By Ethan Maurice | November 21, 2022
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.
What a time and space. Our experience still colors my days and I’m doing my best to integrate many golden nuggets of shared wisdom. I have such gratitude, love, and reverence for these fascinating and beautiful people.
A Short History of WONDER WANDER
In case you haven’t heard me yap about it yet, WONDER WANDER is an annual experiment I host in community and culture, a potluck of experiences (one led by every participant) somewhere out in nature. This year’s gathering was the third attempt at this wondrous weave. I sense we are stumbling our way into creating a powerful event of life-altering potential, a modern-day communal ritual.
The ideas that seeded these gatherings were found in books: a Ben Franklin biography recounting his twelve-man Junto, the philosophical discussions of Indian gang leaders in the book Shantaram, and mention of long-ago traveling philosophical events called “chautauquas” in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I don’t know why, but I am drawn to and excited by these sorts of gatherings like a moth flying frenetic laps around a light bulb.
It started the summer of 2017, when I started “Knights of the Round Stool” with my brother and two friends, a weekly, summer-long discussion group. That summer, I also attempted to host the predecessor to WONDER WANDER, a four-day gathering I called the “Yellowstone Chautauqua,” but failed to bring enough people together for the event. The next year, I decided to try again, but this time scheduled the gathering more than six weeks in advance and renamed it with words that actually have meaning to most people. WONDER WANDER 2018 was the stunning result. Soul-searching and the pandemic put a pause on the gathering until WONDER WANDER 2021, where on a whim, I required everyone to lead an experience, talk, or activity of their own. This seemed to unleash everyone’s active collaborative spirit and took an already great thing to another level.
Then, per the recommendation of one of this year’s wonderwanderers, I read Turn Your Life Into Art: Lessons in Psychomagic from the San Francisco Underground a few months before our gathering.
I discovered much of the fog I was finding my way through in setting the conditions for these collaborative experiences had already been traversed and cleared by these “life art” groups in San Francisco. They’d been building and bending culture for decades through underground events and gatherings (including one you’ve probably heard of called Burning Man). My whole foray into this stuff, I’d never really been aware of anyone else doing this in the modern day. The book made concrete much of what I was intuiting and guessing at and taught me a great handful of new lessons.
WONDER WANDER 2022
Something special happened this year. I honestly doubt I can convey what gathering a diverse group of interesting people together and setting the stage this way resulted in at this year’s gathering… we created this pocket in time and space of unconditional love, depth, philosophy, connectedness to nature, utter zaniness, mindfulness training, and days on end of contentedness that I have never experienced anything like in any other format.
To be clear, this is not my doing. All is made manifest by the people. The experimenting and learning I’ve been doing lies in creating conditions — improving the mulch and environmental settings from which the fruits of the garden of group collaboration organically stem forth from a unique set of individuals. It is a damn beautiful thing.
This year, offerings from individual wonderwanderers included:
Pre-Show Questionnaire & Framing of the Gathering
Morning Meditation & Breathwork
Neurology of the Self & The Good Life Lecture
Walking Sensing and Savoring Meditation
Painting with Watercolors
Chance-Based Philosophical Dance Ceremony Lead by The Dice Man
Examination of Past Accomplishments & Future Goals
Relations to Substances Talk
Cord Cutting Ceremony
UFO Summoning Meditation
Live Performance of Returning to One & Other Songs
Species Identification and Awareness Exercise
Last Night Tea Ceremony & EDM Dance Party Under the Milky Way
A WONDER WANDER 2022 Highlight Reel
Photos of our gathering and this rad WONDER WANDER 2022 Highlight Reel were captured and edited by fellow wonderwanderer Paul Shelton.
Integrating the Lessons of WONDER WANDER 2022
Arriving at the end of our six days together, it seemed to me everyone was asking themselves the same thing: how do I hold onto this experience?
The tough answer is that you can’t. That particular set of conditions, that group of people, that weave of interactions in that particular time and space is a one-off creation — a temporary piece of life art that is rich precisely because it is rare and fleeting. It feels like falling in love and having your heart broken, family-style, in a matter of a week.
That said, though everyone split and spread out across the country, we remain connected through the same source that brought us together: the world wide web. It’s not quite like it is in person, but the internet brought us together to start, allows us to communicate, collaborate, and hopefully gather again with intention in the future.
A week after WONDER WANDER, we all came together one last time via video call for a roundtable integration session, taking turns discussing what we loved, learned, and want to bring into our own lives. After an evening of extensive journaling, I had distilled my takeaways into a clean little bullet point list to hang on my bedroom wall for reminder and reference that I shared with the group:
In Conclusion
Our culture at large takes a mechanistic, cookie-cutter approach to gathering that is efficient, low stakes, and maximizes safety. However, it isn’t nearly as powerful or interesting as what happens when everyone has agency and effect on the experience.
Whether a concert or church, a retreat or festival, when we gather we assume a single person or small group of people will perform or lead the experience and everyone else will observe or passively follow along. While this allows for control and stability, it doesn’t matter what the vast majority of the people do, and most of us tend toward “clocking out.”
What WONDER WANDER is showing me is that when everyone is actively encouraged to help create the experience instead of just following along, it ignites a sense of agency in every person that multiplies manyfold the creative force and electric feel of the group. I’ve yet to attend Burning Man, but from reading Turn Your Life Into Art, I now grasp that both it and WONDER WANDER get their power from the same source: the collective effect of enabling every individual to contribute and gift their gifts to the group.
This changes the experience completely. No longer are 99% of the people sitting there watching, thinking, and judging how good this experience is or isn’t. No, it’s up to each person to make the experience the best it can be not just for themselves but for everyone else. When everyone is engaged in this same collective goal in a one-off, soon-to-end experience, something that feels a lot like magic happens.
Creating that magic at WONDER WANDER was brilliant, full of love, and life-altering in many ways this year. The stoke continues to grow, and I’m excited to do it all again next year.
