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Howdy partners, As I begin this letter, I flip my focus back n’ forth from notebook to the window of this airplane. I’m climbing up above cool, green-life-coated Connecticut, returning to desert summer in Phoenix. Over two hundred years, humans have cut the travel time from five months of hoofed animals pulling wagons to five hours of a plane jetting above the clouds and I’m in awe as we blast into the sky. In the same way airplane windows stretch my sense of scale — from this high up, New York City looks small — gathering for my grandma’s celebration of life this weekend so expanded the “frame” of my conscious awareness. The weekend was wholesome and beautiful. Memories and photographs, laughs and tears, recollections of my grandma’s values and quirks, meeting her friends, and reconnecting with family I haven’t seen in far too long. As my awareness filled with priests, friers, funeral homes, cemeteries, talk of God, acknowledgments of death, the scattering of ashes, and stories of long ago, all the “frames” I experience through came loose and began switching freely. So much so, that I found myself often wondering through which “frame” to experience this or that. I experience through many different “frames” of awareness: individually (as this Ethan), socially (reading the room and cues of others), ancestrally (seeing me my uncle Rick and I as one in the same), biologically (the same spark of life in me, bees, and trees), celestially (our Earth the tiniest spec of evolving cosmic dust in space for a bit of eternity before recycling into something wholly new), and now and then taken by a moment of what feels like a sort of emptiness I’ve touched in meditation (an endless empty field in which all takes place) — to summarize and label some of the “frames” I experience through. Like a kaleidoscope, what is experienced seems to depend on the “frame” through which one looks. Like, I’m sitting on the porch talking to my dad’s cousin, and with so much focus on death and pondering the passing of life across generations that day, my “frames” start to flip and overlap without conscious control. I see myself in his eyes, am in awe with sunlight pouring in through the window, I’m tracking all the social dynamics of the room, and struggling to answer “how’ve you been?” the six years since we saw each other last. I don’t know which “frame” to answer from? In that moment, an honest answer would have come from a wider “frame,” but I doubt it would make sense… so I sit there spinning my wheels, trying to scale down to cultural standard, to the Ethan-isolated-from-all-else perspective that I usually operate effortlessly from in our human world. While I have long cherished the ability to shift “frame,” I’m also careful with the shifting. For all its wonder and beauty, expanding “frame” can be scary, alienating, and even psychologically destabilizing. Most friends I explore “frames” with I consider wise and well, but over the years a few have become disillusioned with or lost the ability to hold the culturally standard “frame” as well. I’ve worked on expanding this freedom of “frame” bit by bit, cautiously exploring farther out and in — while methodically checking back in with cultural standard — for maybe a decade now. Through reading the right books, solo sojourns in nature feeling for what’s beyond the human world, meditation, psychedelics, contemplating the cosmos, gazing from the windows of airplanes, having deep conversations with expanding others, pondering what’s looking back while looking into the eyes of another, and generally pursuing experiences that aid in expanding, larger and larger, one’s “frame” of space, time, and Self. As far out as I am right now, on a flight home from a funeral, everything I usually take for granted (what’s real or imagined, where “I” begins and ends, how “I” got here and what’s happening) seems to have as many answers as it does “frames,” but one thing remains and rings true: what a mystery it all is. With love and stoke, Ethan
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