“Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole… If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is a proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the loved person. Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who instead of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it."

- Erich Fromm

Hello everyone,

Oh what a particular moment, fresh off the loving and wondrous ride of WONDER WANDER 2024 (its extended weekend hang ending just yesterday) and one of the most contentious elections in United States history happening tomorrow.

Such juxtaposition!

I’m quite spent from six days of learning, fun, dancing, hiking, conversation, introspection, hugging, eye-gazing, stargazing, philosophy, and handling the logistics of hosting it all — immediately followed by a three-day sleepover at my place, four DJ backyard dance party, and spontaneous trip to Sedona and Flagstaff to cap it off — so I’ll keep this letter short.

On the eve of this election, I’d like to remind: we’re all in this together. Little buggers on a tiny blue-green planet circling a star in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars swirling about a supermassive black hole.

We’re all on the same team here. Yet the imagined worlds we’ve dreamed up and culturally inhabit are full of all sorts of divisions and systems and rules and ideas and when an election comes around, whomever wins will have more power to remold these imagined parts. This can cause a lot of fear. And fear can make us lose touch with ourselves and do all sorts of things we would never do with love in our hearts.

I won’t tell you who to vote for tomorrow, but I will ask you to do it with love for everyone on all imagined sides. More than the victory of any political candidate tomorrow, what we really need is a renewal of reverence for each other and the strange participatory process we’re taking part in as group-dreaming-apes here on planet Earth.

I’ve received so many political text messages this fall with phrasing like “we can’t believe what _____ did,” “what _____ said is DISGUSTING,” or “help us CRUSH _____.” This fearful, fighting language degrades democracy and is the darkest enemy of apes that dream and decide as a group.

Feeling love, finding reverence, and hearing out the opposition helps us triangulate the truth, compromise into walking the middle path, and do what group-dreaming-apes do best: cooperate.

With love & stoke,

Ethan

P.S. Deep thanks to you wonderwanderers of WONDER WANDER 2024. It was special, gorgeous, and mystic in ways that reached beyond words.

A $1 Stickable Reminder:

In This Together Bumper Sticker

The In This Together Bumper Sticker is a symbolic reminder to zoom out and encounter the vast mystery: we’re all in this together on a tiny blue-green ball covered in life floating in the infinite void of space.

Get em’ here for a buck.