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Howdy partners, I haven’t written a deliberate, heartfelt thank you for gifting your awareness to these Late Night Letters for a while and I first want to spend a paragraph expressing my utmost gratitude: Over the past six years, this letter has grown and morphed into this monthly, mystic, late night ritual; the primary way in which I sense and mark the passage of time; a crazy portal that serendipitously connects me to others around the world who are interested in the same things I’m interested in: travel, perspective, philosophy, books, communing with nature, living life with fullness and zest, the less appreciated approach, etc. I am perpetually honored, humbled, and stoked that you continue to take the time to engage with these letters and things I create and share through the internet. Your awareness and time are precious, thank you so damn much for sharing them with me. On October 13th, a dozen rad readers of this letter decided to take the leap and rendezvous at an old bed and breakfast in Arivaca, Arizona (a tiny town twelve miles north of the USA/Mexico border) for WONDER WANDER 2022. In case you haven’t heard me yap about it yet, WONDER WANDER is an annual experiment I host in community and culture, a potluck of experiences (one led by every participant) out in nature. This year’s gathering was the third attempt at this wondrous weave, and holy wow, I sense we are stumbling our way into creating a powerful, potentially life-altering, modern-day communal ritual. The ideas that seeded these gatherings were found in books: a Ben Franklin biography recounting his twelve-man Junto, philosophical gatherings of gang leaders in the book Shantaram, and word of long-ago traveling philosophical events called “chautauquas” from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I don’t know why, but something deep in me is drawn to these sorts of gatherings like a moth drawn to light. Over the summer of 2017, I started “Knights of the Round Stool” with my brother and two friends, a weekly, summer-long discussion group and attempted to host a four day “Yellowstone Chautauqua,” but failed to bring enough people together for the event. The next year, I decided to schedule the chautauqua more than six weeks out and rename it with words that actually mean something to others. WONDER WANDER 2018 was the stunning result. Soul-searching and the pandemic put a pause on the gathering until WONDER WANDER 2021, where on a whim, I required all to not just observe and participate, but to lead an experience, talk, or activity of their own. This seemed to unleash everyone’s active collaborative spirit and just took an already great thing to another level. Then, per the recommendation of one of this year’s wonderwanderers, I read Turn Your Life Into Art: Lessons in Psychomagic from the San Francisco Underground a few months before our gathering. I discovered much of the fog I was feeling my way through in setting the conditions for these collaborative experiences had already been traversed and cleared by these “life art” groups in San Francisco. They’d been building and bending culture and seemingly reality for decades through underground events and gatherings (including one you’ve probably heard of called Burning Man). My whole foray into this stuff, I’d never really been aware of anyone else doing this in the modern day. The book made concrete much of what I was intuiting and guessing at and taught me a great handful of new lessons. I honestly doubt I can convey what getting the right people together and setting the stage in this sort of way resulted in at this year’s WONDER WANDER… we created this pocket in time and space of unconditional love, depth, philosophy, connectedness to nature, utter zaniness, mindfulness training, and days on end of contentedness that I have never experienced anything like in any other format. And to be clear, this is not my doing at all. All this life-affirming stuff was made manifest by the people. The experimenting and learning I’ve been doing lies in creating conditions — improving the mulch from which the “infinite psychomagical garden” of group collaboration organically stems forth from a unique set of individuals. It is a damn beautiful thing. Interested in taking part in this crazy magic? I don’t just mean attending a WONDER WANDER gathering (that’d be cool too), I mean tapping into ritual and the co-creation of one-of-a-kind experiences with others that are less planned and observational and more organic, participatory, and spring forth in dynamic ways you might never suspect. By allowing the unknown and a degree of randomness into a gathering, the gathering takes on a life of its own — that’s what it’s all about. Our current, mechanistic, cookie-cutter approach to gathering is efficient, easily repeatable, and maximizes safety — but it isn’t nearly as interesting. When we’re observers with little effect on the experience unfolding before us and it doesn’t really matter what we do, we “clock out.” In a world of experiences in which we have no agency, it is so easy to forget that we do have agency in this world. I’d love to see and spend more time in “infinite psychomagical gardens” — the world would be a better, more interesting, and more fun place. With this letter, I hope to offer you the seed of knowledge and a new paradigm: you can cultivate and grow your own garden too. If and when you do, please invite ya brother too! With love & stoke, Ethan P.S. The WONDER WANDER 2022 video dropped today, dig it below! Special thanks to Paul Shelton for this dope audiovisual piece, The Dice Man for getting the people to “dance on the feet of chance,” and all the wonderwanderers for collectively creating an out of this world experience.
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