On Pouring Oneself into Intuitive & Heartfelt Things

I’ve poured my energy into the “House for Human Flourishing” this summer. Like, after a full workday, I give it another two or three hours every evening and half the waking hours most weekends. Except for three short trips away (a wedding plus two podcast recordings, a weekend in Park City with seven wonderwanderers, and two days in Denver to finally get to see Rüfüs Du Sol), I’ve basically been building out the place non-stop.

It’s not just that I want to ease the financial burden of the mortgage by renting two rooms. It’s not just that I want to make the place nourishing and attract rad roommates and a “lab” for experiments in how a house and its contents can support (not malign) wellbeing. It’s that I know by giving myselfover to intuitive and heartfelt things — authentic expressions of myself, so aligned with my interests that the inner-compass goes berserk — I get to continue to live a kind of “magical” life in which I feel profoundly alive, often centered, and myself.

Over the years, to find the space and time to say “yes” to the intuitive and heartfelt things, I’ve consequently had to say “no” to a whole lot of things, all so beautiful, but that were ultimately side-quests that would pull me off the path.

Tonight, I was supposed to be four days into Burning Man with my best friend, the Yesman. He’s there right now. Probably rocking a bird onesie, juggling fire, and dancing in a crow’s nest thirty feet above some pirate ship themed art car he talked his way onto with a real-life-peg-legged man at the helm and a DJ playing tech house from the bow for a big ole’ crowd of burners gettin’ down in the dust.

Damn I wanted to experience that! But as Burning Man approached, and I realized the scope of the commitment, my gut suddenly gave me a hard “no.” It would have been a dream of a side-quest, but it would have pulled me too long from the intuitive and heartfelt things, that are in their crucible cooking-and-unfurling stage, setting the culture and tone of this “house for human flourishing” for years to come.

So, that’s what I’m up to — and the wonderfully challenging dilemma of priorities and values, currently on my mind.

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PODCAST EPISODE:

Steven Pressfield and Rick Rubin on Tetragrammaton

We live in the age of the podcast. How grand it is to listen to two of your greatest living heroes engaged in conversation.

My favorite bit:

Rick: I always used the word greatness — “I’m working toward greatness.” I didn’t know what it meant. Greatness is not sales, it’s not reviews, it’s not radio airplay. It’s greatness. And what I’ve come to realize is greatness means it’s an offering to God. And if you’re making an offering to God, it’s your very best. Your offering to God doesn’t change because of airplay. It’s deeper than that. That’s a surface thing. And that’s what it’s about. In that realm, it’s always your best.

Steven: That’s like in the Bhagavad Gita. That’s really almost the essence of the whole thing, that what you do, Krishna [God in human form] says to Arjuna, give it to me. Give that to me. That’s the highest form.

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ALBUM:

Escape the Trap / Free Your Soul by Avi the Light

Avi and I met back in 2024, together tasked with doing the limbo while carrying our mutual friend Dan’s ceremonial wedding dowry of two baskets of fruit. Since then, I’ve joined a dozen spiritually explorative group video calls he’s hosted, he and his intuitive-artist wife Anna attended WONDER WANDER last year, and we’ve shared a whole lot of depth with one another. I’ve come to see him as one of the wisest, most grounded, best communicators I know.

Late, the last night of WONDER WANDER, I also discovered Avi was a “conscious rapper” (and what a conscious rapper is).

Avi recently released an album, and I gave it a play, because you know, it’s my good friend’s music — I’ll totally give it a listen. And I was like, “hmmm… sweet, I really dig the lyrics.” Then the next day, to my surprise, I felt pulled to play it again. And again. And again. And I probably played the album a dozen times through this August.

Escape the Trap / Free Your Soul reflects the arc of Avi’s life, a story symbolized in the album’s cover art. A dude long-steeped in the deep and spiritual, the combined effect of the music and lyrics, particularly in the back half of the album, is this paradoxical mix of energizing and centering to me, that’s had me hitting play over and over.

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THROWBACK:

Man Overboard

After listening to that Tetragrammaton episode above, I asked myself, “Have I ever made anything as an offering to God?” The first thing that came to mind was this poem I wrote over a way-out-there weekend in the Painted Desert.

What an angle in which to approach creation… Have you ever made anything “as an offering to God?”

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