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Howdy friends, As I took stock and sort of “welled up” to write tonight, what arose was a want to explore a frustration I have with living with a foot in two worlds. These days, I feel caught in a back-and-forth between the cultural world and this more expansive experience of the older and deeper world that pervades it. It feels like a line from that song Big Yellow Taxi: “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” In my early twenties, I had this inkling that the society we were born into was a sort of “parking lot paved over paradise.” Initially, I joined everyone racing for the best parking spots, but found myself overcome with a desire to slow down, look around, and ponder that “paradise paved over.” From 22 to 27, I wandered about, living on the cheap, prizing diverse experience, reading lots of books, and in the grandest sense, trying to feel and figure that paradise out. Living among a variety of worldviews and cultures, picking up on scattered points and clues, it became clear that paradise wasn’t just paved over in the physical world, but even more so in our heads. As we grew up, our perception of paradise was overlaid with norms, language, ideas, and beliefs — with culture. Today, I find myself toggling between the cultural world and this more expansive experience of the older and deeper world that pervades it. The kicker is, as I spend time focused on one, I tend to lose sight of the other. Culture has had a particular hold over me lately. I’ve spent much of the year thus far writing operations manuals for my buddy and I’s real estate photography business. I have come to realize that operations manuals, while exquisitely boring, are cultural documents proclaiming “the way we do things around here” to direct how people think and behave. These cultural documents are remarkably useful for organizing groups of people to work together. However, as I immerse myself in imagining our company’s culture — our rules, workflows, and ways of doing things — I realize these imaginings “pave over paradise” as my awareness and sense of self keep collapsing back to cultural size as I imagine them. By night and weekend, I find myself subtly trying to slip the cultural worldview and open my awareness back up to a more mystic expansive experience of unity and timelessness beyond our imagined world. I feel increasingly called to create in ways that don’t pave over the older and deeper world that pervades ours, but rather act as a window in the imagined walls of culture to offer a view beyond them. I feel that WONDER WANDER, the “experiential potluck” I annually host at some far out place in nature, is a kind of “cultural window.” Every year, there have been moments imbued with that expansive experience. The photo atop this letter, from WONDER WANDER 2022, captures perhaps the largest one we’ve co-created yet: the last moment, of a last night dance party, in the middle of a road, in the middle of nowhere — boundless people with a boundless universe glistening overhead. Interested in joining a dozen other curious, creative, adventurous humans to share what you’re most into, relish in nature, and perhaps stumble our way into co-creating a couple of “cultural windows” this year? From October 25th to 30th, I’m throwing WONDER WANDER 2024 on a five-acre desert ranch with a magnificent octagonal home bordering Saguaro National Park. If you feel called, interested, or even just intrigued, give it a gander! I’d love to co-create an experience out-of-this-world with you. With love & stoke, Ethan
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