Hey friends,

This week on Writing the Heart, we’re diving into Patti Smith’s Just Kids—easily one of my favorite memoirs on what it actually means to live a creative life.

It follows Patti and Robert Mapplethorpe as two young, broke artists trying to figure out who they are in 1970s New York. Sure, it’s a brilliant front-row seat to an iconic era of poets, musicians, and artists. But what really hits me every time I read it is the raw connection between them. The quiet, unshakeable way they believed in each other.

Above all, it’s about that stubborn, absolute need to create long before the world ever gave them a reason to think anyone would care.

There’s so much truth in that. You make the thing because something inside you simply has to. You keep going. Maybe people notice, maybe they don’t—but the making itself is the whole point.

In today’s video, I’m reading a passage from Just Kids and sharing a few writing prompts inspired by it. Pick the line that grabs you, set a timer, and see where it leads.

Leave a comment about how the writing is going for you this week!

Leave a comment

If you haven’t bought my memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing, yet, I hope you will.

Here’s what author Hampton Sides wrote about it:

“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”

If today’s post resonates, dropping a like or a comment means the world. And if you want full access to every piece I publish, I’d love for you to join us as a paid subscriber.

Today, we’re diving back into Glennon Doyle’s Love Warrior to talk about a specific kind of courage. It’s not the loud, mountain-conquering kind, but heart courage: the quiet, steady nerve we must muster to trust our own inner voice. In today’s reading, Glennon is sitting in church when a Sunday school teacher tells her she needs to stay with her husband despite his infidelity. She listens, but deep down, a quiet realization speaks up: No. This isn’t right for me.

And she walks away.

Internally, it’s a massive shift for her and for the momentum of the book. It’s the exact moment she begins to trust her own truth.

After the reading, I’ll share a writing prompt to help you explore that same territory in your own life. Then, we’ll shift into a brief craft talk about taking the raw pieces you’ve written this week and gently shaping them into a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end.

As you write, try borrowing a bit of Glennon’s heart courage. Let the hard stuff onto the page. The scary stuff. The things you aren’t sure you want anyone else to read. But bring the funny, beautiful, and mundane bits along for the ride, too—because it all belongs.

Forget about making it good or polished. Just tune inward, follow whatever feels alive, and see what unfolds when you give yourself permission to tell the truth.

If today’s reading or prompt speaks to you, I hope you’ll leave me message and hit the Like button. I always appreciate your support and I try to reply to every comment.

Leave a comment

If you haven’t bought my memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing, yet, I hope you will.

Here’s what author Hampton Sides wrote about it:

“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”

Dear Seekers,

Here are a few things that have been feeding my seeker soul lately.

As usual for The Seeker newsletter, the things I’m writing about don’t seem to have much to do with each other. And yet, I’ll show you that they do. These practices, books, and places help me get out of my busy, overthinking mind and tap into something much bigger, maybe something quite immense, inside myself. I call it Soul, but you can use any word that works best for you: essence, deep self, true self.

I can find “soul” in a paragraph in a book, a song, or a deep conversation where true, undefended intimacy is shared between humans. Other times I discover my soul standing on a ridge before dawn watching the sky turn orange.

This is my invitation to you with this The Seeker newsletter: to guide and inspire you to find more ways to connect with your soul.

I hope you enjoy the ride.

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Take your soul back from your lover

I recently pulled a small book off my shelf that I read years ago. For some reason, it didn’t stick with me then. I guess I wasn’t ready for its wisdom. But this time, I couldn’t put the old paperback down: Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson’s We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love.

Johnson goes straight for the jugular of one of our biggest cultural obsessions: romantic love. His basic argument is that we’ve forced romantic love to carry a spiritual weight that it can’t possibly bear. We meet someone, fall for them, and without realizing it, start dumping huge pieces of our internal world onto this

ordinary, flawed human being. Suddenly the person you’re dating or married to become the center of the universe and our cure for loneliness—and our entire source of meaning. We see something beautiful and transcendent in another human and then—boom!—they become a transcendent being in our minds.

And that is an impossible job title for any human being to live up to!

Johnson frames the book around the old legend of Tristan and Isolde. He uses their destructive obsession as a mirror for the way we Westerners view love and relationship. He isn’t saying love is foolish or passion is bad. Rather he explains that those big feelings and high expectations we have when we are wildly “in love’ actually belong to ourselves—or souls. These thoughts and feelings about that other person belong to us! He doesn’t use this language, but he suggests that instead of showering your partner with all these big feels, we turn inward and pray, play music, practice yoga, even do our daily chores like washing dishes with almost religious intent.

If you can do this, you can actually look across the table at the person sitting there as a flawed, funny, irritating, beautiful, complicated, and imperfect human being. And the opportunity for real love opens.

I don’t buy every single line in the book, and I’m definitely not ready to give up on romance. I like the spark as much as anyone. Still, I know he’s onto something here. How much does a person’s heartbreak come from asking another person to carry something that actually belongs to our own soul?

PRACTICE: Show up for sunrise

I’ve had a thing about sunrises for years, but back in December I started taking it a step further by hiking out into the foothills in the pitch black to reach a ridgetop overlook before the light breaks, where I just sit and wait. Starting a habit like that in the dead of winter changes you. In December at that early hour, there’s a distinct sort of quiet on the frozen trail. At that hour, the ground is hard,

your breath freezes, and the sky looks like an ice-covered lake. I showed up daily and let this practice work on me. I still do it nine months later. I see it as a way of anchoring myself in the physical realm and of celebrating my own belonging to this beautiful land I live on.

There’s also something wonderful and ancient about the fact that people have been sitting in the dark praying toward the rising sun for thousands of years, asking the sun to return and bless us with its light.

Now, look, I understand the science. I know the Earth is spinning on its axis and my morning walk isn’t keeping the solar system running. Though to be fair, humans have been praying for the sun to come up for a very long time and, well, so far so good!

Try it sometime. Get up early and go somewhere you can see the horizon. Wait. Don’t expect anything to happen. Just pay close attention.

Of course, staying connected to life isn’t only about sitting alone on mountaintops. Enter Otis Gibbs.

LISTEN: Otis Gibbs, keeper of music’s stories

Let’s talk about Otis Gibbs. I’ve been watching his videos on YouTube lately, and I’m hooked.

If you don’t know Gibbs, he looks like he might have walked out of an Appalachian holler with his big beard, brimmed hat, and work shirt. But somehow this crusty character ended up knowing nearly everyone who ever mattered in music. He’s a singer-songwriter himself. He plays mostly folk and

roots music. But his knowledge goes way wider than that. His head is packed with wild, insider stories on everyone from classic country legends to the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and the Grateful Dead. Plus all those obscure session players whose names escape you but whose guitar riffs you know by heart.

What I appreciate most is his total lack of polish. He’s simultaneously earnest and funny. He’s gets out of the way and lets his guests talk. This man is genuinely curious. When I watch him I feel like I’m a young man again, sitting at a bar at 2 AM with a stranger knows way more about music than seems possible for one person.

Music has always been a backdoor into my heart because a good song can get under all my analytical thinking in about three seconds. Music is never just background noise to me, and, well, the same goes for poetry, yoga, a great movie, or a hike in the mountains.

Maybe that’s part of what good art does: It puts us back in touch with a place inside ourselves that we forgot was there.

BELONG: Find your third places

I’ve also been thinking about “third places”: places that aren’t your home and aren’t your job. And yet, they’re an essential part of your daily life.

Here in Boulder, I’ve got a few: Beleza Coffeehouse, Yoga Pod, and Santo, a New Mexican restaurant where I like to sit at the bar and eat tacos. I know the baristas, bartenders, and yoga teachers, and they know me. When I walk in, they

say, hi, and we might share a joke or chat for a minute. Sometimes small talk is big!

I believe these places matter way more than we give them credit for.

Experts talk endlessly about loneliness and community. But I think we make a mistake by focusing so much on finding our “tribe’ or our “soulmate.” I mean, those things are great. But belonging is happens in other ways, too: the barista who knows your drink order, the yoga teacher who notices you missed a week, or the bartender asking how your trip went.

After a while, those places feel like an extension of home until home includes the entire city of Boulder and the foothills to the West.

Belonging. It’s a big, important topic. And it’s why I was so struck by a quote by astronaut Mae Jemison I read this afternoon in a book. Check this out!

A QUOTE: Belonging to the universe

Here’s what astronaut Mae Jemison said after returning from space:

“The really wonderful thing that happened to me when I was in space was this feeling of belonging to the entire universe.”

In another interview, she expanded on that by saying, “I felt like I had a right to be anywhere in this universe, that I belonged here as much as any speck of stardust, any comet, any planet.”

I trust that she knows about belonging to the universe. She went to friggin’ outer space.

So what holds this newsletter here? I’ve offered up a few ways we can escape what David Foster Wallace called our “little skull-shaped kingdoms.”

All of this speaks to why I call myself a seeker. I’m not searching for some final, perfect answer anymore; I’m just trying to notice the places where the distance between me and life itself thins out.

And maybe that’s what Jemison saw from orbit: We belong to this place not because we earned it or figured everything out. No, we belong to Everything simply because we’re here. We’re part of it.

If you’ve enjoyed this week’s The Seeker with BRAD WETZLER, I hope you’ll leave a comment below or hit the Like button. Better yet, consider becoming a Paid Subscriber. Your support helps me to keep creating, and, hopefully, you get something helpful and very real in return.

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If you haven’t bought my memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing, yet, I hope you will.

Here’s what author Hampton Sides wrote about it:

“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”

In today’s video, I’m sharing a reading from a stunning passage near the end of the book. Glennon has snuck away to a beach hotel, completely on her own, trying to find ground while everything around her falls apart. As she sits by the water, something shifts—and for a brief moment, the heavy walls around her separate self just fall away.

It’s a gorgeous reflection on solitude, surrender, and the strange magic that happens when we get quiet enough to feel connected to something bigger. Afterward, I’ll share a few writing prompts inspired by her piece—along with a gentle invitation to follow them wherever they lead you.

Today, we return to Jedidiah Jenkins’s beautiful memoir, To Shake the Sleeping Self. On his thirtieth birthday, Jedidiah walked away from a secure job and comfortable routine to pedal a bike all the way from Oregon to Patagonia. But the journey that matters most takes place inside Jedediah’s mind and heart. Raised in a deeply conservative Christian home, Jedidiah writes with such grace and real honesty about coming out, wrestling with inherited faith, and learning to fully become himself without turning his back on the people who raised him.

That’s what I love about him. He doesn’t pretend living with full-on authenticity is simple. Nor does he offer up quick, neat answers. He just stays open—to mystery, contradiction, love, change. He stays open to It All. He’s a warm, grounded soul who speaks candidly about how fear moves inside him and the importance of finding your courage and being radical honest with ourselves.

If you don’t follow him on Instagram yet, definitely check him out.

In today’s video, I’m reading another excerpt from the book and sharing a prompt pulled right from its pages. This one is built for a raw free write, so start in the body. Feel what’s physically there, follow whatever floats up, and let your pen move without worrying about where it goes.

To finish up, I share a quick craft talk on how physical action can totally transform your writing. One of the easiest ways to bring personal stories to life is giving yourself—the narrator—something to do. Action creates momentum, and momentum keeps the reader right there with you. If a spark catches while you write today, lean into it over the weekend and see what happens when you turn it into a story.

I’ll see you on Monday with a new book and a new prompt!

Please leave a comment if you feel so moved. I read every one of them.

Leave a comment

If you haven’t bought my memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing, yet, I hope you will.

Here’s what author Hampton Sides wrote about it:

“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”

Deep travel has a way of shaking things loose. When you step away from the who you are in your everyday life, deeper questions can rise to the surface.

This week on Writing the Heart, we’re exploring Jedidiah Jenkins’s memoir, To Shake the Sleeping Self, the story of his 2011 bicycle trip from Oregon all the way to Patagonia.

While the external journey across thousands of miles is remarkable, it’s the internal trek that makes the book special. Heading south, Jedidiah begins untangling the fundamentalist Christian upbringing he inherited and learns to embrace his identity as a gay man. Mile by mile, he explores and redefines for himself what faith, family, and home mean to him.

This is the kind of writing I love most: where the road “out there” unlocks the road to our own heart and mind.

In today’s video, I break down his story and share three passages from the book to kick-start your own writing. Pick whichever prompt speaks to you, set aside any expectations, and just follow where your pen wants to go.

You can watch the full video below. To receive these entries twice a week and support the publication, consider becoming a paid subscriber to The Seeker.

Subscribe now

In today’s Writing the Heart video, we’re circling back to the very end of Cheryl Strayed’s epic, heartfelt memoirWild.

I share a bit about what I think makes this final passage so powerful. This kind of depth can only happen when we stop trying to micromanage our words and we simply let the subconscious take the wheel.

I’m also sharing a fresh prompt inspired by the book’s final line.

My invitation for you this weekend is simple: just tell a story based on this work we did this week.

Don’t overthink it, and try not to worry about whether it’s “good” or not. Just follow whatever memories and words bubble up. See if you can drop yourself

right back into that scene, and then see where it takes you. We’ll get into the mechanics of storytelling craft down the road here on Writing the Heart. For now, just let the story rise from the depths.

The new video and prompt are right below for paid subscribers.

If you’re enjoying these Writing the Heart videos twice a week and want to support this work, I’d love for you to consider becoming a paid subscriber to The Seeker. That way, you’ll be sure to get every Writing the Heart video I create for you.

Thanks so much for being here,

Brad

Hello Seekers,

If you’ve been following The Seeker for a bit, you know I write often about living life wide open to wonder—and learning to live with the Big Questions. I also write about how we can connect with our deepest selves, and maybe with something sacred, too.

If you’re like me, you accept that you have an imperfect life. You also know that this is really the only true way to live. We make hard choices, take wrong turns, lose people, and what do we do? We just keep moving forward, trying to learn as much as we can as we go. Often, we have no idea where life will take us.

That’s why I started teaching a practice called Writing the Heart.

I’ve been running this class on Zoom and in person for a while, and honestly, it’s one of my favorite—and meaningful—things I do. Watching what happens when people actually sit down and try to write honestly about their lives has been amazing. Over the last year, one student wrote a whole 80,000-word memoir. Others have just used the class to check in with themselves, and a bunch of folks went from being curious about writing to finally calling themselves writers.

Starting today, I’m bringing a video version of Writing the Heart right here to The Seeker.

Last week, I shared a free preview so you could see how it works. Moving forward, these videos will come out twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, for paid subscribers. If you liked the preview, I’d love for you to join us.

For today’s practice, I picked a passage from the very end of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild.

If you’ve read the book, you might remember how it ends. She’s finished walking the Pacific Crest Trail, and she’s looking back at the person she was when she began the long, grueling hike: the grief over her mother’s death, the heroin habit, the sex, the self-betrayal, the end of her marriage, and all the choices she made that felt at the time like they were going to destroy her.

She arrives at a big realization, and her description of this epiphany is so moving. She stops trying to divide her life into things that should have happened and things that shouldn’t have. Standing there at the end of the trail, she sees something about herself—and maybe about life itself—that she couldn’t possibly have seen while she was right in the middle of living it: her inner dark parts, and the past decisions that felt too terrible to share with anyone, belonged to the journey, too.

None of us can.

We want a guarantee. We want to know the future. We want to know if a relationship will last. We want to know if a huge loss will break us. We want to know if we are on the right road. We want assurance that whatever is happening now will eventually make sense.

But, of course, we almost never get any of this while we’re living these hard experiences. And this: sometimes the wrong turn that we took when we were strugglig turned out to be the exact thing we needed., Maybe that wrong turn even took us where we needed to go.

In the video below, I read this passage aloud and share three prompts to get you going. No need to be a “writer.” Just grab a notebook, choose one of the cues, and see what happens.

The video and prompts are right below for paid subscribers.

Thanks for being here,

Brad

Read more

Dear Seeker,

I’m sitting at my kitchen island right now. The sun isn’t up yet, and Tommy is snoozing in his bed still. My laptop lies betweeen a hot mug of coffee and a messy little stack of books—Karen Armstrong, M. Scott Peck, William Zinsser. An old Neal Casal song plays over a speaker.

On paper, these things don’t seem to have much to do with each other. But this messy countertop embodies exactly the question I like to ponder each week in this newlsetter: How can we more deeply connect with our souls and the sacred in this jittery digital age?

Frankly, I used to worry my own spiritual life was a total mess. And to some spiritual purists out there it probably looks like that. Over the years, I’ve bounced from Christianity to Buddhism and Hinduism. At various times, I’ve devoted myself to psychology then poetry then yoga then deep nature walks and then whatever random paperback had recently caught my eye.

For a long time, I felt like there was something wrong with this approach. Did it show a lack of commitment on my part? Was I flaky?

Friends would say things like, Why don’t you stop seeking and find something, for God’s sake? Others would say,, “I took the precepts, and now I’ve arrived. Maybe you should look into this too. Don’t spend your life seeking. Find! I did.”

These days, I just smile and say, “Good for you!”

But I also find myself wondering if, in their certainty, they’re trying not to feel something. It seems obvious to me that none of us have this life thing figured out. We’re all just blindfolded and our hands are touching different parts of the same elephant. I’m holding a tusk, you are holding the tail.

For me—and maybe for you—seeking is the path. And, hey, I do find. I experience plenty of finding.

At the end of the day, I just want to continue become kinder, more awake, and less guarded. Oh, and more open to the wildness of wonder.

Here are five things that connected me with my soul this week. Maybe one of them will do the same for you.

1. If You Don’t Have One Spiritual Path, Practice Anyway — Karen Armstrong

If you ever feel spiritually homeless, Karen Armstrong offers sweet relief. She advocates that we stop stressing so much about what we believe and pay attention to what we do.

I’ve been reading her memoir, The Spiral Staircase. Toward the end, she mentions a conversation she had with scholar Hyam Maccoby at a cafe in London. He told her that, in most ancient traditions, faith was never about agreeing to twenty impossible propositions before breakfast. It was about doing practices. It was about praying, meditating, serving others, showing up for your life and for life itself. Practicing—including living with deep intention—slowly changes you from the inside out. And none of this is about becoming more godly.

As Armstrong puts it, real faith should make you more human.

I really want you to feel like you have full permission to try on different practices! Nevermind which faith they come from. Sure, some people dig one well a hundred feet deep. I respect them. Good for them.

But maybe some of us are meant to dig ten holes twenty feet deep instead. Consider this your permission slip. Besides, if you have ADHD like me, we experience depth across a wide landscape, not just straight down. It’s a gift.

Besides, who’s counting how many wells you’re digging?

What matters to me is this: Is the practice actually changing us? Are we becoming kinder, more courageous, and more present?

This feels like a much better measure of spiritual progress.

2. If Your Mind Keeps Getting Between You and Wonder — M. Scott Peck & Nick Cave

One of the trickiest parts of trying to live a soulful life is figuring out navigate faith and reason. We want to stay open to mystery without becoming ungrounded.

I picked up M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled again last week. (I read it once a year.) Most of it is about the hard, unglamorous work of growing up. He covers discipline, responsibility, and love, among other timeless topics.

But near the end, Peck takes on transcendence and spirituality.

I’ve always appreciated that he sees having a deep spiritual life as a crucial part of becoming a mature adult. Spiritualty isn’t just a phase you outgrow once you get educated. No, the reverse. Having a spiritual life is a sign of a mature mind. It’s the path to becoming fully human.

One line grabbed me this time.

“The path to holiness lies in questioning everything.”

What a motto.

He’s not saying we should doubt everything to no end. He’s asking us to stay curious and open. This universe is wilder and stranger than we can imagine.

This conversation reminds me of Nick Cave describing his own internal tug-of-war:

“The Hitchens part of me is bad for the business of songwriting.”

In one interview, Cave was talking about the tension between his strong inner pull toward God and mystery, and his “Hitchens” side. He named this part of him after the famous journalist and atheist Christopher Hitchens.

Most seekers are familiar with both of those voices.

Sometimes our work as seekers is simply to refuse to shrink the universe down into a logical soundbyte

Instead, step outside under the dark sky. Let the cold night air hit your face. Turn up the music. Let yourself be moved by unnameable things.

Question everything, sure. But stay wide open to wonder.

3. If You Want to Hear What Your Life Is Trying to Tell You — William Zinsser

You don’t need to fly to India, sit a ten-day silent retreat, or have a dramatic mystical experience to encounter your soul. Sometimes you just need to sit down at a desk with a notebook and pen and write about the life you’re living.

My writing craft book recommendation this week was William Zinsser’s Writing About Your Life. I find his main point deeply reassuring: you don’t need a wild, headline-grabbing life to write something meaningful. Just be honest with your particular life: your family, your work, your old apartment with the drafty windows, and the various bad mistakes you’ve made.

Over time I’ve come to view writing as a spiritual practice. Writing about your life pushes you to slow the hell down. My shoulders actually drop when I write honestly.

Every day, I re-discover that stories I’ve told myself for decades mean something totally different now than I thought ten or twenty years ago.

You don’t have to be writing a book to do this work. Journaling works the same way. Write about the house you grew up in or the smell of your mother’s hands. Noodle around about an old friend who’s gone now or that day you said, fuck it, and walked away from your job. Don’t worry about making it pretty; just write and notice what happens in your body.

Telling the truth about your life. Grappling wiht what you don’t understand… Now that’s seeking.

4. If You Want a Practice That Helps Your Relationships — Heidi Priebe

It’s easy to feel enlightened when you’re sitting alone on a cushion in a quiet room. Relationships are where the real work happens. They show us right where we hide and where we might hold on for dear life. They can cause a sudden tightness in your chest and send you into a panic. They can also reveal how fast our so-called “evolved” self completely vanishes when we don’t get what we want.

I’ve been spending time with Heidi Priebe’s work lately. She’s an attachment specialist with a fantastic YouTube channel where she breaks down relationships, emotional maturity, and human behavior. She brings to this work a beautiful mix of rigor and empathy.

Learning about your attachment system might sound more like psychology than spiritual work. But in the case of learning about how you move in relationships, I don’t think there’s much of a line between the two.

We can meditate and read sacred texts all day, but our relationships will tend to show us how un-enlightened we really are.

Maybe learning how to notice our patterns and hold more loosely to things we can’t control is a form of deep devotion to life.

5. If You Need Another Way Into the Sacred — Neal Casal

Music is still the fastest way I know to feel the edges of my soul. Chanting does it, but so does cranking up a great popular song in the car on the highway at sunset or picking up my guitar. Good songs are like telescopes into the heart.

I only recently stumbled onto Neal Casal, a singer-songwriter who died by suicide in 2019. I’ve had his track “All the Luck in the World” on repeat all week. Knowing how his life ended adds a layer of sadness to this tune. But it’s still gorgeous. And that voice!

I don’t know what he intended, but this particular song captures the painful moment when you realize you’ve outgrown a chunk of your life. Maybe it’s time to leave a relationship, a circle of friends, or just an old version of yourself. You know, deep down in your bones, that, if you want to become who you’re meant to become that you must burn off the dead wood.

There’s a pair of lines in the song that gets me every time: And maybe leave some people behind.

“You tried to do the best you could, but it wasn’t quite enough.

To find a way to make this real, a way to stand true.”

That’s the whole thing, isn’t it? We’re all just trying to find a way to make this real.

Listening to Casal made me realize something about my own coming month. My main spiritual goal these next weeks is simple: Play more guitar. Playing the guitar brought me so much oy when I was younger. Of course, life got busy. I want that blissful feeling of music running through my fingers again.

Maybe that’s sacred, too.

A Question for the Weekend

What’s been opening you up to your soul lately?

Maybe it’s a book, a song, or a new old practice? Maybe it’s going to therapy, grieving a hard loss, breathing the cold air on a quiet trail, or pondering a question you have absolutely no answer for.

Pay attention to it. Take a breath and feel it. You don’t need to analyze it or know where it’s taking you. Sometimes the whole spiritual life starts by just noticing what makes you come alive.

I’d love to hear what’s on your mind. Just hit reply and let me know—I read every note.

Leave a comment

Until next weekend,

Brad

Usually, on Mondays, we’ll dive into a passage from a memoir I love and pull out three lines to spark your own writing. Then on Thursdays, we’ll loop back to that same passage, zoom in on a few lines from the passage, and I’ll offer a prompt designed to take you a bit deeper.

Finally, I’ll share a quick tip if you ever want to shape your journal entries into a story. I truly believe in the magic of storytelling, and I don’t use that word lightly. A good story does something a spreadsheet or a list of facts never could: it slips the reader into a quiet trance where they get to live your experience alongside you. Done well, it gives them a mirror to see themselves, too. It really is pure magic.

I actually broke my own rule right out of the gate this week and started with a poem instead—David Whyte’s “The Well.”I just couldn’t resist. It’s a piece that means a lot to me, and it felt like the perfect place to anchor us as we begin.

I wanted to share this first week of videos with everyone for free. Starting next week, Writing the Heart will move over to paid subscribers. If these prompts resonate with you and feel like a good addition to your routine, I’d love for you to consider upgrading your subscription to hang out with me here twice a week.

On a related note, I also host a live Zoom group that shares the same name, Writing the Heart. Some folks who join are seasoned writers, but plenty of others are just curious seekers looking to explore their inner world, understand themselves better, and see what happens when pen meets paper. It’s grown into such a kind, grounded, and safe space to write and share together. If you ever want to join us live, just drop me a message—I’d be happy to share the details.

For today, grab your journal, find a quiet spot where you can settle in, and let’s see where this prompt takes you.

We don’t write to perfection. We don’t write to make it sound fancy. We write to figure out what’s going on inside ourselves. We write to connect more deeply with our hearts and souls.

Through teaching these classes, I can see how wisdom truly arises in us. It doesn’t come from thinking harder about things. The surest way to connect with your deepest wisdom is to get the pen moving.

Today I’m bringing a piece of this Writing the Heart class to Substack.

Every Monday and Thursday, paid subscribers will get a short Writing the Heart video like the one I’m offering you today:

The Reading: Most days, we’ll dive into a passage from a memoir I love, though occasionally I’ll grab a passage from a poem, essay, or sacred text.

I’ll read it out loud. I believe words land harder when you hear them.

The Prompts: I’ll give you three simple lines from the text. Think of them like doors that open toyour heart and soul.

You don't need to be a writer. You don’t need to call yourself a writer. You definitely don’t need to have published anything. All you need is a notebook, 20 minutes, and the desire to open to your deeper self.

I’m sharing today’s video with everyone so you can try it out.

While we'll mostly focus on memoir passages going forward, I wanted to launch this off with one of my all-time favorite poems: "The Well" by David Whyte. It's a piece I've come back to for years.

Make a cup of tea, find a quiet spot, hit play on the video below, and see where your pen takes you.

Dear Seeker,

I’m sitting here thinking about where you are right now as you read this. Maybe you’re holding a cup of coffee that went lukewarm twenty minutes ago. Maybe you’re still under the covers, watching the morning light creep across the ceiling. Or maybe you’re just sitting with that quiet, heavy thought that sneaks up on us—the realization that you’ve made it all the way to this exact age, and you still don’t have things nearly as figured out as you thought you would by now.

I want to tell you something: I feel that way almost every single day.

Here’s something I’ve been asking myself this week:

How can I stay as open as possible to the Mystery, to the beauty and full-on castastrophe of living in a human body?

I’m wise enough to know now that other humans don’t have the all the answers. I mean, you might glean a helpful tidbit or two from your favorite teacher or guru. But asking a fellow human for advice is a little like being a grain of sand asking another grain of sand for advice on how to be a better grain of sand. I also don’t think the big answers come from reading more books or thinking harder. . I think it comes from learning how to see and stay present with what’s really going on, both out there in the world and in here, inside our human bodies and hearts. (The mind is sometimes helpful, but it’s important to remember that the mind sometimes lies and must be taken with a grain of salt.). All this said, yes, books, films, conversations, and sacred texts, can teach us a things,, when taken in with discernement. All the time I’m reminded that the world is stranger than it first appears and that, if we’re lucky, we can spend an entire lifetime learning how to see its wild majesty a little more clearly.

Here are a few things that have been walking beside me this week.

• Learning how to pay attention with The Snow Leopard

  It’s been nearly thirty years since I first read Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. I was an editor at Outside magazine in those days, and like so many young adventure writers, I was captivated by his ability to weave together travel, natural history, Buddhism, grief, and exquisite reporting into something that transcended ordinary travel narrative. I’m listening to it now on Audible, read by Matthiessen himself near the end of his life, when he was 86. He recorded it in Boulder with audio producer Mickey Houlihan, and hearing his aging, cracking voice adds an entirely new dimension to the book. Every rasp and pause in his tone transmits decades of living.

  When I first encountered The Snow Leopard, I thought it was a story about an expedition into the Himalaya in search of one of the world’s most elusive animals. But listening to it this week, I hear a different book entirely. The title is deceiving. The snow leopard seems almost incidental. The real journey is into attention itself. Matthiessen walks through monasteries, over high passes, and across landscapes that most of us will never see. His descritptions are spare yet eloquent. But what moves me most is his clarity of seeing. He moves through with patience. He notices. He waits—and then notices. He wonders. The way Matthiessen describes this journey strikes me now as a profoundly spiritual way to travel through life. As in life, there is no certainty in this book. It implores us to remain curious even when we think we fully understand.

• When writing craft becomes spiritual advice (Storycraft)

  As someone who teaches memoir, narrative nonfiction, and travel writing, I’m constantly reading craft books, and one I return to over and over is Jack Hart’s Storycraft. I’ve recommended this book to countless students because it demystifies storytelling while also celebrating storytelling and writing’s magic. His chapters on scene construction, action, pacing, and narrative movement are among the clearest I’ve ever read.

  Lately, though, I’ve been thinking that good writing advice almost always doubles as spiritual advice. Hart reminds writers that stories live in concrete moments. Our bodies move through physical space and real time. We have difficult conversations. We face struggles in making choices in how we graapple with reality. We don’t experience life as concepts. We live it. Life arrives as mornings, roads, meals, heartbreaks, hubs, airports, deserts, rivers, and mountains. If we want to tell the truth about our lives on the page, we have to begin with action and physical reality.

• Putting ourselves in motion—on the page and in life

  In keeping with the lessons of Storycraft, I tell my writing students that readers want to accompany you—they don’t only want to know what you thought or felt, they want to walk beside you. Let them see you crossing the border, climbing the trail, sitting in the café, standing beside a hospital bed, driving across Kansas, wandering through Jerusalem, or watching waves roll into a beach. Yes, readers love reflections and insights. But we need lived experience.

  I’ve come to believe that this is just as true beyond the page. We spend so much time looking for transcendent experiences that we forget the sacred usually meets us in the ordinary world, but only we are paying close attention. We don’t discover who we are while sitting still trying think our way out of a paper bag. We discover ourselves by living, doing, mucking it up and letting the chips fall where they may. We find ourselves by traveling, by making mistakes, by falling in love, by grieving, by apologizing, and by beginning again. In some ways, the outer journey is the inner journey. And, maybe, the vice versa is true.

• Catching the spark in No Direction Home

  That kind of immersion into life itself is what keeps bringing me back to Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched it. Sure, I can watch and listen to Dylan any day of the week—I’m a lifelong fan. But I also return to this documentary because it asks questions that get more urgent as I age. What does it mean to devote yourself completely to a calling? What happens when someone gives themselves over to a creative life with an intensity that’s almost frightenting?

  There’s a clip I replay over and over. Sometimes, in the morning, while I’m drinking coffee or shaving, I put the movie on just to watch this particular three- or four-minute clip. Legendary record producer Bob Johnston reflects on those electric sessions in the mid-1960s. He’s in awe of Dylan’s otherworldly intensity and creative drive, Johnston once remarked: “I don’t think Dylan has a lot to do with it [his music]. I think God, instead of touching him on the shoulder, he kicked him in the ass.” Then, a few minutes later he revisits the idea that Dylan is divinely inspired: “He can’t help what he’s doing. I mean, he’s got the Holy Spirit about him. You can look at him and tell that.”

  Johnson’s wild laugh when he says these words gives me goosebumps. Why? Because I believe we all “got the Holy Spirit” about us when we create, if only we allow it to move through us. I think the work of seeking is less about is more about listening carefully to the holy spirit moving through us. We must learn to feel—really feel—that God, Universe, the Mystery is kicking us in the ass all the damn time.

• Seeing with larger eyes through the Bhagavad Gita

  I read from the Bhagavad Gita almost every day. I’ve been doing this for a decade. Most of the time, I play Sanskrit chanting of the Gita in the background to deepen my mood and attention, even though I don’t read or understand Sanskit. This week I found myself returning to Chapter 11, one of the most extraordinary passages in the book—and all of literature. Arjuna asks Krishna to reveal his true form, his Big Form. Krishna gives him what the text calls “divine sight.” Suddenly, Arjuna can see the whole of reality at once: galaxies, gods, birth, death, destruction, and creation, all unfolding simultaneously within the infinite body of the Divine.

  It’s an overwhelming experience for Arujuna. Hell, it’s overwhelming to read and feel. This week, when I listned to it, I didn’t think about the cosmic spectacle of the chapter, but the opposite. I was reminded of how small our ordinary way of seeing really is. We spend so much of our energy worrying about outcomes, trying to control the future, believing that everything depends entirely upon our little, fragile efforts. Then a text like the Gita kicks us in the ass and reminds us that we belong to something unimaginably vast. We always have. Seeking, at least for me, isn’t about escaping this world or collecting spiritual experiences like trophies. It’s about learning to see this vastness of the world with more patient eyes, When I tap into this way of seeing, my trust in myself and the universe grows. This chapter never ceases to fill me with humility, wonder, and devotion.

That’s all for this weekend. If something I said resonates with you, please let me know in the comments section.

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“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”

I left out “coming home.”

Over the years, I’ve noticed that the trip lasts much longer than the trip. It’s not over when the plane lands. A place is still with me as I unpack my bag and throw my t-shirts in the washer. It’s still with me when I take my dog Tommy

out for a walk and pick out salad fixings at the grocery store. As I pay for the groceries, some little memory slips back into my head.

Does this happen for you?

I’ll be standing in line at Lucky’s, holding a bag of peaches, and suddenly I’m back in a market in Palestine where buying vegetables took thirty minutes because everyone had to ask about each other’s mothers.

Or I’ll find myself sitting at the kitchen table long after I’ve finished eating, staring out the window, remembering families in Italy eating and talking and gesturing like time didn’t exist. Sometimes it’s a smell that brings a place alive. Sometimes a face at the market. Sometimes it’s something that feels much bigger and stranger—a feeling in my body, disorienting and dizzying, that reminds me how big and wild and mysterious this world really is.

You can’t hold onto these moments. Grasping for them makes them go away.

They arrive, move around, fade, and then arrive again hours or days later in a slightly different way.

Maybe that’s why I’ve never cared about counting countries or collecting passport stamps.

The places are already inside me.

These little moments—the word “flashback” doesn’t do them justice—change how you see things.

That’s really why I teach memoir and travel writing.

Of course, we’ll do the practical work—scenes, dialogue, structure, how to build a paragraph so it doesn’t fall flat. I genuinely love that stuff. But what I really want to do is sit with those strange, quiet details long enough to figure out why they won’t leave you alone. Why the eyes of an old woman selling herbs on a street corner in Russia still haunt me. Why a boy with his sleeves rolled up like a tough guy in a movie, who asked for ten shekels to take me to his roof, stays with me longer than the actual view of the Temple Mount.

Those are the stories I care about. They’re the ones I love reading, and the ones I still carry around.

If that way of moving through the world—and writing about it—speaks to you, I’d love for you to join me this fall for Travel Writing with Heart.

Sign Up for Travel Writing with Heart

“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”

Sign Up for Travel Writing with Heart

At twenty-two, I moved from Kansas to Colorado to work as a ski lift operator and figure out the next steps of my life. But after only three weeks, I blew out my right knee skiing. Overnight, I found myself back in Kansas, where I grew up, a place I ached to leave behind. There, I lay on my back with my leg in a brace.

You know what? All of this was a blessing in disguise.

I spent the next year rehabbing my knee and reading magazines. I devoured GQ, Esquire, National Geographic, and Outside. I became fixated on the writers. They seemed to be living a dream. They traveled the world, interviewing interesting people. They wrote about places most of us would never lay eyes on. They were living the exact life I wanted.

My knee hurt and rehab was tedious. But I’d discovered my path and my future. And nothing was going to stop me.

Soon, I couldn’t stop thinking about traveling and writing.

I wanted to see how other people lived, sure, but I was also trying to escape a restless feeling I had about American life. The strip malls, the bulldozing of older

buildings in favor of cheap, cookie-cutter developments, a culture obsessed with material things. Perhaps I’m a snob, but I didn’t feel fully at home here the States.

I ached to experience something real, both out there in the world and inside myself. I wanted to feel the truth of this world.

In the early nineties, starting out, I lived on instant coffee and pure adrenaline. My first apartment was a cramped walk-up in Chicago: a futon, a boxy Mac computer, and a stack of magazines that I was pitching ideas to and desperately trying to break into.

I wanted to become a magazine writer and someday write books, too. I landed a job as a junior editor at Outside. I moved to Santa Fe. Newly married, we rented a small adobe house at the edge of the high desert. Within a few years of publishing my first short essay, I was reporting for The New York Times, GQ, Wired, Travel + Leisure, and Outside. I would spend months on the road reporting, then come home and sit on my back patio and write, inspired by New Mexico’s sharp light, summer rainstorms, and the small of pinon pine.

I didn’t have much money, but I was a storyteller. That was my practice and my way of life.

And a long time, before the PTSD and addiction tracked me down and forced me to pay attention to healing, I had a life that felt completely alive.

Back then, I didn’t use the word craft. I didn’t know what that word meant. But I devoured the work of great writers and paid attention to what they were doing. I leaned into what I saw working in their writing. I trusted what sounded right in my ear. I wrote about what moved my heart.

I did have a few skills that served me well: I knew how to sit for hours in cafes and restaurants with strangers and listen. I paid attention to the small things: the traditions. I noticed the rituals of drinking coffee and speaking to strangers. I paid attention to how they fought, and how they patched things up after.

I loved my work and life.

I was thirty and hungry.

I was half terrified and half thrilled.

But when I was on the road, I felt alive.

I remember the mornings on the Amazon when the wet air hung thick, my sinuses filled up with rain-soaked jungle and the smell of gasoline from all the boats on the river. The river itself reeked of mother earth. One morning, while sipping coffee, a pink dolphin surprised me and surfaced right beside our boat. It let out an exhale through its blowhole that sounded almost human.

When the morning fog lifted, the river had become a city: grocery stores anchored on houseboats, kids selling beer out of canoes, women waving from brothels painted sea green. I was supposed to be writing about a pack of adventuresome fishermen, but I found myself caring more about how alive the river and people seemed to be—and how alive all of this made me feel.

Trips like this one became my real education. I learned to pay attention to the way life smelled, tasted, sounded, and moved. I tended to write from the body and the heart. I filled notebooks with scrawls I could barely read—but when I did, I was amazed at what I’d experienced out there in the world and inside my own body and heart. I argued with editors who wanted just the facts, ma’am.

I chased stories and this feeling across the world. In 2012, I drove through the Valley of Fire in Palestine. The red rock radiated the sun’s heat, and the desert glowed like a furnace. I camped on a beach in Greenland where icebergs cracked through the night sounding like shotguns. I remember that after days, the salty air chafed my throat. I shared sausages and beer with dilettante tramps in the Czech Republic who, weirdly, sang folk songs and celebrated Depression-era America.

The assignment that changed me most came in 2012, when I pitched a question to Newsweek: Can you be a tourist in Palestine? I’d visited the West Bank once before for a story on the Jesus Trail and was struck by the culture and the people, a reality contradicting almost everything I’d seen in American news. So I spent five weeks traveling through Nablus, Hebron, Bethlehem, Jericho, Jenin, the Dheisheh Refugee Camp, and East Jerusalem. I stood in the Jordan River, drove back through the Valley of Fire, and drank coffee in people’s living rooms.

One evening during Ramadan, I sat on the roof of a family’s house outside Jerusalem. As the sun sank and the city lights lit up the horizon, I sat contemplating the call to prayer that was drifting across the desert from mosque to mosque. Kids ran through the streets while neighbors carried platters of food house to house. For a moment, the conflict faded. What remained was an ancient rhythm of family and community playing out as it had for thousands of years.

A few days later, after driving across the desert heat, I arrived in Bethlehem and stepped into the shade of the separation wall. The concrete snaked across the countryside, splitting communities, cutting through ancient olive groves, separating neighbors. Standing in its shadow, feeling the cool air on my skin, I read the graffiti left by visitors. One painted line stopped me:

Now that you have seen, you are responsible.

I stood there for a long time.

During those weeks, I met Israelis who carried generations of trauma. I met Palestinians carrying their traumas. Their lives were continually disrupted by armed checkpoints and night raids.

The longer I stayed in Palestine, the less interested I became in taking sides, and the more interested I became in witnessing people and writing about what’s happening behind the news headlines.

I learned that wandering and living on the road required its own version of faith.

All the while, I thought I was chasing stories.

But really, looking back from my office in Boulder, Colorado today, I was chasing something else: the feeling of being fully alive and awake to the world.

Here’s a vulnerable thing to share: Back then, as a writer, I didn’t really understand what I was doing. I had some raw alent and instinct, but I was ignorant of how stories really worked and why readers read.

And then I began to study books about the craft of personal narrative writing. I landed a teaching job, and I devoured books by great writers and editors. I learned what was going on underneath the stories. I learned the craft of writing, and how to teach it.

Now, after fifteen years of teaching memoir and narrative nonfiction, I know all the things—structure, pacing, point of view, and dialogue—as well as any MFA instructor. But that isn’t what I lead with. I lead with storytelling and voice. These two things are the essence of great travel writing. Oh, and heart. I lead with heart.

I’ve learned that deep travel isn’t a vacation. Deep travel requires paying deep attention. It asks us to have immense respect and curiosity for other people. It requires seeing the sacred in other people. It means challenging your own assumptions. A travel writer with heart knows that news clips and headlines are often an illusion. Deep, heart-felt travel writing gets beneath that illusion and strips away the political bullshit to show that history happens to real human beings.

Travel has given me a career, but its greatest gift has been something else. It taught me how to pay attention to life. It taught me how to show up in a place with curiosity instead of certainty, and how to listen more than I speak. I learned to focus on the small, unscripted moments: a conversation over tea or a child kicking a soccer ball through an alleyway. The smell of woodsmoke from cooking fires at dusk and and the silence that occurs after someone shares the hardest story of their life. These moments say more than the famous landmarks and monuments ever could.

That’s the spirit behind Travel Writing with Heart. Over four weeks, we won’t just learn how to write better travel stories; we’ll practice becoming better travelers: more attentive, more curious, and more open to being changed by the places and people we encounter.

Sign Up for Travel Writing with Heart

Together, we’ll explore how to:

• See the world with a travel writer’s eyes: I’ll teach you how to observe closely so that you can turn what seem like ordinary moments into powerful and memorable scenes.

• Find the story beneath the story: We will discuss how to notice and write about the patterns and relationships happening beneath the surface that most travel writers miss.

• Write about people, not just places: I’ll show you how to interview and write about strangers with humility. How to earn trust, real trust. How to write stories that honor the complexity and dignity of the complicated lives of the people you meet.

• Bring readers into the scene: I’ll teach you how to write better dialogue, pay attention to a story’s texture and pacing, include rich sensory detail, and create narrative tension so readers feel like they are there in the room with you.

• Capture the soul of a place: Write about the atmosphere, history, culture, and the subtle details that comprise a place and a culture.

• Approach cultures with humility: We will examine the ethics of reporting on the road. I’ll teach you how to drop the usual tourist clichés and avoid the assumptions that strip a writer of trust.

• Balance the outer and inner journey: Learn to write about your own experience without slipping into self-indulgence. Learn how to add your intimate thoughts and feelings, but only in service to the story you’re telling.

• Trust your own voice: Stop trying to sound like another travel writer and learn to rely on your unique way of seeing and writing about the world.

• Workshop in community: Receive honest, constructive feedback in a supportive group of fellow writers who care about the craft.

• Finish with a polished essay: Walk away with a refined piece of writing, and, my wish is that you learn about more than writing. My wish is that we all become sharper, slower, more attentive way of moving through the world.

• Sign Up for Travel Writing with Heart

I hope you’ll join me for Travel Writing with Heart. Oh, and leave a comment. I try to respond to them all! —Brad

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“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”

I’m Brad Wetzler. For more than thirty years, I’ve worked as an adventure journalist, travel writer, and editor for publications including Outside, The New York Times, Newsweek, GQ, National Geographic Adventure, and Wired. Along the way, I’ve filed longform stories from some of the world’s most remote places. I’ve camped at the edge of the Greenland Ice Cap. I’ve broken bread—or, more accurately, cooked manioc—with Indigenous people deep in the Amazon rainforest, more than a thousand miles upriver. I’ve road-tripped across Palestine. I’ve followed thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail. I’ve interviewed explorers and adventurers. And I’ve traveled to India five times in search of something deeper.

But eventually, I began to see an elemental truth in what I was doing. The external journey is only half the story.

We all have outer journeys and inner journeys. The outer journey is our physical body moving through space and time. The inner journey is the journey toward our own soul. This newsletter is about both, because they are separate but inseparable. Without one, you’re only getting half the story.

What You’ll Find Here

The Seeker with Brad Wetzler is where adventure meets the soul. Every week, I publish short, embodied dispatches (500–800 words) that weave together more than thirty years of travel to the world’s wild edges with the question that matters most: How do we live a deep, meaningful life?

Here’s what you’ll find:

The Outer Journey: Riveting, deeply personal stories from my life as an adventure writer, along with recent dispatches from India, Central America, and the American West and Southwest. From celebrating Ramadan on a rooftop in Palestine to mind-bending encounters in the Colorado high country, these are stories about the places that have changed me.

The Inner Journey: Reflections on navigating fear, surrendering control, discovering the faith that already lives within us, and perhaps the greatest work of all: transforming life’s disappointments into grace.

The Storyteller’s Craft: Practical insights into writing memoir, honoring your lived experience, and telling true stories that come from the heart.

Where to Start

If you’re new here, these essays are a good place to begin:

• A Dove Struck My Windshield, Left a Ghost, and Invited Me to Live in Wonder: A field note about paying attention to what life may be trying to tell us.

• I’ve Written and Edited Stories for 30 Years. Most People Get This Wrong About Storytelling: Reflections on craft, memory, and why your story matters.

• The World Is Wilder Than You Can Imagine: An encounter with wonder—and a reminder that reality is stranger and more mysterious than we often allow ourselves to believe.

• Join Me for Travel Writing with Heart: An invitation to learn how to write about your own adventures with greater depth, honesty, and heart.

Join the Journey

This newsletter is a conversation. I value wholehearted, honest, human writing over algorithmic optimization or AI slop. I read every comment and do my best to respond to each one.

I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below and tell me about a place that changed the course of your life. It might be somewhere on the other side of the world—or somewhere deep within yourself.

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Have a seat, take a breath, and let the seeking begin.

with gratitiude, Brad

“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”

I was lying in savasana in a noon-hour yoga class when a cover of the U2 song “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” began playing. As odd as it might seem, I was instantly transported in my mind and body back to 1987 and the Irish Sea, where I woke up on a bench in a ferryboat’s pub after a beer-y evening and a full night of choppy seas and gut-wrenching sea-sickness.

My watch said 5:30 am, and so I stood up, pushed open the pub’s door, and climbed the stairs the deck. I inhaled deeply, feeling the damp, salty air fill my lungs. What a relief after 6 hours in a smoky pub.

I stood at the railing and watched Dublin approach. I was on the road. I even had a copy of On the Road in my backpack. It was that sort of trip.

To the far left, my eye caught a hill south of Dublin.

The hill wasn’t the interesting thing. But the large cross atop the hill had caught my attention. I immediately had to touch the cross.

A little background: At the time, I was a 21-year-old philosophy student at Kings College in London on fall break from my studies. The previous evening, I’d been sitting in a pub near Russel Square, where I lived, eating fish and chips from a newspaper wrapper, when I had the impulsive idea to grab my guitar and head to Ireland for the week. After paying my bill, I stood at the pay phone and tried calling my friends Catrina and Rich to see if they wanted to join me on a little adventure.

No answer.

So, back in my dorm room, I grabbed my guitar and hopped a train to Holyhead, Wales, where I then caught an overnight ferry bound for Dublin.

At the time, I was a decent acoustic guitar player and a middling singer with a very limited range. My vague plan: bop around the island republic, busk at train stations, and perhaps get comped a few Guinnesses by playing James Taylor and Neal Young songs in pubs.

But now that the sun was rising over the Irish Sea, my focus wasn’t on singing songs but on this cross that grabbed my attention. I had to press my hand into it, I thought.

As soon as the ferry docked in Dublin, I taxied to a hostel and dumped my guitar and bags. Then I took the train the far south end of the city and the base of this cross-bearing hill.

It was raining hard. Nevertheless, I trudged up the hill getting more soaked by the minute. At the rounded summit, I stood there, catching my breath, looking north toward this new strange city that I knew very little about.

Then, I did it. I pressed my hand into the stone cross, a small ritual I didn’t fully understand but one that felt necessary.

I don’t why I did this. Knowing who I grew up to be, yeah, I get it. Of course, that’s what I did. It makes perfect sense to hike up a hill in the rain and press my hand into a stone cross. And, if you’ve read this newsletter,, it probably makes sense to you, too.

I’m obsessed with life’s mysteries, synchronicities, and big questions.

This is just the sort of thing I did then—and still do.

I ended up having a rousing time in Ireland. I met a woman my age named Roisin and we hitchhiked to Galway. I played songs in pubs, and one night, I filled my belly with pub food and made a few Irish pounds by belting out “Me and Bobby McGee” as the pub-goers sang along. It’s a beautiful memory, and it remains the only time I remember making a dime from playing the guitar.

Reflecting back on this time, I can see that I’ve always had the DNA of a seeker, and more specidically, of a travel writer. Within a few years of that trip to Ireland, I landed a job as an editor at Outside magazine.I worked my way up the masthead there, and then I left to work as a freelance travel and adventure writer. I spent decades filing stories from far-off and exotic locales for the big magazines, including The New York Times, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, where I was a senior editor and contributing editor.

I know this area code of travel and adventure writing as well as anybody alive.

And now, for the first time in a long time, I’m offering a course on how to write a memorable travel essay and/or memoir. The class is called Travel Writing with Heart: The Art of the Travel Essay and Memoir.

I’ve provided the details below. Reach out in the comments section if you have any questions. You can also sign up here, and at the link at the bottom of the page.

Sign up for Travel Writing with Heart

Here are all the details:

Travel Writing with Heart: The Art of the Travel Essay and Memoir

A Four-Week Live Online Workshop with Brad Wetzler

Write powerful stories about the adventures of your life

So back home unpacking your suitcase after an adventure that you know changed you.

Your notebooks are crammed full of your observations, thoughts, and feelings scribbled down in cafes and on trains.

Your phone is loaded with photos.

But now what?

You’d love to tell the story in a way that takes readers on the journey with you. You want them to experience the outer journey—the natural beauty and the cultural sites too—but you also want them to experience your inner journey, too. What you experienced inside. Why this trip mattered so much to you. And what insights and lessons your adventure taught you that might help them understand their own travels and journeys through life.

The tricky part is turning your experiences into writing worth reading.

How do you write something more engaging than merely a travel diary, that often dull, blow-by-blow rendering of what you did and saw? How do you bring the places and people alive so that the reader sees them through your eyes?

This is the work we’re taking on here.

During four weeks of lectures, discussions, assignments, and workshopping, you will create a vivid travel essay that accomplishes all of this. Each week, you and your fellow travelers will tackle writing assignments, read your portions of your stories out loud in class, and received expert editorial feedback.

Once week feeds into the next.

When we’re done, you’ll have a completed travel essay plus a clear grasp on how to write future essays that include a strong narrator, rounded characters, sizzling dialogue, and deep reflections about what your travels mean to you and perhaps others.

This class won’t consist of me talking at you the entire time.

Whether your travels have taken you to the high trails of Patagonia, the back roads of Kansas, walking the Camino de Santiago, a stint living abroad, the hiking trails in your backyard that you know by heart, or a weekend trip back to the town where you grew up, you’ll learn the same principles and techniques that the best travel writers use to bring place and people alive.

Why Learn From Me?

I got my start in 1990 as an editor at Outside magazine. Working there gave me the opportunity to learn from (and eventually edit) some of America’s finest travel and adventure writers. These writers helped shape how I understand traveling and telling stories about travel. Editing taught me the fundamentals of travel writing. I shepherded rough drafts through the process of becoming a published travel essay. I learned how to guide writers to construct tight, powerful ledes, write vivid scenes, craft scintillating dialogue, trim what didn’t belong, and find the bigger truths hidden in a story. That kind of training and experience? You can’t learn this in school.

Next, I left the editorial desk to become a freelance travel and adventure writer myself. I wrote about through-hikers on the Appalachian Trail. I stood next to the Greenland Ice Cap, covering the future of adventure and exploration. For the next thirty years, I took on one major travel assignment after another. India, Indonesia, Israel and Palestine, the Amazon, the Arctic, Russia, the Mexican Sierra Madre, Scandinavia, the Caribbean, and all across the American West. My writing appeared in Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Travel + Leisure, The New York Times, Men’s Journal, Newsweek, Wired, GQ, Yoga Journal, and plenty of other outlets.

At some point along the way, I figured out some essential truths about travel writing. The best travel essays don’t are built around characters you can’t forget, scenes that a reader can feel themselves inside, storytelling that feels genuine, dialogue that resonates in your body as true, close observations of places and people, and a writer who’s in full control of the narrative, even if, at times, the adventures got a little out of control. These are the tools we’re going to work on.

What You’ll Learn:
During the workshop, we’ll dig into how to:

•locate the real story hidden inside your travels
•unleash a vivid sense of place
•construct scenes readers can see and hear and feel
•write dialogue people believe
•shape characters that readers can’t forget
•build a narrator that readers trust and believe
•collect and arrange your field notes
•interview strangers and get them to open up to you
•fold history and research smoothly into your story
•uncover the deeper meaning below the surface events
•organize and revise an essay with confidence, and
•get your work ready for publication.

I’ll also pass along many of the hands-on storytelling approaches I’ve built up during thirty-five years as a writer and editor.

How the Workshop Works
This operates as a workshop in the real sense. Each week, I’ll offer a craft lesson and hand out new reading assignments. Between sessions, you’ll write and refine your essay. When we gather again, you’ll bring what you’ve written, read sections aloud, and get expert editorial responses from me and the group. You’ll learn from your own hard work, from hearing other writers’s stories, and from the conversations we have in class.

When the course wraps, you’ll have completed a travel essay. Not merely begun one.

Enrollment caps at twenty writers so everyone gets the chance to share their work and receive real feedback.

Weekly Schedule

Week One: Finding the Story
Every journey holds multiple possible stories. We’ll pinpoint the one that most deserves your telling. We’ll talk about how to begin a great story; how to write with curiosity and conflict. We’ll discuss locating the main question pushing your essay forward. Your assignment: write the opening of your essay.

Week Two: Bringing a Place to Life
Our attention turns to scene, dialogue, character, sensory detail, observation, interviewing, and building a strong sense of place. We’ll also start reading student work aloud and talking through revisions. Your assignment: expand your essay through scenes and characters.

Week Three: Discovering What the Journey Was Really About
We’ll discuss voice, theme, structure, and how the outer journey through the world connects to your inner journey. Plenty of writers realize during revision that the essay taking shape isn’t really about the destination or the passport stamps. It’s about something much deeper. We’ll keep reading great travel writing and discussing student work. Your assignment: complete a full draft.

Week Four: Making Art from Experience
Our last class focuses on revision. We’ll address pacing, structure, beginnings, endings, transitions, story compression, and how to make good editorial choices that turn a competent story into literature. We’ll also use the final minutes of the evening to discuss publishing. I’ll walk through what I’ve learned about crafting effective query letters, pitching editors, locating markets for travel essays, deciding whether a piece fits a magazine, literary journal, Substack, or memoir, and how to live and sustain the writing life after the workshop ends.

Schedule

Mondays: September 14, 21, 28, and October 5
6:00-8:00 p.m. Mountain Time

Tuition

Standard Workshop: $495

Includes four live online workshops, weekly writing assignments, expert editorial feedback, opportunities to read your work aloud, publishing discussion, additional resources, and a completed travel essay.

Premium Workshop: $1,095
This package includes everything in the Standard Workshop, plus four private 45-minute editorial conferences with Brad (one each week), personalized guidance on structure, voice, scene, revision, and theme, and individual publishing and pitching advice. Enrollment for the Premium option caps at six writers.

Who This Workshop Is For
This workshop is for anyone wanting to write more deeply about place and travel. You don’t need stamps from six continents. Some of the best travel essays ever written happen a few miles from home. This class is also a great fit memoirists, essayists, journalists, travelers, adventurers, and anyone who has been itching to finally tell the story of that journey that changed your life.

About Brad Wetzler
Brad Wetzler is the author of Into the Soul of the World and has spent more than thirty years writing and editing stories about travel, adventure, memoir, and the search for meaning. A former senior editor who spent 19 years on the masthead as a contributing editor at Outside magazine, his work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic Adventure, Travel + Leisure, Newsweek, Wired, GQ, Men’s Journal, Yoga Journal, George, and many other publications.

Today, Brad works as a memoirist and essayist, memoir writing coach, developmental editor, and teacher. His workshops blend the rigor of literary journalism with the emotional depth of memoir. He helps writers uncover the stories hidden inside their journeys, he teaches the craft to tell these stories well.

Join Us
Ever journey gives us story that lives inside us. And if you’ve been wanting to write yours, I’d love to help you bring it to life.

Travel Writing with Heart

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“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”

I’ve always believed stories have lives of their own. They wander for a while, and then one day they find someone who’s ready to receive them. I’m glad this one found you.

Today I’m republishing one of my favorite essays because it has become the first story episode of my new podcast, The Seeker.

For most of my life, I’ve been drawn to questions that don’t have easy answers. As a journalist, those questions carried me around the world. As a spiritual seeker, they led me to monasteries, sacred sites, and long stretches of wilderness in search of God and, if I’m honest, myself. Then I discovered memoir writing, which asks us to stop looking outward for a while and turn inward.

That’s what The Seeker is about: true stories about the search for a meaningful life.

If you enjoy what you find here, I’d love for you to click the ❤️, leave a comment, or share these stories with someone who might appreciate them. This newsletter will always be free, but if you’d like to support my writing, podcast, and the community we’re building together, I’d be honored if you became a paid subscriber. Your support helps make this work possible.

Now, here’s the story.

Warmly,

Brad

Last winter, as I drove through the mountains from Santa Fe toward Boulder, a white dove hit my windshield. This happened before dawn. The two-lane highway was empty, and the world was tinted cobalt blue. A cold fog drifted along the road’s shoulders, and frost feathered the glass. To the east, a thin line of orange light hovered over the peaks. I sipped from a paper cup of gas-station coffee, feeling calm, breathing easily, and keeping an eye out for deer. A few miles north of Poncha Springs, a yellow sign appeared in my headlights. WATCH FOR WILDLIFE. I pressed the brake. I knew this area of central Colorado well, and this sign was accurate. I turned off the radio and scanned the edges of the pavement. The road shimmered with ice. How many times had I driven through here and, just as I was upon them, spotted a doe and a couple of fawns standing on the shoulder, eyes reflecting my headlights? I was thinking about the writing classes I teach, the weekend ahead, and the quiet that awaited me at home in Boulder.

Then, without warning, a white blur crossed my headlights from the right. There was no time to react. I felt the impact, and then silence. My chest tightened. I gripped the wheel harder. You know this thud, and the realization that you’ve hit something. No, that you’ve killed something.

I kept driving, stunned, expecting something to follow. I looked for signs of death: a feather caught on the wiper or a smear of blood, or perhaps there’d be a sign that what I’d hit was something more inert, like a branch—but there was nothing.

A dove, I thought.

Nothing remained but the dark road rising and falling through the mountains. All I heard was the hum of the engine. All I felt was that sick feeling when beauty collides with violence.

For the next thirty miles, I drove in a kind of trance. I kept picturing how the dove had come out of nowhere. How alive and quick it had been. And how final this moment seemed. I kept replaying those two seconds. When I finally relaxed my hands, I felt an ache in my fingers. Part of me wanted to turn the car around and search for it. And that feels silly to admit. I have friends I love and respect who hunt and eat doves for sport. A bigger part of me already knew there was nothing to be done.

The highway kept carrying me north, but my mind stayed behind back in Poncha Springs. I felt haunted that somewhere on that dark stretch of road, something beautiful had intersected my life and then disappeared. As I drove toward the orange eastern sky, the world felt charged. And I felt more alive.

When I finally stopped for gas in Fairplay, the sun was spilling over the ridgeline. I stepped out into the cold and surveyed my cracked windshield. There it was: the dusty imprint. Across the glass was the faint, perfect outline of a dove: wings open and head lifted, as if still in flight. There wasn’t blood, only a soft, dusty white powder. The image looked ghostly, like the negative of an old photograph. At the center was a small crack in the glass where its body had struck. I stood there a long time, staring at the white dove-shaped image. I felt guilt. I was awestruck.

It wasn’t lost on me that doves symbolize the Holy Spirit. When John the Baptist baptized Jesus, a dove descended onto Jesus’s head. My mind spun. What would an analyst say about a dream about hitting a dove at dawn? What would a shaman or Christian mystic say? I’ve long had a thing for doves. I don’t go around talking about spirit animals, but if I had one, it would be the dove. Sometimes, on morning walks, I find myself surrounded by doves. Once, I told a girlfriend about this, and she laughed. Brad, doves are all around. When they appear, they mean something to me.

Standing over the cracked windshield, I thought about leaving the white dove-shaped film where it was, perhaps out of respect. But then I reached for the squeegee. I pressed hard, dragging the rubber across the glass. The dove outline smeared but didn’t disappear. I tried harder. I leaned into the strokes as the cold air bit my hands. Still, the wings, body, and head remained: ghostly, stubborn, and translucent. Even now, nine months later, if the light hits just right, you can still see the faint trace of its body on the glass.

I climbed back into my Kia Soul and pointed it north again. I kept thinking about how something so soft could arrive with such force. I’d been living lately with more focus and more boundaries. Good things, but maybe there was a message here: stay soft.

Why a dove? Why not a hawk or a raven or an owl? Why leave its image but no flesh or blood? Why this particular morning, on this particular drive? I suppose these experiences ask us to hold them long enough to work on us. Then maybe they can change us.

I saw the dove as one of those moments when the veil thins, and the unseen pushes its way into the visible world.

I’ve had experiences like this for as long as I can remember. As a teenager, I fell in love with the story of Jesus. Not because I imagined myself to be some kind of messiah, but because I recognized something deeply human in him. I was drawn to his longing for truth, his willingness to speak truth to power, and his refusal to live a half-hearted life. Even more than that, I felt a strange mystical kinship with him, as though I wasn’t simply reading about someone else’s story but somehow participating in it. It felt possible that Christ’s journey wasn’t only about one extraordinary life but, in some mysterious way, about all of us. Our repeated invitations to become more loving, more courageous, more fully ourselves. Even our many resurrections over a lifetime. I didn’t know how to talk about those feelings then. I only knew they felt true, and that the world seemed somehow larger and more alive than many adults around me believed.

That winter morning when I hit the dove felt like what Robert A. Johnson called a moment of the Golden World. He describes the Golden World as a brief opening when the ordinary becomes extraordinary and spirit and matter fold into one another. As I drove, I kept thinking of the bird’s image on my windshield. It reminded me of Johnson’s memoir, Balancing Heaven and Earth. In it, Johnson describes further the Golden World, those moments when the soul breaks through the surface of everyday life and shows us that the world is not random. It is alive, responsive, and speaking.

Johnson’s descriptions and insights helped me understand. He gave words to this type of experience I’d known since childhood. Reading him helped me see that the sacred isn’t somewhere else. It’s right here, hiding in plain sight, waiting for us to notice. I remember closing that book when I finished it and feeling less alone. Johnson wasn’t trying to convince me to believe in anything supernatural. He simply took the interior life seriously. He wrote about dreams, symbols, synchronicities, and meaningful coincidence with the same respect that a scientist brings to careful observation. For someone who had been trained as a journalist to verify everything with evidence, sources, and facts, that was quietly revolutionary. He was inviting me to enlarge my view of the world. Science and mystery coexist. That book changed me. It helped me trust my own way of experiencing things. I now see that the experiences and descriptions that many people would call superstition or projection are, in truth, the way our minds were built, the way they still work, despite our illusions that we have things pretty well figured out. Johnson taught me that these moments of shock and beauty are how the soul shows us it’s listening.

The more I’ve leaned into that way of living, the more the world has leaned back. I don’t mean that life has become easier. I’ve had my struggles: addiction, depression, uncertainty, heartbreak, even profound loss. But life, its texture, feels different now. I notice when a conversation seems to arrive at exactly the right moment. When a man sitting on the ground outside the cafe asks for change and then utters something in Sanskrit and bows like a temple pujari. When a book finds me when I didn’t know I was looking for it. When an animal appears just as I’m wrestling with a difficult decision.

None of these moments prove anything. That’s not really the point I’m trying to make. The point is that I now see my life as a relationship with the universe rather than as a sequence of random events. Or as the causal result of my willful actions. Whether these are movements of God, expressions of the unconscious, or simply the astonishing pattern-making capacities of the human mind matters less to me than this: when I pay attention, I feel more alive.

The day after the dove, I pulled a card from a deck that sits on my mantle. The Great Beyond Archetype Deck. I don’t often remember my dreams, so I use the cards as if they were the content of a dream. I pulled from the middle of the deck and flipped the card over. I laughed out loud.

Here’s the thing. The more I honor this kind of listening to my soul and to the soul of the world, the more people I meet who live this way too. My Substack began to grow when I stopped hiding the mystical parts of my life and started writing about how the world actually feels to me. It is strange, interactive, and full of weird, meaningful emissaries. That morning’s encounter with the dove, with the unseen, felt like I’d contacted something much older in me. I’ve spent my life chasing and being chased by moments like it. I tell this story in my memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing. The book tells of my rise as a journalist and adventure writer, the years of travel and success, and the crash that followed: addiction, PTSD, depression, and the slow climb back. It’s also about learning again to live in conversation with the unseen.

For years I thought those two lives were separate. There was the skeptical journalist, gathering quotes and reporting facts, and there was the private seeker quietly paying attention to dreams, intuitions, symbols, and moments of uncanny grace. Looking back now, I don’t think they were ever separate. They were just two different approaches to the same question. What is true? In it, I write about being pulled back to India decades after my first visit, feeling uncertain of why, and yet drawn by something that felt like a teacher. That journey led me to a cave in the Himalayas, where I met a hundred-year-old yogi who had lived there for twenty-five years. I spent two afternoons with him, chanting, praying, asking questions, and listening to his answers with the help of an interpreter. The experience felt like a prophecy realized.

When I was a teenager, I read books about yogis in caves. I never forgot about those yogis. They remained lodged in my psyche as unfinished business. I never dreamed I’d sit in a cave with one. Forty years later, I did. When I finally sat across from him, I had the unmistakable feeling that I wasn’t meeting a stranger. I was arriving at a conversation that had begun decades earlier, perhaps even in that teenage boy who had sensed there was more to this world than could be measured or explained. That encounter lives inside me today. I left the Himalayan foothills more certain than ever that the world is alive. That it speaks through events and people if we learn to listen.

Later, a friend explained to me how he thinks of things like this. He told me that God shows up in emissaries. These symbols, people, and natural happenings are the ways the divine makes contact. Each one is a visitation reminding us that we’re not alone, that meaning is woven through even the most ordinary moments.

Over the years I’ve begun collecting these emissaries the way some people collect photographs. The hawks that appeared after Andrea died. Certain dreams that quietly redirect my life. Chance encounters that no longer feel entirely like chance. Individually, each one can be explained away. Together, they have become a kind of autobiography written in symbols, a parallel narrative running beneath the visible events of my life.

I think about that when life feels ordinary. When Tommy rests his head on my knee while I write. When my friend starts singing along to a favorite song as we drive the gravel roads outside Boulder, her voice rising with the dust. When a student finds the sentence that finally unlocks their story. These are emissaries too. They are reminders that the unseen keeps moving quietly through the visible world.

I’ve come to believe that a meaningful life isn’t built from extraordinary experiences alone. It’s built from learning to recognize the extraordinary hidden inside ordinary ones. The great moments are gifts. But the deeper practice is attention. It’s in moments like these that my two lives, the writer, and the teacher, feel like one. They come from the same impulse: to pay attention, to say what’s true, and to let meaning reveal itself through story.

I’ve taught and edited memoir writing for almost fifteen years. What I teach in Writing the Heart is not just craft. It’s a way of being with your story. You don’t have to be spiritual to belong here. You only have to believe that stories matter. I teach writing, but more than anything, I teach people how to listen to their own stories and to the world that keeps trying to speak through them. You don’t have to be mystical or have access to golden worlds. You only have to be yourself. You have to stop filtering your story and stop leaving parts of you out. That is where the alchemy begins.

It’s also why I wanted to begin The Seeker with the story of a dove instead of an introduction to myself. I could have started by telling you about the magazines I’ve written for, the countries I’ve traveled to, or the memoir I published. Those things are important, but they aren’t the center of my life. Paying attention is. Learning to trust the moments that interrupt us, humble us, and quietly reshape the way we see the world.

If you stay with me on this journey, we’ll certainly talk about writing, travel, psychology, relationships, spirituality, grief, healing, and the strange paths our lives take. But beneath every conversation will be the same question: How do we become the kind of people who notice when the world is trying to speak to us? I’m less interested in giving you answers than in helping you become more intimate with your own questions. Because I’ve come to believe that the questions we can’t stop living are often wiser than the answers we rush to adopt.

The imprint of that dove is still on my windshield. I’ve stopped trying to wipe it off. It reminds me that the world speaks when it wants to, that spirit and matter are never far apart, and that every story begins with a single, undeniable moment of impact. As I write these words, I find myself wondering about the invisible imprints you’re carrying. The moment you can’t explain. The conversation you never forgot. The dream that still visits you years later. The loss that quietly rearranged your life. The chance meeting that wasn’t entirely chance. My guess is that your life, too, has been speaking to you for a long time. Maybe the work isn’t becoming someone new. Maybe it’s simply learning to recognize the emissaries that have been walking beside you all along.

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If you haven’t bought my memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing, yet, I hope you will.

Here’s what author Hampton Sides wrote about it:

“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”

Over the past few years, this newsletter has followed the path my life has taken. I’ve written about memoir and writing, but also about travel, relationships, healing, spirituality, science, and the surprising ways those subjects overlap. Looking back, I can see they were never separate conversations. They’ve always been different ways of exploring the same question: How do we live a deeper, more meaningful life?

You’ll still find the essays I’ve always loved writing, but they’ll now be joined by a podcast featuring conversations with writers, psychologists, scientists, adventurers, contemplatives, and other thoughtful people whose lives and work have expanded my own. I’ll also share shorter field notes from the road, from the mountains and desert or jungle I’m traveling through, from books I’m reading, and from ordinary moments, too. Because a memoirist knows that ordinary moments contain as much or more juice than the extraordinary times. If there is a common thread running through all of this, it's curiosity. I don't have a grand theory of how to live, and I'm not interested in pretending that I do. I'm not even convinced there is one waiting to be discovered. The more we learn about the universe, the more the mystery seems to deepen. What I care about is paying close attention to this strange, beautiful, heartbreaking experience of being human—and inviting you into the conversation. It felt right to begin this new chapter with a personal essay about the path that brought me here. I hope, as you read it, you’ll find yourself reflecting not only on my journey, but on your own.

Welcome to The Seeker. I’m glad you’re here.

I’m Sixty, and I’m Still Seeking

This morning I came home soaked from a sunrise hike in the foothills above Boulder. It had rained through the night, and instead of wishing for blue skies, I found myself grateful for the gray. After years of drought, rain feels almost miraculous here. The trails smelled like wet pine trees, and little streams that had been bone dry only weeks before crossed the path again. By the time Tommy and I reached home, he was breathing hard from the climb—and I was ready for more coffee.

I poured a cup and stepped onto the patio. Tommy settled onto the cool flagstones while I opened my notebook. Off to the west, the ridgelines disappeared into whiskey-colored clouds. It struck me how fortunate I’ve been to have spent so much time in beautiful places: 19 years in New Mexico’s high desert, 13 years here in Boulder, and months and months of travel to jungles, beaches, rivers, monasteries in the desert, and, of course, my share of airports. I’ve spent my life trying to make sense of wherever I had just been and wondering, often without admitting it to myself, where the hell this journey was leading.

A few weeks earlier, I had returned from Costa Rica, where I had gone to belatedly celebrate my sixtieth birthday. The trip had come together almost accidentally after a friend invited me to spend a week at her retreat center, Ascension, formerly Sunrise Sanctuary, tucked into the jungle above the small village of Montezuma on the Nicoya Peninsula. For years, Sunrise Sanctuary has hosted yoga retreats, healing workshops, and contemplative gatherings. Today, under the name Ascension, it is focusing even more on personal transformation. (For more information about Ascension, click here. Yes, this retreat center is as stunning as the imagery.)

We wandered jungle trails and empty beaches, swam beneath waterfalls that emptied into freshwater pools only yards from the Pacific. The cool mountain water poured over my shoulders while waves crashed against volcanic rock. We lingered over long dinners at little restaurants beside the sea. I climbed aboard tiny puddle-jumper planes that skimmed low above a coastline dividing rainforest and surf. Somewhere during that week I realized I was actually living beautifully. Some birthdays ask for a party. Others ask us simply to live.

I wonder if you’ve ever had a week like that. A few ordinary days that, for reasons you couldn’t explain at the time, quietly divided your life into before and after.

As I sat there that rainy morning, I found myself tracing the arc of the previous three decades. For the first half of those years, I was living the life I had imagined as a young journalist. I wrote for Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Wired, GQ, Men’s Journal, Travel + Leisure, and other magazines that sent me to Greenland, the Amazon, Indonesia, the Arctic, Mexcio’s Sierra Madre and the Yucatan, Israel and Palestine, India, the Caribbean, and dozens of other places that had once existed only on the pull-down maps hanging at the front of my childhood classrooms. I was

chasing extraordinary stories in extraordinary places. Looking back, I can see that those years were carrying me farther and farther from myself. Maybe I had to travel that far before I could begin the journey home.

It’s tempting, when looking back over a life, to divide it neatly into chapters. The years of adventure. The years of healing. The years of seeking. But our lives rarely unfold that way. The seeds of what comes later are almost always buried in what came before, and what looked like an outward journey has turned out to have been an inward one all along. I couldn’t see that when I was thirty. I can see it now.

It all began in 2012, when, on a lark, I traveled to Israel to hike the Jesus Trail, a pilgrimage stretching from Nazareth to Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee. I told my editors I wanted to explore the landscapes of Jesus and revisit the faith of my Christian childhood. That explanation was true, but only on the surface. Somewhere between Nazareth and the hills overlooking the Sea of Galilee, the assignment changed. I remember walking alone beneath a hard blue sky, the trail winding downhill past caves where robbers and stray would-be messiahs hid out during Jesus’ time, when it occurred to me that I had stopped asking questions about Jesus and had begun asking questions about life. Nothing dramatic happened that afternoon. There was no revelation waiting around the next bend. Only the slow realization that I had spent years traveling the world while carrying the most challenging terrain—the mind and the heart—with me everywhere I went.

I only knew that the story I thought I had gone to write had slipped quietly out of my hands. The pilgrimage was no longer about Christianity. It had become an invitation to begin examining the landscape within with the same curiosity I had always reserved for distant countries.

Looking back now, I think that was the beginning of everything that has followed. The journeys continued. India called me back again and again. I wandered the Rocky Mountains and the deserts of the Southwest with no assignment except to pay attention. I immersed myself in memoir, psychology, contemplative traditions, and the long work of healing. I fell in love, lost love, misunderstood love, rebuilt my relationship with my father, and discovered that the deepest adventures of my life would never appear on a map.

Somewhere during those years, almost without noticing, I stopped searching for the place that would finally change me. Paying attention had become enough.

As I sat on the patio that morning, watching the rain move across the foothills, I realized that sixty hadn’t given me the clarity I imagined when I was younger. If anything, the questions had become larger, more nuanced, and far more interesting. The difference was that I no longer felt driven to answer them once and for all. I had begun to trust that a life isn’t measured by how quickly we solve its mysteries, but by how fully we’re willing to inhabit them.

Looking back, I can see that every journey had offered something I needed. Greenland taught me about endurance. Israel taught me that the most difficult pilgrimage would unfold inside my own heart. India taught me to sit still long enough to hear what had been drowned out by ambition. The women I have loved taught me that intimacy is one of the fiercest teachers we’ll ever encounter. My father taught me that reconciliation is possible long after we have decided it isn’t. Costa Rica reminded me that every so often life asks us to pause, look behind us with gratitude, and then turn toward whatever is calling next.

Those places and people didn’t answer the questions that have followed me through life. They refined them. They taught me to ask better ones.

I suspect that’s true for many of us. We spend years believing that meaning is hidden somewhere beyond the next horizon, only to discover that the real work begins when we finally become curious about the life we’ve already been given. We begin paying closer attention to the ordinary moments we once rushed past: the morning walk, the difficult conversation, the grief that softens over time, the

unexpected forgiveness, the sentence in a book that stays with us for years, the quiet certainty that we’re changing even when we can’t yet explain how.

Maybe that’s what seeking really is. Not chasing extraordinary experiences, but discovering that ordinary life is far stranger, more beautiful, and more alive than we ever imagined.

Those are the questions I hope to keep following here.

Tomorrow morning I’ll probably lace up my boots, clip Tommy’s leash onto his collar, and head back into the foothills. If it rains again, I’ll welcome it. I’ll come home, make another cup of coffee, open my notebook, and continue following the questions that have quietly shaped my life for more than three decades.

Because the older I get, the less I believe we’re moving through an indifferent world. I think we’re moving through one that is endlessly speaking to us: through mountains and dreams, through grief and love, through the people who

stay, the people who leave, and through the astonishing fact that we are here at all, conscious for this brief moment, able to wonder what any of it means. We don’t have to solve the mystery. We only have to become intimate enough with our own lives to notice that we are living inside one.

If you’re asking some of those same questions, I’d be honored to have you walk alongside me for a while.

If you haven’t bought my memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing, yet, I hope you will.

Here’s what author Hampton Sides wrote about it:

“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”

Tomorrow at noon Mountain Time, I’m offering a free webinar so you can experience Writing the Heart for yourself.

A few years ago, if you’d told me that I would be leading a community like this, I don’t think I would have believed you.

For most of my life, I was an adventure writer. I chased stories across the world for magazines like Outside, National Geographic Adventure, The New York Times Magazine, and others. My reporting took me to India, Palestine, Greenland, the Amazon, Indonesia, and dozens of other places. I climbed

mountains, crossed deserts, followed rivers, sat with shamans and monks, and spent years convinced that the next journey might reveal something essential about how to live.

What I eventually discovered was that the most interesting terrain I’d ever explore was much closer to home. It was the landscape of memory, meaning, loss, joy, purpose, and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. That’s where Writing the Heart came from.

Despite the name, you don’t need to be a writer, a seeker, or a particularly emotional person to benefit from this community. In fact, many members arrive skeptical. Some join because they want to write a memoir. Others come because they want a reason to slow down and reflect in a world that rarely encourages either. Some are looking for a creative practice. Others are simply looking for a community where people speak honestly about their lives.

Every week, we gather on Zoom. We begin with a brief meditation, check in with one another, and then I share a passage from a memoir, essay, or poem that I love. I pull a few lines from the reading and offer them as jumping-off points. Then we write for twenty minutes and gather again to share whatever emerged on the page.

The process is remarkably simple, but the results continue to surprise me. People remember stories they had forgotten. They discover connections between events that once seemed unrelated. They gain clarity about challenges they’re facing. They uncover gratitude, grief, humor, wisdom, and sometimes entirely new ways of understanding their lives.

One woman joined last August and has since written an 80,000-word memoir largely from material that emerged during these sessions. Others have no desire to write a book. They come because the practice helps them hear themselves more clearly. They come because life moves quickly, and this gives them ninety minutes each week to pause, reflect, and pay attention.

Part of the reason I call this community Writing the Heart is that I’ve become increasingly interested in the relationship between thinking and feeling. We live in a culture that prizes analysis, productivity, and certainty. Those things matter. But I’ve found that some of the most important decisions in my life emerged from a deeper conversation between intellect and intuition, between what I think and what I know.

Scientists now understand that the heart and brain are in constant communication. Long before modern science, poets, memoirists, contemplatives, and philosophers were exploring that same territory through story, observation, and lived experience. Whether we approach it through science, psychology, writing, or simple curiosity, most of us recognize that there is a difference between merely thinking about our lives and genuinely listening to them.

Writing the Heart isn’t about abandoning reason. It’s about bringing more of yourself into the conversation. It’s about becoming curious about your own life. It’s about paying attention to the experiences that shaped you and finding the courage to tell the truth about them.

The word courage comes from the Old French “coeur,” meaning heart. I’ve come to believe that courage isn’t certainty. It isn’t having all the answers. Courage is vulnerability. Courage is the willingness to look honestly at your life and put words to what you find there.

Leading this community has become my passion and purpose. After decades of searching for stories around the world, I find myself most energized by helping people discover the stories they already carry within them. Again and again, I’ve watched people surprise themselves with what emerges when they slow down, write, and share their words in the company of others.

Tomorrow’s webinar will give you a chance to experience the process firsthand. We’ll do exactly what we do in class. I’ll share a reading, offer a prompt, and we’ll write together.

Thursday, June 18

12:00 PM Mountain Time

11:00 AM Pacific

1:00 PM Central

2:00 PM Eastern

7:00 PM UK

Register here:

https://us02web.zoom.us/.../reg.../WN_anb5IXvRTzOGFrbaCZn7Tg

Whether you’re working on a memoir, looking for a meaningful writing practice, or simply interested in understanding yourself a little better, I’d love to have you join us.

Warmly,

Brad

Sign Up For Writing the Heart

If you haven’t bought my memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing, yet, I hope you will.

Here’s what author Hampton Sides wrote about it:

“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”