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.

We are each viewing the world through a lens. This lens is difficult to notice, though, because it doesn’t exist.

Rather, this lens is a collective conception of influential intangibles: culture, beliefs, values, awareness, and all sorts of other ingredients we each picked up in our past. Together, these ingredients amount to a figurative lens — a lens that sits between the world external to ourselves and our internal experience of it — focusing our awareness on particular details.

Through books, writers with minds and prose superior to my own brought this lens through which we are each viewing the world to my attention. Had I not copied a few of their particularly profound passages into my Commonplace Book, I probably wouldn’t have noticed it:

The following is an excerpt from the August 2020 edition of my monthly Late Night Letters. Usually written the last night of each month, I sent this one out a few nights late to coincide with the five year anniversary of this blog. Reading it again recently, I realized it speaks well to the why of the past, present, and future of this project — so I thought to publish it in the blog itself.

This is a follow up to The Unsung Power of Symbols, in which I promised a list of the symbols I currently, consciously use in my own life. The intent is simply to provide some concrete examples of symbols to inspire ideas and act as a jumping-off point into the search for your own.

Below are six of my symbols, with a little what and why about each:

Symbols matter more than you think.

In a column titled, The Story of a Thing, a New York Times Reporter asked a few dozens famous creatives, “what’s your most prized possession?” While the answers varied widely, from a factory table where women sewed flowers onto hats in the 1960s, to a picture of Harriet Tubman, to a fifteen-year-old tea bag, each object was not prized for its usefulness or economic value, but for its meaning. Everyone’s most prized possession was a symbol — an object highly charged with meaning.

Symbols are a curious, human thing. How is it that a fifteen-year-old tea bag could be someone’s most prized possession?

You ever see those Buddhist monks
who spend months placing grains of sand
into those intricate mandala art pieces?
Once finished their masterpiece is
ceremonially shown to all who wish to see.
Everyone attempts to preserve
to photograph or at least remember
what will soon no longer be.
Then the monks sweep their masterpiece
into a pile and scoop it into a bag
to be poured into a nearby river.

My friend is a true artist. A feeler with strong intuition, she lives in deep connection with the desert she calls home.

Her walks through the desert are her daily source of renewal. The smell of creosote in rare desert rains moves her more than anyone is moved by a smell. She feels an energy between all things that I could once only logically intuit.

I am often inspired by her connection to everything. Our time together has connected me to all these gifts, strengthening my connection with the natural world. Recently, however, she told me something I simply have not been able to believe or connect with: red-tailed hawks are messengers.

On my end, 2019 was a year of re-centering, transition, and adventure.

Reeling from the realizations of a ten-day meditation retreat at the end of 2018, I spent the beginning of the year splitting rent and a bedroom with my brother in Flagstaff, AZ attempting to ensure my values—not some image I have of myself—were at the helm of my life. Then, called by curiosity, excitement, and what I could confidently call “inner-pull,” I began again: ventured about to Nepal and Cambodia, built the backbone of a book, and made a most life-directing decision to attend flight school.

At the end of three of the past four years (2015, 2016, and 2018), I’ve taken the time to step back, reflect, and attempt to see the big picture. While a year is just a human construct pinned to an arbitrarily chosen point in a lap of the Earth around the sun, that point makes us want to pause and reflect. I believe that an urge worth using.

What follows is an introduction to hard work not as an act of martyrdom, but a self-aware balancing act between pressing on and renewing our ability to do so. A way of consciously culling the best out of ourselves rather than mindlessly demanding it.

First we’ll consider when to stick with something and when to step away to “press the reset button.” Then we’ll go over a dozen ways to press it.

Let’s get into it.

I was climbing a mountain
a desert island in Phoenix.
It had just rained three days straight
and the unprecedented rain left
everything an unprecedented clear.

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.

I love podcasts—not quite as much as books—but they accompany daily tasks from driving, to cooking, to working out in the most engaging, fruitful of ways.

As but one human, I’ve only listened to a tiny fraction of all the podcasts ever recorded. However, I’ve scoured the web for quality conversation for half a decade now, and for perspective alone, consider each episode below well worth the time investment.

I could write about how valuable podcasts are for expanding awareness, allowing one to choose their influences, and how this list is just as much as a study of my own choices, but these things are easily inferred.

Let’s dive right in.

A mile outside the northeast entrance of Yellowstone National Park, at the bottom of a glacially carved valley 7,389ft in elevation, sits Silver Gate, Montana — an island of humanity among a sea of mountainous wilderness. At the height of summer, the population can swell to perhaps two hundred. However, only eight residents call Silver Gate home year-round and the town’s unanimously elected mayor is a dog named Rommel. Besides a handful of privately owned cabins, the town consists of two small general stores, two lodging businesses, and a restaurant.

Bigger towns surrounding Yellowstone, with large advertising budgets and shorter drives to world-famous “Old Faithful,” attract a vast majority of the park’s visitors. To this day, Silver Gate and Cooke City (its neighboring town three miles up the road), remain less trodden outposts of the little-known Yellowstone High Country. Rather than geysers, Silver Gate is about wilderness, wildlife, and mountains.

Last week, I was talking on the phone with my brother. Discussing my personal selling points for a book proposal I’m working on, he told me that whenever he describes me to someone whom I’ve never met he tells them:

“He does what he wants with his life and somehow seems to not feel the pressure that everyone else does to do certain things.”

Self-awareness is difficult. I never really thought of myself in such a way. My ego held onto the compliment like a pretty pebble from a stream, taking it from my figurative pocket and turning it over and over in my hand for it’s smooth, pleasant feel.

I do feel a lot less pressure to do “certain things” than I used to and suspect most people do. In reflecting upon it, I began to recall other instances of this curiosity.

This afternoon, I’m getting paid to sit under an umbrella next to a pool, read books, and write these words in Flagstaff, Arizona. 

It’s a spectacular summer day. Upper seventies. A slight breeze. Overplayed but otherwise decent music sounds from the speakers that surround. A couple of kids are shooting each other with squirt-guns in the pool while their moms chat at a table under an umbrella. A man that looks like a walrus is turning red with sun in a lounge chair. Thunderheads grow off on the western horizon, but the sky above is a pale blue canvas.

As I plan to go to flight school this fall, I’m particularly aware of commercial airliners silently drawing white streaks across that pale blue canvas and the smaller planes that buzz by in approach to the Flagstaff airport. I’ve been projecting myself into the cockpit of every plane that passes by.

I don’t believe that I’ll live to grow old. 

It’s not that I think I’m going to die young or burn out before thirty because I’m living so hard or something. I just know all too well that life could end at anytime.

When I was sixteen years old, a mosquito bite nearly killed me. A few weeks after this unbeknownst bite, I went to bed with a piercing headache. If it wasn’t for my mom’s investigation of “strange noises,” I would have been dead the next morning.

This mosquito, it transferred a virus to me. A virus that infected the fluid surrounding my brain, causing it to swell and squeeze. The result: many grand mal seizures, four days in a coma, a stroke, and a damaged brain.

For the past five years, I've been doing my damnedest to avoid paying rent. Given, I'm quite nomadic and largely avoid leases for the purpose of geographical freedom, but you might be surprised just how much time rent can cost you in a year.

I don't particularly love articles full of numbers and perhaps you don’t either, but these are eye-opening numbers. Bear with me as we begin with a little math.

For the purposes of this article, let's say your rent, utilities, and other housing expenses total $800 a month. This is a pretty frugal figure, as the average cost of rent alone for one bedroom apartment in the United States these days is over $1,000. So, at $800 a month, you're well under that mark, and you managed to work your utilities into that number too. Well done.

Nepal and its Himalayas are a place I have long wanted to experience. A poor country rich in culture, the birthplace of Buddha, site of Peter Matthiessen’s excursion in The Snow Leopard, and home to the world's highest mountains, many an aspect might draw one there. Not unlike my aforementioned author/hero, both a cultural pull and a curiosity for the Himalayas themselves drew me in. I wondered what might I find in the Himalayas, in my experience of the mountains and the people who live in the foot of the grandeur.

I also had some questions which required space. Space I knew I would find out there. I’ve struggled with this clash of eastern and western values lately, especially since a ten-day Vipassana meditation course last October.

A nomad for the better part of the past five years, I sought to answer the question of "Why I travel?" in a notebook from the window seat of a Boeing 737 last December.

Late one night, I recorded that answer.

While I am no videographer and the majority of my moments go intentionally uncaptured, I did have enough footage from five years of travel to span four minutes. Backed by M83's Outro, this is the "why" behind my last five years of venturing out.

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.”