I just released YESMAN INTERVIEW — a live interview I did with the Yesman himself at this year’s (utterly magnificent) Festival of Yes.

Alex, the Yesman, is a great friend and easily one of the most rad, vibrant, ringing-with-life humans I have ever met. It was a grand pleasure to discuss and share the power, usefulness, and philosophy of “yes” with him, a central pillar to the dude’s infectiously inspirational way of being. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

As a creative, if you ask me, one of the best things that happened last year was a book. The book is a collection of observations on creativity from music producer Rick Rubin. Rick has made brilliant albums with the widest range of the biggest musicians for nearly half a century.

The Creative Act: A Way of Being offers Rick Rubin’s remarkable view on creativity and reads not unlike the Tao Te Ching. Open to a random page in either and you will find an idea as simple as it is profound.

Yet somehow, the podcast interviews Rick has done since releasing the book hit me even harder. There are dozens, and it is possible that I have listened to every one of them.

A haiku about living now.

This past year was a year of hard work at home peppered with experiences beautiful, eye-opening, and totally transcendent.

While the bulk of my year was spent running a real estate photography business — work I find flowy, creative, and interesting — it was largely ventures away from it that shaped me. Some of the most profound internal shifts included a deeper interest in creative collaboration, increasing palatability of responsibility, and more mystic experience of the everyday.

The things that shape us matter most. In sharing what shaped me in 2023, it’s my hope this might connect you with something that resonates in a similar and significant way.

To be a mystic one need not add anything to their experience, but subtract. A mystic simply sticks with and perceives the basics of reality, because the basic of reality are wildly miraculous.

A few examples:

• We live on a tiny planet floating in the endless void of space.

• Time is an illusion made by measuring spins of the earth and laps around the sun. The past is a memory, the future a dream, and both are mental projections from the present. All is one ever-changing, eternal present moment.

• A single cell organism speciated into all forms of life on Earth. All life on our planet traces appears to trace back to one source, an unbroken chain of life branching out from a single trunk. To say we are “related” to all of life on Earth may be the grandest understatement.

The Sunday after WONDER WANDER 2023, magic happened at sunset on the shores of a river running the sonoran desert.

A merry band of creatives ran four hundred feet of extension cord from the hybrid battery of a Prius to a secluded cove to record my buddy Matthew (also known as 2dreamagain and the brilliant groove man behind Between2Clouds) DJing a dreamy house music set as we captured the scene on camera.

A short documentary of WONDER WANDER 2023 by Kevin Ufnal.

Once a year, I host ‘WONDER WANDER,’ an experiential potluck with creatives, adventurers, and all other sorts of fascinated-fascinating humans out in nature. We share, we laugh, we hike, we stargaze, we philosophize, we dive deep, and relish in this crazy experience of being with one another.

WONDER WANDER 2023 took place September 15th - 20th, 2023 in a hilltop hacienda among New Mexico's Rocky Mountains.

I recently had the grand privilege of speaking on Cosmic Consciousness and the inherent oneness of all things through an astronomical lens at the Festival of Yes.

Wandering through my near-death experience at sixteen, insights into the psychological growth process from Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, the formation of the universe, wise words from Ed Abbey, Alan Watts, Carl Sagan, and John Frusciante, and ultimately offering contemplating the cosmos as a means of transcending our repression of “the primary miraculousness of creation,” it felt wildly out of the blue and well received.

A true legend — while running the festival — the Yesman managed to record the speech on his phone! I polished and uploaded the audio to YouTube for your listening pleasure.