This is not our regular programming. This is a documentation of an expedition that few people get to take.

On April 11th, we embarked into Inner Space Cavern. A group of employees and I went in after work with member of the Underground Texas Grotto, and spent several hours crawling around the dark and gloomy depths of the cavern said to be 20 million years old.

After gathering on the hill and locking ourselves in the cave with the gigantic steel gates slamming shut behind us, we ventured downward, leaving the beautiful blue sky and daylight behind.

I know many people might think of a moment like this and imagine that they would feel dread, wondering if they’d ever see that sky again. I don’t experience that. For me, descending into the earth feels like coming home at the end of a long day. Especially when you’re heading into the cavern with a group of friends. The possibility of demise when you’re surrounded by such friendly faces doesn’t seem the worst of fates. The best of them have done this many times, so there is a comfort entering a cavern with people who’ve entered and emerged to tell the tale time after time.

Most of the cave is about 55 feet deep, though it does go about 99 feet deep in some areas. Overall, it is over 5 miles long. I’ve been studying maps of this cave for months, preparing for days like this when further exploration would be done. This cavern has been thoroughly explored since the 1960’s, but I’m still convinced that someday I or someone I work with will discover new rooms.

We headed up to Soda Straw Balcony, a gorgeous room of the cavern filled with thousands of soda straws: thin, hollow formations that resemble icicles on the ceiling. The ceiling rises upward away from you, soda straws getting longer in the distance, and larger formations filling the space in dramatic fashion. After a few words about our plan for moving forward, the first caver climbed into the Balcony, over and under delicate formations, some of which take thousands of years to grow. Everything there is precious, even down to the smallest cave cricket, so we do our best to protect it.

One might think of crawling around through dirt and mud as being uncivilized and unrefined. It takes, however, a great sense of care. There is a reverence to this practice that comes from respect for the surrounding environment. You treat places like these as someone else’s home, and not your own. I think that when we trample on nature, it has a way of getting us back. You are rarely more at the mercy of nature itself than when crawling beneath boulders that weigh tons, so it makes sense to treat it with some reverence.

I watched one after another as members of our group disappeared between a crack in the rocks, then I began the climb. Dropping down into the hole, moving between large slabs of stone, I descended another 10-15 feet, dropping down a small, dark hole where I found the other cavers gathered in a room made of ancient fossilized reef and surrounded by dolomite.

On the far end of the small room was a hole that led to Dusty Crawl, a 50 foot long tunnel from end-to-end with an average ceiling height of 18 inches. One by one, we began making our way through it. You can’t get up on your hands and knees, especially when you hit a part that’s only 9 inches from ceiling to floor. So you wiggle.

As we got further in and the ceiling got lower and lower, so low that I was flat on my belly, squeezing between large slabs of stone, I began laughing. Ace, a long-time cave expert on our team, asked me what I was laughing about. I told him that I couldn’t get over the fact that I describe this sort of thing to people every day, often pointing out the entrance to this very hole, but knowing what it is and feeling what it is are two entirely different things. My dad used to describe experiencing the living presence of the Holy Spirit this way: You can watch Muhammad Ali throw a punch on TV and know it hurts. That’s basic knowledge. But when you get punched by Muhammad Ali, you REALLY know it hurts. That’s knowledge from experience.

This crawl was exhilarating in about the same way I would be excited if I got punched by Ali. I found myself excited in the kind of, “I’m going to tell everybody about this,” sort of way.

Emerging from that crawl, we came out into Wendy’s Room. Dolomite Dust filled the air and covered our clothing. Most of us resembled something like a powdered donut. Isaac, a tour guide who famously ripped his shirt in half down the middle the last time he did this, stood up from where he was squatting on a rock, and ripped his pants. I spent a lot of the tour behind Isaac, looking at his bare white thighs, which made me laugh a little bit every time I looked up.

At this point, we could stand, so we stood and walked through dark passageways that led deeper into the cavern. Up Brandon’s Staircase, into an area called Round Room, then we dropped down into the Gravel Room which was the start of our next crawling portion: Rebirth. Through here, I found myself crawling like Spider-Man with a comfort and ease that took me back to my childhood. When was the last time I had crawled like this? It felt good. It felt familiar. Like a kid on the playground going through tunnels the way I did when I was going down a slide, hoping nothing blocked my path at the next turn. To feel in touch with these childlike parts of oneself is a gift. It’s like you’re reconnecting with a version of yourself you used to know. There’s a beauty to it, and that beauty is brought out so well by adventure. When reverence meets childlikeness, you’re nearing the realm of the holy.

At the end of Rebirth, you emerge from a little tunnel, crawling over loose rocks, and under one large slab of stone. As you stand, you find yourself in an underground canyon, 45’ from ceiling to floor: A crack in the earth widened over millennia by flowing water, making tall white walls that are smooth and wavy, stretching up toward an orange-ish, golden ceiling of chert. There’s a bridge going across the middle of the canyon, and we went under it. The canyon is only a few feet wide, so with each foot on a rock on each opposing wall, you walk across it and try not to slip the rest of the way down, 10-15 feet below you. Though it would be a short fall, it still feels pretty exhilarating.

Emerging from the far end of the canyon, you crawl out between a pointed rock in your front, and a pointed rock at your back. Each digs into you like a spike, so you keep your weight lifted as you pass through it. You don’t want to push up, or you’ll get stabbed in the back. You don’t want to let your weight rest, or it will stab you in the stomach. This squeeze has affectionately been named, “the ex-girlfriend.”

From here, you walk up a muddy pathway, past trickling water that flows into the canyon, up into a room called Treasure Room, A gorgeous area filled with incredible formations. There’s one in this room that defies all logic and grew in a corkscrew shape in the center.

We walked past Skull Room where 12 Peccary (Platygonus Compressus) skulls were discovered in 1963. Incredibly enough, not a single other bone of the animals were found in that room. Only Skulls.

We walked into a large open area, around some 3 large flow-stones called, “Tres Amigos,” then climbed a debris cone. One of five debris cones in our cavern that entered through sink holes that were open during the Ice Age.

Crawling around the edge of the debris cone, past a large mammoth tusk just several feet to our right, we went through a narrow gap that felt roughly 1 to 2 feet tall, then I watched the people in front of me slide down a narrow vertical slot that dropped down about 30 feet. One at a time, a person would slide through until they made it to the bottom and out of harm’s way, then they would yell, “clear!” One after another, I watched people disappear down that hole. In front of me was my buddy who began to drop down the slot, but got stuck pretty quickly. His chest was lodged between the walls.

The most important thing when stuck is not to panic. The body will swell up when you panic, getting you even more stuck. One of the cavers, in fact, was wearing caver’s t-shirt that said, “Don’t panic!” on the back in giant red letters. A great reminder, especially for those new to the experience.

I watched him try to wiggle his way further through. Realizing he was only going to get more stuck from this angle, he took a moment to evaluate the situation. I could see him making an intention to stay calm. He positioned his arms against the walls in a way that allowed him to slide an inch or so higher. Then another. And another. I watched him over the next couple minutes struggle to pull himself upward and out of the slot.

This probably sounds anxiety inducing or dramatic, but let me tell you that when you’re in that kind of a situation and watching it unfold, it is anything but dramatic or anxiety inducing. You stay professional, you stay focused. You think of it like a puzzle. You keep calm and carry on. He made his way out. I switched places with him and began making the descent. Feet first down the slot, I slid down with ease. Feeling the smooth, cool, and wavy stone against my chest, and the other stone at my back. This was my favorite cave challenge so far. It truly felt like the earth was hugging me, cooling me off, and welcoming me in deeper.

At the bottom of the slot, I dropped down into a larger tunnel where we could almost fully stand, and there was my friend Casey. She pointed me down the length of the tunnel to the left and there I found some of the people who had made it down before me. Following their voices, I emerged into a large open space with a ceiling probably about 20 feet high where members of our expedition were resting on large boulders and slabs of stone. To the right were a series of tunnels that all connect to one another. As some rested, others explored this area known as, “the Maze.” This became what is now one of my favorite rooms of the cavern. I’m looking forward to the next opportunity to explore this maze area, because I only took the time to see a portion of it. One striking thing about this spot are the bones that have been found by people traversing its tunnels. There is a pile of bones from extinct ice age animals just casually sitting atop a rock in a collection that has built up over time. The one that caught my attention the most was a beautifully preserved vertebrae from what we assumed to be a Flat Headed Peccary. To hold the bones of something that has been extinct for about 12,000 years makes you feel connected to something bigger, like you’re reaching out through time and connecting to a mystery.

From here, we made our way to Coral Crawl, a long tunnel that goes through more fossilized coral reef. There are miles of reef down here, showing that this part of Texas was once covered in a rich, vibrant sea. We emerged atop a huge piece of cave breakdown that is now known as, “The Napping Rock.” Here, we all laid down and took a rest.

I stared up at the ceiling of the cavern, letting the coolness of the stone cool my body. The patterns on the ceiling delighted and entertained me in a way I’d forgotten something so simple could do. They were not particularly remarkable, but my reaction to them being filled with such innocent joy left me with a lasting sense of delight that I carried with me the rest of the journey. Like a baby staring up at a mobile, or glowing stars on the ceiling of their bedroom, I imagined as I stared into the rock that I was looking deeply into the night sky. While being so confined, at the very same moment I also felt limitless. Not in the delusional sense, but in the sense that I was made keenly aware of my limitations. Knowing how I could work with them gave me delight and peace. I realized how even with the aching of my body, how content I was being human, and that felt right. Exactly as it’s supposed to be.

We had limited water supply, so my friend Grace and I shared a bottle. Here, we used the last of what we had left, and there was still a long way to go. Luckily, I had hydrated a lot the day before, and all throughout the day while at work.

We decided to continue on. We climbed down some boulders, through a massive room called K-Town that must be 50’ x 100', and 20’ to 30’ tall. The walls look like Jupiter. There are several tunnels in this room, but we chose one called Tall Man’s Torture, then took an immediate left turn into “Belly of the Beast” that takes you into an area beyond a formation that looks like the giant mouth of a dragon.

It was in here, quite a distance through, that a large man behind me was having some trouble. I stopped to help him. By the time I got him free, the people in front of us were out of sight. They had kept going. We called for them, but had no answer. There’s something mysterious about the way this part of the cave absorbs sound. They couldn’t have been more than 20 or 30 feet in front of us, but we couldn’t hear them, and they couldn’t hear us. We pressed on until we came to an area where the tunnels split in different directions. I evaluated the area and chose the one that seemed most logical. Then we came to another intersection. There were tunnels that went left, right, up, down, and I had no clue which way they went. In my mind, I went to all those hours I had spent studying the map of the cavern. I thought about our goal, where we were going, and all things I’d seen in the past. The cavern map doesn’t say anything about tunnels that go up or down. I ignored the vertical orientation and considered the direction we were heading. I roughly knew which way was North, and I trusted my gut. We continued on until finally I began to hear voices. When they got a glimpse of my light, I heard someone ahead say, “Thank God!” We emerged and I saw one of the tour guides Isaac on his knees praying. He was afraid something bad had happened to us. The kindness of that gesture struck me as something lovely to see, if not a little overly dramatic for the scenario.

It was here that Isaac then decided to tell us with certain conviction that Robert Pattinson had died. I have not yet forgiven him for this.

“No! You are not telling us that right now while we’re 70’ underground. How dare you?! You are wrong! I reject this!” Shouted me, Grace, and Breeley.

“I swear,” said Isaac. “I saw it on the news!”

Turns out he was wrong, but none of us could possibly know that for sure until we were able to get out of the cave. No cell signal that far underground. Don’t ever break news like this to your colleagues, especially if you’re terribly wrong. In hindsight, it was hilarious. In the moment, frustrating.

After completing Dragon’s Mouth, we emerged onto the side of another Debris Cone. This one was not just a big pile of dirt, it was covered in massive slabs of stone, cube shaped boulders that must’ve been 10’ high, and just as wide.

From near where the debris touched the ceiling, I looked down into a large open room and saw what I think must be one of the most beautiful views of the cavern. This room is called Squid Room, named after the large formations on the ceiling that look like giant squids. I looked down at massive formations towering over my friends and coworkers. In caving, the scale of things is often lost, but when someone stands beside a formation and you can truly see how big it is, it puts scale into perspective.

At the base of the debris cone, we rested. While sitting and talking, suddenly underneath a rock that some people were sitting on, hands and a head emerged from a tiny crack beneath the rock. It shocked everybody, but made us laugh as she said, “Here I come!” It was Casey (who is a Wild Cave Guide and had been down here many times before) surprising everyone intentionally. She then offered to take some of us around the giant rock and show us how to slide underneath. This particular squeeze through is called “The Iron Maiden.”

Coming through it, I was so excited. As I squeezed my head through, I thought maybe this is what my son had felt while being born. Feeling myself unable to move up or down, only forward, I said, “This is absurd!”

People think the hardest part of caving are these tight squeezes, but in reality these last only a moment. The really hard parts are the long crawls, the ones that take extended stamina and physical exertion. There are large, more open spaces that prove more challenging than these tight squeezes, so to me these tight squeezes are just fun.

From here, we had one challenge left. The big one… “Rain Drain.”

After a walk back to the entrance of Dragon’s mouth, we re-entered. This time, however, we went all the way to the back of the beast (the beast’s butt, if you will), toward the Discovery Room. We hiked, crawled, squeezed. And then came one of my favorite parts of the whole experience. Looking forward, I was staring into an abyss. There was a giant flowstone on the left slanting downward at a steep angle. It went up into the darkness on my left, and down into the darkness on my right. Following the people in front of me, I put my back against the flowstone, and my hands and feet on the opposite wall. Little pieces of chert on the opposite wall made good handholds and footholds. Sliding across the flow stone, I made the journey about 40 feet to my left, toward the tunnel we were trying to reach. If anyone doing this were to let go, they would quickly slide down about 40 feet down to the bottom of the canyon-like crevice. I kept going until there were suddenly no more footholds, just smooth rock slanting upward near my feet. I could, from there, only hold on with my hands. Essentially, by that point, I was hanging by my hands from a wall, extending my arms out to the left, and hoping the rocks I was holding onto wouldn’t break free. The consequences wouldn’t be bad unless you landed terribly wrong at the bottom, but it added an extra level of tension to this stretch of cave.

After several minutes of carefully crossing, I found myself dangling at the far end of the crevice.

“What do I do now?” I said.

“You drop!” Somebody else told me.

Looking beneath me, I could see a little ledge about 10 feet down. The man who went before me was down there, waiting for the person in front of him to continue forward. I looked around to see if there was a better way to do this as he moved out of the way. Discovering none, I let go, and slid down the giant flowstone onto the little ledge.

From there, we crawled into a little hole. This was Rain Drain.

A small, tight tunnel formed by flowing water. A literal rain drain. There were spots where you had to go forward, and spots you had to go in feet-first. There were things you crawled over, and things you crawled under. After one narrow squeeze, I came into a very small open space and heard an unseen voice say, “Now stand up.”

I looked above me and was surprised to see a little slanted hole in the ceiling, and lights peeking through it. I began to stand, carefully angling my body to fit through the hole. I turned my helmet to the side so it could more easily fit through, and found myself emerging into the Discovery Room: The first room of the cave that had ever been found.

Casey and someone else helped me out, and I took the first deep breath I’d had in a while. We did it.

One by one, my friends began to emerge from that same little hole. One that, if I pointed it out to you, you might not believe.

I love taking people on tours, pointing out rain drain, and watching their astonishment as they said, “You’ve been through that?!”

When a soldier finishes a battle, they often look like a living image of defeat. I’m saying this from experience, because though we had conquered the cave, we emerged looking like the cave had conquered us. Muddy, scratched up, and bruised from head to toe, we walked outside ready to drop at a moment’s notice.

After this, there was no late night Waffle House run, or IHOP meal. In truth, I don’t even remember anything between stepping out of the cavern and walking in my front door covered in dried mud.

Following that are memories of tossing and turning, everything aching during the night. I learned after that first time, always to take ibuprofen before and after wild caving.

Since experiencing and writing this, I’ve become a Wild Cave Guide, leading people through this very kind of experience over and over. I’ve done these crawls, and others, so many times now that I’ve forgotten how many times I’ve done them. I’ve been to many parts of the cavern not mentioned here, close to half a mile worth of tunnels not covered on this expedition.

Let me tell you, as crazy as it is, I love these experiences. If you ever get the opportunity to experience it yourself, I recommend it. There is a feeling of accomplishment that comes with completing something like this that can’t be beat. You emerge from it feeling like you can accomplish anything. If you do come out for a wild cave trip sometime, ask for me as your guide. I can’t wait to experience it with you!

Thank you for coming along on this expedition with me. I hope you enjoyed it half as much as I did!

There’s something that happens now that didn’t happen to me when I was younger. It happens most often when I look someone older than I in the eye. Unbeknownst to all others around us, there is a communication that happens, a twinkle, an acknowledgement. It is a knowing, perhaps, what one might call a spark of wisdom. Without saying it, and I swear this must be true, it’s as though another person is telling me, “I know what you know too.” And that’s all it is, just a little twinkle that implies a wisdom that is beyond words. I’ve heard it described by my father when he once told me about what it felt like to look into the eye of a great humpback whale while swimming beside it in the open sea. “Imagine an eyeball as big as a basketball, and you can just sense the intelligence behind it,” he exclaimed. He knew that whale had seen things, been places, and perhaps understood some deep truths about existence, about God, that could not be perfectly communicated with words alone. When I look into an elder’s eyes, sometimes that’s exactly what I find there.

Sometimes, I realize, I even divert my gaze unconsciously to avoid it. Perhaps I don’t want to acknowledge that I know what it is that they know. When I catch myself not looking, then I want to look even more. I overcorrect. Then with my gaze, I am asking, “Do you know?”

When this kind of communication does happen, nothing is ever said about it. Life goes on, and I think there is a wisdom that prevents that twinkle from being talked about sometimes. As I get older and gain more wisdom of my own, I find myself wanting to talk about it a lot less. When I do talk about it, it’s simply put. If it can be expressed with a short sentence, a poor analogy, or a catch phrase, I actually prefer that to a lengthy explanation. As I’ve come to realize this, I think I’ve realized why nursing homes are often so quiet, or filled with idle day-to-day chatter rather than deep philosophical or meaningful talks. These knowings are treated like treasures. The greatest wisdoms are kept close to the heart, a place from which words most rarely emerge amongst those seeking restfulness.

With wisdom, one learns that the words of the heart stir up trouble. They ignite passions, inflame the senses, and engulf the imagination, causing one to dream about worlds that may or may never be. What comes from the heart can be beautiful, or painful, and sometimes both. Better to keep it in, perhaps. Better to watch the sunset from the rocking chairs and smile, chat for a few, find something to laugh about.

Undoubtedly, those nursing homes are filled with more wisdom than could fill the books of an entire library. If you search for it, you can dig it out, but the wisdom doesn’t always make its way into the daily chatter. Maybe there’s a wisdom of its own kind in that silence. Perhaps the wisdom is distilled into that unmistakable twinkle that I see so often these days.

As I grow as a father, I am finding myself more grounded in deeper truths, yet desiring less to talk about them. Oddly enough, the truths I speak that gain the most pushback, are the ones having to do with objective reality, not lofty ideas. Not things that are up for debate, just basic, concrete truths that are beyond argument. This is a strange phenomena of recent days. Growing up, I always thought it was my job to undo the shackles of objective reality, to cause people to dream and think of what could be possible beyond what they thought was true. You would tell me back then that red was red and blue was blue, and I would say, “are you sure? Maybe they’re not.” Well now we’ve moved so far away from objective reality that I see creating that kind of questioning as the development of further fracture in the fabric of what sustains us, and it’s utterly unproductive. My interest in undoing reality is of less importance than preserving the beauty of what we have been blessed with. Now, I am more interested in encouraging the love of this life, not the dismantling of it. In the process of learning to love reality, the shackles fall off by themselves. When we all meet our end in this life, all that was unreal will fall away. Why bring about that end a day too soon?

My goal isn’t to change your mind with words, though that would be lovely. It’s not to speak my wisdom to great acclaim. These days, I think that maybe it’s just to twinkle. If ever I find the words to tell you what’s causing that twinkle, by God I’ll do it. Yet there’s a knowing deeper than words, a music higher than the songs that can be sung, and a truth that’s deeper than anything that’s ever been carved into stone. Maybe God made it to be communicated best with a look.

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Could it be that the surfer could learn more in his being from simply standing atop a wave than to study from a distance to learn what makes them work?

A scientist could know everything about the sea there is to know and still not be able to surf himself to shore. He might know what makes the oceans swell, but he doesn’t know its rhythms. He might know about creatures in the sea larger than he is, but not have the intimate knowledge of what it’s like to have his skin brushed by one, or the near-psychic connection that comes with having looked one in the eye. He could understand all there is to know about physics, yet not have the experiential knowledge that allows him to stand atop a board. Knowledge comes either academically or by experience. Academics in its best form teaches through experience. But what the book-smart individual knows in his mind, the surfer knows in his being (though maybe he does not know he knows). We needn’t understand intimately our lungs in order to breathe. We needn’t have knowledge of the heart, yet still it beats. To this point, there is an underlying intelligence in all of creation that does for us what must be done. While humans vie passionately for powers beyond the scope of our beings, aim to understand the universe in greater depths, and all of it is beautiful, what is it to us if we cannot learn to ride the waves? If we would, all the knowledge we wish for would be inherently learned in our beings. Even if unable to articulate it, at least we could feel it. At least we could be it.

We wish to be the ocean in its entirety, so we pick it apart, yet sometimes we become it best when we are simply the surfer on the board. Keep in mind that even God entered earth as a man and learned how to work wood. It did not detract from his true essence, to be human. He is not lesser for having seated himself at our tables. So why are we afraid of being human too?

Simplicity at the Pub:

I sat down at a little British pub with my dad yesterday evening and he asked me what the best part is of being a father so far. Without having to think, I quickly said, “The simplicity. How simple it all is.”

He laughed, and I did too. It’s possibly not the answer that would typically be expected in response to that question, but I meant it.

“Suddenly, life is so simple. I’m not caught up in chasing lofty goals. All I have to do is work, make money to take care of him, hold him, feed him, and do what needs to be done.”

I think about all the time without a child, my goal was to accomplish big and unbelievable things, see my name up in lights, make something of myself. When I wasn’t doing that, I was trying to unravel all the secrets of the universe. I was reverse engineering God by studying all the world religions and trying to find my way beyond the “illusions” of life. Was there value to that? Absolutely. I gained some fascinating perspectives on life and existence through the lens of many cultures and by way of remarkable experiences that took me far beyond the realm of conventional thinking. I would even say that many of them took me deeper into the heart of God. Now, however, I don’t worry about any of that. I went from my head being in lofty places to being in a position of simply wanting to live a life. Priorities have shifted. All I want to do is take care of my family. That simplicity is perhaps a freedom greater than having the secret key to any boundless cosmic knowledge. A great surfer probably knows this. As the sun begins to set this evening, it seems apparent to me that all the cosmic knowledge I need is sitting right in this room, breathing the same air as I.

There are some things we’re not meant to know:

There is a wisdom to not knowing; a beauty to the mystery. Some of the most wise spiritual teachers I ever sat at the feet of would respond to questions about God and the Cosmos with a simple statement that I appreciate now perhaps more than I did when I first heard them: “That’s above my pay grade,” and “there are some things are just not for us to know in this lifetime.”

I think about my great grandmother. We called her Mamaw. Mamaw had kindness, love, and wisdom beyond what I think most people possess. She had wonder and curiosity, remained fascinated by the world around her, but she didn’t trouble herself with it. Her wisdom was in her simplicity. She knew how to love, how to keep her house nice for when her family came to visit, and how to keep her heart on Jesus and family. She also had a notable love for Elvis. Mamaw would ponder big things. I remember her asking big questions about God, life on Earth, and why things are the way they are. Often, though, she would say, “I guess that’s just not for us to know until we go to Heaven.” What wisdom there is to that still simplicity, to that surrender to life and God.

When we want to be God, I think we lead ourselves to ask the wrong questions, or to go to a depth that we needn’t go. When we learn to love God, our questions settle. We learn to stand still. We feel the muscles in our legs as we seek to balance. We feel the wind on our face and the spray of the sea as we rise upward and gain speed. We learn to move with the waves in ways that are astounding and beautiful. The surfer isn’t separate from the ocean. He’s part of it, intimately so. And he knows. Somehow, deep inside, he knows.

As I began to become interested in the arts of magic and mentalism, I was able to study subtleties and secrets of the human mind that allowed me to better understand how we create our world on a psychological level. Not only that, but I also learned how easy the mind was to bend and manipulate, and how people’s perception of reality could easily be distorted. Through my teens, I even worked with hypnotists who I watched influence people to completely act in ways that no sane person would act. Once you have seen enough people cluck around frantically like chickens, then snap out of it moments later with seemingly no awareness of what had happened to them, you start to question how solid and non-pliable the human mind really is.

That said, at some point I started to ask the question, “What if all the stuff people felt at church was also psychological manipulation?” That is not to say that it is being done knowingly. Maybe sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. Maybe sometimes we deceive ourselves into emotional or even sensory experiences that we perceive as supernatural. I think this can be true at times. Some people who watch Ghost Adventures often will critique the experiences of the people on the tv show as being self-conjured. Yet here’s the challenge of judging the reality of that claim: If anything or anyone from another realm was actually to communicate with us, how else would they do it apart from our senses? And how else would anyone interpret their experiences if not through their mind? Even if relatively concrete evidence presents itself, there is still an act of faith in believing.

An atheist mentalist I greatly admire named Derren Brown did a show in 2016 entitled “Miracle,” in which he explores the pliability of the human mind in a religious context. After a certain point in the show, he switches to using church-like language. The show essentially turns into a classic church healing revival like you might have seen on TV back in the day, complete with miracles, healings, and even people from the audience standing up out of wheelchairs. His conclusion in the show is not that miracles aren’t real. In fact, he doesn’t even claim to understand how some of the healings that occurred at his live show happened. At one show, a woman who was blind was cured of blindness and made able to see. At another show, a woman in her 30’s who had a paralyzed arm since she was a kid was able to move her arm for the first time. Many years later now, some people still claim that show changed their lives. Though Derren, a stoic and an atheist, was praying and commanding people be healed as part of the performance, some of the miraculous things actually happened for real.

Derren has, when pressed on that in more recent interviews, attributed it to people being more free and capable than they thought they were, and he simply gave them permission to step out of the boxes they had been living in. While he still views it all as purely psychological, or as physiological responses to the people’s changing psychology, some of the people whom the show was meant to convince left more convinced that God had healed them. It’s a fascinating phenomenon.

The beauty of Derren’s show wasn’t that he was able to explain the things that happen. He couldn’t. But he does give his theory, and he ends his show with a beautiful message: The miracle is you.

I viewed the incredible things happening at church in that light for a few years. Still, that did not explain certain things I’d seen. Once, as my sister and I prayed for a woman, she levitated slowly off the floor several times. That prayer turned into an exorcism as her body would levitate slowly upward, then violently be repeatedly slammed to the ground by an unseen force. There were several witnesses to this, and what we saw that day can’t be chalked up to psychological manipulation. Another time, a woman came to my friends and I for prayer in downtown Austin after we had set up a canopy with a banner above it that said, “Prayer Tent.” She had a blood issue in her leg. Massive blood clots, swelling in her leg that was horrendous. One entire leg was purple and swollen with dark spots all over. She had wobbled over to us with a cane. We were young and passionate about God, and people, so the three of us put our hands on her leg and began to pray. As we prayed, I watched her leg. I remembered the story of when Jesus healed the woman with the blood issue in Caesarea Philippi, and said, “On this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of Hell shall not stand against it.” I spoke those words under my breath, and in a matter of seconds, I watched the dark spots beneath her skin begin to fade away. I watched the swelling go down. I watched her leg turn from purple to a normal skin color. I looked up to see my friend Aaron with eyes wide, because he had witnessed it too. The woman began smiling and laughing. She stood up from the chair we had her sit in, and she raised her hands to the sky. It was funny. She never said a word to us after we prayed for her. She was too happy to be healed, and the rest of us were all in a stunned silence. She started walking away without the limp that she had before, and she threw her cane to the ground. I remember watching it clatter to the pavement as she strolled off smiling and even kind of dancing away.

Those things cannot be explained by mere tricks of the mind, belief in self, or psychological manipulation. Those things… those must have been real. Yet despite having those experiences, I somehow, in my pride, convinced myself for a season that it was not all as supernatural as we thought. At times, I believed it was, but I also believed that the supernatural and natural were not different from one another. That, even now, seems more like it.

But here’s what I’m getting at… after all this time… all this life… all these complex viewpoints, periods in time during which I believed, and those during which I didn’t… after all the knowledge I’ve accumulated, these scientific things I’ve tried to understand, to help explain away the mysteries I’ve encountered… What I’ve discovered is this: I melt in the true presence of God. It is so beyond anything purely psychological or physiological, but God works through those vectors.

I know that music can change frequency, manipulate the mind, touch the heart, and cause us to feel. That said, when I opened my front door tonight to hear what the ruckus was in my neighborhood, and I realized it was live worship music, none of that mattered. There was something in my heart and soul that needed it like a cool drink of water. I pulled on my clothes, walked over, and encountered the spirit of God that is beyond all that music can do, beyond what the mind in its waking state can conjure. I walked up to the local coffee shop where a church band was playing, I saw all these people gathered together, hands to the sky, hearts open wide, I picked up a cappuccino and joined in.

Though I understand all the psychological subtleties, though I see right through the musical trickery, though I had spent so many years tearing apart these worship scenarios from a literalist’s perspective, my heart came to life. The deepest part of who I am responded to what was happening like a whale coming up from the deep for air, and I said to myself, “The Holy Spirit is here.”

And here’s how I know: I cannot be in the tangible presence of the Holy Spirit anymore without sobbing. I just can’t do it. I break down, I fall apart, and I cry. My crying is coming from the awareness that what is happening is so far beyond what all my studies and understanding could allow me to grasp. It’s coming from the acknowledgment of a reality that’s so much greater than what words can express. Because of all that, my tears are how I worship lately.

A rush came through me that felt like mercy and grace, and a thought appeared on the forefront of my mind:

“God comes to you in the form of mercy. The devil comes to you in the form of your arrogance.”

In the short number of years that I explained away the supernatural power of the divine, I don’t feel that I was ever without God. In fact, looking back, I feel that God was entirely present. I think a lot of the time I was even somewhat aware of that. However, I was without the kind of intimacy that allowed me to enter into that deep level of conscious connection, knowing from the heart. The ability to step back into that, that was the mercy; the grace of God being actively experienced. The time I was without that was due to my own pride; the need to explain it. I took that journey as far as it could go. I had the best understanding I thought a person could have of the psychological nature of the supposed experiences of God. And with all that in mind, I sat beneath a tree tonight outside of a coffee shop, and wept. For that, as with the levitating woman, as with the woman with the issue of blood in her leg, there is no explanation.

For every heart and soul, I wish this kind of weeping.

Sincerely,
Britain Vanderbush

Warm days invite the opening of the windows, and no conversation could be greater than the whispers of the wind that passes through my house like a kind visitor on a lengthy journey. The wind and I have tea sometimes as we mingle with the sunshine spread out over old wooden floors. It whispers gently, like it must know I have a newborn baby in my arms. These moments seem like gifts, and feel like what life must be all about. When family stops by to hold the baby or swing on the front porch, the colors of nature seem to come to life. Deeper blues, softer greens, everything perfect exactly as it is. This feels like what I was born for, not for my life to be lived for me alone, but so I could pass life on gracefully to my son, and so that he may do the same.

For what use could one consider the temporal nature of time, or the possible infinities of the soul? The big thoughts that once entertained me endlessly, had me looking beyond the skin of this world, hypothesizing endlessly of what’s beyond the life we perceive, suddenly seem irrelevant in the face of my own child. All that matters now is this. Did God in all his infinite power once feel the same when he looked into the eyes of his son at the moment of the creation of man? Was it then, at the beginning of humankind, that God of all decided to become a man? Did he know then that He would take on the form of temporal flesh and bone, heart and mind, to feel and experience the beauty and tragedy of one human life for the sake of love, right from the beginning? Suddenly, I would give all else up just to fully live these moments.

I don’t have much time to think of it. I must answer his cries, change his diaper, and rock with him in the wee hours of the morning. I must swaddle him, cradle him, bathe him, and respond to the curiosity in his eyes as he looks up and studies the expressions on my face. I must be here and now because here and now is where he is, and we are in this together.

I think of all the times I sat and listened to monks and teachers talk about the importance of doing all that you are doing with total dedication and attention: washing the dishes, changing your socks, brushing your teeth, and even breathing. The kind of presence that I learned then with dedication, focus, and attention would have come naturally to me in these moments. I feel that as a deep and present truth.

My dad teaches people about the nature of God’s grace. I’ve seen the way that a person without a revelation of the gift of grace will try to earn what could be given to them if they’d open their hearts to realities deeper than what can be brought about by the toiling that they do in a constant state of perceived worthlessness. Grace is written into the realities in which we are born, and is brought to fruition by the events of our lives, simple as they may be. It is by our toiling that we fail to perceive them, as they are plentiful throughout life by way of the omnipresent God that grace itself represents. It is by living and experiencing, without resistance to life, that we will realize it.

The father who finds total presence in the eyes of his child may be as awakened as the lone monk who adheres to celibacy in monasteries high in the mountains, intentionally putting himself into a position in which he must serve, become free of the desires and movements of the egoic self, and come into intimate contact with deeper truths of being. While one seeks total presence by that route (and may find it), the other finds it by simply being thrust into service by way of living his everyday life. The possibility of that discovery, in and of itself, is grace written into the way of things.

We often push away life the way that it is in search of some greater way of being. But we come into a greater way of being by first embracing life as it is. After rejecting the life from which he comes, the monk must learn that too as part of his walk.

Tonight, the Happiest Millionaire plays in the room next to me as I finish writing the closing of this piece. I hear the songs that played six years ago at my wedding. I hear the little sounds of my son as he readjusts in his bassinet, the result of the love we shared and celebrated on that day. I feel the heaviness of my eyelids as my body beckons me into a sleep which will surely be interrupted. All of it feels like the grace of God. Perhaps all those years of training simply prepared me to see it that way. If that’s so, then everything has been grace.

Look no further, fellow monks, than the experiences of your lives. Grace, I assure you, is sprinkled throughout and within them. I wish this grace upon you, all of it, and the grace to find it as you follow your own path, so that you too may wake up when you are called.

With love,

Britain Vanderbush

Life starts us out by putting us through birth. Constriction, movement, discomfort, being expelled from the only place we’ve known in the physical world as home. We touch air for the first time with our skin. It’s new; unfamiliar. We have to breathe it, so we gasp. It makes us feel something in our chests that we’ve never known, so we cry out at the feeling, and reach for we’re not so sure what. Within reach has always been something to touch, and now we’re grasping at air. So maybe we clench our fists and feel our own skin against itself. There are sounds, clearer and louder than before. There is cold, more cold than we’ve ever felt. There is room to move, so maybe we stretch. We do all this as the remnants of our old home are being cleaned off us, and we cry or question, until we find ourselves held in an embrace.

We do that over and over again throughout our lives. We are constricted, expelled, pushed and pulled, we feel new things and uncomfortable things, we cry out, and we wait for embrace. It’s a pattern, and it’s the pattern of growth. It’s the pattern of life.

If you learn to watch your life without too much concern, you can welcome these changes. You can see the discomfort and invite it in, explore it like you’re learning about a new friend. The Buddhists call this practice, “Inviting Mara in for Tea.” The term comes from ancient tales of Buddha in search of enlightenment. As he sat meditating and learning the nature of his mind, he watched all these negative things come flooding in: lust, anger, greed, jealousy, sadness, fear, etc… These were said to be brought to him by a demon spirit called “Mara,” who wished to cause him to stumble. It’s not too much unlike the stories of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. Mara would throw everything she could at him, but nothing worked. The Buddha, it was said, instead of turning her away and fighting, causing the disturbance to grow, would sit down at a table and serve Mara a cup of tea as he would an honored guest. He would recognize what was being thrown at him to destroy him, but would remain so undisturbed that he would enjoy his own tea until the demon got frustrated and left. The Buddha would remain sitting with his tea, untouched and undisturbed.
It is recognized that resistance creates its opposite. It’s a fundamental law of physics: One object pressing against another is by default creating an equal and opposite amount of force. We create our own problems this way. We create our own enemies this way too.

So when met with disturbances, with discomfort, with change… we invite it in for tea. We must. It’s the only way that we can grow - willingly at least.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

—Rumi

I am a father, and my son will be here any day now. I suppose that’s why I’m thinking about growth, births, and new beginnings.

I went into the cave where I work today to get some 3D scans of one of the rooms for a project I’m working on. While waiting for a tour group to exit the room I needed to be in, I wandered back into another area where I sat on the floor. In front of me was a large room that looked nearly endless, a pile of rubble, under which I know are countless bat bones crushed by a collapse around 30,000 years ago. A jaguar was found back there too. I sat at the base of a debris cone that came in through a sinkhole and naturally sealed itself shut about 12,000 years ago. Near where I was sitting was discovered a Giant Ground Sloth. To my right was discovered a Glyptodont, and a Florida Spectacled Bear as well, all from the Ice Age. It is possible that Native American people entered this cave when it was open to the surface, during the same time all those animals walked the earth as well. They would have walked right there, about where I was sitting.

I turned off my flashlight and sat in the darkness, waiting for that tour group to leave. Total darkness, no source of light. It didn’t take long for my eyes to play tricks on me in the darkness. Was that movement? Was that an orb of light? Did something unseen flicker across my consciousness? When the senses are dulled or withdrawn from, and stimulus is reduced, you access parts of your psyche otherwise unknown or less accessible in our world of constant stimuli. Out loud, I said, “Hello,” to the silence. A couple of seconds later, thought I heard a man’s voice from the darkness make a sound in large corridor in front of me. It… also could have been water hitting something in a way that happened to make a noise I somehow interpreted as vocal tone, I thought to myself. Then I got very quiet, just in case something conscious in the darkness had responded to me. Maybe I didn’t want him to find me, I thought.

I could have responded immediately by turning the light back on and ending the whole experience. I saw fear of the unknown pull at my mind ever so slightly. Instead, I did something different. I smiled, and in my heart, I poured a cup of tea. I was not attacked, I was not in danger. I was at peace.

So why I’m telling you this? When you find yourself facing uncertainty, or something unfamiliar. When you feel yourself rubbing up against the edges of what you know to be certain and true; when you say “hello,” in the darkness, and the darkness unexpectedly whispers back, do not give in to fear.

Instead, pour a cup of tea.

You are right where the growing begins.

It was quiet in the desert one early morning in May of 2022. I was waking up in the Mojave for the very first time. I didn’t know it then, but I would do it hundreds more. I was amazed by the stillness, the gentility of the wind blowing nearly microscopic grains of sand that must have looked much larger to the little ants and beetles I’d seen crawling around on the desert floor. I sat in a sturdy rocking chair on the front porch of a tiny cabin while I looked across the way at a larger house where my friends were still sleeping. A large creosote bush to my left nodded a constant “yes” to the world in that moment, bending gracefully beneath the gentle breeze.

Everyone was asleep but me. I’d been working to stay in contact with that quiet part of myself. Quieting the mind through mantra, meditation, keeping my thoughts from running wild so I could hear beyond the constant chatter of my mind. If the mind became quiet enough, I believed I could encounter living truth in the spaciousness beyond all thought. I breathed, and let all the thoughts slip away.

In that quiet state, I listened for the still, small voice within. The voice of the soul. Perhaps it was that voice, inaudible, existing in a realm beyond thought or language, that encouraged me to pick up a book before I left for that trip. It was a translation of “The Showings,” writings left behind by the Christian Mystic, Julian of Norwich, translated by author Mirabai Starr.

After my moments of silence, I brought my mind back to a slow and stable level of function. Looking around, I saw that I was still the only one awake. I picked up, opened the book, and began reading.

I did not consider myself a Christian at the time. Nor did I consider myself a non-Christian. I was something in-between. I had stripped myself of believing in the specialness of Jesus Christ, which now pains my heart to say. However, at that period of time, I was focused purely on the mystical Christ (not the man). By that, I mean the Christ who, “Is all and is in all,” as is written in Colossians 3:11. I was focusing on seeing God in everything and everyone. Looking at everyone you meet as “God in drag,” as Ram Dass had put it. From this vantage point, I did not see Jesus as separate from Christ, Christ as separate from you or me, or from anything else for that matter. There is some beauty in that mystical view of things, and it put me into a state of bliss that felt eternal. Still, there were pieces to the puzzle I was missing. I was in denial of who Jesus really was, and how He paved the way for us to come into a conscious state of union with the Father, not by our own works, but by His grace. That, however, is not what this particular post is about.

I read that book for what could have been hours, as the sun rose higher, and the desert grew warmer. Of all the phrases I could have written down, I only recorded one. I came across it earlier this week in a note, and I stared at it in awe. A clue left behind by a former version of myself, a breadcrumb in the story of my life that was leading to who I would become. A record I don’t even remember making, and an invitation for the divine to wreck me so that I could truly see the graciousness that I was situated in at that moment.

The note, a quote from Julian of Norwich, read as follows:

This was not the simple logging of an interesting quote. This was not an intellectual thing or a thought experiment… This was not even the cataloguing of something I didn’t understand, but wanted to understand later. It wasn’t an appreciation of the poetry of these sentiments… This was deeper. This was a crying out from the deepest part of my heart. This was my soul, taking note of this other mystic’s experience, and inviting that into my life. This was a moment in which my heart said, “Shatter me, so that I may know You like this, at the level of my soul.”

What you ask for, my friends, even from a mentally unconscious standpoint, will be given to you. If you ask it in the name of Christ, even if that asking is done from your soul alone, it will be done. My soul did the asking for me, and my mind was simply not puffed up enough to get in the way. It said, “Shatter him, so that he may know it is Your longing that draws him to You, and that he may live in the boundless goodness of God.” So I was shattered.

Three years later, I would be driving away from that same desert in a moving truck, shattered, and new.

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Britain would aim to become “spiritual, but not religious,” as he put it. Spirituality, to him, would be reduced to a mental game in which letting go of one’s assumptions, convictions, preconceptions, and reactivity would become the freedom that people often turn to religion hoping to find. Buddhism, he thought, might have it right with all the “letting go” business. It turned out, he decided, there was indeed something to it.

He questioned whether or not our projections of God were just tools we used mentally to allow us to let go of the things we couldn’t let go of on our own, or if they were creations of the mind that existed to give us explanations for why things were the way that they were. He let the doubt cause him to ask big philosophical questions. He tore apart the rules and expectations of society as though it were his life’s goal. He thought that perhaps he was right and the rest of them were all wrong.

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Then the industry crumbled to pieces. I was left out to dry, and even those with seniority decades above my own came tumbling downward with me. There was no climbing back, though I tried. I ended up jobless, in a desert both literally and figuratively, and had to start finding work elsewhere to stay afloat.

Over the past few years, I have done a variety of jobs completely unrelated to that industry, and I did these out of a necessity to support myself and my wife.

My parents always taught me one simple lesson, and it’s something I’m so grateful for: “If you can be faithful in the little things, you can be faithful in the big things.” When I think of that phrase, I almost always hear it in my mom’s voice. When I was a little kid, I didn’t want to clean my room or take care of the house. I wanted to practice my magic tricks so I could have my own show someday. “If you can take care of your room, maybe God will help you have that show you want,” mom would say. It was a tactic I think she’d adopted shortly after the, “what if President Bush came to the door right now and wanted to see your room” tactic had stopped working. Though I do have to admit, I often do still think of ol’ George W. when I’m cleaning the house.

When the time came to do something else, I knew how to pick myself up. I’ve scraped the bottom of the financial barrel hundreds of times, but I’ve never been afraid. Somehow, I always find a way to pull through, work to do, or some way to pay the bills. If not for the work ethic I saw modeled by my parents, it’s likely I wouldn’t have that.

So many times, I saw my mom and dad adapt. I saw life throw them curveballs, I saw the bills come in the mail, and I ate the Taco Bell we could barely afford. Nobody demonstrated faithfulness in the small things better than my parents. I have seen them time and time again pick themselves up and find another way. We are adaptable like that. I think it runs in the family.

Today, I’m not getting paid to make video games. I’m taking people on tours of caves instead, for a lot less money than I used to bring in. I don’t take any time out of my work day to think about what I’m doing now vs. what I used to do. I love what I do. When I first went in to apply for the job, they said, “Do you know what you’re applying for? You might be a little overqualified.” I wasn’t concerned about that. All I wanted was something I could love doing and that I could do well; something small that I could be faithful in.

What I’d learned about the big things is that I could be faithful to them, but they weren’t faithful to me. Big business rarely shares the same values as those most fit for doing the work that they need. In my case, the biggest fracture in values was that lack of loyalty companies had toward their workers. After all that time, all the sad last days at different companies, tearful goodbyes, and layoffs I didn’t deserve, doing the small things again faithfully sounded like all that I wanted. At some point in getting older, stability began to seem more worthwhile to me than chasing fleeting glitz and glitter.

So I don’t think about it much, or fret about the amount of money I have. I just lock into what I’m doing, and do my work wholeheartedly, even when that means I’m scrubbing the grime off the bathroom floor. I just do it.

A great Indian Saint named Neem Karoli Baba once said that we should do all our work as if to God. “Love people, serve people, and remember God,” he would say. I think of that often. I think of how Neem Karoli Baba when once asked by a group of Westerners how they should meditate… He told them, “Meditate like Christ,” then he walked away.

Some time later when he passed back by them, the same group asked him, “Baba, how did Christ meditate?”

The old man closed his eyes and they welled with tears. A single tear fell down his cheek, and he said, “He lost himself in love.”

Over the years, I’ve heard that story repeated many times by the people who were there. They are older now, and still so impacted by that moment, and the statement… “Meditate like Christ… He lost himself in love.”

I am always doing my best work when I am lost in love, both for what I am doing, and for those for whom I do it. I don’t do the small thing just to get to the big thing anymore. I’m not writing this to get to any sort of goal either personally or financially. I am writing this because I love it, I love the duty I have to it, and I love you. I am writing this because we always become our best selves when we lose ourselves in love. To me, right now in life, that means being faithful in everything, big or small. It means simply picking yourself up, and doing the work, even if it puzzles other people to death.

Today is cleaning day, so I’ll be in my bedroom, hanging up my clothes, and thinking about George W. Bush.

With love,
Britain Vanderbush

Some of us are method actors in life. Ever think about that? Bank teller, writer, vacation planner: these are not ultimately our truest identities. The people who believe they are, however, who get lost in the act, will probably do the best at playing those parts. This is why actors go “method.”

In fact, those who reject their roles are often the worst at playing them. Sometimes you get a rare breed of person who is able to embody a role fully without getting lost in it, without forgetting to firstly identify with their soul.

In the past, my aim has been to free people from the roles that they play, aiming to put them in touch with their souls. However, as time goes on, I realize that it’s okay to be lost in the drama of life. It’s alright to be lost in the parts that we play. It might actually be the most helpful and fruitful thing for many of us on the path.

(Continued below)

What the East has to teach the West:

Hinduism and Buddhism, being as old as they are, have beautiful ways of viewing this topic. They call the roles we play our “dharma,” meaning our “duty” or “path.” Within those traditions, through things like meditation, people can come to an awareness of the nature of their souls, and their connection with God. Awareness of one’s true nature, however, does not invalidate the necessity of the path that each person is born to walk. There is an understanding in their culture that walking one’s own path is a way of living their dharma. When you go to India, you will meet the most deeply spiritual, mystical people, and they will have no problem washing the dishes, sweeping the streets, and living out their human roles.

I have such a deep respect for these eastern cultures and the way that they approach their duties. Having walked the path of Buddhism and Hinduism before coming back around to Christianity again, I really sense that we would do well in the west to learn many of the lessons of the east. In the west, somehow we have lost that sense of duty in a large portion of our culture. Entitlement has led people to reject their duties and the paths that they were born to walk. I’ve met people who know and believe in their value as a soul, in their oneness with God, but who could barely pick up a spoon to feed themselves without complaining about how much work it is. These people, as I see it, have a ton more learning to do than the ones who have no clue about God or their spiritual identities, yet will work, be loyal, and contribute well to the societies that they live in.

I find myself envious sometimes of people who have one clearly defined path in life; one that works. It seems like I’ve walked hundreds, taking on various identities as I went along, and shedding them when the time came to do so.

Prior to going into animation, I saw one singular path so clearly, something I thought I could do for the rest of my life. I saw the route to getting the jobs I wanted, I knew what I had to do, the ladder I would climb. I didn’t know, however, how quickly the industry would fall apart or how much it would feel like the job that I trained for is dead in the water. It makes me sad to think about it. The value for art has changed, and the corporate appreciation for the way that it was created feels so lost in the weeds. It’s weird to have such a specific skill, to want to be able to do it, yet to have the opportunities pulled out from under you like a rug.

It’s easy from a place like that, one that feels like defeat, to become bitter. I have been, and I’ve been good at it. But here’s where the real spiritual work comes in: seeing every circumstance of your life as part of the path. The joblessness, the struggle, the climb, that’s part of the path too.

I hear the words of 14th-century English mystic, Julian of Norwich so clearly in my head, saying, “First there is the fall, then there is the recovery from the fall, and both are the grace of God.” I have to believe that. When I do, I can continue to climb. I can continue to live in a state of joy. When I’m in that place, even my struggle begins to feel like ease, and every step forward feels like power and grace.

There’s some strange mystery about my life. Something that causes me, in times of transition, to go back toward the things of my childhood, the things that brought me a sense of adventure and joy. Today, after sitting at the DMV for a while, I got in the car and drove to a place my parents sometimes took me when I was a kid: Inner Space Cavern. It’s an ancient cave in Georgetown, TX, filled with wondrous things: Stalactites and stalagmites, ancient animal bones from creatures that no longer exist, hidden passageways, and mystery around every corner. I loved going there when I was little, and earlier this week I walked my wife and my little cousin through it for their first time. I thought about it for a few days, then today something urged me to go back there and ask if they needed any tour guides. It wasn’t too long later that I was shaking hands with the new boss and walking out with paperwork signed, a couple of employee shirts, and a start date of tomorrow.

It pays about $45 less an hour than I’m used to, but it excites me. I drove home with a mix of emotions. Joy that I found something to do, fascination with how I was drawn back to this place from my childhood, and a bit of sadness for the old career path I dreamed of feeling further away than it ever has.

The last time I really felt this exact cocktail of feelings was when I left the world of live performances and working on magic shows to work at Walt Disney World for very little pay, but a whole lot of magic, memories, and fun. I am filled with such hope when I think about what a magical situation that turned out to be. Through it, I discovered new skills, got to spend precious time with Floridian friends who were like family, and even met my wife. Great things came from that time in life. Remembering that, I think that great things will come from this time in life too.

This, I remember, is my path. It’s my dharma. It’s my duty.

(Post continues below photos)

What can we learn from this?

If you want to live a joyful life, don’t spend the time comparing yourself to others, or even to who you used to be in the past. Instead, wake up and live your dharma. Love your path. Often, when I think about what it means to do this, I envision an image I once saw of a poor Indian man sweeping the dirt streets of his town with a smile, knowing that he was doing his part in life. If he can be that happy doing his part, so should I.

You are always, at every moment, at the exact most optimum place you need to be to make your next best move. You are always, in every second of every day, exactly in the most perfect and optimum place you need to be for your spiritual growth. You are always, even when you don’t have all that you wish you did, living in the flow of the grace of God. You will feel most alive when you are awake to the truth of that.

Sincerely,
Your Desert Monk, Texas guy, and Cave Spelunker

The night before had been my little sister’s wedding. It was magic, start to finish. The ceremony was beautiful; I’d cried countless times. Little Sara — my built-in best friend in life, my sister, my buddy — in her wedding dress was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen. I watched my dad’s eyes remain glassy throughout the day as he watched his little girl get married, and I imagined I felt only a fraction of what he was feeling. Still, I couldn’t imagine being more proud.

Sara asked me to perform magic tricks at the reception — an honor greater than just about anything else. I’d bombarded her with magic trick rehearsals throughout our childhood, asking her to give me her honest opinion as I performed the same tricks she’d seen a hundred times before, hoping I could perfect them and somehow still entertain her. All of growing up, it was me asking if I could show her tricks. This was one of the first times she ever asked me to perform one. That, to me, was special.

Under the sky that night, we stared up at fireworks as they exploded in the air to the soundtrack of Wishes, the old Disney firework show we had watched so many times as a family throughout the years. It had given us hope to carry on during some of our most difficult times, when we had to work hard just to put food on the table. The Vanderbushes were always a family of dreamers, and we all had big dreams. We supported each other wholeheartedly, ran wild after the things we wished for, and that night in Italy, everything felt like it had come full circle. While the night was about my sister and her new husband, it was also about all the moments and stories that brought us there. I was grateful when Mom, Dad, Sara, and I ended up in a group hug that melted me to my core. It felt just like home.

I thought back to the night before — to all those moments, to the wildness of the dance floor, to the party with the DJ in the wine cellar, to jumping in the swimming pool at 2 a.m., then to my little sister coming to my room to talk and laugh late into the night.

Then, pulling me back into the present, I heard the bathroom door open behind me. “Babe,” Annie said. There she stood, my lady, my partner in life, holding what I thought was a positive Covid test. It took a moment for it to click. I was probably halfway to her before I realized it wasn’t a Covid test at all. It was a pregnancy test. Why else would she be smiling?

We laughed and smiled, let it sink in, then went down to the pool to see our families and reminisce about the previous night’s festivities. By the pool-house, Annie and I quietly told both of our sisters. “We’re going to be aunties,” they said as they hugged and cried. It wasn’t until later that we even realized it was Father’s Day.

My world has been shifting. From that moment, everything changed. I’d spent months sitting quietly in the desert, working my ass off, navigating difficult friendships, trying to keep steady work, and patiently waiting for a sign, for something, for anything to tell me what I was meant to do. God spoke back, “be a father.”

In a short amount of time, Annie and I decided we would move to Texas to raise our son, and to be near family while we do it. We needed to be where we would have a good support system.

I began to dig deeper into public life and policy, becoming clear about what mattered most to me — my passion driven by the knowledge that I want to create the kind of better world I wish for my children to grow up in. My stances began to shift further when I saw him in the womb for the first time, at just several weeks old. Not a clump of cells. Not a “fetus.” He was human. He was alive. He moved and felt and sensed, and I didn’t just think it — I knew it. I saw it. I felt it. That’s all it took for this pro-choice, liberal man to realize he didn’t truly even believe the things he thought he did. My belief changed. Life is precious at every stage.
Did I have to register as a Republican now? Geez.

Then Charlie Kirk got shot. I’d been listening to the guy. I’d listened to his most recent podcast just that morning. He gave such clear, morally sound, and intelligently defensible arguments on every subject he spoke about. He began to help me unravel my long-held liberal beliefs and see things in a more balanced and intelligent sort of way. More than that, he spoke so often about his love for God — his belief in Jesus Christ, and how important it is to have faith — that I began to really hear it. I had begun opening my Bible regularly for the first time in over a decade. I was thinking about going to church. I was talking to God like I used to. I was finding refuge in Jesus.

When Charlie died, something in me broke — whatever wall was left around my heart, holding me back. I went outside and prayed with my hands to the sky. I prayed like I hadn’t prayed in a long time. Then I went to church — a little Baptist church in the middle of the desert — where I wept as I sang, prayed, and listened to a gospel more hopeful than it had ever been. I understood what it meant that it was a “living word,” because it felt so new, alive, and fresh even though it had been repeated for thousands of years.

Sitting in that church, I laughed quietly to myself as I thought that prayer must really work, because how else would I have ended up there? Seriously, what the hell? ;)

This morning, I woke up in Georgetown, TX — in my cute little house, next to my wife and my son (who will be born in February). I looked out the window at my town, walked to coffee, and read my Bible in the cool Fall air.

Who am I now? The better question is: who was I before? Am I still a Desert Monk? Or am I a small-town Republican Texas cowboy? Again, seriously — what the hell? lol

I suppose it’s true that man makes plans and God laughs. We will always be challenged by what we oppose. Sometimes we will even become it. And truth will have its day. No matter how long we push it aside, no matter how long we avoid it, truth comes back around and embraces us, reminding us of who we were before we wandered far from home.

I know this post has read more like a blog post than anything else, but I needed to update you on who I am becoming. You signed up to hear from a desert monk, and he’s drifting away like sand in the wind. He is changing and becoming something new.

These days, I am looking for work, focused on how to support my family, letting go of old things, and remembering who I am. I couldn’t have predicted it, but my what a wonderful story.

Annie seems so happy here. We can walk to everything, we can sit on our front porch and enjoy the weather, and there is so much to do in archaeology out here (which is ultimately what she wants to do). We spent last weekend at the Texas Archaeology Fair, and it was incredible. Great things are on the horizon, God is working all things together for our good, and we are so, so grateful.

I suppose I will leave you with this: Listen deeply, lay down your preconceptions of how things are or of how they should be, ask deep questions without supposing the nature of the answer or the answerer, be surprised, be enchanted, lose yourself in wonder, pray, and when you feel God move you, move. Let your commitment be to truth, not to consistency.

Much love to you all, and thank you for reading.

Take care.

-Britain Vanderbush

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In the wake of tragic events, and the uproar that rises up within society, there is a necessity for people to speak the truth. If all those who spoke truth were silent for the sake of conformity or lack of confrontation, imagine where we would be. It is only because of our ability to communicate, confront, and reason that we even exist as a country; that is why we have survived so long as a species on this earth.

My heart has been filled with the vast array of emotions this week, the kind that follow tragedy, destruction, and acts that lack humanity. They have been further exacerbated by the words of mockery and vitriol that have followed. Yet despite these darker happenings that threaten to throw us into perpetual turmoil, also experienced has been a hope so nearly irrational, it feels that it can only be my spiritual heart in its longing that notices its promise.

An inconvenient truth is that if one endeavors to speak the truth, inaccuracies, lies, and intentional misgivings must be recognized, interacted with, and challenged. Every encounter with a great un-truth, or any piece of information - whether spread with vitriolic or virtuous intent - has the ability to weigh heavily on the heart of those for whom truth is of great importance. When you recognize that another individual, for whom you have a heart, has been lost in a state of mind that is contrary to reality, it has the potential to weigh heavily on the human heart, for which the tides are always turning.

How does one maintain balance in a state of such tumult?

You must nurture your heart, dear friends. You must. I plead with you to protect that in you which loves, which wishes to stand in defense of the truth, and longs ultimately for unity with those to whom you are opposed. The mind divides things up into categories, it fleshes out arguments, it gives us the ability to reason. Dividing and conquering is what the mind is great at, whether to our success or to our detriment. The spiritual heart, however, longs for union. Its desire for union is what allows it to function; it is also what allows it to break.

It seems apparent to me that a heart so affected by events that harm the mind can turn in on itself and on its own purpose, replacing its longing for union with hatred and divisiveness.

In all my years, the lesson I have learned and seen played out in reality most clearly is this: that whatever you oppose when you allow hatred into your heart, you are making allowances for your capacity to become it.

I think it worthy to examine whether or not this becoming is itself some sort of love on a much larger level. This thought experiment is meant to examine the greater workings beyond our ability to reason, a spiritual possibility that our becoming what we so wrongfully hate is the divine’s way of putting us in the shoes of our enemy, and of moving us one step closer to breaking down the barriers we would otherwise have continued to build within our hearts. In these past ten years, I have watched the conservative movement of the United States embrace the gay community that it once so vehemently opposed. I have now also seen many Democrats embody the attitudes of the Westboro Baptist Church, as this week, many are desecrating memorials and making plans to protest the funeral of a dead man. All of this weighs heavily on my heart, and I feel within me the desire to argue other people into understanding my views surrounding it. I can be prone to forgetting at times whether the intent behind the argument is to bring us to a common state of clarity and understanding, or if it is simply to win. One comes from the heart, the other comes from the mind, and we must remember that the two can work in harmony.

It has been a very long time since I have been so impacted by a major world event. I feel beyond it, however, a hope. My hope is that you do too, and that you do not let it take from you the connection to the most beautiful parts of your heart. This does not mean that you don’t speak the truth directly, pretend you are undecided on something on which you are, or that you should act and move with timidity. My advice to you is that you speak the truth as clearly and soundly as you can, but stop once in a while to feel the positioning of your heart. It is so easy to slip out of sharing the truth in love, and to harmfully share it out of purely egoic justification. It is the plight of all truth-tellers to feel the space between these two positions, and to know where they stand between them.

We are living in our heads so often that we forget to feel into the spaciousness of our hearts. Our hearts are bigger than we think, and they have the ability to hold all of the hurt, all of the confusion, and all of the things we so often wish to avoid.

Allow pain to break your heart. Allow it to move you toward truth.

Invite truth to bring you in touch with reality. Truth is just another word for Reality.

Seek to let your heart, while in touch with reality, give you hope for things yet to be seen.

Let hope keep you in a state of spaciousness that allows you not to deny what’s going on in the world around you, but to make space for all of it while you continue to speak truth.

Lastly, when discouraged by the world, let your faith tell you that it's all working together for a greater purpose, beyond which you have the ability to bring into reason. Trust that, and don’t seek too deeply for answers which can only be granted in time.

The sick irony of this topic is that no amount of words will ever be enough to fill the hole we now may feel. Our desperate attempt to fill that space can drive us into madness. Let it instead drive us toward peace, and to a greater dedication to all that is good, beautiful, and true.

-Britain Vanderbush,
The Desert Monk

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When the moment is right, he reaches for the great bow that no other man could bend, and strings it with ease. In an instant, everyone knows that the master is home. He unleashes vengeance and is at last restored to the throne and the home that he has longed for.

That is the tale of Odysseus following the Trojan War, as told in The Odyssey by Homer.

Many stories like this exist across cultures and have been told countless times across thousands of years, The Prodigal Son being the most famous among them. From the lost sheep in scripture to Simba returning to the Pride Lands in The Lion King, it is a story we never tire of telling.

Throughout this week, I have sat down to write time and time again, and one thing or another has pulled me away. Earlier this week, I went to the coffee shop to really lock in and get my work done, but a guy who was fresh from Burning Man and bugged out on ketamine sat down next to me and began interrupting my work to talk to me about how Burning Man changed his life. He never provided a single meaningful detail apart from describing how loud the music was and how many drugs he did. Again and again, I tried to return to my work, but he would interrupt me and start talking in my ear. Normally, I like to hear people out, but in that moment, I decided I was officially “over” California. I got very little done that day compared to what I intended.

Looking back on it, it was hilarious. As I see it, everything that happens in your life is part of your spiritual work. He was giving me a gift. See, what doesn’t matter is how many times he pulled me away from what I was doing. What matters is that I came back.

One thing I often see in creatives is how fantastic they are at beating themselves up for how much they get pulled away from their work. I think we all have some fantasy that we’ll be able to sit down every time and do what it is that we do without being interrupted. It’s not uncommon for writers to draw the shades, lock themselves in a dark room, and refuse to come out until a chapter is written. Many of us wish that we could be that “locked in.” We are so skilled at applying guilt and shame to ourselves for how often we drift away. In the story of the prodigal son, the boy returns in shame. The boy’s brother even treats him with resentment for it, wishing that he be shamed and punished. The father, however, shows them the real way to come back home: in celebration.

How often have you seen an artist who takes time to beat themselves up actually finish a project? Every moment wasted in resentment for oneself or one’s own life is another degree of separation away from what you want to accomplish. It doesn’t matter how many times you get pulled away. What matters is how you come back.

What if we could apply this not just to our lives as creatives, but to every other area? In work, in play, with friends, in our relationships… Life will pull us in a thousand different directions, and seemingly away sometimes from what we love, but what matters is the return. For Odysseus, it took him 20 years, but he returned. That’s why we tell the story. Make your story worthwhile by returning again to what calls your heart. Tend to it like you’re tending to a garden, little by little, and things will grow in time.

The place I learned best about the art of coming back home was in meditation. Even the greatest practitioners sometimes have the tendency for their minds to wander. What they all will tell you is that it’s about coming back. Tara Brach, one of my favorite meditation teachers, often highlights the importance of bringing loving-kindness and grace to yourself when you notice that your mind has wandered. You don’t force it back into submission, you lovingly and gently recognize it, examine it, and bring it back into focus. Tara, with a PhD in Clinical Psychology, has become keenly aware of the harm that is done to oneself by the shame that is applied when we notice we have drifted off somewhere we didn’t want or intend to be. She has examined how harmful it can be to a person’s mind and spirit when they beat themself up for it, and how helpful and beneficial it can be when we use gentility and kindness to bring ourselves back. That is how we come home to ourselves.

So, I’d like to give you permission to do something right now: Be the prodigal of your own creativity. Let the journeys you take inspire you, let them feed into the things you create. Don’t ignore the things that pull you away from your goals and desires. Be with them, let them be your teachers, and hear what they have to say. I am so grateful for that man who sat next to me at coffee, because now I get to tell you about him. I get to share this lesson with you, too. Be okay with yourself when you get pulled away. Nothing in this universe is static. If you look at even the molecules that hold us together, you will see that they are in an endless, wiggly dance of life. Nothing alive is static. We live in a very wiggly world, and you are a part of that, too.

Lost in my wiggly world, it’s been too long since I’ve written to you, dear reader. It is with great joy, however, that I reunite with you now. As the father celebrates the return of his son, I celebrate my getting to sit down and share this with you today.

To those whose minds have wandered away while reading this, yet made it to the end… Welcome back home. I am so glad you made it.

Sincerely,
Britain Vanderbush
The Desert Monk

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When I first arrived in the desert, it was with the full bleeding heart of a lover. I walked around in bliss, looking people in the eye and seeing them as souls rather than as personalities. I fell in love with everyone. A simple hello from a stranger would turn into hours of listening to them share things about their lives, their stories, and struggles. Egos would break with one long gaze and I would bring people into contact with their own souls. You could feel it. It was an energy that I was giving off because I was living on the plane of the soul. I could have started a cult.

Over the past year, I have felt so out of contact with that part of me due to life’s circumstances and the unique challenges I have faced. Friends have made up stories about me and used them to turn against me. I never thought that would happen, but I have come to understand that sometimes people will elect to believe more in their stories about reality than to see reality as it is. All of those hurtful events have affected me like the weather. Your skin changes in heat and in cold, your body functions differently, your heart beats at a different pace to accompany the changes brought about by one’s environment. An emotional heart will do that too when found in different kinds of company. Today, however, in the crisp morning air, I feel that soft and sensing part of me more alive; as alive as before.

As I grow older, I come to believe that faith is simply trusting the process. If I get too hung up on how I want to be, what I want to be, what I am vs. what I am not, I do such violence to myself. We all do, simply by our wanting. But wanting can be beautiful, can’t it? As I drove to my favorite little coffee shop in the desert today, I listened to a song written by a friend of mine who was contemplating through music the function of “want.” Where does it come from, what drives it? Want is a mystery. It can drive us to do great things, beautiful things, and horrible things. When we want so greatly that it causes us to despise what we are currently, however, we can do violence to ourselves emotionally. If we affirm what we are, on the other hand - if it is something we should not be - we may do violence to ourselves as well. Can we escape such violence? Or are we destined to experience it one way or another. Is it simply a part of growth?

Want as an energy often desires nothing more than acceptance. Beyond the acceptance is the action that comes from it. Perhaps the first thing we ever need to do is accept the feeling of want. Accept what we are and what we are not. It is in denial, not acceptance, that most all violence is done to ourselves. It is there -  in the actions that follow the feeling, not in the feeling itself - that want plays out in our lives. What happens if we learn to feel everything fully, and act consciously and tactfully rather than out of desire or desperation? In being able to do that, that’s where our power is.

Think of something that you want. Imagine having what you want. Imagine the feelings, the sensations, the thoughts you might have. Now tell me, what changes? Not on the surface, but at the core? You, the essential self, is still the same regardless of what you have. At the end of the day, you are still resting in the same ocean of awareness you were before. If you do not feel at home or happy currently in the place of awareness, you won’t feel at home or happy when you have everything you want. The kind of happiness that comes from the fulfillment of desires is temporal. True bliss is in our ability to remain at home in our souls.

I know this, I believe, because I have lived many dreams. I have felt the rush of standing on stages in front of thousands of people, of putting on a show, of receiving praise, releasing award winning AAA games, and going to big events in LA to celebrate them with fans and other creators alike. I’ve lived my dream life by the ocean, made 6 figure salaries, done what I thought brought happiness. To be SURE, I was very happy during that time, and all of it brought comfort. Being comfortable certainly is nice, and makes it easier to be in contact with those deeper parts of our souls. At the end of the day though, you are still the same pure awareness behind it all, behind the experiences, and it becomes incredibly obvious that you are simply a soul playing a role. All of that surface level stuff is only a mask, and what you really are is the awareness behind it.

Looking back at this past year, I see it and all that’s played out in this vast desert landscape simply as phenomena. It is a story that’s played out on life’s stage, but it’s all temporal as the sands that blow across these plains. Ultimately, this space is a sandbox for souls to do their work, and I was one of them.

Think of reality, for a moment, as light playing across a movie screen. And you, the essential self, are the screen on which it is all appearing. No matter what happens in the movie, what distraught, drama, or hilarity plays out, it is all just passing show. You, the essential self, are the screen, which remains behind it all. If we can know ourselves as that essential awareness, what happens here on the surface of our lives has much less power to plague, torture, and control us.

Knowing you are the screen doesn’t take away our enjoyment of the movie. It allows us to delight in it, to invest in it fully and when necessary, but not to be brought down by it.

Today, I felt like someone turned on the lights in the theater, flooded it with crisp, cool air, reminded me of who I am, and swept the floor clean of the popcorn of the past. Now, I am ready for the next movie to play, and I will remember my true essence all the while.

Today, I have fallen in love with the desert again. As this chapter comes to a close, I feel the gentility of my heart, and I know that things are happening as they were meant to. I can love both the movie and the screen, knowing that all is well. Wanting nothing but the next chapter and all it has to offer.

I pick up my little brown mat that I got from the monks at the Deer Park Monastery years ago, and a little red meditation cushion that sits atop it. I go outside, find a spot in the shade, and I sit. If I don’t, my mind can find a million games to play before it’s even noon. Thoughts of the mind are a useful tool, but they act as a lousy master.

When I allow my mind to calm, simply watching them as they pass, they begin to dissipate. Our tendency is to see a thought flicker across our consciousness, and cling to it. We follow it down a rabbit hole and end up lost in patterns of thinking. What happens when we don’t do this? What happens when we see the thought, and simply let it go? In my experience, it’s like watching ripples on the surface of a bowl of water slowly fade. You cannot calm ripples on water by trying, only by allowing, by watching, by simply being aware and not reactive. Eventually, you are left with no thought, no clinging, nothing but pure awareness, silence, consciousness in its purest form. That’s the stuff, I believe, we are all made of. That very same awareness that unites us all. Unbound by space, time, or condition. Simply free.

Today, I didn’t do that. Instead, I replied to emails, got in the car, turned on a political podcast, and hit the road. I watched the way my mind began to work, the things I wanted to say, the fights I wanted to fight, and began to see the reactivity arising. Don’t get me wrong, all of those things can be good. They can have their place. In fact, I plan on finishing that podcast later today. But in that moment, it all hit me like the moment in Jurassic Park where you see the ripples in the water signifying the return of the t-rex (man, that metaphor works perfectly here, doesn’t it?) I turned off the podcast.

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Silence in a state of great change is the way of nature here on this earth. I have felt myself in such a state of change. I remember when I was going through puberty, and the more loudly I would try to speak, the more my voice would crack. I retreated into silence. Noise, perhaps, is related to some kind of denial of change. It’s a rejection of the metamorphosis. Silence is acceptance. Silence is surrender.

When I first began to meditate, I remember what it felt like to watch the noise of my mind, the temptation of being swept along the currents of thought and habitual pattern rather than to stay anchored to the subtle movement of my breath. The mind resists stillness because in stillness comes the greatest transformation. In stillness, one can begin to identify with their soul. As Ram Dass put it, they go into “Soul-Land.” In that place, the rules are different. The game is played on a much subtler level. Existing there is like learning a new language. You will see, hear, and experience things with which you wouldn’t otherwise be familiar, and with that change comes fear. Why is that fear so prevalent? I’ll take a stab at it. I think it’s because once you’ve become identified with the soul, you stop identifying as much with the thinking mind. Your offenses to others, your ideas about how things ought to be, the structured way you’ve organized your world in your mind - all of that goes out the window. Or to put it more precisely, it remains there, but you simply loosen your attachment to it. For those of us who have learned to define ourselves according to our thoughts and opinions, the concept of losing that is filled with anxiety. On the other side of that anxiety, a place we can only arrive at through fierce trial or total surrender, is blissfulness that brings us into our hearts; into contact with the true nature of our souls.

Throughout the past several months, I’ve encountered a number of life experiences that have plunged me into silence, because what I am experiencing is extreme change. Beautiful change. The change requires giving up so much about the way my life and world have been, but I’m alright with that. I feel like through the grace of God, the attachments I’ve had have been loosened, either through life experience or through circumstances that previously were undesirable and uncomfortable.

I’ll let you in on one piece of the change. I will be moving away from the desert in just a couple of months. Of course, I love this place. Arriving here, it felt like home. It felt like a place of transformation, and I recognized it as such. People come to the wilderness to do their spiritual work, but there’s one important rule about the experience of the wilderness that shouldn’t be forgotten: you can’t stay there forever. Sure, some of the greats have hung out there for 30 or 40 years, but even they eventually had to leave too.

Several months ago, my relationships with the closest people in my life who also live here near us began to fracture. It was an extremely scary and painful experience that I still don’t completely understand. These are people I had given so much of myself for and had loved so completely. For reasons out of our understanding and control, these friendships gradually fell apart. I couldn’t understand in the moment why that was happening. Some of these friends we imagined living near our whole lives, raising our kids with. We often talked about how we wanted to still be hanging out together when we’re all in our 80’s. It was unfathomable to me that we would ever become distant.

In light of the upcoming changes in our lives, now I see those fractures, as painful as they were, as grace. If we were still so close with our friends, I don’t think we would have reacted as kindly to the possibility of leaving this place. Our attachment would be too great to allow us to leave. So in this way, everything feels divine.

After Ram Dass, one of my spiritual teachers, had his stroke in the late 90’s, he lost the ability to walk, to talk like he used to, and he ended up confined to a wheelchair. His whole life changed. He couldn’t write books the way he used to or use his body in the way that he wanted. Over time, however, he began to see his suffering as grace. He saw the way his life unfolded, the way that the stroke sent him inside himself. It caused him to identify with his soul. He was an intellectual, a psychologist, a Harvard professor, someone who wove words together in lectures with skill and finesse, and he couldn’t do that anymore. Instead of identifying with the intellect, he was plunged into the depths of himself. He spoke slowly and with words separated by long silences, and he learned to surrender to those silences. Rather than losing his ability to connect with people, he found himself sitting in auditoriums filled with people who desired to meet him in the silence. He would look into their eyes, his own filled with tears, and meet them in the space of pure love. Beyond words. He was living full-time in soul-land.

He said, “The stroke has given me empathy. Now, when I sit with someone who is suffering, I don’t try to change them or fix them. I just am with them. I see their soul… I look at the soul, and I love them. The personality may be difficult, but the soul—ah, the soul is so beautiful.”

It takes a great amount of spiritual work to arrive at the point at which you are grateful for your own suffering. It doesn’t come easily or by trying. You can not try to love your suffering, you just learn to surrender to what is - and in doing that, you learn to love everything - including even the pain of your own experiences and the way that they’ve shaped you.

I feel that to remain conscious means to choose love in the midst of your suffering. Not all of us are able to do that, and we shouldn’t expect that of ourselves either. Sometimes we need to experience the raw and the messy. We need to feel all the pain, the anger, the rush brought on by the judgements of the mind. We have to go through all that sometimes. I did not stay conscious through the losing of these friends. I hurt immensely, and I felt my heart growing hard. Now that I see the beauty of how all things have worked together for good, I am beginning to feel the softening and the appreciation that seemed impossible just a short time ago.

A great jazz musician can play a series of notes you with an untrained ear might think is a mistake. And if they know what they’re doing, they can bridge those notes together in a way that sounds beautiful. My favorite musician, a brilliant young man named Jacob Collier, does this better than anyone I know. He understands music and harmony in a way that even the greats have said they do not. Jacob often says, “there are no wrong notes.”

In a brilliant Youtube video Jacob once did on music theory, he explained the concept of “Devil’s Chords,” or “the Devil’s Interval.” The concept refers to the tritone, an interval in music consisting of three whole tones (six half steps). It’s known for its dissonant, unsettling, and unstable sound, which historically led to its association with the devil. Tritones were avoided, especially in religious music, and many musicians of the medieval ages did not believe it could be used in pleasant sounding ways. As Jacob explains it, playing a tritone back then was “completely insane.” Today, the tri-tone is used all over the place in music. It’s a key part of jazz, and people who have a great understanding of music theory know how to make it work in the greater context of a song. When used correctly, it sounds beautiful.

I suppose, as I age and grow, that I am learning to tie in the tritones of my life in harmonious ways, and to appreciate them even before the sounds have been resolved by the notes that follow afterwards.

That said, I have been in the midst of seasons of change, during which I have been quite silent, but I feel myself emerging anew into new phases of life which are blessings all on their own.

My love to you from this hallowed desert. I wish you comfort in your silence, joy in your change, and faith in the harmonies of your future that you haven’t heard yet.

Sincerely,

Britain Vanderbush
The Desert Monk

Reflecting:

Following my conversation with Miri Weible, I have experienced a renewed sense of fervor for art in its simplest forms. Meaning simply that I am creating now with a level of feeling which I had previously lost some of due to pure focus on technicality. If you’ve listened to our talk, you may have heard her speak about the reckless abandon with which she flung her paint onto a canvas one day. When an artist she admired pointed out the way she was painting on this particular day, she responded by saying, “I’m FEELING it!” That. That is what I have captured since our talk. Reckless abandon that allows lines and shapes to form without the hinderance of perfection, and from it comes beautiful things.

At the same time I’ve been feeling so deeply as I create, I have been revisiting the technical fundamentals of art. I am allowing myself to relearn what I was taught during the early months of my time at art school, those renaissance era techniques for capturing human beings with accuracy and feeling.

There is a beauty in the space between the technical and the intuitive. In between those two places is where they meet and intermingle, and what is intuitive absorbs what is technical, not so that the artist is constrained, but so that they are better able to communicate what is in their heart.

The Eternal Student:

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I originally recorded this with the intention to save it only for paid subscribers, leaving only a much shorter version for free subscribers. However, this conversation was such a gift, and I just can’t bring myself to cut this up without feeling like I’m shortchanging you. So here it is in full! If you enjoy this conversation, I’d so greatly appreciate it if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber - even just for one month - so I can continue to bring you more content like this.

I hope you take away joy, wonder, and inspiration from this conversation. I hope that you take Miri’s advice and wake up each day with the kind of gratitude that connects you to your spiritual heart.

Please share this with friends, loved ones, and all who might appreciate it.

Love to you all,
Britain Vanderbush

Six months later, Farrello awoke feeling destiny again and dreaded what its visit might mean this time. He asked for destiny every day, but was sick of it each time it arrived like a stranger in his bed who he hadn’t invited to stay the night. That was the thing about destiny, it doesn’t often work on your time, nor in the way that you wish. You can’t give it a schedule, and it doesn’t come precisely when you want it.

As he walked the hiking trail early that morning, he came to a fork in the road. To the left, walking straight toward him was Victoria, the person who’d hurt him most. He wanted to turn to the right, to follow his fear, but his heart held him steady in his tracks. He took one deep breath, felt destiny at his back, and walked boldly to the left. They talked for the first time since their divorce and sat together on a rock by the creek.

It was mere hours later that destiny met him again, this time in the form of death. The grim reaper stood over him in the grassy ditch, tilting his scythe to touch Farrello’s neck. Sitting up, Farrello looked down and realized that his own body was still lying twisted beneath him. He knew that he could leave his body behind, stand and run, but instead he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and felt every sensation the moment had to offer. This is what destiny had been teaching him to do.

Farrello had known that every instinct rooted in fear was based in some old story of survival. When someone confronted him with things he hated to look at about himself, the feelings he felt in response weren’t as practical as they seemed. His throat would tighten, his brow would sweat, he would feel the uncontrollable twitching of muscles in his face which he feared made him look weird. His heart would race, he would become lightheaded, his hands grew cold and his legs told him to run. Farrello knew, however, that his DNA held memory; thousands of years of human evolution had trained his body so it didn’t know the difference between an old friend’s simple confrontation and a sabertooth tiger trying to crush his skull between its teeth. Sometimes he would confuse the dissatisfying taste of a healthy herb for a poisonous berry that was about to kill him. One bite of bitter radicchio in a nice salad, and he’d find himself thinking of death. Farrello’s teacher once told him that reality wasn’t as mean as his thoughts about it, and he began to believe that. So when he felt in danger, he thought of the tiger… he had compassion for his body which did not know the difference, and he’d say, “it’s ok,” then walk right into the flames.

He faced Monroe, he looked into Victoria’s broken heart, then he’d surrendered to death. Yet Monroe heard his friend in the coffee shop that day, and hugged him when they parted ways, letting go of all the anger left in his heart. Victoria felt the closure she needed and finally felt her heart allowing her to let go of him too. The tension he’d felt from each of those relationships had loosened their grip on him. And death, at seeing the fullness of his surrender, surrendered its own mission, allowing Farrello to return once again to the earth he was finally learning to love more than fear.

“Keep fighting,” the nurse said before she left the room for the final time that evening. That’s what we always say, isn’t it? But as I watched him lying in the recovery room, wrapped in bandages and attached to wires that monitored the beating of his heart, I remembered that many of the greatest battles that were ever won were won in surrender. To love what is… enough to say yes to what our fear would have us run from… Maybe that’s the strongest thing we can ever do.