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I saw this prompt. Set a timer for 30 minutes and this is what came out: a conversation with myself.

A Love Letter to This New Chapter of My Life
An opening ritual to welcome the next season.

Drew —

Look at what you’ve done. I am full of purpose, passion, and peace in my heart. You are the author of this beautiful reality that you have created. Always the truest self, being the compass of where and what you need to be.

I have conquered many obstacles when I didn’t know what to do: getting up and leaving a place because the world called out to a destination, so I could sow the seeds of lessons in the garden of humanity. So that I could give. And take.

And in this next chapter of my life, I tend to the fields that have gone dry with doubt and want. I return to the garden I have built on purpose, where lost souls find their way back to self, once again.

Because to this next chapter of my life, I believe in trusting what my soul calls me to align the Universal Heart. No matter how many times you fall in the downpour of storms while mending your harvest: always did I stand back up and continue to work towards what soul is calling.

So in the morning I honor myself and give thanks. I kiss the love of my life and know we are connected. Growing a garden from the experience of my life, to leave a harvest behind, that is the alignment. What a beautiful 40 seasons it has been. No pen has written such a beautiful story : hero’s journey, written in the sky by God’s whispers of hope on the coldest night of the year.

A journey. A message to others: that they can do anything. No dream that has ever been remembered will die on a deathbed: pen full of ink, attempting to write when the heart stops.

This new chapter of my life is an opening ritual written in a notebook. The breath and feeling is the formula for an intentional life. The garden of humanity is laid with the fertilizer of pieces that never served you: watered by the tears of heartbreak and pain. And light, from the deepest depths of the dark. All things are necessary for a plentiful harvest.

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July 4th, 2010. Two beers down and feeling as if it was ten. I hadn’t drunken in seven months but felt like a lifetime.

A celebration of America. My brother Jon always threw the best parties. God bless his parents. Beer pong has to be one of the most American things I’ve done in a while: other than waging war in a far away country.

Boom. Crack. Shooove. Fireworks.

I immediately hit the deck and took a knee: nearly hitting my head on the table. As I looked up at Jon, wide-eyed, we both began to smile & laugh. As I rose, we embraced each other with a hug.

It couldn’t have been more than six weeks since I’d been back in the United States from Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

Happy Birthday, United States of America.

The very way we celebrate the birth of a country triggered me: a warrior that was sent away to fight for the military industrial complex. The very same sound and sight brings joy and owe to some and others back to a place where blood flows and brotherhoods and bonds are broken.

Oh U.S.A. How complex our relationship has been.

When I think about YOU- I think about sitting next to Silvi, explaining the beauty of a place where i forget how it feels: with so many cultures coming together. A walk down the street in any major city you can hear ten different languages or taste of cuisine from around the world. How someone can come here without a dollar to their name and build wealth they never could have where they were born.

When I think about YOU- I think about weight that it was to walk into the Veterans Affairs medical center. Waiting in line at check-in. I’ll never forget: as a young man barely holding it together with the crackle in his voice, cut in-line and said to the receptionist: “I need help. I’m seeing things. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

She responded: “You need to wait in line, sir.”

As we all protest : get him some help now!

When I think about YOU- I’m reminded of my first Spanish professor, Maria. What she endures on a daily basis in Venezuela. The times she was hungry and there were no food programs. No guarantee the power will be on. No one coming for you as you’re buried under the rumble of a building constructed without code.

When I think about YOU: I think about the value of life. I once stood in front of a judge. He looked at a file of letters, community advocacy, suicide prevention events, military awards and accommodations : a book of evidence of an outstanding community member - and said:

“Mr. Lucas, I deem you a threat to society.”

Raised my bail to $80,000 for having a firearm securely stowed in my home.

Just like those fireworks : we designate meaning for what we see, what we experience in our past. And experiences may vary.

My time in Colombia wasn’t an escape. It was a mirror.

A mirror to what I already had inside: I just wasn’t able to access it yet. Just like changing my relationship with the explosions and sounds of fireworks.

Happiness is a decision. I saw that in Colombia. Most people there had less than I’ve ever had. Kids don’t really need that much: just love, some food, a river to swim in, and a community where everyone cares.

Not just kids. Us, as adults too.

In Colombia, coffee is never drunk on the go. You sit. Me regala un tinto, por fa - gift me something small.

It’s the slowness that drove me crazy when I first arrived. The pace- like we all have unlimited time here.

But I learned.

Presence is valued. Not that time is going to end- but that time is here and now. So let’s enjoy it.

Vamos por un tinto. Parcharamos.

Something that drove me crazy when I was there- I miss dearly now that I’m here.

I’m learning opportunities are created by changing our internal, not our external.

We’re waging war at the same time we’re stripping veterans of the benefits they bled for.

The fireworks. It’s all just noise now - the backdrop for why I left, why I came back, why I’ll leave again, and why I’m here now doing the work.

Not here to fix the U.S.

I’m here because I found what was missing in myself. And now I’m helping others find it too.

Happy Birthday, USA. You are beautiful. You are ugly. Experiences may vary. And that’s okay.

I guess I had to come back to be reminded.

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What’s Home to You?

How do you define a safe place to reflect. To be. To breathe.

I’ve been around the world looking for my home. Maybe it comes from never feeling safe growing up. Maybe it feels like always knowing how difficult it is to connect to those around me.

I feel safe and comfortable on my own but my own thoughts can be the biggest threat. Maybe I’m so comfortable alone because it’s what I know.

But maybe what I know no longer serves me.

And in that is where the change needs to be.

I just came back from Colombia. Where I’ve always felt most at home. A new language. A new culture. Space to be whoever I wanted to be.

I’m a different person in Spanish. Less attached to what was. More focused on how the present is shaping me. Allowing space for the future Drew to emerge: though he already exists.

Everything here feels a bit dull by comparison. Muted colors. Muffled sounds. A defended feeling.

Home to me is where I feel seen. Where I feel trusted. On the side of someone who believes in me even when I have doubts myself. Where strangers want to know your story. Just to know your story.

The day I returned, I facilitated a writing workshop on emotional clutter.

The framework came from a piece I’d been sitting with from the Minimalist , about how we should be more like a cork. Trying to teach a cork to float is like teaching a bird to fly. It already knows how. It just needs what’s weighing it down removed.

A cork floats by its very nature. You don’t need batteries or an engine. You need only to let it be.

But when a cork keeps sinking, something is obstructing its natural buoyancy. Maybe it’s absorbed too much. Maybe something foreign is interfering with its ability to rise.

We are the same.

Our soul knows how to be well. We can float through life’s experiences, ride the waves of turbulence, keep our heads above water. But emotional clutter: unresolved emotions, heavy baggage, attachments that don’t amplify who we are pulls us under.

The work isn’t adding more. It’s removing what was never ours to carry.

The separation from self is the doorway home.

Coming home to yourself.

I leave you with this prompt from the workshop:

What feels heavy in your life right now? If that weight was removed, who and where could you be?

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I can’t not do what I’m doing.

Have you ever felt that way? In a position or role where there is something sweetly burning inside your soul?

I’ve been quiet for two weeks. Not because there was nothing to say because I was busy preparing for a life I’m not sure I’m choosing. Interview prep for an opportunity I never meant to create and 9-5 obligations. The kind of grinding that looks productive from the outside but feels like walking in the wrong direction with good posture.

I kept opening this page. Kept closing it.

But here’s what I kept coming back to: I imagine what my heart feels when I take a stage to deliver a speech and performance on resilience. As I open up: introducing myself through the artistic delivery of spoken word: the chills of intention and attention from others who desire the medicine of being seen.

I can’t not do what I’m doing. I know the path and clearing through the action I’m taking. That’s not a job description. That’s a calling.

The pull toward stability doesn’t mean you’ve lost your direction. Sometimes it just means you’re human, and the bills are real, and fear is a reasonable response to building something from scratch.

But I notice what happens to my body when I imagine taking that job.

And I notice what happens when I sit down to write this instead.

One feels like contraction. One feels like coming home.

What is that thing in you that won’t let you walk away from it: even when it would be easier to?

Drop it in the comments. I read every one.

The photo doesn’t show everything. But it shows everything, how my journey started and the invisible weight.

I was thirty years old in this photo. Thailand, 2016. Two combat deployments behind me. College student. Tattooed arms. Marine cover on my head. LA Marathon shirt on my back.

I looked like a man who had it figured out.

I didn’t.

What the photo doesn’t show is that I was still searching for my purpose. Still figuring out where I was supposed to be, and how I was supposed to be of service. I had started the path: speaking, sharing my story, watching it give people permission to feel less alone. Veterans. Everyday people. I could see it was helping. But there was still this deep emptiness in me. A sadness I couldn’t name. The combat mission was over and I was still looking for the next one.

And right there around my neck: a veteran suicide crisis line bandana. I didn’t even notice it when I put it on that morning. That’s the thing about that season of my life. The weight was so normal I stopped feeling it.

But here’s what really haunts me about this image: I didn’t notice the bandana because I didn’t notice a lot of things. Sixtheen years ago, a blast and a fall on patrol slowly began stealing the mobility in my shoulder. Tore my labrum. Started arthritis creeping in. And these past few weeks my fingers and my arm have been going numb:tingling, fading all while I’m trying to write, trying to show up for myself and you. The frustration of your body not cooperating, not doing what you ask of it, runs deep. But the body keeps the score, and it doesn’t care how long ago it happened. It just waits. It settles into your bones and reminds you that you’re still carrying it.

None of us look like what we’re holding.

I was in Thailand searching for something: stillness, maybe. An answer. A version of myself I could trust. But I was also a man whose body was already rewriting itself without my permission. And I had no idea.

Confidence isn’t something you wake up with. I’ve learned that now. It grows slowly, through the doing. Through showing up even when you’re uncertain. Through surviving the in-between long enough to come out the other side. And sometimes it means showing up even when your hands won’t cooperate: when the nerves in your arm remind you, quietly, that the body never fully forgets. A faint echo of something carried so long it started to feel like yours. Just as you think you’ve left that reality behind for good, it surfaces again. But you show up anyway. Even when the past is still speaking through your nervous system.

The man in this photo needed to hear that. Maybe you do too.

This week’s journaling prompt:

What is something you’re carrying right now that nobody can see? Write about what your body remembers that your mind has tried to move past.

The photo below was taken right after the blast. I looked okay. You’d never know I almost didn’t make it home.

I wrote this in December. I share it now because some things don’t age: they just wait until you’re ready to look at them again.

It’s cloudy this morning. The cold is a quiet reminder that the body keeps the score, no matter how many seasons have passed. In December, I’m always taken back to mornings where I’d wake to sip water and feel the burn of ice on my lips. Happy suits keeping us warm as temperatures dropped below twenty degrees. I’d wake to a faint tickle across my face, briefly imagining the warmth of my lover’s hands on my cold skin, before being pulled back by the reality of a rodent-infested house.

What I remember most is the coffee. Dunkin’ Donuts was a luxury. If it brewed long enough, it could almost erase the smell of sixty-four days without showers. Even now, every time I pass a sign that reads “America runs on Dunkin’,” I smile, because it carries a meaning time can’t touch. That morning, I was preparing coffee for Nick and me. It felt ordinary. Quiet. Human. Unaware that it would become the moment everything was set into motion.

Then came the explosion: one we didn’t just hear, but felt deep in our souls. A suicide bomber had detonated himself in the market. Being among some the first on scene after a man ends his life in the center of a crowded street is not something you simply process and move on from. It was the beginning of an unspoken contract, a decade-long reckoning with suffering that would demand acknowledgment, meaning, and eventually, transformation.

Through that suffering, I’ve learned the world is a place of action, not just things. We understand what things mean far faster than we understand what they are. I didn’t know what it would mean when I raised my hand voluntarily for my second deployment to Afghanistan. I only knew what it felt like to shimmy to the edge of a dust-covered rooftop after the blast and look down at a mother grieving the loss of her two young children. Heartbreak so raw it reshapes you.

Yet something else grew alongside that pain. Because I have seen loss so closely, I now recognize innocence more clearly. I see it in the way children can light up a room, in the reverence of new life held by aging hands, in moments of tenderness that might otherwise pass unnoticed. These experiences didn’t harden me: they sharpened my awareness. They taught me how fragile, and how precious, life actually is.

My purpose didn’t arrive neatly packaged. It wasn’t handed to me by time or circumstance. It revealed itself slowly, through survival, reflection, and the long work of learning how to live again. For nearly ten years, I had to figure out my own path to wellness: navigating pain, confusion, and transition, before I could begin to stand in service to others. Now, that lived experience is the foundation of my work. I help people rebuild connection to themselves because I once had to do the same, piece by piece.

Every experience becomes a threshold. Every season carries its own death and rebirth. Confidence isn’t something we wake up with one morning, it’s built through what we endure, what we choose to face, and how we respond when life breaks us open. The worst thing that has happened to you is the worst thing that has happened to you. Pain does not need comparison to be real.

What matters is that confidence grows when our actions align with our truth. When we learn through struggle : that we are capable. Capable of surviving what once felt unbearable. Capable of transforming pain into purpose. Capable of becoming someone who stands not in spite of suffering, but because of it.

I’m not sharing this because I have it all figured out. I’m sharing it because I know what it costs to carry something alone. The pain you’ve been through , the seasons that keep finding you:they aren’t evidence that something is wrong with you. They’re proof that you felt something real. And when we change our relationship to what we’ve survived, we stop being haunted by it and start being shaped by it. That’s the work. That’s why I’m here.

Journaling prompt:

What is one experience you’ve been at war with inside yourself? What would it mean to stop fighting it: not to forget it, but to let it become part of you instead of something you’re running from?

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Share Drew Lucas

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I didn’t start writing because I had answers. I started writing because I couldn’t stay silent.

We all need to be seen. To have a sense of being witnessed by community. I’ve been on this journey for over 13 years. A seed planted in the concrete streets of Los Angeles: the soil was the trauma from war -the water that gave life was my voice. A microphone in hand, trembling and scared, was my hoe to tend the land. I didn’t know what I was doing : only knew I needed to do something. To speak my truth vulnerably and authentically. Vulnerability, I’ve learned, is the birthplace of all positive emotions we need in our lives: love, faith, connection, trust, creativity, and innovation. And those last two are only found through failure. And fail I did, a lot - until now. But I’m sure I’ll keep going.

Courage: latin origin meaning heart: to share all of yourself through an act. Mine was storytelling. Battle Class was the platform I built before social media became a mindless distraction. My courage came by way of a small green NCO notebook issued to Marines. I had countless. I can’t recall the moment I began writing, but I remember it was in the middle of the night after countless sleepless days. I rolled over in bed and began scribbling all of my demons from pen to pad in the dim light already on from the corner of my room. The light had been on for years - I refused to sleep without it for over three years.

There was an open mic at my local community college. After days of suicidal and homicidal thoughts, I knew I needed to be seen. So I took the mic and read, screamed and cried , and immediately ran out of the auditorium. I saw the shock in the eyes of young people who had no frame of reference for what I was carrying. I went and sat on a bench, embarrassed. Imagine that : a warrior embarrassed of what war did to him. Then a young man named Nehi approached me and said, “That was the realest thing I’ve ever heard. Keep doing it.” And that was all I needed.

Battle Class became the catalyst to my journey : seeing the impact my voice and storytelling could have for others. This is where I realized my purpose. People resonate with someone when they see that person sharing things they don’t feel safe sharing themselves.

Street Poets taught me about the power of witnessing in community. I was already seeking and creating those spaces with Battle Class but I didn’t understand why. Street Poets empowered me to own my skills in storytelling and to understand what it means to hold space for others. Their philosophy: the gift that every person has to offer the world lies next to their wound. One must dive deep into that space - begin to heal the wound , before they can offer their medicine to the world. I became a teaching artist and facilitated workshops in youth detention centers and high schools throughout Los Angeles.

After two years I came to a realization, the warrior spirit in me was still strong, but what once was my vehicle of survival had become a barrier to serving my community. In facilitation and soul work, it must always be led with the heart. I could not do that while the warrior in me still needed to die.

February 2019, I left Los Angeles, left the United States and began my journey through Mexico and Colombia. Five months later I would meet Eagle Condor Alliance and my brother Bobby. My introduction to sacred indigenous medicine. Over the next six years, Colombia would be my home. Being a student of the medicine and learning to co-facilitate Ayahuasca ceremonies deepened my understanding of what it means to hold space , to create a container for people to heal, alongside elders and medicine men who have dedicated their lives to sharing the ancient knowledge of how to live a meaningful and purposeful life.

That journey brought me here. To you. To this.

Daylight Wellness is a community that gathers : digitally, intimately, and face to face. A fire we sit around together. Not with the intent to fix, but to be witnessed and heard. To relate to one another at a time when the world keeps pointing at our differences. I want to know your story. What experiences have shaped your beliefs and from that, what medicine do you carry to offer the world.

Here’s what you can expect from me:

Every week I’ll bring you a piece of writing rooted in lived experience and a prompt to bring you back to your own story, because your story matters and it deserves to be on the page.

Twice a month the Daylight Wellness Podcast drops : honest, unfiltered conversations about healing, purpose, and what it actually takes to come back to yourself.

I also hold small online group workshops: trauma-informed, intimate, never more than fifteen of us at a time. We write, we share, we witness each other. Themes include Coming Home, What the Body Remembers, and Burning Clean. Forty dollars to sit in the circle. Come ready, or come as you are.

And if you want to go deeper, the Daylight Inner Circle is where we live between sessions : consistent connection, resources, and direct access to me as you walk this path.

The fire is lit.

Come sit down.

P.S. If the workshops or the Inner Circle are calling to you, message me directly. Let’s talk.

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