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Hey, Do you ever look up at the night sky and ponder the scope of space and time? Or ever consider that all our lives, that all our history — from life crawling out of the water onto land to dinosaurs to World War II — has taken place on this pale blue dot? I’ve been thinking about this a lot the past year. When I do, I feel humbled and awed and settle into what seems to me a more primary reality. To exist in awareness of this primary reality feels miraculous. Right now as you read these words we are all zipping through space on our tiny little planet, the gravity of the sun swinging us around in circles like a ball on a string. On another level, the Milky Way is swirling that sun and hundreds of billions of other stars in a gargantuan whirlpool motion too… there are hundreds of billions of other galaxies whirling their stars the same way… sometimes it all just melts me into a puddle of breathless wonder. Primary reality’s awesomeness can be found on all levels. From the macroscope of galaxies to the microscope of atoms with electron clouds popping in and out of existence. The tree outside my window makes food with sunlight. This evening, I watched a Boeing 777, this huge airplane humans somehow managed to build that can fly many thousands of miles at 590mph with nearly four-hundred people aboard, laboriously climb into the sky at sunset as I finished a run and it was magnificent. That I’m pressing buttons with symbols on them that will communicate my thoughts and feelings to you and a few thousand other people through 1’s and 0’s and electricity and screens blows my mind too. Awareness of primary reality — of what is simply, actually happening — is wondrous and crazy. However, our awareness of this primary reality is often obscured by a secondary reality. Secondary reality is a cultural thing. We grow up and learn to see and do things the same way as others. We are so good at weaving this secondary reality that by the time we’re adults most of us rarely, if ever, take conscious note of the primary reality anymore. For example, think of how wrapped up most of us get working to accumulate money, the stock market, and such, all of which are utterly pretend, made-up things that are useful only because we believe in them. I’m not writing to bash secondary reality tonight, but I would like to put a crack in it and perhaps allow some more primary reality to shine through. I’ve been veiled over with secondary reality myself often this month, with the real estate photography business growing with a near-crisis-inducing leap. I’m honestly quite shocked at my own amnesic ability to look right at and be unable to experience the awe of primary reality before me, sometimes for days straight at a time with all this busyness. It takes things like long runs, good friends I’m lucky to have who see through the veil, and late night letter writing to open my eyes to what’s been right before me the whole time, but been covered over by perhaps overzealous secondary reality participation lately. Our current, secondary reality doesn’t really point to, honor, or make space for primary reality. However, we can easily create portholes to the primary if we consciously choose. This certainly happened while we all lied on a big blanket atop a sand dune gawking at the Milky Way at WONDER WANDER 2021. It was totally transcendent, and I hope to use the cosmic perspective as a porthole to the primary reality at this year’s gathering too. Speaking if it, I’ve received seven applications for WONDER WANDER 2022 thus far. I’m humbled and amazed at the variety, depth, and radness of the people who turn up in my life through writing words on the internet. We could use a few more for this go around still! If you feel called to come but find yourself hesitant to leap into the unknown or lead an experience, I leave you with an infinitely wise Terence McKenna quote, the centerpiece of the second article below: “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.” With love & stoke, Ethan
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