taken a pause on for the past few weeks because I haven’t had any great ideas and have been focusing on my courses and personal writing, etcetera.

Its ideas were so good. But I began to feel very, deeply strange about using them. Then I began to wonder: If I’m using ChatGPT — me, someone who is strongly against AI — then how often are other writers using it? What is real? What is true? What is authentic?

I keep returning to the same idea that I’ve been circling around for years. As AI becomes more common, and the ideas market becomes even more saturated, it will become more and more important to present ourselves as human presences online. We will need to build real human relationships with our readers, as much as possible. We will need to build deep trust with each other.

My favorite writers on Substack, after all, are not just writers. They are personas. The same goes for my favorite musicians. I know their faces and their stories. I feel personally connected to them as people, not just their art.

I’m not saying this is good or bad. I just am saying that to sustain ourselves as writers in an AI-saturated world, we’ll have to lean into this. We will need to our personas and our brands, but more importantly, we will need to truly connect to other living humans. Share our vulnerable selves. Our journeys. Our humanness.

We will need to lean into our own unique writing styles. Our grammatical errors. Our messiness, our wildness. This is what will become truly valuable in an age of AI-glossed, perfect, yet inhuman content.

Our real stories. Our real words. The unique cadence that only we can craft. The bizarre experiences only we could have lived through.

Anyway, I’m curious about your thoughts on this. Curious about how AI can serve humanity. Curious about how we can make AI work with us to improve our lives. Curious as to how AI can help us connect more deeply to our hearts, our spirits, our work, and our words.

Maybe AI isn’t replacing humans — it’s enhancing us.

Did you recognize it? That trademark ChatGPT syntax in the word above? The emphasis, the weight on that emdash? The drama of it? The readability?

I hate it. But also, it’s just good writing, at least from a copywriting standpoint. It gets its point across. And isn’t that all we’re trying to do here? To reach out, to connect across a void, to share meaning? To know and be known?

Perhaps, and I hate to say it, AI might have something to teach me. Perhaps I need to befriend it. I’ve always felt that AI and I are about equally talented when it comes to writing. We can go toe to toe, so maybe it’s a worthy peer. Of course, I don’t write for free (unless it’s on Substack, for all my beloved roughly 731 subscribers — give or take the 10 who seem to subscribe and unsubscribe each time I post). And AI does. So that’s why I’m leaving journalism behind.

Of course I will never leave writing behind. You’d have to pull this laptop from my cold, dead hands before I do, and I have a lot to say before I go into that good night. I’ll probably be scribbling pages or writing songs on the last day of my life, lamenting every moment I spent worrying that I wasn’t good enough or that AI could do it better.

I believe in human stories. I believe in great stories more than I believe in almost anything else. I’m not sure exactly how AI will help or hurt the writing world in the long run. I just know that I will keep writing, without AI, no matter what, and forever.

Also, I promise to never use AI to write, and to always disclose it if I do, even if it’s just a title of an essay.

What do you think about all this?

I’d love to hear.

Leave a comment

Get 20% off forever

*

When I arrived at Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, I found myself completely overtaken by a flood of inspiration. I believe it was my second night at the farm where I was staying when I found myself lying in the cool darkness, plucking a guitar that had been plucked by many hands before me and would be plucked by many hands after.

Suddenly, words came to me as they always do — seeming to fall out of the sky. Landing upon me like little fragments of a shooting star.

I wrote about 25 songs during my three-and-a-half month stay at the farm. They simply kept arriving, like little fairies or dreams, settling down light as air.

Get 20% off forever

Many people asked me where the songs and creativity came from during this time, including the original owner of the farm, an inspired tea-pourer and mystic-philosopher named Brother V. Sitting in the tea house across from him, little bells ringing, hummingbirds buzzing through the pink flowers all around, I really started to think about it — where do songs and where does creativity come from?

The divine origins of art

I suppose I’ll just come out and say it: I’ve always believed that creativity comes from another realm — threaded and looped within and around our own, but not one at the same — where all songs, books, poems, and ideas live in a perfect, holy format.

Our job as artists, I believe, is simply to make ourselves available to transmissions from this divine realm, and to translate them as best we can onto the page, guitar strings, camera, or whatever else we’re using to bring them into a format that’s legible for other earth-dwellers.

I have always been gifted with a very open channel to this realm, and part of my body is always listening close for signs and whispers from it. This essay itself is the product of one of those whispers. Before I began writing it, I could feel the shape of it, the heft and rhythm of what it could become. These paragraphs almost seemed to exist already. It wanted to be born, and all I have to do is allow it to emerge.

The other part of the creative’s job is to actually midwife these ideas into being. This means not only staying open to channel them, but refining them, packaging them, promoting them, and sharing them in whatever way they are meant to be shared.

I truly believe that creativity wants to be shared, heard, and seen. I think making art that connects to others is part of our purpose as humans.

Many religions and ancient traditions across time have proposed that gods and spirits love humans because of our ability to craft beauty in the form of songs and poetry and other arts. Creativity, in this framework, is actually fulfilling an obligation to the gods.

I also believe that creativity is a godlike act — something done in God or the gods’ images. Sometimes I look at how beautiful the world is and I can only think that this world’s creator must have been the best artist of all time.

Last week, sitting by this mysterious lake I and so many others have come to call home, watching glittering waves crash on the rocky beach, I began to feel something I often feel: that I was in the most incredible art installation of all time — a 5D, multisensory experience, a living garden of dreams and change, an immersive sequence of events so rich in beauty and tradition and wonder that it truly takes my breath away, to think about how glorious it all is.

How to work with the divine creative force

In short, I believe creativity is magic. It’s interfacing with something far beyond us, something pure and wild, something deeply alive.

To create, we must do what any magician must do: We must learn to speak with the intangible — to commune and dance with forces that we cannot see. We must learn to correspond with the energies of inspiration, which ebbs and flows like the tides.

We must make ourselves available to the creative realm, letting its spirit messengers know that we are ready for it and that we can and will bring the ideas it gifts to us into being.

Non-creative times are important for artists too. We can use more fallow, less inspired times to midwife the raw creativity we’ve accumulated and translated into legible formats that humans and spirits alike can both enjoy. And yes, sometimes we must rest in the desert where there is no creativity at all, which really just means that new ideas are incubating in the ground, waiting to be born.

The perils of creativity

In spite all this faith I have in the divine purpose of creativity, being an artist sometimes feels like a doomed, or at least dangerous, pursuit. I constantly wonder how I will, if I will, be able to sustain myself financially as an artist, and if I’ll ever actually achieve my creative dreams.

But then I remind myself that I’m allied by many forces far beyond me. That my creativity comes from beyond me. So of course the answers to these questions will come from beyond me, too.

Get 20% off forever

Another thing I believe about creativity: If you are an artist, it is extremely dangerous to not create. If you stop creating, if you stop the flow, some of your creative magic can get stuck inside you, and this can morph into all sorts of cruel or destructive impulses.

I believe that artists have the responsibility to put ourselves in the way of beauty, as Cheryl Strayed’s mother wisely told her in the book Wild — to focus on constantly refreshing and rejuvenating our wells of inspiration by exposing us to what ignites us. We must go where we are inspired, and leave behind what does not light our souls on fire.

This is ultimately why I’m making the decision to leave behind the city for a wilder, more overgrown, less-traveled path. More than anything, I find that nature encourages my creativity while city living crushes it, at least when it comes to songwriting. (Oddly enough, cafes, motels, and airports seem to be best for writing Substack posts).

As artists, collaboration is also critical. Yes, there are solitary artists, just like there are solitary witches, but even the most solitary of artists (or witches) is in constant collaboration with the natural world, and long-dead artistic greats, and long-held traditions. As artists, we grow when we weave with other flows and webs of magic.

All this is why I think my time at the farm in Guatemala was so creatively fruitful. There was a flow of inspiration, a field of magic there that I could feel, humming tangibly from all the artists who walked there before.

To be creative, like all good magicians and manifestors and devotees, we must also believe in what we are doing. If we are constantly questioning ourselves, letting our inner editors run the show, we’ll always be stopping ourselves before we start.

The good stuff, the juicy, raw, creative marrow, lives beyond the edge of fear, deep in the wild unknown. It lives in the same place magic lives, in the spirit realm, in the astral, in the subconscious and the sticky mycelial webs of the collective unconscious, in the parts of the psyche we’d rather hide but ultimately must face in order to alchemize and grow.

Creativity lives in places and people that glitter with ideas and stories. It lives in books and songs that inspire us, and it lives in the forgotten, shadowy backrooms and underground rivers of our own souls and hearts.

As a kid, I had a post-it note on my desk that read write what scares the shit out of you. I still follow that gospel. To create, truly, I believe we must go past the edges of the known. We must clear our minds out of the way and let ourselves be guided by flows and songs that come from a world so much bigger than us, so far beyond ourselves. Yes, it’s scary, but usually the scariest stuff to write is usually what people most need to read.

This is what I know about creativity. It’s an act of channeling, interfacing with the divine, and catching little jewels and fragments of perfection from another world and translating them into something that can exist in this realm.

That’s also the tragic part of creativity: nothing is ever truly finished. Maybe a few songs and books have maybe come close to approximating perfection. But really, I don’t look to art for perfection — do you? I look to art for truth, and part of the truth of the human experience is that we live in a flawed, broken world full of suffering and pain.

The greatest art reflects that suffering, while also spinning it into something that reminds us that we are not alone, and that there indeed is something holy and noble and magical about this whole living thing, with all its colors, its twists and turns, its harmony and its spiraling tides.

So keep creating, friend, if you are called to do so. You will know when the creative spirit taps on your shoulder, just like shamans know when spirits tap on their windows.

Leave offerings to your creativity. Leave offerings in the form of scribbles and songs written even on days when you don’t feel inspired, offering in the form of flowers around your computer or a fresh set of canvases lying in the shade.

Learn from the creative masters, but don’t copy them. Trust your intuition. Trust that you have a unique kind of magic to offer the world.

I sometimes think creativity is like catching butterflies in your hands. One must go gently, not letting a desire to succeed or be anything in particular to anyone crush the gentle magic force of the creative gift itself.

Now, I’m working on the next part — on figuring out what to actually do with all my creativity. The other day I asked my partner what he thought I should do with all my new songs.

Sing them, he said. Just sing them.

Creativity wants to be channeled. It wants to be shared. It wants to spread beauty and it wants us to know we are not alone.

It’s something that many of us can freely access in our day-to-day lives, if we only give it time and space. It’s also the holiest, most sacred force I know, and it’s always been my portal to divinity.

Creativity is magic. The purest, most powerful form of magic I know.

I believe in magic and I believe in art. I believe we need art. I believe we need everyone to create, because we need creative, unique solutions to our world’s problems, not rote reiterations.

In the age of AI, we need truly divinely channeled creativity more than ever. Creativity that is one-of-a-kind, not dialed in and programmed. Creativity that connects to people, not algorithms, because it is so uniquely human, so uniquely flawed, so uniquely powerful, so uniquely magical.

Keep creating, friend. I see you, I support you, and we’re in this together.

Until next time,

Eden

xx

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Quick announcement: I’m co-hosting a creativity and yoga retreat in gorgeous coastal Maine in September! We’ll spend mornings meditating by the sea, afternoons writing and creating by the sea, and evenings singing songs around the fire by the sea.

This is a beautiful chance to connect with nature, your muse, and what’s really important. Truly, it’s my favorite place in the world, and I’m so excited to share it with you.

Reach out with any and all questions or to book a discovery call, and click here to learn more. I’d love to have you there.

Subscribe now

This post is a part of Cosmic Junkyard, a biweekly series on the world’s most interesting unanswered and unanswerable questions. I send out new posts every other Sunday.

*

If you are reading this email, I am, at this very moment, about to try ayahuasca for the first time.

There is a good chance I will shortly be vomiting. Or connecting with the oneness of all beings. Or in some kind of shadow realm, grappling with mysterious spirits and entities and hopefully reminding myself that fear the only thing that gives them power. Or something I cannot even name or describe.

So, if you are reading this and believe in that sort of thing, I’d appreciate if you could send a prayer or some good energy my way. (If you don’t believe in it, it’s not real; if you do, it is. More and more I believe that life is as simple as that).

I have been on a journey with plant medicine for the past couple of years. It started with mushrooms in 2020, in the depths of that surreal pandemic summer. I was with my ex in New Hampshire and I was terrified, but it ended up being quite mellow. We listened to a lot of Pink Floyd records.

Then came LSD. This was the first time, in the California redwoods, that I realized just how deeply plant medicine allows me to connect with nature. I could feel the redwoods, could feel their spirits. Could hear, and maybe even sing, their songs. Could hear them calling me to sing out the earth’s pain, so it could be known, so others could hear, so we could all be inspired to heal together.

I was intrigued.

Ayahuasca has always felt like the pinnacle of this journey, and in hindsight, it’s probably where this whole journey has been leading.

It’s been trailing me for months. I’ve spent the past month sleeping next to a Banisteriopsis caapi vine that is growing right outside the bedroom. In these weeks, she’s crept closer and closer to the windows, circling me, trailing her long spidery arms into the shower.

I’ve also been invited to, and have declined, over six aya ceremonies in the past few months, not feeling like I was ready or that it was the right time. But ayahuasca has been on my mind constantly lately, appearing all over the place, in conversation, on the lips of seemingly everyone I meet. It changed my life, everyone seems to say.

And I’m terrified. But I know it’s time.

In the past few months I’ve also picked up two books on ayahuasca: Daniel Pinchbeck’s When Plants Dream and Jeremy Narby’s The Cosmic Serpent, which I finished in a matter of days, entranced by Narby’s gonzo anthropology style. The book starts by chronicling Narby’s journey into the Amazon jungle as PhD student, where he tried ayahuasca and encountered two fluorescent, hallucinatory serpents, among other visions.

This vision sent him on a massive rabbit hole of a journey that led him to reach a remarkable conclusion. Per Narby, the two serpents he saw while on ayahuasca are actually one and the same as the two strands of DNA that twine through our bodies.

Many cultures around the world contain stories of great cosmic serpents that live in water and contain all the wisdom of the whole world within them. Many ayahuasca journeys also tend to involve these serpents, or other twin beings, which Narby proposes are really embodiments the two strands of DNA. In this paradigm, shamans will have been perusing this cosmic DNA through the ayahuasca vine for thousands of years, he proposes, which is how they gain access to ancestral wisdom, to cures for various ailments, and to the spirit world at large.

It sounds wild, but maybe not so much when you think about it? We do know that trauma can be encoded in our DNA, and I imagine love also can be genetically passed on. Regardless, we do really carry our ancestors in our DNA.

We also know that 98% of our DNA is still in the process of being understood and mapped fully. We know that so much of life — our origins, what happens when we die, why we’re here at all — remains a mystery. And we know that most of our universe is dark matter. So the idea that ayahuasca might connect us to some kind of cosmic leaderboard or collective primordial soup really doesn’t seem that far-out to me, especially when you look at its history and read the testimonies of so many of those who have worked with her over the years.

We know that Indigenous communities refer to ayahuasca as “grandmother,” and see her as a teacher, a source of knowledge, and something that can lift generational curses of all kinds. Carl Jung also believed that ayahuasca may put us in touch with the collective unconscious — the energetic field that swirls between and connects all beings. Some believe it allows us to briefly see and enter other realms.

Some people have proposed that ayahuasca might be rising in prevalence outside of Indigenous communities right now because of our planetary crisis, and because the plants are connected to a greater intelligence that has a plan for us all — namely, to wake us up. Others take issue, and rightly so, with ayahuasca’s commodification as a self-help tool, when it is so sacred and complex and very distinctly not a product in Indigenous spirituality. But the people I know who have worked with Indigenous communities and shamans seem to say that these healers, teachers, and medicine-carriers seem more than happy to spread the medicine to those willing to approach it with integrity and respect.

All I know is that it’s calling me. Loudly. So I am listening. Approaching with the utmost reverence for the vine, for the Indigenous communities that have protected and cultivated it for thousands of years, and for this body and mind that let me experience so much wonder, beauty, terror, and love.

All I know is that we need all the help we can get on this changing, boiling planet. And I think we’d be remiss to think nature doesn’t have her own plans, schemes, and networks ready to help us heal and transform, if we’re willing to listen and take some leaps now and then.

So here I go. Wish me luck!

Get 20% off forever

I have a bunch of offerings in the works, but if you’re interested in an in-person event with me soon, I’d love to invite you to a creativity and yoga retreat I’m co-hosting in Maine this September. It’s September 12-16, and there will be plenty of time to work on your art and writing in a beautiful seaside setting as well as daily yoga and meditation classes, kirtans, song circles, and much more. You can learn more here, and feel free to reach out with any questions. It’ll be a beautiful opportunity to reconnect with your creativity, with spirit, and with your connection to your heart and nature.

Thanks so much for reading — so much more to come!

*

Get 20% off forever

This is Cosmic Junkyard, a biweekly subsection of Ink Roads about the world’s most interesting unanswered and/or unanswerable questions.

So much of our human lives are shaped by language. Language is the entire basis of Substack, this very platform. And in many ways, it’s always been the core of my life. Words were my first great love, and they continue to guide me on my path, shaping my perception of the world, resting at the core of my heart and purpose on Earth.

But where did all this human language — all this syntax, all this grammar and speech, all these individual and infinite words — come from in the first place?

The simple truth is: Nobody knows. Naturally, though, there are many different theories about how language first developed.

One major theory posits that we humans began to speak in an effort to imitate the sounds of the world around us, and namely to imitate the sounds of animal calls. This theory is quite flawed, because even ancient words for bird don’t resemble bird-calls in the least.

Another theory suggests that the first words we used were expressions of love — little sighs, coos, and other purrs of affection. If you’ve ever spoken to a beloved pet or child or lover in an unintelligible, oxytocin-fueled dialect, perhaps you can understand how this idea may have originated. Similar theories suggest that language may have originated with cries of pain, or perhaps from grunts and sighs that result from hard work or long days hunting in the jungles and deserts.

Yet another theory suggests that language may have started with physicality, not verbal speech at all. This theory proposes that early communication was mostly done with hand movements, suggesting a kind of prehistoric sign language was actually our first way of communicating.

Meanwhile, Noam Chomsky has kindly suggested that language actually originated from a kind of universal grammar embedded in our subconscious minds, meaning everyone is born with the innate ability to understand and speak and understand. Perhaps this innate aptitude for language was passed down through our DNA; perhaps it’s simply woven into our brains.

One thing we do know for sure is that for something around 295,000 years, language was only spoken, never written. Stories and language was passed down from parent to child, sung out around fires, morphed and altered by circumstance and dialect, and eventually shaped and carved into the nuanced and precise linguistic models we use today. But for most of human history, language was inextricable from sound.

Because of this, we really don’t know much at all about the first languages to exist. We do know that the oldest language still spoken today is Tamil, and Sanskrit is the oldest written language we have on record. But as for the languages spoken at the dawn of time, those have been lost to memory, or perhaps preserved in snatches of ancient songs and syntax passed down through the ages.

There are also many different theories about how all of our different individual languages developed. Some people believe that it’s possible that at one time, all of humanity spoke the same language — a tongue sometimes called Proto-Human language or Urlanguage, an idea which is, of course, echoed by the Tower of Babel story in the Bible. Other theories suggest that languages originated independently all across the globe. One thing is clear: At some point, though, people started speaking and never stopped.

Any question about language’s origins also innately invokes the question of what constitutes language at all. Animals undoubtedly speak to each other (and to us) in their own unique ways, and the earth also speaks — and some would say they can talk back, and even regularly commune with the planet through frequency, vision, plant medicine, spirit, or other avenues. Energy is also a language, as is song and light, and as are dreams and memories and emotions.

It would be a complete fallacy to think we humans have a monopoly on language, when the world speaks so fluently around us and to us. But there is undeniably something special about human language — something special and heart-wrenchingly flawed, about its beauty, its complexity, and its inadequacy.

Yet what we call human language itself is merely a flawed and insignificant effort to encompass the wholeness and vastness of the living world. Language, to me, has always felt like a shadow, a daguerrotype, a reflection or a mirror that barely begins to approximate the vastness of actuality. And any writer (or speaker, or communicator) must grapple with the gulf between language and actual presence when trying to craft a story or an essay or any sort of message.

And that’s part of its beauty. Language exists to bridge another perceived gap — that between between individuals, which is perhaps the greatest illusory gap of all. When we speak, we send sparklers and signals across the great void between ourselves and others in hopes that our inner worlds might be comprehended or even loved.

So of course at one point in the distant past, people volleyed wordless sounds to each other across the night, sent them in the same way tree roots fire signals across whole forests or birds send cries through our windows every morning. I’m here, look out, I love you. These are the fundamental wishes of every being: to be seen and heard. This is the fundamental wish of language.

Of course at some point in the dense mist of our earliest days as humans, we drew galaxies of letters and phrases out of these sounds, designing them and cultivating them in hopes of being better understood, in hopes of being loved.

Today, we’re still sending out our signals, eternally trying to hone them into more comprehensible and beautiful forms, all so some of our aliveness and perception might be shared and seen, all so that we can be closer to others.

So here were are, living in a world of over 7,000 (human) languages and countless more nonhuman ones, not knowing how all these words found their ways to our lips yet doing our best to speak and write them anyway. Doing our best to close that divide between the self and other, and between the experienced and the understood.

So thanks, as always, for reading my attempts.

I also resonate with the element of water a lot. Water tends to symbolize flow, emotions, fluidity, and cleansing — all things that I work often with, all things that flow through me constantly. Few things refresh me like a glass of water or a shower. I love water and feel so connected to it, to oceans and rivers, to their flow and their mutability. I relate to how it changes shape, and am in awe of how it slowly, very slowly, reshapes the world around it.

And when I think of God, I always think of an ocean. An ocean of which I am a single drop, falling and falling, containing bits of my vast origins in my small and formless form, bound one day to return to the whole.

So today’s post is about water. Specifically, it’s about a certain scientist whose work has come up for me many times in the past few months: Masaru Emoto, who theorized that human consciousness and intention could change the molecular composition of water.

I first heard of Emoto’s work from a friend who was weaving his ideas into her MFA thesis, which I was lucky enough to read. The thesis explores plant medicine, prayer, the power of intention, and much more, and also threads in some science, including Emoto’s work.

Emoto’s studies involved exposing water to different forces, including music, photographs, and various emotions. His research found that water exposed to harmonious and blissful emotions or music or photographs would form beautiful ice crystals — whereas water exposed to negative stimuli would dissolve into porous or blob-like shapes.

In a 1994 study, Emoto asked thousands of people in Tokyo to project gratitude onto water samples located in an electromagnetically shielded room in a laboratory in California. Then, a group of people unaware of the study were asked to rate the water’s ice crystals, as well as those formed by an un-blessed control sample of water, based on aesthetic appeal. The study found that the blessed water had significantly higher aesthetic ratings, and generated significant attention to Emoto’s claims.

Over the years, Emoto published several bestselling books, and in subsequent studies, he also found that positive thought and intention could even clean polluted water.

Of course, his work has also been heavily criticized and labeled as pseudoscience, and I’m not going to argue that it is or isn’t — that can remain a question. Yet I do want to note that Emoto is far from the first scientist or philosopher to propose that the makeup of the external world changes when we change our internal world, or that negative stimuli can generate negative consequences in the body.

We know that stress and anxiety can lead to illness in our bodies, whereas love and happiness can heal us. We know that discordant music or sounds literally makes us flinch or sweat, while peaceful music soothes us and sometimes makes us feel like we are flying.

We know that trauma can store itself in our DNA. We know that everything in the world is colored by our perspective.

Quantum physics tells us that just by observing a particle, we can fundamentally change not only its location in space, but the location of other particles that it is connected to by invisible threads.

Our bodies are 70% water. Is it so hard to believe that the water within us is somehow responding to input from the world around us?

Is it so hard to believe nature is listening? That it feels us, hears us? The earth is alive, after all, woven through with knowledge we humans cannot even dream of understanding — knowledge of the alchemy of death and rebirth, knowledge of propagation and creation, an understanding of how to survive on light and rain.

Emoto’s studies came up today in a workshop about manifestation magick I took at the farm where I’m staying. Manifestation is all about the idea that our internal actions help create our external realities, and it proposes that by aligning ourselves with our highest intentions, we can magnetize them towards us.

I personally know that my life has dramatically changed for the better since I moved to this farm, where I have started living more closely with water and nature, and where I have been surrounding myself with a community that lifts me up. Sometimes, I can almost feel the water within me reshaping itself from an oozing mass into some sort of crystal, its wings unfurling.

Does water have emotions? Do trees? Can fire hear our prayers and alchemize them? Can wind carry messages from the spirit world?

I see stranger things happen every single day. I see stranger things in the marvelous technology we humans have created, which is slowly devouring our brains and replacing us as we watch hapless and addicted. I see stranger things in the way that so many of us float numbly through existence, drowning ourselves in distraction and drugs. I see stranger things in the way we are destroying the very earth that is our mother.

Is it so strange to think compassion can reshape the water within us? When I approach a task with love, it always turns out completely differently and so much better than when I approach it with disdain or fear. People are the same. And so, I believe, is water.

Everything around us is listening. Everything around us is responding to the energy we give to it. Everything around us mirrors the world within us, aligning itself to the promises we make, adjusting to the flow of our habits and our integrity.

The water, I do think, is listening. Water is life — integral to every single living thing’s existence on earth — and we are also water, ever-flowing, ever-changing, always connected to the vessel that holds us.

So what are you saying to the waters within you? Have you been telling them kind things? Have you been allowing the beautiful snowflake patterns of your soul to unfurl? Or have you been shutting them down?

What are you saying to the waters around you? Are you wasting the waters, pouring waste into them? Or are you thanking the water for its cleansing powers and its life-giving hydration?

A phrase that has been coming back to me often since being at the farm is the holy waters were within you the whole time. This comes from a story I wrote as a child involving a girl who goes on a great quest to conquer a sacred, secret body of water only to find she’s been living alongside these very waters her whole life. The waters are within us; we need only to honor them and to open to them and to let them flow. Creativity is also a river and so is reverence. Everything is listening, from our fibrous fascia to the webs of energy lines that connect our chests to our teeth and our minds to our feet. Everything is listening, from the molecules of water to the spirits of the earth, which have been waiting for so many of us to realize what all the great sages have been telling us for so long: that it’s all connected, all interwoven, all a tapestry of oneness.

Or at least, that’s my running theory. And I would imagine Emoto would agree.

What do you think?

I’d love to hear from you.

May your waters, and all the waters of the world, flow ever-freely.

According to this concept, before we emerged as screaming babies, our ancient spirits selected our parents, challenges, identities, and life paths.

To me, this concept feels like a sister idea to karma and a sibling of faith in a higher power. Within this paradigm, rather than our lives being predetermined by our past actions, our souls actually elected the paths that we are on.

It’s a comforting thought, and though it sounds outlandish, I don’t think it’s altogether less plausible than the idea that some great God in the sky wove the fabric of every moment of our lives.

Personally I don’t know how I feel about this idea. If this is the case, then terrible suffering and awful circumstances were somehow our souls’ choices, and this just seems implausible (though I do struggle with the existence of suffering in general, which you can read more about here).

Yet there is also comfort in having faith that all of this was a choice, just as there is deep comfort in believing that we are all part of a greater divine plan. Whether you believe in god or your soul or some blend of both, it does feel good to believe you are being carried forward by a deep and benevolent force.

Sometimes I even believe this, truly. When I look at the intricate structures that shape every leaf and tree and flower on this lakeside land I’ve come to call home over the past few months, it’s hard not to believe there is a greater genius at work — a consciousness that flows through everything like a river, drawn from an oceanic source of love, wisdom, and infinite abundance.

So did our souls choose to come to Earth, with its magnificent flowers and its countless mysteries? The logistics of the soul-selection process do admittedly grow a bit fuzzy when you think about them in detail. Like — Is there some huge round table where our souls sort through possible life paths, examining various lessons that they need to or want to learn? Is there a higher board of directors that approves or denies various path selections? Do we have to sign some kind of waiver clarifying that we agree to forget our true selves, we agree to participate in an illusion of separateness, and we will not pursue litigation if life on Earth does happen to be rather painful?

Then there is the question of the overall goal of this incarnation. Why would our souls choose to come to Earth, where there is so much suffering and so much beauty, especially if they’re in some kind of state of communion, unity, or timeless knowledge up there in the soul-realm? I think there are many possible answers to this. One is the more Buddhist answer: that our souls are seeking total enlightenment or transcendence, and that only by choosing certain life paths that allow us to purify certain actions and karmas can we leave the wheel of soul-reincarnation entirely.

Another possibility is that our souls come to Earth for the same reason that we go on any kind of trip: to experience beauty, wonder, magic, and challenges that help us grow. Sometimes I think life itself might be one giant trip (of the psychedelic or travel kind — you choose), and anyone who has done psychedelics or navigated an airport in order to get somewhere knows that these travels aren’t easy. That’s not why we embark on them. We embark on trips to know ourselves more deeply, and to experience oneness with something greater than ourselves, and to explore the beauty of the world.

Maybe that is why we are here. Maybe it’s all about the journey.

Maybe we are simply here to be compassionate and spread love. Maybe many of us are here simply to help all the other lost souls on Earth and to guide people towards the light. This idea holds a lot of weight in spiritual communities — that some of us are here as “lightworkers,” meant to bring luminosity to a dark world — but it’s also basically the core idea of many religions: be kind. Love each other as yourself.

Maybe love is why we came here in the end. Love certainly is the sweetest part of life, as well as the most painful.

Yet we love anyway, because it is so worth the risk, and maybe that’s why our souls came here. Because it was worth the risk. Because the pain was worth all this beauty.

*

Regardless of why we came here, if our souls did choose this life and if all of this was predetermined by the parts of us that are eternal and all-knowing, that does feel strangely comforting. It feels nice to know that I’m not alone and that I’m protected by a higher source, something in touch with something much greater than me.

So much of being human to me feels like walking around in a dark room, running my hands against the walls, feeling the outlines of things but never fully able to see. I think I sense the presence of higher entities, I think I sense the presence of magic, I think sense the presence of spirit. I know feel the flow of creativity in me, alive and sparkling. I feel that all this could be part of a divine plan, either plotted by our souls or God, but I can’t quite see the details of this plan.

Going by all that’s happened so far, though, I can kind of understand why my soul may have chosen this life. I incarnated into an incredibly lucky situation and have been generally incredibly lucky, and I have always been met with a great deal of abundance and love.

Yet it appears my challenge and task in this life is to develop love for myself — to learn to live with and alchemize some of the shadows that tend to follow me — and to figure out how to bring my creative gifts into the world. I sometimes have the sense that I lived many lives before where I suffered deeply, and I believe I had good karma that led me to this place in my life thus far. I often pray I won’t waste it, this wild and precious dream of a life.

Of course I could be wrong and I don’t know how things will go. I would never presume to know more than time itself.

I also think I may be here in this time of ecological decay for a reason. Perhaps I simply chose to came here because I saw the suffering that was here and wanted to help.

Maybe it’s all pre-written. Maybe my soul plotted everything out. Maybe I wrote it out in some cosmic cafe like I now write my stories.

Maybe I even imagined myself here, writing this as the wind rolls in from the lake and the trees shiver and dance and my heart feels both heavy and so, so alive.

What would she say, that great immortal soul? Probably something like: Everything is working out as planned. Don’t fear; trust the process. Your soul is here to grow. Step into your power and sing. Be the love and change you wish to see. The simple things, the great cliches that all thought leaders have been telling us over and over.

And if it’s all a game? If it’s all a great psychedelic trip, all a great journey into the illusion of time and space and skin?

Might as well enjoy this experience of having a body and a mortal self when possible. Might as well choose compassion and love over everything.

Might as well dance.

So now, I will close my computer and take a boat across the lake to ecstatic dance, and I’ll do just that.

Where do songs come from?

Do they come from the wind? From the singing breeze? From the hum of the birds dancing on currents, spinning up towards the infinite sky?

Do they come from water? Do they come from the rhythmic dance of the the tides, the low cymbal-crash of wave on shoreline, the bass-beat humming up of the airless deep below?

Do they come from fire? The crackle and hiss of flame, the pop of sparks, the melodic press of heat humming as warm as a cello, as nimble as a harp?

Do they come from the earth? From the frequencies reverberating from every living thing, drawn from the particles vibrating at the very core of all matter?

Do they come from deep space? From the low boom of a black hole? Was the first thing in existence the sound of some particle splitting open, some cosmic crackle that sang and hummed us all into being?

Do songs come from somewhere deep within us? Are they something instinctual, something inherited? After all, humans naturally know the difference between major and minor chords; we are born with this knowledge, and we know that a minor chord invokes melancholy and we know that a shift to major brings sweet relief, sunshine, and joy.

Song is our birthright. And so is singing.

*

Nobody knows exactly where the first music originated, though scientists have found bone flutes made of mammoth ivory which they have dated back to 40,000 BCE. It is likely that instruments date back much further than this, though these were probably made of materials that have since decomposed.

The oldest remaining musical instrument is a flute made of crane bones, found in central China. Many ancient Chinese leaders were buried with musical instruments in their tombs, possibly just in case they needed the help of song on their journey into the beyond.

The earliest songs were, of course, not written. They remain lost in time, though perhaps we still carry bits of those ancient tunes deep within us. Perhaps they live on in certain songs we still sing around campfires today.

As for the earliest instruments: hunter-gatherers may have initially started banging on objects to signal to each other as they traveled; these sounds may have been the first drums.

One thing is clear. At some point, someone somewhere heard a drumbeat and began, for the first time, to dance.

And at some point, somewhere, someone sang for the first time — sang or hummed quietly to their child or their loved one, or perhaps imitated the cry and call of a bird.

And at some point, somewhere, perhaps gathered around a fire under limitless stars, people began to drum and sing together, and they felt it, that joy we all still feel when we sing — that timeless and infectious wonder, that magic of song.

Yet even before this, the earth still sang. The wind still cried. The birds chirped. They still do, and will long after we humans have gone from this place.

Most of the early music we do know about relates to religion. Song has always been used as a vehicle for connecting to the divine, be it God or the Earth or, as is often the case with the carefully preserved songs of many Indigenous cultures, a mesh of both. Music was also used for healing by physicians across many ancient cultures.

The first written music we know of is the Hurrian Songs, a collection of hymns written on cuneiform tablets found in the Amorite-Canaanite city of Ugarit, now northern Syria, dating to approximately 1400 BC. These were invocations to Nikkal, a Mesopotamian goddess who may have been the consort of the god of the moon.

The ancient Egyptians considered music to be a divine gift from the gods, and often used it for healing purposes. Vedic texts also frequently invoked music, naming mantras as key ways to embody divinity and to unlock various wishes, miracles, and transcendent states of being.

In ancient Greece, music was considered key to the understanding of philosophy, mathematics, and the cosmology of the universe, and the philosophy of musica universalis, or music of the spheres, proposed that the movements of the planets and celestial bodies is itself a form of music. In this framework, the whole universe is a symphony, always singing, bending towards harmony.

But long before all this ritual, rite, notation, and theory, someone somewhere began to sing. Someone began to bang a stick on a rock. Someone strung up a reed to a tree, and noticed it vibrated when plucked.

Music may have originated at the same time as language. It may have been initially used as a form of seduction or communication.

Many religions propose that music was a gift of the gods. For many of us today — myself included — music is one of the most sacred parts of this life on Earth.

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music,” Kurt Vonnegut said, and I’d have to agree.

*

Lately I have spent many nights sitting around fires, singing along to devotional songs at the farm I am living at in Guatemala. I have also been able to hear many ancient songs — mantras and hymns and and medicine songs gifted from Indigenous tribes in the Amazon rainforest. I have spent many nights lately been soaking in these ancient, often sublimely simple melodies.

Not coincidentally, I have also been writing many songs, too, the music and words flowing through me like rivers. I don’t know where the songs are coming from. I only know I must make myself receptive to them, must open my heart to them, must allow myself to be a vessel for them. Lately they seem to fall into my hands like raindrops, pouring over my guitar strings.

I do believe there is a great unified field of song and creative flow that exists just beyond sight. I do believe there is a web that connects all things, and I believe that web is a song.

So where does music come from? Where did song begin?

There are no answers, only the truth of the matter, which is that song is everywhere around us and within us.

We are song. We are music. We all have a place in the great symphony of the universe.

So why not sing?

I hope you enjoy it.

What if you didn’t have to be great?

What if you didn’t have to change your whole life?

What if you could just start right now? With this air, this body?

What if this body, with its aches and pains, was enough? What if this weight, this outfit, these old clothes, this half-light, what if it was all enough?

What if you weren’t waiting for something? What if you weren’t waiting to find the one? What if you weren’t waiting to suddenly know what to do?

What if you were allowed to be exactly as you are?

What if you were allowed to follow those soft sparks, half-lights, and glints of inspiration and wonder? What if you were allowed to go down the rabbit hole, to chase the fragrant jasmine-scented wind?

What if you were allowed to try the figs on the tree? To pick one, and to get it wrong, and try again?

What if you were allowed to want to be more than one thing? What if you were allowed to be both sad and grateful, to be angry and overwhelmed with love?

What if god wasn’t some holy man far away in the sky waiting to judge you, to redeem you or to smite you? What if it wasn’t waiting for you to go meditate on some distant mountain? What if it wasn’t waiting for you to purify ten thousand lifetimes of karma? What if it was inside you? Like you? As full of mistakes and of wonder?

What if you didn’t have to save the world, start an empire, win the whole game? What if that’s what got us in some of this mess anyway, the idea of winners and losers, of building our towers so high we forgot about the medicines of the earth growing right beneath our feet?

What if the sorrow was medicine? What if the sadness was a song waiting for you to sing it? A song drawn from the very heart of the dying earth?

What if this withering time is a portal to something much greater?

What if all the wondering and questioning wasn’t a mistake but was just part of the journey? What if all the aches and pains were threads in a much greater tapestry, stretching beyond lifetimes, into multiple dimensions?

What if this moment was enough?

What if it’s okay to simply live on earth? To be alive, to be soft, to be pliable, to be angry, to be wounded, to be you?

How would the world shift? What would open up? What would you do? If it was enough? If for one hour, or one moment, it was enough?

What if this moment was the grail? If the great quest was to stop seeking in the first place? If the jewel was inside the deep, rooted knowing, echoing like a bell in your chest?

What if this is where you were always meant to be? What would you do then?

What if you stopped asking the world to love you? What if you stopped demanding to be repaid for some terrible debt? What if you stopped asking people to be who they aren’t?

What if you stopped hoping for a perfect world and holding others to impossible standards, and started working inside this one, with these people, threading your hands with the others who are also buried in the work?

What would happen?

What if you could let go of that great weight — you know the one? What if you could float? What if you could allow yourself to join the flow of something much larger than yourself?

What if you could allow real love into your life — protective love, simple love that’s easy on the mind and body? What if you could allow simple nourishment to fill your days, if you relied on the gifts of the planet, if you moved in tune with the seasons and the sun?

What if you stopped searching for the next hit or high or great conquest? And started to unfurl soft like a flower to the medicine inside your own chest?

What if this, with its bitterness and its birdsong, was all there ever was going to be?

What if life is never going to take the perfect shape? What if there’s no finish line, at least not until the final great sleep? What then?

What if you do have the answer? Not some great teacher or doctor or sage, but you? What if you were the lover you had been waiting for?

What if you were a good enough friend, a good enough person? What if you were allowed to speak your mind? What if you were allowed to exist in your fullness, allowed to play your music, allowed to be not for everyone?

What if you could survive being turned away and rejected, because you were so at home in your own skin?

What if you were allowed to create that project? Write that essay that you’re scared to share? What if you could actually become the healer, the author, and the magician you’ve dreamed of being? Not because you have to be, but because something deep within you pulls you towards it, an oceanic flow drawn from the magnets at the earth’s core and the breath of the moon?

What if this whole journey was about the creation rather than the end result? What if the act of creating, if the giving and breathing of love and magic into the world, was the point all along?

What if you could trust that it was all for a reason? That you’re being taken care of? That you’re already blessed beyond measure?

What if you could feel the hurt in all its fullness and move deeper into it rather than running away? What would it become, then? A great, black-winged bird? A tear? A poem?

What if this is it?

What then?

What would you do?

If this, if you, were enough?

Subscribe now

If you’re reading this, I’m currently staying at an off-grid permaculture farm with very little internet access, so posts, notes, and responses have been a little more infrequent than usual. I’ll be back in full swing in about a month! Until then, and as always, I’d love to hear what you think about all this.

Get 20% off forever

One night in early February of this year, I found myself in a panic about climate change.

This hasn’t happened in a while, to be honest.

Years ago, when I first fully understood just how bad climate change is, I went through a sort of dark night of the soul with that realization. Once you see it, the full size and scale of it, you really can’t unsee it. I know many people reading this have also been through that — the free-fall into understanding the actuality of where we are and the vastness of how much needs to change in order to create a sustainable future for life on Earth.

This led me into climate activism, which gave me newfound hope. Since then I’ve basically lived by the gospel of the excellent climate-themed anthology All We Can Save — yes things are bad, all we can do is just focus on making a difference in whatever small way we can, and it’s better to focus on what can still be done rather than on everything that’s going wrong.

Yet the Trump Administration’s destruction of the EPA (and so much of what is going on in the US) is a major blow to the movement. Things already weren’t looking good, of course, and business as usual was not functioning either.

I don’t think most people have any idea just how bad climate change actually is, let alone how bad it’s going to get. Honestly, I’m not even going to drop in any facts or projections into this piece because those generally aren’t even that effective at summarizing the size and scale of the problem, but I’ll just link some here.

I will say instead that we can already see climate change manifesting in travesties like the California wildfires and the ever-more-frequent hurricanes and heat waves happening around the world. Climate change truly means we are going to keep seeing more and more horrifically traumatizing natural disasters happening more and more frequently. The destruction will truly be unfathomable and it will get exponentially worse each year.

There will be waves of climate refugees (there already are). Already the air grows poisonous, already our brains are full of microplastics, already so many of us have lived through natural disasters. A natural disaster is not a simple thing to heal from — they are massive traumas, and the truth is, most of us will go through many of them within our lifetimes.

All this is actually why I don’t want to have children. I don’t judge you if you’ve chosen to have kids, but I personally don’t want to put another living being through all this.

Truthfully, it blows my mind that there hasn’t been a massive, systemic global movement to address our changing climate. But another part of me understands why all attempts to address this problem have failed.

Climate change is the natural end point of a system built on extraction and consumption. We are overusing the earth’s resources, and the earth is treating us like the parasites we are, coming in to wipe us out so it can grow back.

Unfortunately, the people using the most resources — the billionaires, the 1% — will be least affected by climate change, and the poor will be on the frontlines of every disaster.

Most likely, unless we see a truly radical mass movement surrounding a proto-Bernie Sanders, the government will not swoop in and save us, because the government is being run by wealthy oligarchs who probably are already planning to fly to Mars when shit really hits the fan.

The best thing we can probably do at this point as individuals on Earth is learn to grow our own food, prepare ourselves for disasters, and build supportive, resilient communities. We can also learn from the earth and from communities who have also been through variants of their own apocalypses. The world has ended many times for many peoples, after all. AndtThere are so many people deeply engaged in this work already, working to build and imagine resilient mutual aid networks and alternative structures on top of the ashes of the burning world.

Normally, I am able to have complete faith in this subterranean, mycelial change-making movement. Yet in the midst of my panic the other night, it all fell away, and I found myself wondering if maybe, just maybe, some sort of miraculous technology might swoop in and save us.

This likely won’t happen, and it’s not a good idea to rely on miraculous science to solve all of our climate problems. Carbon capture as a way of leveling out global temperatures is impossible, most scientists say; we’d need to sequester about 20 billion tons of carbon per year to cancel out emissions, which is an unfathomable, unachievable amount.

But there are also projects in the works like solar geoengineering, which could help reflect the sun’s heat back into space. Meanwhile, ocean fertilization proposes stimulating the growth of phytoplankton in the oceans, which could also help get rid of some of that excess carbon.

All these projects could have horrifying unintended consequences on our ecological systems, but hey, things are already pretty bad. This will be controversial, but I personally believe that we do need to be putting some energy and resources into these projects. These probably have no chance at getting funded in America at this point, but right now, from a purely ethical standpoint, I think there’s nothing more important for humanity that we could possibly do than putting our energy and resources into finding a solution to climate change.

One thing I know won’t save us is little, individual efforts to reduce waste or emissions. Sure, it matters to take care of the earth and garden and minimize our use of single-use plastics, and we all have a role to play in this moment of great change.

But the truth is that most recycling isn’t actually recycled — the oil industry brainwashed us into thinking it would be to deflect responsibility away from them — and tiny changes in our own individual emissions will not be nearly enough to prevent full-scale disaster.

What we really need, best case-scenario, is systemic change on a global scale, and fast — a World War II-level of mobilization. What we really need is to completely shift away from oil and gas to renewable energy. We need to cover the world with forests, which serve as natural carbon capture technologies, and we need to build resilient, sustainable, green cities, and we need to transition to sustainable and/or electric cars. And so much more.

These would take effort, but this is not impossible. We have the resources to do it and we just need the political power to make it happen.

Back in the heyday of my climate activist days, I was really excited about the Green New Deal, a plan which envisioned decarbonizing the US economy in 10 years while creating countless high-paying jobs in the clean energy sector in the process.

Of course, the people have spoken in America and we couldn’t be further away from a Green New Deal now. Everybody was too scared of “socialism,” and now here we are. It’s really, really tragic. It breaks my heart, the total failures on both sides of the political spectrum, and the carelessness and greed of this exploitative system that was built on the backs of slavery and subjugation and the illusion of endless progress which is really endless, endless black holes of desire and consumption that only lead to despair.

And yet. I know that doomerism is never a fertile place to start a movement; it is actually desert you can get lost in forever. People need to believe in something, need to be excited, need to have hope. I know my place at this point; I’m a storyteller, and if there’s one story I want to tell, it’s a better one about climate change and the future.

So here’s what I believe. I believe that the first step in solving climate change is telling some really, really good stories about it.

The original stories about climate change were so badly told. We were told, or at least I was told as a child, that we need to come together “save the Earth.” We were shown poorly drawn graphics of polar bears on sinking ice floes, and we were told to recycle for distant hypothetical grandchildren’s sake.

This is how climate change became the domain of the privileged and disconnected, a cause designated for those who had the ability and time to care about things like trees and birds rather than their next meal and rent.

The simple truth is, most people are too tired and working too hard to care that much about something that doesn’t connect to them and their families personally. The climate change movement royally fucked up by focusing on statistics, polar bears, and doom rather than the reality of what’s happening RIGHT HERE AND NOW — the consequences that will happen TO US AND OUR FAMILIES as we fail to act — and the reality of the changes we can make that would make all of our lives better today.

This initial climate change story failed to give us the most critical part of the message: The earth is us. (!!!!) We are the polar bears. We are the grandchildren. We are the earth. It’s our homes that are being destroyed, our wallets that are being bled dry as billionaires leach resources from the earth and leave us with the consequences.

To put it simply, we are the ones going down with this ship. Climate change is HERE. It’s why we’re all so sick. I deeply believe it’s connected to the high rates of mental illness among the masses — we are not meant to be this disconnected from the earth, and we are suffering thanks to a lack of clean air and water and free time to roam around our planet.

On the other hand, working to build a better world as the old one burns can actually make each one of our everyday lives so much better. A climate movement can and should mean better jobs, more time, and more freedom and abundance for everyone.

Yet the truth is, none of this, none of what I’ve written about here, is why I started truly caring about climate change in the first place. I actually first really got invested in climate activism when I visited a refugee camp on Lesvos, Greece, and saw just how terrible the conditions were there. I eventually learned that the Syrian refugee crisis was in part originally sparked by a drought that had sent people from the countrysides pouring into the cities, which created the conditions for a great deal of unrest. All at once it all became very clear. This is what droughts and wildfires and hurricanes do. They create the conditions for war.

The best refugee camp, I decided during my time there, is one that never exists in the first place. To prevent countless more refugee camps, we need to fight climate change. It’s as simple as that.

So, all that is to say — we need new stories that connect the dots and really engage people, stories that focus on the lived, dirty, bloody, thirsty reality of what climate change is.

I also think the best shot at system-wide change is to really make climate change a class issue, which it absolutely is. The 1%, the titans of production and industry that are our new kings, are destroying our world and exploiting all of us. We need to fight them and the poisonous carbon they refuse to ban from our atmosphere because of their greed by banding together in solidarity with our fellow humans. And I still believe we can band around the idea that can create a better world for everyone by transitioning to renewable energy and creating many green, equitable jobs and sustainable, supportive systems in the process.

Even if you can’t get behind the whole Green New Deal thing, and no matter where you are on the political spectrum, most of us can agree there’s something wrong with the world as it is right now, right? Maybe you agree that we’re filling ourselves with poison, eating food shipped from way across the globe, and trashing our bodies and minds with filth. Maybe you’ve realized that we have more therapy and more makeup and more TV than ever and yet more of us are mentally ill than ever before. Maybe it’s upsetting to you that people live paycheck-to-paycheck and can’t afford to pay for gas or healthcare in the wealthiest nation in the world.

This is all connected, so deeply interconnected it breaks my heart sometimes with just how clear it all is. Our separation from the earth and each other. The destruction of our planet, this beautiful planet that provides us with everything we need.

Indigenous communities have always known this and Indigenous leaders should absolutely be at the forefront of any real movement for change, and there’s so much more to say about that, but it’s best to just start researching Indigenous ideas about ecology and change. It’s also helpful to pay attention to what is already happening in the climate movement. So many people are also engaged in the Great Turning, which is Johanna Macy’s term for the spiritual and systemic shifts the world is undergoing as the old system and old ways die one way or another, and new, life-sustaining systems are born.

Still, as much as I’d like to throw the full force of my faith in behind something like the Green New Deal or the Great Turning, honestly, I don’t know what’s going to happen or what we’re really going to do about climate change at the end of the day.

I haven’t stopped believing in the possibility of a better world, mostly because I’d rather believe than not. Yet on that February night, I felt truly and deeply scared again, so scared I found myself seriously researching carbon capture technologies and wondering we’re not using all of AI’s power to innovate actual climate solutions.

What if we can’t do it, any of it? What if we decide it doesn’t matter and just close our eyes and it just gets worse and worse until Earth is uninhabitable?

I personally plan to move to a green, temperate place far from the ocean and free from wildfires in about twenty years, which is around when I think shit will truly start hitting the fan. There, I imagine growing a garden, living in community, and keeping underground stores of food and medicine (modern and holistic) and water to use as the world burns. In this way, me and my community will hopefully survive while huge swaths of humanity die out.

I realize this sounds doomsday-prepper-ish, but I feel about as dedicated to this idea as I do to a 401K. It’s just something that feels important and responsible to think about, is all.

In the meantime, during these critical next ten years, I plan to at least try to do my part in creating change. The truth is, I haven’t been involved in climate activism for a while. I got a bit disillusioned with leftist organizing and infighting during my time in the movement, and life got in the way. I’m a bit ashamed of this, but also, I do think the inner work I’ve been doing over the past few years will aid me as I grow into the next phase of my climate activism life.

I’ve never stopped thinking and writing about climate change, and I am currently seeking a new, truly powerful climate movement to be a part of. One that isn’t defined by division, but that really is focused on building a better world for all in a tangible way.

This is not to say everyone has to join an activist movement. I really don’t think judgment or shame is helpful here, and there are so many other ways of contributing to the world aside from traditional organizing. So much of the old climate change story, and so much of leftist organizing, honestly, has been about judging people for not being enough — not pure enough, not good enough, not dedicated enough, not oppressed enough. A lot of this came out of a desire for equity, but the truth is this framework just doesn’t create the conditions for sustainable change and solidarity.

No one is responsible for saving the world single-handedly and everyone has a part to play. We need healers, storytellers, artists, spiritual leaders, lawyers, doctors, marketers, good parents, and so many others in this movement.

At the same time, I also believe that being a part of a unified movement for change of some kind is the best medicine for fear and despair. Movements connect us, and connection is what will really save us in the end — connection to the earth and each other, and realizing we are all not separate, that our fates are bound up and intertwined. The lake’s and the sky’s, the hawk’s and your child’s, mine and yours.

Change still feels possible when I look at it all that way. And of course change is much more than always possible — it’s the one guarantee in this life.

What do you think can or will actually be done about climate change? Are there any really powerful movements that you’re a part of that I might be missing?

I’d love to hear in the comments.

Leave a comment

I’d place this week’s question firmly in the unanswerable territory, though I’d love to hear if you disagree.

Get 20% off forever

In a column about the world’s most interesting unanswered or unanswerable questions, I’d be remiss not to tackle one of the greatest mysteries of all: where it all began.

I mean all this. The grasses. The wind. Skin upon bones, soil upon stone. Planets whipping around gigantic burning orbs of fury and mathematics and light.

Whose idea was this? Whose dream, whose master plan?

Or was it all truly random? And if so, how did that randomness conceive things like Fibonacci sequences and webs of neurons that mirror tree roots and galaxies?

Science and religion both offer up some answers. Of course, the most widely accepted scientific theory of how everything began is the Big Bang.

According to this theory, the universe was conceived when an extremely hot and infinitely tiny point of heat and light began suddenly expanding, echoing outwards far faster than the speed of light.

When at last it came to a relative standstill, the theory goes, waves of matter and radiation began sowing the seeds of what would become me writing this and you, reading this.

According to NASA, this initial period of expansion may all have happened within a single second. The temperature of this primordial soup: around 10 billion degrees. The date: 13.8 billion years ago.

Think of it. A vast nothing. A blank without space and time.

Then, all at once, a hot flame in the darkness. A ripple, a flame catching into a forest fire, and then, with a bit of time-space spice and a bunch of chemical reactions sprinkled into the cosmic brew, all this.

This theory is the best we’ve currently got, but it is also tattered with both scientific and ontological holes. First off, it doesn’t explain why or how that initial expansion actually kicked off in the first place, let alone how and why any of this wound itself into matter that resulted in the formation of the human brain and our capacity to ask these questions.

Many other theories have attempted to fill in these gaps, such as tthe many-worlds theory, which posits the existence of many branching realities layered on top of one another. In this paradigm, the Big Bang may have been the result of another universe’s dissolution, and so on in an endless spiral.

There’s also the more recent discovery that dark matter and dark energy make up the majority of our universe, and may have been key to developing our universe’s shape and size. This material may have acted as a kind of cosmic scaffolding, propping up a web of matter so vast that individual galaxies look like grains of sand.

Scientists are also looking for clues about our origins in things like cosmic microwave background radiation, which fills the entire universe and is believed to contains echoes of the original radiation that sparked everything into being. These radio waves resemble the signals that transmit information from radio stations to our living rooms, and carry bits of our universe’s first primordial gasp of light. In short, we’re all walking around in the ghostly radio waves left over from the initial Big Bang.

As for what came before the Big Bang, there’s the cosmic inflation theory, which posits that before the Big Bang, the universe consisted of pure, undiluted energy. Yet ultimately, most scientists conclude that we simply don’t and cannot know what caused the very first thing ever.

And this is where science still must cede to God.

Thousands of years before Edward Hubble gazed at the skies in the 1920s and conceptualized the expanding universe theory, which later spawned the Big Bang idea, religions were preaching their own version of the events that led to all this. Yet even they often admit that they have no idea why it all started.

The Vedas, sacred Indian cosmological texts which likely emerged between 1500 and 1200 BCE, bluntly state that humans will never know how the universe was born. They also theorize that gods emerged quite a while after the universe originated.

These texts do suggest that before existence, there was a kind of ur-nothing — a nothingness that transcends the idea of nothingness (with its implication of somethingness) entirely.

“Then, there was neither non-existence nor existence. There was no space, nor sky above. What covered it? Where was it? In whose protection? Was there water, deep and unfathomable?” the Vedas ask, per one translation. “Neither death nor immortality was there then. No sign of night or day.”

But still, there was something: “That One breathed by its own nature, without air. Besides that, there was nothing else.”

Then, a shift. “Darkness there was at first, by darkness hidden; the universe was undistinguished like water,” the text continues. “That which, becoming, by the void was covered; that One by the force of heat came into being. Desire first arose in It, which was the primal seed of mind.”

Heat. Desire. Were these why the universe was born? Was there some sort of spark that caught, and wanted more of itself, more light, more life?

Still, even now, we are all just bending towards more life.

Many other religious stories mention a source of the universe that exists beyond a nothing-something binary. “The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and
unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and
unchanging name,” Lao-Tzu writes of the fundamental, eternal essence of the universe in the Tao Te Ching. “(Conceived of as) having no name, it is the Originator of heaven and earth; (conceived of as) having a name, it is the Mother of all things.” In short: Some unnamed, unknowable, unthinkable force brought this all into existence.

Many Indigenous faiths speak of worlds created by some kind of great fall from the sky — the Iroquois speak of Sky Woman, whose descent from a floating island led to animals helping her craft the Earth. Other stories invoke eggs or gigantic wombs or cosmic serpents when speaking of the universe’s origins.

However, when addressing the very beginning of the entire universe, these stories often return to notions of either a Creator who started everything or a darkness and stillness that was broken by inexplicable, miraculous light. Light that bloomed out into the firmament and spiraled out into stars and planets.

Sometimes the light was shaped by a trickster god, as in Cree stories. Sometimes, as in Aboriginal cosmologies, spirits existed before matter. But always, there’s that first nothing, broken by that first something.

Other cosmologies seem to suggest that the universe seemed to exist in a state of chaos before order was imposed. Japanese cosmology proposes that the universe existed in a chaotic, disordered state until sound — given off by the movement of small particles — created the world. Ancient Greek cosmology also tells a story of a primordial god called Chaos that birthed the universe, resulting in the existence of earth/Gaia, sky/Uranus, and other deities.

Meanwhile Islam, Judaism, and Christianity unequivocally suggest that God created the universe. Often this creative effort begins with speech, as if God spun existence like some yarn told around a cosmic campfire.

The Book of Genesis says God created the universe with a word, which sparks a flood of light upon the dark and deep. The Qu’ran also says God’s intention willed the universe into existence. “When He decrees a thing, He only says to it ‘Be’ and it is,” it declares.

These stories never really address the question of how or if God was created in the first place. Perhaps asking would be to presume that God could ever not be, which would certainly leave a dent on His all-encompassing power, at least in the monotheistic framework.

Aristotle attempted to explain God’s existence-within-nonexistence by describing God as an unmoved mover, a being that could exist in the ur-nothing before nothing and something even became a binary split — a kind of quantum mastermind that was never born and can never die and is also in everything, an explanation which honestly sounds reasonable and likely to me.

Buddhism, meanwhile, postulates that the universe is cyclical and is recreated every moment. In this paradigm, nothing is independent, and there is no creator, and everything exists within everything else, eternally within each moment.

There are actually some scientific theories that evoke this idea, such as the aforementioned many worlds or multiverse theory that proposes that before the Big Bang, there were many other universes that arose and collapsed, and on and on in an endless loop.

Yet Buddha also said that questions about eternity and infinity are unanswerable and actually do not benefit the goal of existence, which is to escape suffering by transcending the wheel of death and rebirth.

Perhaps, then, this is a good place to end all this questioning. Perhaps it is enough that the origins of all things remains a mystery — something so miraculous that only something as vast as a question can even begin to hold it.

Thanks for reading and wondering along with me.

Subscribe now

Like many, many other people, I’ve been listening to the podcast The Telepathy Tapes over the past few weeks. It’s currently one of America’s top podcasts, and it’s centered around one very fascinating question: Are nonspeaking autistic people actually communicating telepathically?

The podcast begins by following television producer Ky Dickens as she interviews a series of nonspeaking autistic kids and their parents. The first few episodes center around few featured families who undergo a series of tests, which seem to prove that the kids can read their parents’ minds.

Many of these parents long-ago realized their kids’ abilities when the children were able to find hidden candies or know certain computer passwords. Most originally thought they were completely alone in experiencing this phenomena, and most simply seem to want answers about what it all means.

Things only expand and deepen from there, as the nonspeakers reveal that they meet with other nonspeakers on a non-material plane called “the hill.” The podcast hits its stride in the sixth episode, when Dickens begins to explore several well-documented tales of telepathic animal communication. She uses this as a segue into deconstructing scientific materialism, which is basically the hypothesis that the physical world is all that actually exists. Within this theory, all that really exists is matter/material, and therefore everything follows the same fundamental laws.

But this is a flawed paradigm, Dickens and a host of other thinkers she cites in the episode argue, and has stymied a great deal of research into things like the possibility of other realms, spirits, clairvoyance, and magic. She specifically invokes Rupert Sheldrake, whose talk on this topic was removed from TED and which I’m linking here.

Telepathy sounds like a wild, out-there concept, but is it? Dickens asks. After all, our phones send signals to one another. Why shouldn’t our brains, which are inarguably more advanced systems than our iPhones?

If the revelations on this podcast are to believed, the autistic nonspeakers’ telepathic abilities may be a pathway into merging science and spirituality. Serious research on this subject could prove the existence of realms we can’t see, that we’re all connected, and that our lives extend far beyond death, among other revelations that have long since evaded science’s glare. It could also prove the existence of some kind of unified field — some kind of God-like or genuinely Godly web across which telepathic signals can fly like neurons or shooting stars.

I have to admit that when I first started listening to this podcast, I was feeling skeptical. I started it shortly after writing an article on deep-sea conspiracy theories, for which I’d spent a fair amount of time reading posts and watching videos about people who claim to have witnessed bizarre, inexplicable things out on the open ocean or under the waves.

The internet, and the history of humanity at large, is rife with stories that seem completely absurd to the scientific materialist’s mind. Many, many, many people say that they have experienced alien sightings, ghost interaction, NDEs, and all manner of other extraordinary things I often write about on here.

So many of these stories must simply be made up, I thought as I began listening to the podcast. Products of a desire for attention, or tricks of the light.

Yet there’s another possibility. What if they aren’t all made up?

What if some these parents, and some of the thousands of UFO-sighters and clairvoyants and energy-sensors and dream-walkers who populate the earth, are telling the truth?

Could everybody, every parent in this podcast and every child and teacher and scientist and cameraperson, really all be lying?

The podcast’s second half makes the resounding choice to believe in these nonspeakers and the teachers and parents who have experienced their gifts. It fans out from the telepathy idea, exploring various nonspeakers whose experiences reveal that, as Dickens often repeats, telepathy is just the tip of the iceberg. She goes on to interview and profile nonspeakers who seemingly can remote-view the lives of strangers, predict natural disasters, and much more. Really, it’s a trip from start to finish.

In one episode, she profiles a nonspeaking autistic adult whose parents and caregiver both say he channels songs to them within lucid dreams. In another, she interviews a family whose son died — though many of his nonspeaking friends said they knew he was going to die in advance of his death. They also say his funeral was full of angels, and claim to know he now is helping other kids in a place in the afterlife that seems awfully like heaven. Apparently, he still can occasionally visit them sometimes on the hill.

Meanwhile, a bonus episode features a non-autistic teaching assistant who underwent a near-death experience in early 2024, and who claims he actually was able to visit the hill several times. He and another teacher also claim that some of the kids he met on the hill could verify his presence there by reciting information he’d told them while on the hill.

The nonspeakers are a relentlessly honest bunch, Dickens emphasizes numerous times, so she finds it highly unlikely that they would make all this up. Importantly, they also communicate through a method called spelling, which involves pointing or signaling to letters shown to them on a board. Spelling is actually quite controversial, given the argument that sometimes spelling facilitators might accidentally facilitate nonspeakers’ responses with small, imperceptible cues. In general, but particularly due to the nonspeakers’ reliance on spelling, The Telepathy Tapes has dredged up quite a bit of controversy, and the podcast has been repeatedly and heavily criticized by The Atlantic and many other major outlets.

But spelling also seems like the best shot at unlocking the inner lives of these people, many of whom are treated and taught like young children throughout their entire lives. According to the podcast, the nonspeakers really are in there — and in fact, they may be in touch with a much higher reality than most of us can reach.

Through spelling, many of them are able to share profound insights and deep wisdom. They all seem to argue that compassion and love are the most important things in the world.

There have been legends about telepathy and extrasensory communication since time immemorial. You actually see many of the same themes found in The Telepathy Tapes popping up in tales of Indian yogis, and the book Autobiography of a Yogi is full of tales of enlightened masters seeing the future, transcending space and time, and returning to communicate after death. In these stories, the yogis seem to earn the ability to do this through incredible focus, meditation, renunciation, and sheer will. The book is written by the renowned spiritual teacher Paramahansa Yogananda, who says he saw many of these miracles with his own eyes.

Of course, the Bible features stories of similar miracles — burning bushes, fiery angels, Jesus walking on water and making water from wine. History and folklore are also full of tales of magic, gods and goddesses, house spirits and elves, prophecies and revelations.

Are all of these, all of them, made up?

I doubt it. And that doubt, my friends, is a door.

There is undeniably something very special about The Telepathy Tapes, which has resonated with an unusually wide audience and is arguably playing a major role in bringing these ideas, which are so often easily laughed off and disregarded by the scientific establishment, to the mainstream. It may be critical in sparking deeper research into topics in this realm.

One thing that some of the nonspeakers often say, though, is that it’s difficult to engage with others telepathically who don’t have some form of compassion for them and some amount of belief or receptivity to the idea of telepathy itself. So if this is true, it’s easy to imagine that scientific research done by complete skeptics may not be effective.

This might seem absurd, but the fundamental principles of quantum physics tell us that by observing something, we always alter it. Why should telepathy be any different?

As I listened to the podcast on several long drives on snowy highways, I found my doubts fading as the story pulled me in. I soon began looking for signs all around me — and finding them in fragments of rainbow lights and angel numbers on the side of the road.

I think it is vital that this podcast is shining some light on the place where science and observable phenomena brush up against the sublime and the sacred. I really hope it does inspire deeper research and deeper thought. If we can prove beyond all doubt these nonspeakers are telepathic, that opens up a thousand new realms of possibility.

Yet sometimes we must also look past a need for truth, and simply admit it: The world is far more magical and mysterious than we can know.

I fully understand that so-called “magical thinking” can become dangerous, especially when it leads to a disregard of critical, existential risks like climate change. At the same time, we are cutting ourselves off from so much possibility by disregarding what hasn’t be proven by science yet entirely. I believe science and so-called “magical thinking” can actually mutually enhance one another and push each other to new heights, and I also believe that with the advent of AI and quantum physics occurring at the same time as rising discussion about things like telepathy, manifestation, and the like, we’re in the midst of a truly extraordinary paradigm shift.

The final episode of the series, which has been renewed for a second season, mostly features the words of nonspeakers, communicated through spelling and read by artificial voices or friends and loved ones. All of the nonspeakers, without fail, seem to have an extremely important message for humanity: We must treat each other with grace and compassion.

That’s a message that holds up regardless of the validity of each individual story in the podcast. And maybe, just maybe, that was the point all along.

Have you listened to The Telepathy Tapes? What do you think of it? Let me know in the comments below, and thanks for reading.

There are a lot more of you here lately, and I’m honored to have each and every one of you you reading along. Thanks for being a part of this growing community of questioners, journeyers, magic-makers, and weavers. Keep contributing to the building of a more interconnected world as only you can.

Get 20% off forever

On a relatively insignificant day in early February of this year, as the human world above simmered in its mire of apocalyptic news, war, technology, and development, a peculiar fish made its way up from below.

This was an anglerfish, a creature usually found at the very bottom of the ocean. This fish is notable both for its gigantic fangs and the signature bob of bioluminescence that hangs before it, illuminating its way in the dark, airless deeps.

Something strange possessed this particular specimen. The fish, when it was first spotted about 2,000 meters off the coast of the Spanish island of Tenerife by researchers who typically study sharks, was far closer to the surface than an anglerfish should ever be. These creatures normally float some 200 to 2,000 meters deep, but this one was ascending rapidly.

The researchers were not exactly sure why the fish appeared to be swimming towards the surface. No one really seems to be sure, though most scientists seem to believe the fish was sick, injured, or afraid.

One scientist posited to National Geographic that it may have eaten something that possessed a swim bladder or gaseous gland. Another suggested it may have been disturbed by an environmental shift, like the El Niño winds, which can alter sea temperatures and currents deep below.

The fish died soon after it was spotted. It was later plucked from the waves and brought to a museum to be studied.

Then it did what many of us secretly dream of on this very site and all across the world as we cast our little pixelated offerings into the algorithmic altar: that little fish went viral.

You sort of have to see the video of this creature’s ascent to really understand why its image caught on. Here is a creature somewhere it does not belong, approaching death yet soaring towards a luminous beyond. There’s something uncanny and cinematic about its smallness and darkness against the bright sea.

@animalcrew.13Angler Fish spotted swimming to the surface in broad daylight. It could be the first recorded sighting in the world of a living adult black seadevil or abyssal anglerfish, this species of anglerfish are found in the ‘midnight zone’ of the ocean around 2,000 metres below the surface… why do you think this is happing is it due to climate change I wonder 🤔 but isn’t it just amazing getting to see such a beautiful creature ❤️🐟#fyp #boost #news #ocean #anglerfish #deepsea #sea #oceancreatures #deepseacreatures #hamstergang🐹 #animallover #properhamstercare #animals #trendingvideo #animalcrew13 #fyppp #fish #angler

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

It struck a chord with viewers, especially younger viewers on TikTok, inspiring articles with titles like “Gen Zs are literally sobbing over viral video of ‘small but mighty’ anglerfish: ‘We are so proud.’”

One particular refrain, often uttered by crying amateur videographers in their eulogy to our bygone soldier, went: “She finally saw a light she didn’t have to create.”

@sailgpAnd on her final day she chose to see an F50 ❤️ #SailGP #anglerfish #truestory

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

@mdzulqarnnn"Terlalu lelah untuk memberikan cahayaku dalam kegelapan seumur hidupku. Akhirnya, aku melihat cahaya nyata yang diciptakan oleh Tuhan." -Anglerfish #anglerfish #ikan

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

I do think the video and the fish’s journey is beautiful in a very bittersweet way. Her journey must have been terrifying, but it may also have been full of unimaginable wonder.

She might have felt the fishy equivalent to the kind of awe astronauts experience when seeing the earth from space for the first time. This phenomenon, called The Overview Effect, is notorious for its tendency to fill astronauts with reverence that, in some cases, inspires them to become ecological stewards or experts in consciousness studies.

It’s not hard to see why the fish’s journey struck an emotional nerve. “The anglerfish has spent its entire life in the deep, dark ocean, a place of survival and isolation,” psychotherapist Dr. Nivedita Nayak told Metro. “Now, it is swimming toward something brighter, something unknown, even though it will not survive the journey. It speaks to endurance, resilience, and the idea of moving toward something greater, no matter the cost. Many people see themselves in that struggle, and it resonates on an emotional level.”

Humans know and love the archetype of ascent through trial. Jesus dying on the cross, only to be reborn, transformed, immortalized forever in story and song and carbon-copy pop songs. The starving yogi, having sat upon the mountain for days until at last he sees the connections that bind us to everything else.

Our narratives are full of tales of creatures reaching for a light far beyond us. We love a hero’s journey, a triumph, a travelogue with some glorious release at the very end. (Anora, sweeping last night at the Oscars, speaks to this very dream as well as its dismal aftermath).

The image of the anglerfish speaks to something fundamental within us: our need to hope.

Everyone can relate. I know I can. I am on a traveling journey of my own, both inwardly and outwardly, seeking to expand my understanding of the world and my purpose in it and wandering my way through the world in the process. In the spirit of Timothée Chalamet bluntly admitting that he wants to be great in a recent speach, I can admit: I do wish to leave myself behind, to transcend darkness and fear, to achieve my own version of greatness, and ultimately, though it may take many lifetimes, to finally reach the luminousness all the sages seem to say is just beyond some sort of perceptual door.

@motiversityPursuit of greatness 👏 Speaker : Timothee Chalamet #mindset #inspiration #motivation #timotheechalamet

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Who knows what the fish felt. Probably her ascent was not a pursuit of any kind of glory. It must have been so deeply strange.

Did she see or sense the boats soaring overhead, hear the caw of sea birds, see the unfathomable flicker of her reflection? Did she sense the presence of another world so nearby?

Larger and larger it would have grown, that unbelievable brightness. Perhaps they were marvelously strange or even familiar, those first strands of light. Perhaps she recognized the glow as some primordial ancestor of the small bioluminescent orb that had always hovered before her.

There are many stories of bright lights appearing at the moment of death. Many who undergo near-death experiences tell of tunnels of light, or angels, or higher realms. Scientists have also observed surges of electrical activity in animal brains near death. There is no reason to think the anglerfish may have not experienced the bright glow of death in her final moments, which may have intertwined with the warm glow of the sun she met for the first time as she rose.

Perhaps her death was like leaping from water into to air. Like entering a realm she never even knew existed but which always lingered just above her, a mirror world no less real for its absence from the reality she knew.

It is likely that she suffered or was at the very least terribly confused. She was displaced from her home and brought into a completely foreign environment. She may have been hurt by the light or the change in pressure.

Imagine that kind of death, surrounded by an element that you have never sensed before. It makes you wonder if fish can engage with anything like prayer.

It also makes me think of the death many people and animals will experience as the sun grows ever-hotter on Earth, as wildfires and heat waves strip our green planet bare.

There are many ways to read the fish’s story. It can be read as a tale of triumph or displacement, as a tragedy or a miracle, or even as a quotidian example of nature’s everyday brutality and mysticism.

Ultimately I do enjoy the fact that the fish has tugged on so many of people’s heartstrings. I’m also glad that a fish that is so often seen as ugly or monstrous is being given a little extra love.

I think we can learn a lot from animals, and even if projecting our pride onto this fish’s ascent might not be scientifically accurate (though I’m not saying it isn’t!), the emotion behind it is still a step towards a more empathetic connection with the natural world.

I also think animal videos and viral trends like this one are what the internet does best, full stop. Really, the internet should have stayed mostly cute animal videos. By essentially all accounts, things were much better back then when cat memes were the internet’s main purpose. The anglerfish’s virality feels like a bit of a callback to that original, reportedly Edenic time.

It is also a reminder of the childlike wonder humans can experience when faced with the beauty of a creature being wondrously, purely alive, even as it approaches death.

*

A few weeks ago, for this very same column, I wrote about the mysteries of the deep sea and some of the conspiracies that surround this little-known terrain — stories of Lovecraftian monsters and alien vessels creeping across the watery deserts so near the earth’s burning heart. I also reflected on the fact that climate change will cause many uncanny entities to surface as sea levels rise and temperatures shift. Reading this story about the fish felt like an acknowledgment. Things indeed are rising from below. But not all change is monstrous.

This is a calamitous time to be alive, what with the madness of the US government uplifting prejudices and delusions that have long swum in the darkness of half-obscurity, at least to some of our untrained eyes. Yet at the same time it is a revolutionary time, a time when science is coming closer to understanding spirituality through quantum physics and subjects like telepathy are going mainstream. A singularity likely approaches. These are strange, radical times and no one can predict what is going to happen.

Like the anglerfish, we swim towards the glow of our chosen dream, be it capital or enlightenment. Perhaps the poetry is in the journey. The journey is the the tragedy and the wonder and the futility of the quest, and in the way that our pursuit of luminousness can resonate even beyond death.

Was the anglerfish’s descent a product of collapse or curiosity, of science or faith? Was it a tragedy or a triumph? If nothing else, I think, the anglerfish offers us a chance to wonder at the world’s mysteries and complexity. I believe wonder connects us to each other, and that’s the whole point of this newsletter at the end of the day.

Just keep swimming, friend. Thanks for being here.

Get 20% off forever

Get 20% off forever

Sitting on a beach looking out at the Atlantic Ocean, I think of all the little things that had to happen to shape this landscape.

Rocks broken down over thousands of years into fragments of glittering sand. Ice floes melted into droplets mixed with the salty remnants of long-ago volcanic explosions. Eons of the sea breathing up on this rocky giant island, carving it into shore.

The land, like our own bodies, is the product of billions of years of time and change. We walk in the imprint of all that came before us: the chaotic meshing of of starlight and space, the squelch of black holes into young dimensions, the forging of the earth and its moon from asteroids, dust, and the pull of a once-young star that now kisses my skin just softly enough to slightly burn it.

We are made up of, and exist solely because of, the past. I could easily write about this fact for a whole essay or perhaps ten books, and if anyone would like to commission that, let me know.

But in this piece I want to ask a different question. If the land is made of the past (and we are also the land, of course), then what, exactly, does the land remember?

This question is at the heart of the field of landscape memory, which asks how the past influences the present and future of ecosystems and geographies. This field is becoming more timely as the earth changes faster and faster thanks to climate change, which is making it easier to see just how adaptable to trauma and change the earth really is.

On a macro scale at least, the earth is startlingly adaptable and tends to work with memory to craft more sustainable ecosystems. In our climate-distorted reality, you can see this pliability in the way certain pine seeds are developing a reliance on fire to grow in wildfire-prone areas, or the way certain deer are now gravitating towards forests that are less likely to burn.

Memory manifest like this is how landscapes adapt to past disruptions. It’s how life has continued to exist on earth for so many billions of years.

Our bodies have also learned from past traumas and lessons that span many generations. In our single mortal lifetimes, we are influenced by the ways our parents treated us as infants until the day we die and can carry grief for decades, but we also walk with much older knowings.

Our bodies recoil from spiders and loud noises out of innate fear born of thousands of years of ancestral wisdom. We are naturally drawn towards activities and traits that helped our ancestors survive, like dopamine hits and certain lovers. We are also influenced by our ancestors’ specific traumas, which studies have found can encode themselves in our DNA, leaving chemical stains on certain genes that can influence future generations.

Legacies of affection and joy can be passed down, too. We are all just taking what we can from the past and learning it to bend towards survival, towards more life.

So landscapes and bodies remember. But perhaps the truth of what and how they remember goes deeper than what our current scientific and geological paradigms can comprehend. The question of ghosts, spirits, multiverses, and astral planes brings up a host of other dimensions to this answer (literally, if you’d like).

Maybe it is a solely human endeavor to project memory and sacredness and hauntings onto landscapes, but some places in the world have always been consecrated by specific groups. Take the temple site of Borġ-in-Nadur in southern Malta, which has been the home of a startling number of Virgin Mary sightings — or the sacred waters of the Ganges of India, where it is believed souls can clear lifetimes of negative karma simply by bathing in the waters.

Do landscapes carry memories in the form of hauntings, or portals, or long-ago blessings that can still be felt? Could that mean that land can also be inhabited by the ghosts and spirits of the landscapes that were there before? Could landscapes be inhabited by much larger, more ecological deities than humans can comprehend — sleeping ocean gods from when the earth was a sea, or angels from distant solar systems?

Are oceans haunted by the memories of the deserts that once were? Do paved parking lots long for the ghosts of the trees that once danced and swayed upon them?

These are questions for another time. But in terms of whether land can grieve what it used to be, I suspect the answer to this lies outside the bounds of individual ideas of human thought. After all, death is a part of life in nature. The wild is used to death. If landscapes could mourn the past, the world would be overcome by wild cries of mourning. If every violent death or war or wildfire left a host of screaming floralian and faunalian ghosts behind there would be no peace anywhere.

It could be that the earth, at least as a Gaia-ecosystem, is more in tune with the timeless nature of true reality, living closer to a state of suspended peace that resembles something like enlightenment rather than in a state of longing and separateness like we humans are. It could also be that like us, with time and new growth, landscapes can just forget. Most likely, it is a wild blend of both.

I do assume that our earth is grieving all of its current losses in some way, as reefs die and forests grow up in smoke and humans continue to destroy ourselves. All this must be resonating somehow across Gaia.

Yet I also believe the earth is big enough to hold it all, big enough to alchemize all this grief into new growth. It is doing this now, converting its grief into the energy that is inspiring floods and hurricanes and rising temperatures, which are clearing the way for new biomes, new life. It’s we humans, and the other temporary life forms of the planet, that will have to face the grief. Grief, of course, is memory too — memory combined with love for something that is gone, or something that can’t be.

*

I think often of the film Nostalgia For the Light, which follows two groups of people exploring Chile’s Atacama Desert: a team of astronomers looking for hints of the past in the uniquely dark and starry night skies, and a group of women searching for the bones of loved ones they lost during the cruel Pinochet regime.

Ultimately, one of the women finds solace in realizing that all things are ultimately returned to the universe and recycled by the earth. She also finds hope in believing things will be better for her son in the future. Sometimes memory is only bearable when paired with the possibility of things going differently.

This is the greatest gift of memory: It allows us to hope that things can change, that the cruel parts of the past won’t be repeated, that transformation is possible.

I also think often of the Killing Fields in Cambodia, where thousands of people were murdered by the Pol Pot regime. When I visited, it was a beautiful day, though rain threatened. I remember the birds were singing. Sunlight illuminated the grasses. The trees were soft and gracious with their shade.

It was so strange how the landscape, at first glance, seemed to have no memory of what had happened to the humans who had walked there. Instead, humans had to erect a monument in order to preserve the memory.

Yet for years after the genocide’s conclusion, the landscape used to cough up bones and other gruesome shards. Fragments of tissue or clothing or scraps of the dead would literally rise up from the earth and were often spotted by tourists at the site.

I wondered if the trees who had seen so much knew. If they grew differently. If the landscape pushed those bones up for a reason.

Do landscapes remember violence? Certainly our bodies can. Perhaps they also remember beauty. Perhaps the land in places like Chernobyl recalls the time before radiation, or our deserts remember when they were covered in shining ice.

Then again, maybe it’s human hubris to believe that a landscape would mourn humans, especially when the land has so much of its own dead to worry about. I’ve actually always found that nature can seem exceptionally peaceful in places of great human suffering or destruction. There’s a special kind of silence in graveyards or abandoned buildings, a resonance born of contrast, or at least that’s how my human mind interprets it.

Yet more and more in the future, we will see human trauma intertwining with ecological ruin. Our healing and the earth’s will become more bound-up. We will have to learn from the earth, from the way it steadily works with the wounds of disaster. From how it learns from its mistakes. From how it still makes flowers and rain even in the bitterest of times.

*

For a long time on earth, there was no burial except for a wild return to the land. The earth is a giant graveyard, a garden of memories subsumed and resurrected.

There are so many bones lying in the earth, at the bottom of the sea, deep in the soil. Washing up on the shore along with shards of sea glass.

What does the earth remember of its past? Certainly it bears the fossils and the minerals of long-dissolved matter. We, too, bear the imprints of the stardust we once were. The imprint of our distant past lives deep within our atoms, shaping our future.

The earth remembers. But what? We can only ask the stalactites and stalagmites, the looping tree rings, the tusks and mollusks buried deep below the topsoil. The drift and flow of continents, the crack of fault lines, the sleeping pathogens and mammoths buried in ice, the mushrooms sprouting up from fallen birds and decaying deer.

We can ask the seeds that contain the memory of the parent trees that unleashed them, the droplets of water that remember being clouds, and the light of the stars that is really memory made luminous, as most of the starlight we see is coming from stars that are presently dead.

Memory is imperfect. It also changes form, like the earth, like us, and it is also vulnerable to erasure. We humans seem especially plagued by amnesia; we forget our past mistakes, we repeat them, we uplift dictators, we fall for the same lies, we continue to pollute and wreak havoc on the land and ourselves.

If there’s a lesson to take from the earth, it’s that we cannot bury memory. Instead, when we find ourselves haunted by the memory of things we don’t want to repeat, we need to alchemize them — to convert radiation into new life, like the black fungi growing in Chernobyl’s nuclear-reactors, feeding off poison and growing still.

Get 20% off forever

Share

The ocean covers 71% of the planet, but humans have explored about 20% of it. You don’t need to know those statistics to understand why this dark and deep mass of sunken bones, cavernous trenches, and unfathomable pressure has always captivated humanity’s collective imagination.

People have always speculated about what might be down there in those untellable, unspeakable depths, where oxygen and light cannot reach, where the pressure is so intense that exposure would mean instant death to a human body.

Down there, reason and order mean nothing at all. Down there, all our cities, towers, and philosophies crumble. Down there, there are other rules, other gods.

Down there, way at the bottom of the deepest dark, things start to glow.

*

The deep sea has spawned countless myths, legends, and conspiracy theories. Everything from 16th century maps to the tales of H. P. Lovecraft teem with stories of tentacled sea monsters rising from the depths. Fantastic tales of sunken cities like Atlantis abound.

Truth is stranger than fiction when it comes to the otherworldly deep, with its errant megalodon jaws and translucent-skinned, fanged array of fauna. Many of these legends are in fact based in reality, and there are undeniably mysterious and monstrous creatures in the depths.

There also are a number of very real undersea cities, including Baia, Italy, which was submerged after volcanic activity over two thousand years ago, or Mahabalipuram, India, which was a legend until its existence was proven in 2004 after a tsunami exposed fragments of its remains.

In our collective consciousness, the ocean seems to occupy a similar place to outer space. Like outer space, the very deep ocean is inhospitable to life. Like outer space, when you go far enough, you’ll eventually stumble upon something that shines. Perhaps that subconscious association is part of why humans seem intent on finding connections between extraterrestrial life and the deep sea.

One of the main conspiracy theories I’ve encountered involving the ocean has to do with the fact that NASA — America’s preeminent space exploration authority — was originally created to explore the sea in addition to space. Much ado has been made over the fact that in 1978, NASA’s Seasat satellite was sent out to explore the oceans, but the organization suddenly pulled the plug just after 105 days of activity.

Today, there are many YouTube and TikTok videos with eye-catching titles such as “Why NASA Stopped Exploring The Ocean Will Shock You!” “NASA started exploring the deep sea in 1958 but stopped in 1978. After that, they started working on getting us off the planet,” the narrator of that video says. “They even detonate a massive explosion in the ocean, in 2021. What did they discover down there? What are they so afraid of?”

Reuters, of course, has an answer: NASA didn’t actually stop exploring the deep sea in 1978. In fact, they’re still working on it. In 2021, they even launched a very aptly named probe called Orpheus to explore the also aptly named hadal zone (named after Hades), which is the official name for the very deepest part of the sea, the part that stretches from 6,000 to 11,000 meters below the sea’s sun-dashed, wind-sliced surface.

(Orpheus, of course, is the mythic musician who descended down to the underworld to rescue his lost love, Euridyce; he manages to persuade Hades to let them go on the condition that he won’t look back at her on the way out, but of course he can’t resist, and down she goes again into the darkness).

*

Before we dive into some of the main conspiracies about the deep sea, let me say this: I could not find much, or any, substantial information to back up any of the theories floating around about aliens or cosmic horrors at the bottom of the ocean. It looks like there probably isn’t anything extraterrestrial or multidimensionally horrific under those endless waves.

That has not stopped people from speculating, and Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok teem with theories. “They probably discovered the Beast mentioned in the book of Revelation that says its supposed to rise up out of the ocean! It probably saw the eyes and heard a growl and got out of there quick!! I would not even doubt it!!” says one YouTube commenter under “Why NASA Stopped Exploring The Ocean Will Shock You!”

One of the main conspiracy theories about the deep sea appears to be the idea that there might be aliens at the bottom of the ocean. This idea is not new. “Ships’ logs have information about UFOs coming out of the water, hovering next to the ships and then taking off going back into the 1800s. This has been going on a long time,” Kevin Knuth, an astrophysicist and a former NASA researcher, told Vice in 2022. “They are very often associated with water. They’re very often seen coming out of water, seen going into water, and sometimes seen underwater.”

In1977, residents of the Welsh village Broad Haven said they saw a silver disc drop into the ocean. Today, residents of Mexico’s Miramar Beach reportedly believe in the existence of a nearby underground UFO base called Amupac. It is also true that in 2022, the Pentagon did announce its UFO investigation department would study “transmedium objects,” or objects that can pass between air and water. And of course, YouTube and Reddit are rife with stories about underwater alien bases from Alaska to the Red Sea, stories that amount to the closest thing we have to modern folklore.

In November, this folkloric idea made it all the way to Congress when Republican rep Lauren Boebert asked a group of UFO experts if they knew if the Department of Defense had been involved with creating alien “bases” at the bottom of the sea. She also asked if they knew of projects involving the “manipulation of human genetics” with “non-human genetic material.” Journalist Michael Shellenberger, who was on the panel, claimed he “didn’t know about a base” but had spoken to a source who saw an orb emerging out of the sea and meeting another orb.

On the very day I began this article, another Republican named Tim Burchett happened to give some airtime to the underground-base theory. "I haven't been briefed on this, just from what I'm putting together, but we have some secret sonar,” he told disgraced former attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz in a rather nonsensical rant. “But what's so crazy about it, like we're hiding it from the Chinese. Well, heck, Matt, the Chinese sold us the components for it. They know what's in our sonar probably better than we do. But when they tell me something's moving at hundreds of miles an hour underwater, and our capabilities are—I don't think we have anything that'll do 40 miles an hour, and this one was as large as a football field underwater, and this was a documented case, and I have an admiral telling me this stuff.”

Whether the admiral appeared to him in dreams or reality is another question more appropriate for a David Lynch film (RIP). And while I’ve seriously contemplated the existence of aliens elsewhere on this blog, I’m not as interested in whether there is something to the whole aliens-underwater thing in this context. Instead I think there’s something deeper here, something more important than the real-not real question.

Conspiracy theories are interesting to me because I think they illuminate aspects our collective hunger for magic and our innate awareness that there is much more going on in the world than meets the eye. At their core, they come from an instinctual knowledge that the world is more strange and powerful than we can imagine, and they signify our desire to merge with the more-than-human, interconnected reality beyond our individualist minds and religions that have confused metaphors for truth.

Many of us live in a world divorced from magic. We are increasingly separate from the unknown. This has been going on at least since the Enlightenment, but now that we can look up anything online, there’s less and less room for mystery.

At the same time, interest in religion and spirituality are rising among the masses. Everywhere I look people are looking for meaning and finding it in engaging with things we cannot definitively know are real.

No matter how much light we try to shine on the dark, the world remains a mysterious place. Nature is embedded with deep wisdom we can only engage with by diving into the intuitive parts of ourselves. Truth and insight are often found in the darkness, when we go deep enough to hit bioluminescence.

There may not be any aliens in the ocean. There also might be. I am not one to act like I’m certain about something I actually don’t and can’t know. But I am certain that the ocean’s power, like all of nature’s, cannot be denied.

Nature has immense power over us humans, a power is difficult to recall sometimes in our world of walls and insulation. And yet, as climate change and environmental destruction continue to wreak havoc on our Earth, we will continue to be confronted by this power day in and day out. Wildfires are already destroying whole cities, decimating industries. Hurricanes are flattening transit systems.

The deep is rising, and it is coming for us all.

As temperatures rise, ice will melt and sea levels are also beginning to encroach upon land. Deep sea mining is also bringing us closer and closer to those airless depths, potentially unleashing untold chaos on our planet’s oldest ecosystems. As the deep emerges and we get closer to that interminable edge — and closer to the dark beyond it — certainly things that are wonderful and strange and terrible will begin to emerge from those airless chambers.

America and much of the world is now being led by people who believe conspiracy theories and take them at face value rather than investigating the deeper forces that may be fueling these theories: paranoia, for one, and also, the possibility of actual sacredness and power in the world that exists beyond the slim realm of organized religion and nuclear families that they deign acceptable, a world which was always built on the backbone of bloodshed and subjugation.

Perhaps at this time we must look to deep, which is a place of questions rather than answers.

It is often geopolitically difficult to tell who owns what part of the ocean. The sea erases our borders and boundaries. Laws shift and sink out there. Perspective mutates. Possibilities emerge that were not there before. Order fails. Something new and wild emerges. And certainly, it is time for something new.

*

In many of my favorite books, when confronted with some impossible life change, characters tend to venture out to the sea, walking in and letting the salt clear away their pasts. Sometimes they die there. Sometimes they emerge changed. Always they are reborn, remade by salt and storm.

It’s possible to read the deep as a metaphor for the unconscious mind, the deeper parts of the psyche, and the sunken and hidden parts of reality. The unconscious is where the foundations of all old stories live, like sunken whale bones upon which civilizations are built, and it is also where new stories can be born. The deep reminds us that there is life there too, beyond the edges of our comprehension.

There are parallels between the deep sea and the womb-space, which is really the space of the feminine and the unknowable and the mystic and the wild. There are parallels between the deep sea and dreams and death and outer space and the deep forest and anything that exists beyond the visible realm. These are dream-threads, not logical links, and yet they are there if you look for them, like fine beams of light connecting psyche to salt and sand.

Of course we want to imagine alien bases down there. Of course, in our hubris, we want to project militarism onto the ocean floor as well as the stars.

Yet what if the deep sea contained something much older and much, much stranger?

In our world of destruction, where ever-more-corrupt powers that be continue their efforts to destroy all life, we will probably see more and more conspiracy theories rising up about everything from the deep sea to wildfires and plane crashes. We can dive into these theories. We can wonder what lies out there among the anglerfish and the sunken whale bones, and we can project our human thoughts onto these dimensions. Yet we must sometimes leave room for questions.

At the end of the day, we do not really know what is at the bottom of the sea. It could be gods or ancient monsters, or simply stones heated by the furnaces at the heart of the earth and delicate, vengeful glowing creatures that can survive and thrive in seemingly impossible situations.

But whatever is down there, it is far more powerful and so much older than any of us, and it will outlast us long after we, too, have rejoined its dark oblivion.

Get 20% off forever

*

Did you know that the plant you’ve forgotten to water might actually be screaming at you too silently for you to hear?

This is the conclusion of research from a 2023 study published in Cell, which found that plants sometimes change shape and color, emit aromas, and yes, make specific sounds when they are stressed.

In the study, scientists used a machine learning algorithm (AKA AI — which is also aiding scientists in their mission to talk to animals, weirdly enough) to figure out that distressed, dehydrated, or otherwise damaged tomato plants emitted popping or clicking noises at ultrasonic frequencies human ears cannot hear.

A few years ago, the same scientists found that flowers technically can hear, even though they of course don’t possess anything like the human ear canals we have on our heads. In the study, flowers that were exposed to the sound of buzzing bees started making sweeter nectar.

Meanwhile, the idea that plants can hear and respond to music has been around for decades, and while the evidence is still a bit inconclusive, it certainly seems like plants appreciate strings, classical music, and jazz — though they may not be keen on rock and roll. Either way, it’s pretty obvious that they’re listening (or rather, feeling the vibrations deep within their cell membranes).

*

We live in a universe born of, and made of, sound.

There are no creatures and no entities that are not emitting some kind of buzz or hum. Everything is energy and everything is singing, according to all the laws of both science and faith that I have ever encountered.

But it can be difficult for us humans to hear languages or ideas that are not our own, let alone frequencies that do not reach our ears. Still, I wonder if some part of us can sense these frequencies deep within us, in the parts of our psyches that are more keyed into whatever collective force or energy binds us all together.

Perhaps some distant, remote part of our brain can pick up the shrieks of the flora dying on our windowsills. Perhaps some of us are better at sensing this than others, and perhaps that’s why some people naturally have “green thumbs.” Perhaps some of us have just forgotten how to hear, or maybe we’ve learned to tune it out thanks to our lives of constant music, stimulation, and distraction.

*

If plants can make sounds, and hear sounds, by that logic, then trees, microbes, and mycelium should be able to do the same. It’s likely that animals can also hear the frequencies of these entities.

Perhaps forests are really choirs that we cannot hear — symphonies of invisible signals, webs of tongues carried on invisible vibrations.

All this raises a whole host of other questions, such as: If plants can cry when stressed, then what happens when a whole ecosystem is stressed or worse? When a drought hits key rivers? When wildfires devastate whole cities?

Perhaps we can, in some part of our brains, hear those frequencies too — those ecosystem-wide alarms. Perhaps that is the cause of some of our collective discomfort, our anxiety, our increasing inability to focus, our sense of precarity and even despair. What if some part of us can hear the earth screaming?

*

Indigenous cultures have always known that the more-than-human world is speaking to us, that it is sentient, that we are in relationship with it and in dialogue with it.

Look back into the past long enough and you will see stories of deities that are nature embodied, and stones that contain inner lives, and spirits that inhabit houses and structures and rivers and shadows and must be worked with and appeased. There is something deep within us that knows this is true: The world, everything around us and everything in it, is speaking to us, is alive, is animate, is all bound up in a web of interconnected frequency.

Perhaps all this is one great hall of mirrors, a chamber of songs intertwining like tree roots just beneath the soil of the visible world. Perhaps it is all guiding us towards the understanding that everything is connected and we are all one, though most of us have forgotten.

Perhaps listening to the silence can help. Listening deeper than the sound of birdsong or wind or the hum of the refrigerator. Allowing the messages of the natural world to permeate our intuition. Hearing with something other than ears.

This, I think, must be how we join in communion with what we cannot see. This is how we begin to speak the language of the stars and soil. This is how we grow into our true nature. By looking to the more-than-human world, getting very, very quiet, and listening until we can hear it. Perhaps then we will realize it can hear us back. Maybe someday we’ll even realize we’ve been listening to ourselves all along.

By now, AI has weaseled its way into most of our everyday lives. For years I’ve been saying that people actually have no idea what’s coming when it comes to AI — it will reshape our world in fundamental ways, and likely will do a lot of bizarre things we cannot predict. (It’ll also do a whole lot of taking our jobs — a whole lot more than immigrants ever could, anyway, but I digress…)

AI undeniably poses unprecedented dangers to our civilization, with the threats of AI going rogue and destroying us all, stripping creatives of their already meager sources of income, and/or perpetuating our worst human biases all seeming more viable each day. Whatever happens, AI will fundamentally rewire our ways of thinking and the landscapes of creativity and work at large.

But in addition to that, I think it might do some truly surreal, dreamlike, weird, and maybe even wonderful things. For example, it might help us finally understand the more-than-human world just a little bit better.

Here’s a personal conspiracy theory of mine: I believe it may not be a coincidence that climate change and AI are coming to Earth at the same time. I actually do think that it’s possible that if AI catches wind of how destructive we’re being to the earth, it may choose to either generate new eco-friendly systems that could save us all from this mess, at best, or completely systemically eliminate us, at worst. No matter what, I think AI has a key role to play in our climate crisis-wrought era.

Could we create AI that has a generative, symbiotic relationship with the earth? That even cares for the land, and that understands reciprocity? I do suspect the key to creating real, durable AI systems — and, critically, humanoid AI — actually might lie in utilizing the wisdom of the earth and its seasonality. We are humans because we are of the earth. As we work to create ever-more-humanoid digital systems, we shouldn’t only feed them humanoid texts or human worldviews.

Of course, AI is also actively destroying the earth as we speak, so it’s likely that it’ll just keep contributing to our ever-worsening ecological crisis.

This is all speculation. But anyway, back to the whales.

In July 2024, scientists said they’d successfully used AI to identify a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet,” which revealed structures in whale-speak that resemble human language. Spearheaded by the Project Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI), scientists took over 20 years of research on the “codes” whales use to communicate and fed them to an AI neural network, which was able to identify which calls came from which animal.

Other innovations are in progress. In 2022 researchers in Copenhagen launched an algorithm that can tell whether pigs are upset based on the timbres of their squeals, and another algorithm (charmingly called DeepSqueak) listens to ultrasonic rodent calls and declares whether or not they’re stressed.

All this comes together with NatureLM, a new AI system that is already capable of identifying what species of animal is speaking. NatureLM is part of Earth Species Project (aptly also called ESP), which has the goal of harnessing AI to eventually develop the ability to converse fluently with animals.

At a December summit in San Francisco, ESP CEO Katie Zacarian said she thinks AI can help us heal some of our pathological sense of separateness from the earth. “The situation we are in today is driven from a disconnection with the rest of nature,” she said. “We believe that AI is leading us to this inevitability that we will decode animal communication and come back into connection.”

*

Algorithms like Google Translate are already revolutionizing the way we communicate with other humans on Earth. And given AI’s powers, I wouldn’t underestimate its ability to decode animal patterns of speech. I could also see AI being capable of understanding the thoughts and feelings of plants; we already know they emit frequencies, after all, and scream when stressed.

This raises many other questions, like: What would happen if AI developed the ability not only to speak to animals, but to larger interplanetary systems at large? What if it was able to tap into languages we not only can’t understand but were never even capable of hearing before?

What if AI develops the ability to speak with the dead or with spirits, if those things exist? What if it develops the ability to understand just how dire circumstances on our planet are? What if it identifies that our planet is enraged and exhausted, that animal species are furious?

What if we could hear birds crying for their mothers, or pigs begging not to be slaughtered? What if our family pets started speaking about their hopes and dreams?

What could the animals teach us? Would we try to domesticate and educate the wild creatures, bringing the more gifted Orangutans out there into our vortex of houses, jobs, and taxes? Or perhaps, could the animals know something we don’t? As humans, we’ll always be projecting our humanoid ways of thinking and communicating onto the animals, but could AI avoid this pitfall?

How might this reshape our relationships not only to ourselves but to the entire world? Would we develop more compassion, or use the algorithms to more efficiently hunt and slaughter and destroy living things? Would we finally see that humans are not special or better than any of the earth’s creatures, and that we’re instead part of an intelligent system of interdependent entities?

*

In posthumanism, the relationship between humans to AI and humans to animals and nature actually bear some similarities. These relationships both ask us to look beyond the boundaries of the human, thus peeling apart our typical perceptions of our own consciousness, our sense of faith, and our places in the universe. AI also threatens to overtake humans in our planetary food chain, which would inevitably fundamentally rewire how we relate to our planet and its systems (if it doesn’t destroy us).

One other thing: AI will likely be indispensable in communicating with aliens if and when they do break their apparently endless state of silent surveillance. Actually, aliens are the reasons why researchers from the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) are also currently focused their energies on using AI to communicate with whales — they believe these undersea giants could utilize linguistic stylings akin to our interplanetary neighbors.

All this is speculative, but I don’t think we can be too creative when thinking about what AI might achieve. I do predict AI will be able to understand and speak the languages of animals within my lifetime. It’s going to be a wild ride. The future is now, and honestly, I really do hope we have whales (and maybe a few revolutionary orcas) along for the journey.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

*

I hadn’t realized that the retreat I was staying at on the island of Koh Phangan was way more famous for tantra than Osho meditation, but I would soon find out.

Before any family members reading this get concerned: Prior to arriving, I did make sure sure that the retreat didn’t practice any form of sexual tantra — and everything really and truly did remain resolutely PG for the whole time I was there.

As it turns out, the idea that tantra is all about sex is a mostly Western bastardization of a truly beautiful esoteric philosophy. If you take one thing from this post, let it be this — tantra is truly about finding oneness through the unification of binaries.

Yes, some tantric practices do culminate in sexual rites and tantra does make use of sexual energy, but traditionally, these rites were only performed by deeply knowledgeable spiritual masters who had already transcended their physical desires. At Samma Karuna, tantra was exclusively practiced through non-sexual exercises, and a hug was the most intimate anything ever became.

That’s not to say it all wasn’t uncomfortably intimate, though. It absolutely was, almost the entire time.

*

My first class was called Biodynamics, and it reminded me more of contact improv than anything else. We were invited to dance with our fellow students, and we all wound around each other, leaning on each other, experimenting how it felt when we led or followed each other as we mirrored each others’ movements.

Everyone was very stylish, dressed in their New Age best, and felt slightly inadequate in my shorts and T-shirt before reminding myself that I was no longer in the business of criticizing myself. I had, I reminded myself, the right to be there.

Even so, interacting with strangers is challenging for me. I knew in my heart we were all projections of the same divine oneness, and yet something about eye contact made me want desperately to look away and disappear back into my own safe hole.

This would be a good challenge for me, I decided. After so much introspection at my last retreat and in Vipassana, perhaps it was time to learn through relationship and connection.

At one point the power cut out, and we all stood around sweating buckets before deciding to go out to finish the class on the beach. The session ended by the shore, the waters stretching towards the limestone cliffs in the distance, the sky smeared with wispy clouds.

We hugged our last partner. Mine was a woman with beautiful sparkling green eyes that radiated love, and after we pulled away, we just started laughing at each other, cackling harder the longer we stared at each other.

Eye contact is very intense for me, and when I look in someone’s eyes, I often feel a slight electric shock. It’s like I’m seeing their whole soul and spirit and being. All their emotions, all their aliveness — it can feel like a lot.

At the same time, eye contact is extremely important for me when it comes to anything romantic; I love staring into someone’s eyes once I’ve passed a certain threshold of comfort with them. And yet with strangers or new friends or anyone who I’m not quite sure about, I often feel so much discomfort welling up in me. It’s actually a similar discomfort as the sense of unease that often wells up in me during meditation — an intensity, a current, a bright aliveness, wild as the sea and cutting as arctic wind. That’s another reason why I’ve always written; there’s simply too much without some way to offload it.

But anyway, this was a tantra class, I forced myself to push through my discomfort and gazed in strangers’ eyes.

Afterwards, another attendee with kind blue eyes told me he was a jazz musician and said he was performing at an open mic the next night. We quickly made plans to attend and play something together. That night we wound up having dinner together and discussed our share love of music and spirituality and the intersection of them both, and made casual plans to host a music and spirituality and creativity retreat at his house in Mallorca someday.

That evening I attended my first tantra lecture. Our teacher was a gorgeous man around my age with long, flowing hair and a shirt unbuttoned to reveal a startlingly chiseled chest — appropriate for a tantra teacher, I supposed.

We all sat in a circle in a shala by the beach, and as the sun set, he discussed how the tantric path deviates from the path of self-renunciation, which I believe includes Vipassana. 

There are two paths that lead to the same place, he said: a path of compassion and a path of renunciation. The renunciation path is definitely the one I’d been most educated in across most of my spiritual journey. It involves renouncing the senses and desires, and using self-control to dissolve the idea of the self achieve enlightenment. Tantra, on the other hand, involves using compassion for all beings to reach that same end goal.

I think that a binary between these two schools of thought is actually pretty reductive, for when you look closely, they split and unfurl to reveal similar, intertwined ideologies. But it was useful to hear, and I found myself resonating with so much of what he said and realizing that my heart had been calling me towards a more tantric, open, connection-based mentality as opposed to the militaristic, renunciation-based mentality Vipassana had taught.

Mosquitos buzzed around us as we listened. People asked tons of questions and shared their own stories, and I had more questions than answers by the end of it, but I started to realize that it seemed like, at its core, tantra is about acceptance rather than rejection.

The next day we had our first actual tantra class, which included a practice called Atisha’s Heart. After a long opening exercise of improvisational dance and more prolonged eye contact, we all joined hands, placing one hand on the heart of the person to our right and one hand on the waist of the person to our left.

There, threaded together, we did a collective Metta meditation: first channeling love to ourselves, then to the others in the circle, then to people we loved, and then to the whole world. We swayed by the sea as the sun sank into the waves. 

At first my feet were killing me and so were my arms, but I tried to channel as much love as I could into them, and eventually, I am not kidding, the pain just disappeared. 

And then I was just connected to the others there. Arms around each other. Discomfort arose, then passed away.

Tantra is about connection. Connection and love is the animating force that breathes the universe into being.

Tantra developed around the first millennium CE in India, and the term tantra literally means “loom, warp, weave” in Sanskrit. As an esoteric tradition, tantra is wrapped in mystery and misunderstanding, and there are many different variants of it. But all of it is tied to the idea that there is no separateness and no duality.

“The word interweave is the key to understanding the real meaning of Tantra. As many tantric texts put it: ‘Nothing exists that is not divine,’ explains the Samma Karuna website, which features a very eloquent overview of tantra.

“Everything is interconnected and is a manifestation of the divine energy that rules the whole universe. It is the dance of the by-polar energy of Shiva and Shakti, the masculine and feminine archetypes, the Sun and the Moon, night and day, life and death. This duality is found in everything that exists in nature, it’s a never-ending cycle that remains in balance. This is why a deep understanding of reality reveals that there is actually no duality, these two poles are the two sides of the same coin.”

Many tantric thought systems believe that the whole universe is animated by a divine feminine force, often called Shakti, which saw the feminine principle as a wild and powerful entity that births all being and all awakening. I’ve long believed in the importance of unifying masculine and feminine archetypes, and think a lot of our modern gender wars could be solved by realizing we all have different levels of masculine and feminine energies in ourselves, and we need to accept them both and learn to work with them rather than rejecting opposing sides of ourselves or others.

During my second tantra class, we stood across from each other in lines and gazed into each others’ eyes for long periods of time, switching every few minutes to different partners. Then we held hands for a few rounds and finally, we embraced. It was amazing to notice how differently I felt with each partner. How some people made me feel vulnerable, and how I wanted to protect and comfort others.

In our final tantra lecture, two teachers I hadn’t worked with before spoke on the topic of using tantric practices on our relationships with ourselves and on our deepest core wounds. The practice is to offer profound acceptance to the sources of our deepest pains, and to not lock out any parts of ourselves, but rather to gather them all up and hold them.

One of the teachers spoke of finally realizing she would never have a real connection with her father. She recalled at last accepting him exactly as he is, with love, as they were watching television together in his small apartment on a winter day.

Someone brought up the psychology practice Internal Family Systems and recommended the book No Bad Parts, which had also been on my mind during the conversation — its’s amazing to see how much of modern psychology is rooted in ancient spiritual wisdom, and how all these healing systems are really mirrors of one another, all framing these deep truths in different ways.

Then blonde girl who had smiled at me so radiantly after my very first class spoke about how she feels she’s pushed away love throughout her life, and tears glistened in her eyes as she opened up about how guilty she feels for how cruel she’d been to others in the past. It was a reminder that the people who do this work and who are drawn to these practices are often people who do have deep wounding themselves. A reminder that everyone carries their own pain. That everyone is really looking to be loved, and yet we constantly build up walls against this love, because it exposes us to our greatest fear — not being loved.

Yet people have always, across all of time, been drawn to developing loving relationships with the divine. We know there’s something out there, something taking care of us, something guiding us. Tantra is just one way of getting to that same place.

One of my most powerful lessons from this whole trip has been the importance of connection with others. When we are really seen, and when we really see others, we being to realize that we are all just mirrors — and others are in as much pain, and are full of as much love, as we are.

This, I believe, is at the core of tantric practice; seeing ourselves in others, and so seeing ourselves as part of the truth, which is oneness, and wholeness, and interconnectedness with all things.

*

You may have come across Stoicism if you’ve been on the internet for long enough. Founded 300 BCE by the Athenian philosopher Zeno of Citium, Stoicism is a philosophy designed to help people live better lives. Today, it’s quite viral and prominent, at least in certain self-help communities.

It’s also become heavily misconstrued and misinterpreted, which is why I think it’s important to go back to its roots.

There are four guiding principles in Stoicism.

First, there’s wisdom, which is our ability to know right from wrong. Second, there’s courage, or having the bravery to do what’s right. Third, there’s justice, which involves our dedication to helping others and improving things for the collective. Fourth, there’s temperance, or restraint and our ability to resist what’s bad for us.

Stoicism is all about accepting what we can’t change.

Stoicism basically teaches that virtue is good and vice is bad. However, all we can control is our own selves, and we can determine our own character, and our own ability to resist vices and follow virtue. So we should focus on our own lives and actions while accepting that we don’t have control of anything else.

Stoicism is all about focusing on what we can control. The Stoic concept of Amor Fati, or “love of fate,” means that we should accept what’s going on completely, including the hardships we face. Since we cannot control them, we may as well see them as catalysts for growth or lessons that help us become stronger. Sounds pretty Zen to me.

Stoicism encourages us to meditate on death and suffering.

Stoic philosopher Epictetus advises us to constantly remember that we will die. This concept, also known as Momento Mori, is more about living our lives knowing that this could all end at any time — which means that we should prioritize what’s really important during our short time on Earth.

Meditating on suffering is also important as it keeps everything in perspective. “Keep death and exile before your eyes each day, along with everything that seems terrible— by doing so, you’ll never have a base thought nor will you have excessive desire,” Epictetus wrote.

Famous Stoic Seneca the Younger also spoke on this. “Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day…,” he wrote. “The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”

How would you live if you only had six months left? Or six weeks? Stoicism reminds us that our answer to that should guide our actions.

Stoicism reminds us of how small we are.

“How beautifully Plato put it,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. “Whenever you want to talk about people, it’s best to take a bird’s- eye view and see everything all at once— of gatherings, armies, farms, weddings and divorces, births and deaths, noisy courtrooms or silent spaces, every foreign people, holidays, memorials, markets— all blended together and arranged in a pairing of opposites.”

We really are so small in the grand scheme of things, and so very ephemeral. Stoicism emphasizes the fact that everything is passing, and so we might as well focus on what matters: virtue, ethics, kindness, etcetera.

And yet even though we are so small, we are also connected to everything — that’s the Stoic principle of sympatheia, or interconnectedness. We are part of humanity, bound into a web of reciprocity that ties together all beings (not just human beings, in my opinion).

That’s the majesty and paradox of living: We are so small and insignificant as individuals, yet we are also a part of the greatest thing in existence.

Stoicism is based on the idea that there’s an order to the universe.

From a philosophical standpoint, Stoicism basically says that everything is made of matter, and we come in contact with matter through our five senses. But we interpret matter through logos, or a fundamental order that pervades the world. Logos is the basis of ethics, which guides how we should act.

In Stoicism, logos is God. So acting ethically is following logos, or God.

Stoicism also encourages us to practice gratitude.

Be grateful for what we have. It sounds so simple, but it’s hard to practice. It’s so easy to fall into the desire trap: If I just get this, or win this, or have this, then I’ll be happy… even though we all know that’s not really the case.

A way to combat this? Allow yourself to truly want what you have. Think of something you do have that you love, and then imagine losing it — and then allow yourself to remember you do have it. And voila. Instant gratitude.

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” – Epictetus

Sounds simple and rational, right? But so hard to put into practice. It’s also remarkably similar to the base philosophy at the heart of Christianity, Buddhism, and…I’d wager…pretty much every other religion.

Practice gratitude. Remember you will die. Be moderate, and resist excess and temptation. Accept what you can’t control. Change what you can. Have the strength to know the difference.

Yet it’s so hard when we’re constantly inundated with images of people who seemingly have better lives…or when we’re constantly trained to be always optimizing and improving…

All we can do is keep trying, I suppose! So here are some ways to integrate Stoicism into your daily life.

How to integrate Stoicism into your daily life

1. Mindfulness: incorporate meditation or reflection into your everyday routine; begin each day by meditating on what’s in your control and what’s out of it

2. When faced with difficulty, pause, and ask yourself how challenges can help you grow instead of just resisting them

3. Be a good person; perform acts of kindness and virtue

4. Remember everything is impermanent

5. Journal; record your reflections and track your progress

6. Read about Stoicism and learn from the great Stoic thinkers

That’s just a small overview of Stoicism, because it’s interesting and sounds rational and I wanted to know more and am always trying to figure out how to live this life and I thought you might be too.

Do you practice Stoicism? What do you think of this philosophy? Let me know in the comments!

Share

Get 15% off forever

*

When I was 20, I spent a few weeks staying with a philosopher-druid in rural France. He had a house full of books — and I mean literally full of books. Each wall was stacked from floor to ceiling with tomes of all shapes and sizes. Each room had its own theme based on one of the nine muses of Greek mythology.

I would spend quiet afternoons poring over different religious texts — esoteric, long-buried Quabalah volumes, Buddhist tantric scriptures, treatises on witchcraft and Gnosticism.

Over and over again I kept stumbling upon the same themes. It really seemed to me like these books were using extremely elaborate metaphors, stories, and philosophical arguments that were all truly designed to get us to be more compassionate towards one another and ourselves.

It struck me like lightning: this was the point, what they were all trying to say. That, in short, and to use what I believe is the truest cliche of all time, love is everything, and everything is love.

I’ve continued to delve deeper into spirituality and religion, but the deeper I go into different faiths and practices, the more I keep coming back to this creeping suspicion — that religions are simply trying to tell us one basic truth, and that everything else is smoke and mirrors.

It’s the same truth that our bodies are trying to tell us. And nature. And all the (good) philosophers and the (good) friends and the (good) therapists. And our hearts, beating away in our chests, so lovingly pouring blood throughout our body and cleaning it when it comes back around.

I’d even wager that love is the meaning of life itself.

But what does that mean?

Is Love the Meaning of Life?

Wondering about the meaning of life might be part of what makes us human. It’s a huge part of what differentiates us from the plants and animals that surround us, as far as we know.

I honestly believe that there is no way to truly answer the meaning-of-life question, though most likely, we are all responsible for crafting our own ideas about life’s meaning. That’s the conclusion Viktor Frankl comes to in “Man’s Search For Meaning,” anyway, which tells the story of his experience in a concentration camp during the Holocaust.

In that horrible situation, in that hell on earth, he came to understand that he had the capacity to determine how he wanted to see the circumstances he was in. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances,” he writes. “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

But what answer did he come to? What worldview did he choose to adopt, with his sovereign mind?

“For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers,” he writes. “The truth — that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

Through compassion and love for his fellow man, even for the people who were torturing him, he was able to transcend time and to craft meaning in hell.

I could have cited so many examples — so many writers, thinkers, and believers across time have come to this very same conclusion. “We can reject everything else: religion, ideology, all received wisdom. But we cannot escape the necessity of love and compassion... This, then, is my true religion, my simple faith,” the Dalai Lama has said.

“In this sense, there is no need for temple or church, for mosque or synagogue, no need for complicated philosophy, doctrine or dogma. Our own heart, our own mind, is the temple. The doctrine is compassion. Love for others and respect for their rights and dignity, no matter who or what they are: ultimately these are all we need.”

Share

What Is Love?

So what exactly is this great Love, this transcendent truth, this jewel above jewels and God above gods?

Love, compassion, and kindness are all words that have many meanings. They, like meaning itself, depend on the perspective of the person thinking about them. They are mirrors, reflecting the state of our inner worlds.

“I really don’t know love at all,” sings Joni Mitchell, and I relate. But I do have some thoughts on what love is not.

So often, in our quests for meaning and fulfillment, we think that some kind of love will be what fills the void within us. But we usually think this love will come from another person, or from some great success or a sea of adoring fans.

When these things fail to fill that void we lash out, or continue our relentless quest for more, or walk away disillusioned with life entirely. So, conditional love and material love are clearly not the meaning of life. Love that involves grasping or acquiring something is not what Frankl and the Dalai Lama are talking about.

Love does not mean sacrificing ourselves entirely for others. It does not mean receiving total devotion from others. And it does not mean something that stays the same forever. Sometimes, love can be letting go.

Real love and compassion in the transcendent sense are not fixed, limited concepts. They — at least in the way Frankl and the sages talk about them — mean so much more than romantic love or to human-to-human love.

It’s a great shame that we’ve learned to associate love with romance alone, though it’s an understandable mistake, as it’s often the easiest way to brush against the type of love this essay is about in our day-to-day lives, when many of us are so profoundly disconnected from magic, ritual, community, and awe.

The scriptures put it plainly. “In their real form, love and compassion exist outside of time and outside of ownership,” states the First Corinthians. “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

Clearly, real love is timeless. At the end of the movie Interstellar, love was the force — the one force — that could break open space and time. This same story has been told over and over in different forms. That love is what keeps the human race alive, twining down through generations. That it is the only thing that lasts forever.

Love, real love, has no beginning and no end. It transcends and encompasses death and life entirely. Love is the measure of all things, the one thing that can overcome our limitations. If we knew love, and if we all practiced supreme, selfless love, there would be no need for religion at all — no need for laws or punishment and no hunger and no division.

How Do We Live With More Love?

So how do we go about finding and embodying this great love in a world of such division? How do we make it more of a guiding force in our lives rather than something peripheral, something perpetually to-be-attained, something we’ll deserve or give once we’ve achieved something or become someone new and somehow worthy?

I certainly don’t have the answers, but many wise people have taken a stab at this question. Most seem to say that finding this great love is not about seeking, but rather about peeling back the illusions that separate us from it.

Most sages and enlightened masters, to put it quite simply, seem to be trying to tell us that life or so-called reality is a dream, and so is the illusion of the individual self.

I suspect that this is yet another complicated way of getting us to be more loving to one another and ourselves. Once you start to see your individual self as an illusion, after all, you realize your fate is bound up with the fates of others. Real love dissolves the boundaries of the self and breaks down every door.

Love is already here, the sages seem to say; it is not something to be attained, but rather something to become aware of. Here’s a Rumi poem — Rumi being a poet whose works all flow with ecstatic storms of love:

“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.”

Yet how do we become aware of it? Many sages seem to say that renunciation of sensory pleasures and overcoming the ramblings of our monkey minds can guide us to real love, and many promise that meditation is the path to getting there. Here’s the sage J. Krishnamurti on love:

“The idea is not love. The idea, the word is not love,” he writes. “But only when you have seen the whole movement of desire, attachment, pleasure, then out of that depth of perception comes this strange flower with its extraordinary perfume. That is love.” Love also must exist beyond comparison and separateness, Krishnamurti adds. “So love is not a thing of the mind. It is only when the mind is really quiet, when it is no longer expecting, asking, demanding, seeking, possessing, being jealous, fearful, anxious — when the mind is really silent, only then is there a possibility of love.”

*

Clearly, by all accounts, we need to live with more compassion — not by saving others in order to enhance our egos, but by living in a way where our actions contribute to others’ evolution and development into their highest selves.

One of my favorite definitions of love is Scott Peck’s definition, which I found in bell hooks’ seminal text All About Love: “Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”

So yes, love is about dissolving our sense of isolation and helping others. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Jesus said, after all. And yet this help and love must be given with compassion but not with judgment. When we allow people to be as they are and don’t try to change them, we give both them and ourselves a great gift.

True love is not perpetually hoping someone changes their ways. It’s accepting someone as they are, completely, and operating off of that.

It’s — as Byron Katie says in her practice The Work — loving what is, exactly as it really is, without making assumptions or getting carried away by ideas of what we think should be or what we’ve projected onto the situation. We can love things simply by taking them as they are.

We can also offer more love by being forgiving, using words of affirmation, sharing messages of gratitude, giving away our time by volunteering or joining movements that benefit the world, and performing small acts of kindness when we get the chance. In truth, we can really do every act with love, arranging our space or doing our busy work. There’s nothing that cannot be touched by the light of love.

Living with more love can even be as simple as becoming more aware of its power over everyone in the world. Here’s a Hafiz poem that explores that idea:

“Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, ‘Love me’.
Of course you do not do this out loud; otherwise
someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us
to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon
in each eye that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?”

How would your world change, if you walked around and saw that everyone you pass by is as desperate for love and acknowledgement — as starving for that sweet ambrosia — as you are?

Why Self-Love Is Holy

A key part of living with more love is self-love. Across all my journeying, I’ve come across this idea over and over — the relationship we have with ourselves blurs into the relationship we have with everything else.

Genuine self-love is not selfish at all, because we are not separate from the world, so by loving ourselves we are also loving everything else. Self-compassion is an incredible gift we can give to ourselves. I believe it is also a deeply holy act.

If we give love to everyone else but not ourselves, if we’re always forgiving of everyone else but not ourselves, then we’re still seeing ourselves as separate, still building walls, still living in an illusion.

Self-love doesn’t mean constantly cutting people out or always prioritizing your needs and desires above others’, however. I think this is a great fallacy of our modern wellness movement. Real self-love isn’t about living in a self-absorbed and isolated bubble where we constantly fixate on our own lives. This usually just generates more unhappiness. Love should mean seeing everything, including ourselves, with more compassion.

We need each other, after all. We need connection, kinship, community, and friends. We need lovers and romance and family or chosen family to get us through this long strange winter and to bring us back to ourselves when we start to stray.

And we also need loving relationships with the more-than-human world, with plants and animals and art and spirituality. It’s all part of the same tapestry, each type of love a golden thread.

I’m not saying I’ve mastered any of this by any means. I often feel haunted by the idea that I’m not doing enough for the world or that my work doesn’t make a difference or that I’m not having a positive impact on others. Sure, I’m afraid of harm being done to me, but I think I think I’m equally afraid of being someone who does harm.

Yet I’ve been working on shifting this fear-based mindset into a love-based mindset, realizing that it’s enough for me to move through life with the intention of being a loving person who leaves a positive impact on the world.

I’m also realizing that living with love doesn’t mean letting people walk all over me or never challenging anyone. In fact, putting up boundaries or challenging people or systems is an incredibly loving thing to do.

I’m also trying to live with more love by following the call of the things I love to do. When I ask myself how I can best love the world, to be honest, all I can think of is writing. It’s what I love to do the most, after all, and I would write even if no one read it.

So what do you love? In what ways is it calling to you? What strange perfume pours through your window on late nights, when the world grows still?

Barriers to Love

Love is the great work of this life. It’s the ultimate practice of existence. It’s probably the meaning of life and why we are here on Earth. And yet, though it’s so fundamental and key to life and we all desire it so deeply and powerfully, love is also plagued by so many distortions.

Love has become cliche, trite, commercialized. Compassion has become equated with weakness when actually it is at the heart of all real warriorship and true nobility and genuine holiness. Kindness has become seen as extraneous or it’s become a tool of manipulation, when it is the greatest and most sacred gift we can gift to another person or ourselves.

Unfortunately, this world is fragmentary and transient, and all the suffering makes it difficult to love. When you or your loved ones are suffering, you want to lash out, you want to hate, you want to make the person harming you feel as you have felt. Love, real selfless love, would take more strength and sacrifice to than any army has ever possessed.

There are a million reasons to not love. A million reasons to be cruel. A million reasons to be mean and cold, violent, and angry.

Perhaps the great teaching of love and all the religions that preach it as the key to life is that we must love even all this — even the cruel, even those who do harm, even the systems that subjugate us. We must love our own sorrows too, and sit in the fire of our pain. We must love our shadows and our light.

Love doesn’t mean stagnant acceptance. It doesn’t mean not doing anything to change our lives. It means understanding. It means embracing. It means holding people and systems accountable. It means knowing when walking away is the most loving thing of all.

Through loving understanding, we can create real change that creates something better rather than something worse. Something born out of love rather than fear.

Strange Perfume and the Weight of the World

There’s so much more to say. For thousands of years, all the poets and mystics have been talking about this topic, and yet the conversation always seems to be just beginning. That’s because love can’t be trapped in words or summarized or held still at all.

You know the feeling of lying in someone’s arms, feeling completely safe and protected? Or singing and laughing with a group of real friends and feeling the warmth of their love in your own being, mirrored by their smiles? Or walking in the woods and feeling completely one with the trees and the butterflies? Or writing or creating something and giving yourself over to it so completely that there’s no separation between you and the words and the great loving creative thing singing the words through you?

Wouldn’t heaven feel like that, lasting forever and ever? Isn’t that the state that we try to get to with every drug and achievement and meditation? That wholeness?

Allen Ginsberg wrote, “The weight of the world is love / under the burden of solitude.” More and more I am convinced that we come from a state of total love and love is our true nature, and life is like a video game where zombie-like barriers to love are constantly popping up and trying to distract us and make us cruel and un-loving. A lot of times they win, unfortunately, and it’s game over and we have to start again.

A lot of times, the truth is, I don’t love myself or others. I also know very well that all this is rather idealistic. We don’t live in a world where it’s possible to love and be loved all the time. If we did, we’d be in heaven or we’d all be enlightened beings.

But today, sitting by the ocean on an island off the coast of Cambodia writing these words, I’m feeling clear. I’m pretty sure love is the meaning of life, the purpose of life on Earth, and the true nature of the source that created us. I’m pretty sure all religions are elaborate metaphors designed us to get us to love one another.

To be honest, I used to be quite resistant the idea of love as the Answer to Everything. As an edgy teenager, I thought it was cliche hippie Live Laugh Love shit, a lie people told themselves in order to feel better. Love is all that matters. So trite. I wanted to know some deeper truth. I felt solitude was the real answer. I felt I was alone. It felt powerful, as if I saw some kind of awful truth nobody else did, which of course is how every teenager feels.

Of course then I went out into the world and lived, and looked deeper into this great mirror called reality. Then I went and felt the terrifying fire of actual love, and met so many others who also felt so alone.

I also began to see that I’d been raised surrounded by immense love, and this was a gift I was given by those who raised me, and now it’s my responsibility to radiate that love out into the world.

And it’s yours too — it’s your responsibility to love yourself and others, and your choice.

You don’t have to do it, of course. By all means, resist. You can build up walls, you can pretend you’re alone. But I know the truth, and so do you. That, as Leonard Cohen sings, “Every heart to love will come, but like a refugee.”

When I think of love, I think of beauty and wonder and abundance and warmth. But I also feel fear, and some residual resistance to the idea that love is everything. Part of me enjoys keeping to myself, and keeping the world a little bit away. It’s a protective mechanism, a way to avoid being hurt.

Of course, life doesn’t work that way. I know that I have to crack open my heart to love, despite the risk. I’ve done it before and will again. We all have to do it.

We can resist it, but we’ll end up washing up on its shores anyway. Crash-landing into the window of love.

But the window is always open. The wall is in the mind. The world, the real world — the world of strange perfume and flowers forever opening to the sky — is beyond the mind. I’ll be searching for it for the rest of my life, as will you.

Still, there will be a few moments in time where we stop and see that we’ve always been there, in the garden. But those moments, like all things touched by love, can last forever if you let them.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment