There are times in life where things are so beautiful and electrically good you can’t even believe they’re happening.

My friends Matthew and Nicolette, brilliant humans, DJs, and the creators and curators of Between2Clouds, are better at manifesting such moments than any humans I have ever met.

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.

October 13th - 18th, a dozen rad readers of this blog came together at an old bed and breakfast near the tiny town of Arivaca, AZ (a dozen miles north of the USA/Mexico border) for WONDER WANDER 2022.

What happens when thirteen humans arrive in a remote pocket of time and space, each prepared to lead the talk, activity, or experience they most want to share with others, and everyone is invited into the collaborative effort of kindness, trust, and the creation of a temporarily-constructed culture to inhabit together for the next six days is surreal... it was unconditional love, depth, philosophy, connectedness to nature, utter zaniness, mindfulness training, and days on end of contentedness unlike I have experienced in any other format.

November 4th to 8th 2021, I'm hosting WONDER WANDER 2021 — a five day, four night gathering of curious, creative, and adventurous people to collectively wonder and wander among one of the most surreal, philosophical landscapes on Planet Earth.

We'll be staying in a big ole’ cabin among the red rocks just outside of Kanab, Utah, but a drive away from nine US National Parks.

It's only $300 to attend.

And it's going to be legendary.

Join us!

Joseph Campbell is one of my greatest heroes. His words ring with deep truth in me and my life has been greatly inspired by his.

What so inspires me about Joe is not that he uncovered and popularized the psychologically powerful, universally mythologized cycle of “the hero’s journey,” but that he did so by walking the hero path himself. His ideas are the foundation upon which our modern myths, movies like Star Wars and The Matrix, were deliberately built. His posthumously released six-part PBS interview series with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, remains “one of the most popular series in the history of public television.” The interviews from that series were filled with such deep insight and wisdom that their transcripts were simply printed into one of my all-time favorite books.

The other day, I figured out how to put the way I go about life into a single sentence. It then occurred to me that life was far too expansive. One couldn’t possibly do such a thing! However, it felt like an important sentence, so I thought to share it with you:

I strive to be cheap, sensitive, and naked to the world.

As language is subjective, those words probably mean something different to you than me. Let’s break it into parts and elaborate on each.

In the United States, road trips are almost a rite of passage — our ultimate symbol of escape, freedom, and adventure. From the written works of Kerouac and Steinbeck to a laundry list of films that take place on the open road (from Little Miss Sunshine to Into the Wild to Rain Man), we’ve culturally come to recognize the road trip as the antidote to too much city, sameness, and domestic life.

After personally crisscrossing the American west more than half a dozen times by car, driving the entire west coast, and spending more than five months of 2018 living out of a Honda Element converted into a home on wheels, a sharing of my take on the art of the 21st century road trip has felt long overdue.

However, it wasn't until I conducted a bit of “road trip” keyword research, that I found the fire to pen this piece.

Why?

I discovered that the most searched keyword associated with “road trip” is “planner.”

I wasn't sure if this was the exact spot until, climbing down the black rocks of the seawall, I suddenly remembered their placement. This was it. I had hopped down this exact path to the beach nearly five years ago.

Reid and I were overwhelmed with waves of emotion. Pride, that we pedaled bicycles across the United States. Relief, that we survived. Despair, that it was over. Fear, that life might never be so good again. Frustration too, as we waited for Rob to pick out this spot, a five-minute eternity in a motel parking lot. That motel being the last obstacle between us and the Pacific.

Amid the emotional storm, this was the big payoff scene. The moment the Arizona Republic and NBC had paid to send Rob, the same photographer they send to the Olympics, on a drive from Phoenix to Oregon to capture. Much hinged on this footage, not just for us, but for Rob, who had surely stuck his neck out a bit to dub his neighbor's cross-country bike ride for the local children's hospital worthy of the financial investment.

In life, we each get a few shocking, external events that shake us. Life-quaking events that cause us to stop and question, that force us examine our lives from another perspective. It might be losing a job we've long held, the death of someone close, or dancing with death ourselves, but when tragedy strikes, awareness often results.

A good analogy might be swimming across a great body of water.

We put our heads down in the water to swim. Stroke by stoke, we move along. We focus on making progress in the direction we're heading. And maybe we are making great progress in that direction! The problem is, we can't see where we're going while swimming with our heads down.

Maybe once a month, or even less frequently, I have these moments. Moments that last anywhere from five minutes to an hour. They're sublime moments—moments of elation, verging on ecstasy. Moments when I find myself utterly moved by my surroundings or by an experience.

I had one of these moments today.

Rain was falling all day and after spending one too many hours inside, I needed to escape. I grabbed headphones, pulled my rain coat on, and stepped out into the cool, heavy air of late afternoon. Grey clouds hung overhead and as the Interstellar Soundtrack eased into my ears, I walked west out of a small New Zealand town into farmland and pastures.

I'm jet-lagged and have to run to catch a bus across the south island of New Zealand soon, but I want to pin down a beautiful thought that's been bouncing around my head the past couple days.

In the history of humanity, traveling has never been so damn easy. Think about it: you could be almost anywhere on the face of the earth in a matter of a day or two. This weekend, you could snorkel the Great Barrier Reef, walk the Great Wall of China, or drink a Guinness in Ireland.

This might seem normal to us, as we were born with this privilege, but looking from a larger perspective, it couldn't be further from usual. For hundreds of thousands of years, we humans could only travel as fast as we could walk. Eventually, we figured out how to tame and ride animals that were faster than us, which sped things up a bit. We built ships, and bold explorers crossed uncharted oceans with wind power. However, nothing comes remotely close to the ability to travel we have today.

This is a guest post by Patricia Maurice. An accomplished professor, mother, and a voracious student of life.

There’s nothing like a solo hike up the side of a rugged mountain peak to organize one’s thoughts and create a little time for reminiscing. But, it wasn’t until I got back to camp this evening and raced to warm a bowl of soup in the path of a thunderstorm that clarity finally struck me… at 55 years old, I am happier than I’ve ever been in my life.

This journey towards happiness has not been steady or linear by any means. Mine has been a life of long periods of chaos punctuated by sudden epiphanies that have arrived like thunderbolts from out of the blue. I could, and perhaps will write about several of them. But, surely, one of the most important occurred a little over a decade ago. In my mid-40s, life had become a seemingly endless, exhausting ping-pong match of career and family. I wasn’t sleeping, was hardly eating… and it always seemed like the harder I worked, the more behind I fell.

Five years ago, I almost broke my neck at an indoor trampoline park. I'd always been pretty athletic, but anything that involved going upside down was completely foreign to me.

One of my friends is incredibly acrobatic and he decided to teach our other buddy how to do a backflip on a trampoline. They both encouraged me to join, but I knew there was no way I was going to land a backflip.

“Yeah,” I jokingly replied, “I'll try once Casey lands one.”

Turns out, my acrobatic friend is also a great teacher. Ten minutes later, Casey landed a backflip.

Dammit... I had to try now. I couldn't even begin to imagine myself attempting to do a backflip, let alone landing one. Flipping was not my forte.

I strode out onto the trampoline feigning confidence and got my bearings as best I could. The plan was simple.

In every movie, there's an event or decision that alters the course of a character's life. A moment that sets them down a path or jolts the main character from their everyday routine. This moment is referred to by screenwriters as the inciting incident.

The inciting incident in Spiderman is when Peter Parker is bit by a super spider. In the Hunger Games, it's when Katniss volunteers to take her sister's place as tribute. In the Hangover, it's when they realize Doug is missing, and nobody can remember what happened.

The word inciting is derived from incitare, a Latin word which means “to press, drive, or impel to action.” In a movie, the inciting incident is the essential tool that launches the main character into some sort of journey.

Inciting incidents don't just exist in movies though – they spark all endeavors. And though they may be less dramatic than the inciting incidents of blockbuster movies, we can create our own inciting incidents that compel us to do incredible things.

We constantly hear how important goals are.

To plan things out is synonymous with ambition and fulfillment in our culture. However, unnoticed by most, our obsession with goals in western society also has it's downfalls. Goals are a valuable tool for achievement, but are also a double-edged sword.

Here's an eye opening discussion of goals, between two of my personal heroes.

There's a surprisingly large gap between the small difference in prefix of nonconformity and unconformity. Both words suggest an opposition to conforming, which is to comply to the rules, standards, or status quo. The difference though, lies within how those rules, standards, and status quo affect an individual.

Nonconformity is a complete rejection of the norm. It's automatically taking an opposing stance towards rules, regulations, or what's popular. The idea is simple, reject the standard, because it is the standard.

Unconformity, on the other hand, is a refusal to let the norm influence one's decisions. Whether something is normal, popular, or not, has no effect on the decision making process. A weighing of one's options without factoring in what the mentality of the herd.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking: “He wears those weird toes shoes when he runs?”

I do, I wear Vibram FiveFingers when I run. I know they're not the ultimate fashion statement, but the world's ugliest shoes saved my half marathon training. In the summer of 2012 I was training for my first half marathon. I did my research and started a 16 week training schedule that eventually lead to me placing 254th out of over 8,300 runners. I wouldn't have survived without my “toe shoes.”

I grew up running around barefoot in the park across the street from our house. I'd play football, soccer, and any other grass based sports without shoes, preferably. I'd take my shoes off so I could run faster.