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Heya, There’s this thing that happens when you travel, every once in a while, where you see someone and just sort of know you’re “meant” to run into them. Two Decembers in a row, it’s happened to me flying down to South America. December 2nd, 2021, I was sitting cross-legs on the ground in front of floor-to-ceiling window at the Miami Airport, writing a Late Night Letter, and turned around to find a clear-eyed, crusty climber reading in the seat behind me. Noticing his barefoot sandals, I struck up a conversation and discovered we were on the same flight to Medellín, Colombia. One year later, the exact same day, I recalled that moment in Miami while standing in a security line of the Guayaquil, Ecuador airport. I was like, wouldn’t it be funny if that happened again, looked around, and it was so obvious… “holy shit, that’s the dude right there” I walked back in line, said hello, asked where he was going, and sure enough: he was bound for the same beach town four-hours away by bus. There is this embodied resonance that I do not rationally understand, but am slowly learning to trust. While traveling, I’ve learned that when I notice this feeling of resonance with another, it’s remarkably worthwhile to pursue the connection. It’s become unsurprising to fall right in step with these resonant travelers and share, not just the external path, but the internal, deeper, more spiritual one with them as well. Almost immediately comfortable with each other, we tend to just open right up and talk deep. On the taxi ride from the airport into Medellín, I asked Landon (that climber I at the Miami airport) what he was doing here. He straight up replied, “I am on a spiritual journey.” Damn! We spent the following three days wandering about Medellín having incredible discussions in which he forever altered my understanding of time, empathy, and Jesus as a spiritual figure, in non-dogmatic, graspable ways that ripple through my conscious everyday experience. In Ecuador, I hung out with Evan from the airport on the daily. We surfed, ate probably two dozen meals together, went to parties, got stoned on jungle hikes, explored nearby towns, and discussed everything under the sun. The quote atop this letter is sourced from his all-time favorite DJ set. It jumped out at me the same vibrant way he did from the crowd at the Guayaquil airport. Here it is a second time: ”Meaning really is a dynamic relationship. You experience things as meaningful when you sense a relationship between what is innermost within you which is unsayable, and what is outermost beyond you which is ineffable. It is that connection, that arch, between the two things. If you can create an experience like that for people then you have created this very fertile ground of meaning. Now, what sprouts up out of that ground has a lot to do with their particular experience, but it does have the property of absolutely commanding their attention and profoundly altering their life experience.”
These words are a better-than-I-ever-grasped description of WONDER WANDER. And although I didn’t logically grasp the “unsayable innermost” connecting with the “ineffable outermost” as the basis for meaningful experiences, or why participatory, co-created experiences among nature and in direct view of infinite cosmos are such fertile grounds for meaningful experience, I have intuitively felt and attempted to bring these ingredients together year after year in pursuit of peak, transformative experiences shared with others. Also, in the same way insights about WONDER WANDER come from resonate people, resonate people come from WONDER WANDER. I suspect that because I do my best to be an authentic weirdo on the internet, pursuing and writing about his deepest interests, that those who resonate with what I’m doing don’t just resonate with me, but all the others willing to head out to some remote place in nature to spend a six days and five nights together — not with a random bunch of strangers — but with others who have some deeper, “unsayable” thing in common that we are largely unable to put into words, but don’t need to, because we can feel it by gnosis even though we don’t know it by logic. Wild words I have honestly surprised myself with tonight (being a dude who spent four years in college memorizing things about biological and chemical sciences), but I’ve had enough resonant experiences to know and go by feel. Anywho, the WONDER WANDER 2023 application period ends July 9th! If you feel it, me and the others who feel it hope you take the leap. With love & stoke, Ethan
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