By Ethan Maurice | January 20, 2024
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.
Here are eight things that shaped me in 2023:
1. 11 Days Across Asia
In late February, my business partner Cole and I flew to Asia for an eleven day business trip. The intention was to visit a sauna builder in China and our real estate photography editing team in Vietnam. Thanks to a small visa mistake, though, the trip ended up including eight hours of detainment at the Chinese border, five countries for visa purposes, and a single day where we ate breakfast in China, lunch in Cambodia, and dinner in Vietnam. Other highlights included sneaking into a sauna atop the tallest building in Hong Kong and two days cruising around a Vietnamese island on scooters before another forty hour string of flights and layovers home.
Feeling five Asian cultures in eleven days was fascinating. I was struck by the paradoxical sense of peace in downtown Tokyo and the livability of Vietnam. However, what hit me the most was the might of China. The airports, train stations, gargantuan cities, cameras everywhere, and visible layer of pollution above it all looked like I imagined the United States might in a few decades. There’s an idea that the United States will someday be outpaced by China. It felt as if this had already happened. I returned feeling our world is more in flux than we realize in the States.
2. The Astral Plane & Chapel of Sacred Mirrors
In March, I met with some friends to intentionally ingest a substantial amount of mushrooms. I spent the next four hours experiencing what I suspect others refer to as “the astral plane.” This was absolutely unbelievable and astonishing to me. It felt as if I had dropped into a realm below and unpinning all of life, an infinite “web of life” in which I was one node of life intrinsically woven into infinite others. Unembodied, I flew around this realm for hours, marveling and laughing at the sureness with which we think we understand it all in waking consciousness.
Afterwards, I wrote this:
“Embodiment is a miracle that your task is to remember, feel, and see.
Your life is a very, very, very specific, minute life in a vast and endless web of life. Anything that happens in this life is okay. Including dying. Life is so big, so so big, and vast and robust and life is having innumerable, unquantifiably endless amounts of every kind of experience at all stages right now. You are an individual embodiment of the whole, living creative force — a node of experience in an infinite web — so you can relax and let go into that experience, you can inhabit this life like a hammock.
When you do, you do not force, you flow.”
Later, trying to describe the experience, I showed my friend Dan this wild painting I once saw that was the closest visual representation of what I had experienced. He went, “Oh that’s Alex Grey! He has this art temple like an hour north of New York City. We should visit sometime.”
I was so curious and two months later, we did. Visiting CoSM was like visiting a religious site, that for the first time, really resonated with me. The art was riddled with the vibrance, cycles, and mystery of life. These experiences stirred something within me, connected dots that previously didn’t, and brought the mystery again to the fore of my experience.
3. “Man Overboard” in the Petrified Forest
In April, my mom and I did a little artist in residence program at this old, remote ranger station outside of Petrified Forest National Park. One of the most stark environments I’ve ever experienced, it is land, sky, and silence.
In exchange for a free stay, we each created a piece of art. My mom crafted a photograph, and I, a poem.
Stripping away society and being only with the basics of reality for three days, I felt I touched true mysticism and what Ed Abbey meant when he said, “there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which sustains the little world of man as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship.” I attempted to distill the experience into the poem:
Looking back at last year’s writing, I’ve been increasingly interested in direct experiences of reality without the lens of culture or thought intermediating the experience. Articles like What is a Mystic (And How to Be One)? and Waking Up in the Middle of a Dream speak to dropping these intermediaries and the agency we have to craft the lenses we look through.
4. Collaborative Creation of Beautiful Things
In August, friend and legend Alex Chmiel (aka The Yesman) threw his first-ever Festival of Yes. As he did of many that weekend, he asked me to share one of my deepest interests in a more public way than I ever had, and I gave a thirty minute speech on Cosmic Consciousness. Sharing my perspective of the oneness of everything through an astronomical lens, and feeling wonder and resonance arise in an audience in a way I never had before felt so like that Joseph Campbell line, “the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
In September, fellow camera-wielding creatives Kevin, Cheyenne, and I spur of the moment recorded this gorgeous DJ set at sunset along the Salt River with brilliant DJ friend 2dreamagain:
I’m increasingly interested in collaborative potentials, in people bringing their unique skillsets together to weave beautiful things bigger than we could on our own.
5. WONDER WANDER 2023
Speaking of collaborative creation, WONDER WANDER 2023, the fourth “experiential potluck” I’ve thrown was near magic. Thirteen open, curious humans met and dove deep for six days, each person leading an experience for the group in this funky hilltop hacienda overlooking New Mexico’s Rocky Mountains.
Year after year, WONDER WANDER continues to astound and be one of the best experiences I’ve ever had… over and over again. A pocket of space and time filled with radness, learning, wonder, primal joys, and unconditional love — it was a transformative experience for many, myself included (the “increasing palatability of responsibility” I mentioned atop this article was found here).
I totally plan to throw another in 2024.
6. Insights into Growing Our Real Estate Photography Business
For four years, my friend Cole and I have been building a real estate photography business. It started as a fun side gig in flight school. We’re now a full-fledged business with twenty photographers in Phoenix and Denver.
It’s been the best education and most unexpected adventure. I’ve gone from learning all these imagery skills (photography, videography, flying drones, 3D Tours, etc.), to teaching others all these imagery skills, to hands-on learning every aspect of business. We attended a real estate photography conference in Las Vegas in November and saw how far systems have taken other businesses. In 2024, we’ve set our sights on building systems for Desert Lens and Denver Lens that run smooth without us constantly tending everything.
7. December in Ecuador with Rad Friends
I spent the month of December in my favorite little beach town in Ecuador with a gorgeous group of ten friends. We worked remote, surfed, danced, philosophized, did yoga, ate big group dinners, rode rusty beach cruiser bicycles, snorkeled with sea lions, and watched the sun dip into the Pacific evening after evening while throwing frisbees… it was the finest and most wholesome way to be.
We are so shaped by our environments and experiences. Being surrounded by kind, loving people who each inspire in their own way for the entirety of a month in a slow-paced Ecuadorian beachside paradise was nourishing and shaping in more ways than we have space for here. A few include: striking up more conversations with strangers, living life as art, and probably starting a podcast this year.
8. Not a Journey, But a Dance
While not an experience, one of the things that shaped me most this past year was an Alan Watts quote:
“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”
Life is not a “journey” because there is no such thing as a destination. The moment we reach any goal, life just keeps on going.
How many stories of people getting what they always wanted only to find it the worst thing in the world because it doesn’t change anything about how they’re being and leaves them hopeless have we heard?
The universe goes on and on, round and round, in circles.
While going round and round, picking a specific point in a circle as “the point of it all” makes little sense. Rather, we should learn to “dance,” to be here and now with the movement of it all, and enjoy the whole thing.
