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Hey, I don’t mean to paint 2020 as a bad beginning to a decade, but I’ve felt an abnormal amount of people in my life and I have had a bit of a rough start. One of my favorite humans spent five months preparing for and was about to attempt to be the third human to walk 6,785 miles on the Great Western Loop, but the main sponsor of the endeavor just backed out. Yesterday, my real estate photography business partner’s drone malfunctioned and decided it was a good idea to plow straight into the garage of the house he was shooting, exploding to bits and pieces across the driveway right as the realtor pulled up. My college best friend’s car was stolen today. And my parent’s received a letter by certified mail from my Grandmother’s lawyer with the threat to sue them for years of caring for her and my Grandfather, remarkably misconstrued, while she lives in an apartment attached to our house. Living among this complicated, latter situation, I’ve had great trouble putting my mind towards writing words worth publishing the past few months. So, I thought I’d use this letter as an exploration of the darker half of a truth I’ve been swimming in recently: that life is neither all light or dark, is not all sunshine or storm, but a great entanglement of the two. I see life as an inherent opportunity, not an obligation. I would surely rather dance with life, or ride the endlessly boggling coaster, than sulk at it. But sometimes, as we all do, I lose sight of that inherent goodness. Shit happens. Moments get the best of me. When sucked under, I notice I like to fixate on whatever has brought and “holds me” down. The sliver of reality’s vast spectrum that hurts demands attention. In low moments, some part of me doesn’t want to look at anything but the sliver and gets a moral sort of satisfaction out of blaming it for my unhappiness. It’s a curious process. Luckily, I also believe in spiritual buoyancy. Like a bobber on a fishing line, I can and will be pulled down into the darkness, but as sure as physics, I know I will eventually bob back up into the light. A gift hidden in hardship is the opportunity to work on letting go of whatever painful sliver of reality bothers faster, or just accepting that it’s there and taking a look around at what else is there, and through these processes getting more spiritually buoyant. Looked at in such a way, this rough start to a decade could be seen as an opportunity for the lot of the unfortunate us to bob back even better. To include a little light with the dark: it has been simultaneously incredible and overwhelming to finally begin my education in flying airplanes this month. I flew over a friggin’ cloud last week (think about that!). I’ve felt the fear of intentional stalls and the G-forces of steep turns and emergency descents. I’ve sweated and white-knuckled my way through twenty takeoffs and landings now. Flying machines are beautiful and fascinating and intense. This is very crazy for a ground-bound ape who had a great fear of heights as a child. So yeah. Light and dark. Sunshine and storm. The day I wrote a sixteen-page defense of my family’s caretaking of my grandparents in one sitting at a coffee shop was also the morning I clutched the steering wheel with tears in my eyes as orange sun rays punctured the cityscape before me to the tune atop this letter. This is life. I’m trying to learn to reject less, let go more, to ride, and dance with it all. Shifting gears here, PLEASE COME JOIN ME WONDER WANDER 2020!!! I know we all tend to apply closer to deadlines, but I only have four applications thus far, and this is a vision worth conversion to reality. WONDER WANDER 2018 was such a memorable, different, wonder-ridden encounter, and with a little experience under my belt now, I suspect WONDER WANDER 2020 will be a genuinely special encounter. I also suspect a few of you are hesitant to apply because everyone will teach, share, or lead the dozen of us at some point during our gathering. To that, I’d like to say I have the same fear-gripping thoughts about hosting the event myself and ask you to take the leap with me. I think anyone who truly cares about what they’re doing secretly feels like a fraud and wonders when they’ll be found out. I do battle with these feelings all the time and believe they’re actually an indicator you’re supposed to do something. I make no promise that WONDER WANDER 2020 will make you richer, better with the opposite sex, or improve your life in the long term in any tangible way. You’ll probably learn some cool things, but the true aim is to spend our time so damn well that we’ll all look back on the gathering as one of the coolest things we ever set the busyness of our lives aside to take part in. Please, bring your zaniness and quirks, your hopes and fears, your hiking shoes and sense of wonder, and join me this April! The clock’s passing 3am, I’m getting loopy, and want to end with thank you. I love this late night letter writing process. I’m never quite sure what this is to others, but its become an almost spiritual practice for me. It helps me remember and leaves me ringing with life. Thank you for being a part of it. With love & stoke, Ethan
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