“The practice that I’ve developed over the last fifteen years or so, since beginning that journey as a hospice doc, is really making sure I’m trying to die every day. To die well every day prepares you for a rich death, but it also releases you into a much more vibrant way of living. To die today is to let go of all of the beliefs, regulations, rules, stigma, that you held yesterday. Can you release yourself back into the playfulness of being alive? Back into the jubilation of that rebel jumping on his bike at midnight to go ride across a dark town and ride through all the stoplights and pass all the sleeping people with a sense of exuberance and adventure while everybody else is off in some dream state. You’re the only one alive in the streets of humanity. That level of vibration — that is something I yearn for for all of us — and to get there we’ve got to die every day. And so you’ve got to let go of everything and mimic nature.”

- Zach Bush (on the Align Podcast)

Hey everyone,

I hope the new lap around the sun is off to a grand start.

A full moon, the “Snow Moon,” my mom this afternoon mentioned, graced my bicycle ride over to my favorite open-late coffee shop in Phoenix, adding even more surrealness to this strange night: the writing of the last Late Night Letter.

Since 2018 — after seventy-five consecutive months of Late Night Letter writing — I tonight put to rest perhaps the most interesting, serendipitous, and simply put, best creative endeavor of my life to date.

Late Night Letters were born of a monthly newsletter that sometimes slipped into the late hours the last night of the month. I stumbled upon a little extra something among those late, pressed-to-finish-writing-so-I-could-go-to-sleep nights. Eventually, I realized that this pressurized, sleep-deprived crucible could summon a sort of soul-stoked flow-state particularly conducive to pouring forth the most curious things I’m capable of penning. It became a common practice, my favorite ritual, and culminated in renaming the newsletter: Late Night Letters.

I’ve had many of the more beautiful, surreal, and soul-stirring moments of my life writing these letters. Moments where that late night crucible of creation aligned with the most surreal circumstances: in the dark of a closed general store just outside Yellowstone after a wild encounter with a bison on a bicycle, in a hostel off the coast of Vietnam after spur of the moment renting and riding scooters across an island on an Asian business trip, for months in parks near my parent’s place deep in flight school debt and directionless during the pandemic, on a motorcycle ride to a volcano island in Nicaragua after a month of surfing, in a beachside Mexican mansion after eating mushrooms on a mountain that breathed clouds into and out of existence, alive and kicking in my college library where ten years previous I’d be memorizing the structure of amino acids for no other purpose than to regurgitate them on a biochemistry exam, piling into a house with a dozen legends in Seattle about to throw the Festival of Yes… I could go on.

Late Night Letters have been a forcing function for me to pause, reflect, and digest — not just ingest — all the explorations, books, and experiences across these years. They’ve also been a means to distill and share that distillation with you all, my fellow living, breathing, English-speaking humans of planet Earth.

Not just connecting through words, which hundreds of us have as these letters have always been a two-way street: I get to write you and you can hit reply and write me. But also in-person: across six WONDER WANDERs, hangs on road trips, meet-ups on international travels, many readers visiting the valley of the sun have climbed mountains and watched sunsets with me, and dozens upon dozens of less labelable but particularly deep connections. More than anything else in my life, these letters have helped me find my kind of people. This alone would be worth all the sleep-deprived day-afters and spilled ink.

So — why stop?

The main reason is this: the website has been dying a long, slow death for six years. This has little to do with large language models or technological shifts, but simply that I started flight school in 2019, accidentally founded a real estate photography company during the 2020 pandemic, and the company grew into a full-time foray. My remaining creative bandwidth has largely gone into Late Night Letters, which I love for all the above reasons, but only exist as a flash in the inbox of three thousand or so people, most of whom have been around since 2019.

Through my website’s articles, I’m quite apt at writing what I feel most compelled to write about and getting it to rank in search engines — I just haven’t had the creative bandwidth. So, instead of Late Night Letters this year, I aim to reallocate that creative energy into the farther-reaching and more evergreen effort of writing an article per month.

This doesn’t mean I’ll no longer be landing in your inbox. I’d love nothing more than to stay connected and continue to do beautiful and rad things with y’all. This email list will be recycled into something new, something I’m already half-doing for myself, something collected and curated, akin to past projects like the commonplace book, Needlestack, and Favorites — but more visual and hopefully immediately impactful. After months of pondering how to artfully, heart-fully, and less labor-intensively continue to email-commune, I suspect I’ve found the way.

As Seneca long ago said and Semisonic quoted in the last lines of their smash hit Closing Time, “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

Catch you next month, in a form brand new.

With love & stoke,

Ethan

Things I Created This Month:

Zach Bush Quotes from a Sagacious Align Podcast

Perhaps three times in the past five years, I’ve heard someone speak in a way that hits me as truly profound, yet half goes over my head.

I consider this half-grasped, resonant feeling the sweet spot. A signal that what is being communicated is both something I need to hear and lies at the edge of what I can conceptually grasp. The feeling is the signal of signals: if I come to understand this, I will grow.

Read on >