”We don’t grow from our experiences. We don’t grow from reflecting on our experiences. We grow by acting on the reflections of our experiences.”

- Alex Chmiel (a.k.a. Yesman)

Howdy y’all,

We’re a month into the new year, and I hope yours has been off to a swell start.

Mine’s been full — photography business, the dreaming up of new things, two legendary weekends with legendary friends, challenging family matters, reworking how I workout… I’ve been go-go-go and living the whole spectrum, and am frankly quite spent as I start this letter tonight. After a wondrous and much slower-paced December spent beachside in Ecuador, I find myself back at it in the USA.

While I’m roaming less and living in a routine more these days, I’ve become more and more interested in a specific kind of repetition: ritual. In talking with friends about ritual recently, I discovered many associate the word with darkness, the unknown, “satanic rituals,” “witchcraft,” and such. I want to use this letter to shine some light into the darkness around rituals, what they are, how I use them, and why you should totally toy with them too.

Basically, I think of rituals as patterns performed repeatedly for a purpose. What that purpose is is up to you. It could be anything — visualizing the day ahead as you drive to work (to make your day better), stretching for five minutes after lunch (to improve your posture), listening to Alan Watts before bed (to open your mind and relax), hiking each Sunday (to confer with nature), or meeting friends in a cabin in the middle of nowhere each summer solstice (to celebrate life and realign with your highest priorities).

Rituals, in this sense, derive their power from consistency. By consistently repeating an action with specific purpose we can purposely do crazy beautiful things like care for our bodies, consciously shape the lens of our awareness, or instill just about any sort of change within ourselves we wish to instill. The key is consistency. Start so small that you can’t say “no” and create reminders for yourself like this note that I tapped to my bedroom wall to remind me of the little morning and evening routine I’ve been practicing (most days) this month:

Meditating on rituals tonight, I realize I’m unconsciously filling my life with them. Morning and evening rituals most days. On Sundays, I walk around the block cultivating gratitude, visualizing the future, or repeating a particular phrase on each straightaway. When I get home, I gaze at this little, evolving vision board I’ve been cobbling together for a couple minutes. With the turn of each season, I drive out into the desert and spend a night solo — getting stoned, sensing the vastness of the Earth, listening to the Eagles while cooking dinner at sunset, reading old journals, and generally taking stock of life. Annually, I host WONDER WANDER, sharing and exploring reality deeply with others who are open and viscerally interested in life. These rituals compound. They help me to do what’s important on the daily, to find my way through chaotic times, and deepen my relation to everything else.

Rituals are profoundly useful in these ways. But we’re only exploring the shallow end of deep, deep pool here. I write tonight less troll the depths and more to say that my internal metal detector is going “beep, beep, beep,” that I’m consciously realizing that there is something valuable here, and that I sense a grand adventure is afoot. I have come to believe there are very good reasons why all religions have rituals and why the healers of so many cultures work in the realm of the unknown. We live in a time when logic reigns culturally supreme, but logic has shallow reach into the causal factors at the core of us. All this to say: I think I’m going swimming, I offer ritual to your awareness, and invite you to dive in too.

Thanks for sharing your time and awareness with me (and this little late night writing ritual).

With love & stoke,

Ethan

2022 In Review and A Glance at the Map

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.

Read on >

The Newest Addition to the Bookshelf: Turn Your Life Into Art

If hosting deep, participatory, transformative experiences interests you, read this book. It is phenomenal, and a whole lot more than an instruction manual. Part how-to, part history lesson, and part memoir, Turn Your Life Into Art paints a picture of an underground scene that created experiences designed to blow minds, breakdown psychological barriers, and open people up to the possible.

The ideas and principles are powerful and totally legit (I have spent the past few years figuring out some of this stuff on my own and have come to many of the same conclusions). The fun you can have with this stuff can change lives, including your own.

Read on >