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.

Fellow riders on spaceship Earth,

May I introduce to you the ‘In This Together’ Bumper Sticker — a symbolic reminder that we are literally in this together, residing on a tiny blue-green ball of life miraculously afloat in the void of space.

One night, in a flash of inspiration, the whole thing: idea, phrase, and image, just struck me.

In 2021, I created the “Needlestack”, a simple grassroots solution to making the browse the web by best.

Playing on the metaphor of “finding a needle in a haystack,” the Needlestack was a list of links to what I personally felt were the best pages on the entire internet. The idea was to make my Needlestack, encourage others to make their own, and to link them together — weaving a navigable web of links to the best pages on the web.

Here to remember
he sits at the sun worn table
among rock and shrub and sky.
The matters and stories back home
dry and crack in the afternoon kiln
of ceaseless alabaster sunlight.

We are dreamers.

We dream not just when we’re asleep, but when we’re awake. We dream not just as individuals, but as a group. We’re so good at dreaming that we can hardly distinguish between dreams and the ground on which we dream.

Yet, one can wake up in the middle of a dream.

With the turn of each year, I find great benefit and orientation in reflecting on the year past and envisioning the one to come.

While a new year is but an arbitrarily chosen point in Earth’s lap around the sun, it is also a regular reminder of transition. And as transitions tend to cause us to pause and reflect, a new year seems a sweet, cosmically-tuned reminder to pause, ”pull your head out of the water,” and look around.

I don’t really believe in resolutions or fixating on specific goals. Rather, I liken the process to “stopping to glance at the map, check that we’re heading in the right direction, and boldly continue with the journey of life.” Goals help us to achieve our aims, but are also blinders to opportunities that arise in the present. I attempt to walk a middle path, priming my awareness for particular things, while not fixating on them.

Would you like to live a captivating life? To feel alive and engaged in the ways you spend your days? Interest is the unsung key.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about interest the past year and believe it to be the missing vital value and navigational compass for the modern day. Interest is the fountain of youth we don’t know we’re after, not in the sense of everlasting life, but of life ever-engaging. When rooted in your interests, you don’t need all the tips and tricks to be present, happy, and engaged — living in alignment with the delights and drives of your deeper self, you simply need a lot less soothing.

While the effort to discover your deepest interests is far from straightforward, the process is remarkably simple. So simple, in fact, it can be written out in the most standardized and trite form in the world: a three-step formula.

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.

A highlight reel of WONDER WANDER 2022, by Paul Shelton.

From October 13th to 18th, I hosted WONDER WANDER 2022 — my blog's annual gathering and experiment in co-created community, this year among the high desert surrounding Arivaca, AZ.

This article offers a means to a more expansive perspective of reality by pointing to the size of the universe — a cosmic view of the vast reality in which our lives are taking place.

I find this perspective of immeasurable value and encourage you: take your time, watch the videos, dig the links.

Back in 2019, while walking the Annapurna Circuit through the Himalayas of Nepal, I spent a lot of time looking up. While all that looking up was prompted by those incredible mountains, my awareness kept catching on the daytime moon.

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.” - Terence McKenna

Last fall, I was struck by understanding in an old, crowded diner in Nevada City, California. I was seated in a booth across from Ed Buryn, author of the 1971 travel classic Vagabonding in Europe and North Africa. It was an important moment in which golden wisdom was grasped.

I want to tell you about it, but first some backstory.

Released today! I sat down with my good buddy Milan Smets, for an interview on his In Full Effect Podcast. Originally from Belgium and currently residing in Vietnam, Milan is a videographer who’s led quite the international life. We met back in 2017 in New Zealand, both tramping about the country on working holiday visas.

We delve into personal perspectives of travel, creativity, interest, money, time, and a bunch of other subjects at deeper fathoms. Twas a good time, deep exploration, and real honor.

With the turn of each year, I find great benefit and orientation in reflecting on the year past and envisioning the one to come.

While a new year is just an arbitrarily chosen point in Earth’s lap around the sun, it is also a regular reminder of transition. And as transitions tend to cause us to pause and reflect, a new year seems a sweet, cosmically-tuned reminder to pause, ”pull our heads out of the water,” and look around.

I don’t believe in resolutions or fixating on specific goals. Rather, I liken the process to “stopping for a few minutes to study the map, check that we’re heading in the right direction, and boldly continue with the journey of life.” Goals can help us achieve what they’re aimed at, but also become blinders to other opportunities that arise in the present. I attempt to walk a middle path, aiming my awareness at certain things, but not fixating upon them.

There is speculation that John Frusciante — the guitarist most renowned for face-melting licks with the Red Hot Chili Peppers — is a modern day Jesus Christ. While this speculation is largely fueled by a few photographs of John floating around the web dressed as Jesus, I’d like to add to the internet that the similarities go deep than appearance.

While I am half-joking, I am also half-serious.

One of the greatest gifts of writing online about things that matter to you (that rank in Google searches) is that others interested in those things find you.

Sometimes they send you heartfelt notes out of the blue that make your day. Other times, you get to meet them and go on hikes or hang out in view of city skylines as you mutually discover deep connection and conversational depth that lifts your spirit for weeks. The best of times — if you can work up the courage to do something like invite a bunch of them to hang at a cabin in the middle of the desert — you can pull together a collective of individuals with resonance unlike you've ever experienced and find yourself amid the most fun, fruitful idea/experience/philosophy swap of your life to date.

This is what happened at WONDER WANDER 2021.

Because language cleaves
difference that matters
Inuit people in the Arctic had
more than fifty words for “snow.”

In a modern world of abundance
where strife has become
more mental than physical
let us cleave “enjoy” and “have fun.”
…