I thought I was free at last. After successful careers as a software CEO and business coach, I knew I was ready for a change.

So for over a year now, I’ve been slowly and kindly closing my coaching relationships with all my other entrepreneurs. Debi was the last one. The person I’ve been working with going on three years. In fact, she was not only a client, she’d become a friend. But, it was time to have that discussion with her.

The truth is, I just don’t excited about dreaming up new marketing strategies anymore. Breakout branding ideas no longer appear like magic while I’m chopping peppers for the grill or taking a shower. And I don’t remember the last time I woke up in the middle of the night with the right cure for a customer’s cashflow crises.

It’s just not like it used to be.

I still love working and using my mind. Helping people solve problems is stamped into my DNA. But I when I hit my 60s, I made a vow with myself to stop taking on projects that met other people’s needs but not mine. Doing work that is meaningful is more important than making another buck. How I spend my time matters a lot more than it used to. And I can afford to make that my priority now.

That was where I thought I was headed at my meeting with Debi last week. It was the final hour of our current coaching contract. We were wrapping up a discussion about securing sponsors for her HR Colorado website. I already had some research comparing pricing packages. I offered to retrieve those files and update them with new data.

“How long would that take?” she asked.

“Oh not long, an hour or two,” I said.

“Why don’t we wrap that into a new coaching contract and go over it next Tuesday?”

And without thinking about it, I said, “Ok, Thank-you.”

The Twang

Right then, I felt a little twang in my stomach. It was exactly the kind of body based signal I’ve spent years teaching other people to trust. Sometimes it’s the tickle of a good idea. Sometimes it’s twinge in your toe telling you to watch your step.

In this case, the twang meant, “You just made a boo-boo.”

I could blame it on my decades of being an entrepreneur. The first rule of survival is never turn down work unless it’s illegal, immoral, or the client can’t pay. It’s hard to override your old habits, especially when they got you to where you are today. But I knew better. I should have checked in with my gut before speaking. Instead I agreed to do the work, send the invoice, and “see you next Tuesday.” I said yes to all of it.

And spent the next couple days agonizing over what to do about it.

It reminded me of a similar situation when I was first starting out. I was young and launching my first software company in Palo Alto back in the 1990s.

We operated out of a garage, literally. Our office was in renovated Shell station down the road from Whole Foods and Steve Jobs’s private workshop. We were a new outfit, hungry for work. That was when I met Rick at a trade show.

Rick was a VP for a big software company based in New York. He wore suits, designer glasses, and wore skinny ties like the guys in Blondie, even though he was older. His accent was Long Island and within a few minutes of first meeting, he was bragging about all the big projects he’d done, some of which were right there at his company’s booth.

Over coffee, I pitched him an idea for an education title. He lit up and said it sounded like a great idea and he’d like to hear more. He gave me his card and said stay in touch. Something felt a little phony, like he was trying too hard. But he was a big shot, he seemed interested and so I wanted to believe he was what he said he was.

Over the next few weeks, I spoke to him at his office in Manhattan. We developed an outline for the title and he got excited about the animated graphics, digital video and gamification strategies we would use. Every time I gave him an idea, he said it sounded fantastic and encouraged me to think bigger.

When he asked me to do a prototype on spec, I felt a twang. My heart kind of sank because I’d assumed there would be a budget for building something. It didn’t feel right. But we were hungry for work. With a green light from corporate he said, this could look a high five-figure project, talent for the videos, and a travel budget to fly out to work with him in New York.

“Is he for real?” one of my developers asked. “Oh yeah,” I said. But inside, I felt the quease - which is related to the twang. It’s when the twang has spoken, you ignore it, so it settles down for an extended queasy feeling in your stomach. This project was a big investment for our little company. Building a prototype on spec with nothing up front would eat up production time and money out of my pocket. But I convinced myself it was worth it.

The 7 minute teaser prototype came out great. I Fedexed a DVD to Rick along with a contract and hoped for the best. He called back the next day and said his team loved it. I asked about the contract and he said he got it, no problem. Then he changed the subject to how excited he was to take it to up the food chain. Somehow I agreed to fly out to New York and help him pitch it to the corporate executive team. On my own nickel.

So there I was, early, at the fancy corporate offices on Lower Broadway in a new Armani jacket with my briefcase and backup laptop. But right from the beginning, things weren’t right. Rick was late. The secretary seemed confused about our meeting. Rick did some fast talking. She disappeared into back offices, then led us to a conference room. Three young professionals filtered in and introduced themselves.

The VP of Education was a woman with thick black glasses and curly hair like Elvis Costello, but in a cocktail dress. She turned to the other two and silently communicated: “this isn’t my meeting, but here we are.”

I did my pitch. Everything went okay. But the vibe was all wrong. No one got excited. Rick didn’t help except at the end, when he jumped up, said how fantastic it was that we all got together and he’d follow up with Brent, whoever that was, later on. Everyone had another meeting they had to go to.

I flew home feeling snookered. On the phone Rick was effusively enthusiastic but still no contract. He strung us along for almost a month. Each call dropped a notch with no follow up, until the call backs stretched into day-long delays. Then he stopped returning our calls. When I called his company they said Rick was no longer working there. I had his home phone number. I spoke to his wife. She said Rick was not well. He wasn’t available. She sounded resentful that I’d called and hung up.

Later, I had to admit my body had been sending me signals about Rick all along but I wasn’t paying attention. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Rookie mistake. That cost me thousands of dollars and a migraine headache that lasted for weeks. But I never forgot the lesson: trust the twang.

What we learn later in life is that these signals from the body are intelligent.

The nervous system isn’t confined to the brain. It’s composed of neurons, neurotransmitters, proteins, and immune cells distributed throughout the entire body. The gut contains roughly five hundred million neurons. Biologists at the Technical University of Munich spent years studying whether the enteric nervous system could actually learn, and their research was clear: yes, your gut is smart. It responds, it’s sensitive, it remembers.

The tightness in your chest, the twinge on the back of your neck, these aren’t metaphors. They’re data.

In his book “The Embodied Mind”, Thomas Verny MD put it this way: “Intelligence is a body-wide network that is constantly sending signals to the brain to influence the function of higher brain centers in perception, cognition, and emotional processing.”

You might know it as that little zing that happens when you see old friends number flashing on your cell phone. Or that hot feeling in your ears when someone a third your age lectures you like you were born yesterday. This is the kind of information that percolates into memories and observations when you do reflective writing. For me, when I sit down to write, first I take a deep breath and let myself get quiet inside. Writing longhand with a pen and paper is enough physical activity that my nervous system and my cranial brain begin to sync up. The resulting signals start flowing as ideas, insights, connections.

Once you start trusting your embodied brain, it will provide you with guidance. You can pay attention to it or not, if you want to just trust your mind. If your mind is anything like mine, that means sorting out ideas and judgments all competing for attention with very little mindfulness. Unless you slow it all down, ask solid questions, and let the writing do its work you might find yourself agreeing to all kinds of things that don’t feel right.

Like blurting out “yes” to a client when every signal in your body was saying no.

Practices

Here are some of the things I do to keep in touch with my internal signals. Try them and see if they work for you.

Write longhand before you make a major decision. When your body sends a signal you don’t understand - a twang, a tightness, a strange shiver - sit down with a pen and paper. Don’t try to figure it out. Just write what you’re feeling. The physical act of moving the pen across the page syncs your nervous system and your brain in a way that typing doesn’t. Answers arrive as sentences you didn’t plan.

Name the feeling. Not “I’m not sure what to do.” Describe what that actually feel like: “It feels like a lump of wet laundry weighing on my chest.” “My ears are tickling.” Naming these sensations helps you tune in and decide what might mean. Most people ignore these feelings and do what they’re used to. Maybe you’re at a place in life when that doesn’t work anymore.

Ask yourself one question and then answer it. Not “What do I need to do today?” That’s a to-do list. Try something more interesting like “What would I do if I knew I couldn’t fail?” Write your answer without editing or judging. Then ask yourself another question that goes deeper. Don’t try to make it sound good. Just trust that something surprising might show up in your next sentence. It usually does for me.

Making Things Right with Debi

When I took some to write about what happened, I could see where I took the wrong turn. I didn’t want to disappoint my Debi, my client, and that over rode my vow to myself. But this was a moment to practice keeping that promise to myself by saying what I knew to be true to Debi.

On Monday, I did pull together the files for her, no charge, and composed an email that essentially said “Thank you so much, but this isn’t right for me, and I’m going to bow out.” She responded that day by thanking me for my candor and my professionalism. The bonus is that she offered to stay friends.

The twang had been right the whole time.

I just let go of my last consulting client. There is no money coming in right now. That’s OK. My time is my own. I love the project I’m working on. People say it’s doing good things for them. It’s great when your life is more about a sense of purpose instead of the hustle.

The project I built is called Guiderly. It's a simple daily practice of listening to your inner signals and using them to find your way. It’s for people who want to author the next chapter of their lives for themselves. I use it every day and it still surprises me what I learn about myself.

If that's where you are, you can learn more at guiderly.com

“It’s over,” she said. “And there is nothing you can do or say that will make me change my mind.”

With that, my wife ripped up our 18 years marriage. I felt the walls around us crashing in. My brain went numb. I tried to say something that didn’t sound stupid but it did no good. She may as well have carved those words in granite and hung them over our bed. She’d been planning what to say for months. She’d run it by her daughter. She was packed and gone by Friday.

When I read what I wrote in my journal about that time, it is like reading about a car wreck in the Ellsworth American. Direct, careful paragraphs describing the basic who, what, where, and when. There is a detached undertone of sympathy but frozen emotion. Minus the howls of rage and pain. Minus the answer to the question that turns journalism into non-fiction: why.

I didn’t know why. I groped for words for why my heart felt like split wood. I tried to describe how parts of me felt missing like lost keys and my wallet. Instead, I wrote about how the car wouldn’t start, the house was so empty, and the meals I threw out because I’d lost my appetite.

I failed to see the signs. I was unprepared for my marriage to suddenly collapse. It was like a giant wind swept out of a clear blue sky and blew our house to smithereens leaving me dumbstruck and shivering in the wreckage.

I had a neighbor named Newbold Winthrop. He was a builder and he owned a boatyard out on the point. He came from the illustrious old New York family framed in sepia pictures hung on his living room walls. He cut a wide swath in the little fishing village in Maine where we lived. He aimed to be the head selectman at some point. He and his wife, a sensitive artist, were our best friends. The four of us were all great cooks and had many a merry evenings eating and drinking to excess deep into the night.

One freezing cold New Year’s Eve, my ex-wife and I toddled home from their place, arm in arm, drunkenly singing an old show tune. We slipped on some ice and fell together in a deep, fluffy snowbank. We lay there for a few moments laughing in the dark, watched over by snow-covered pine trees, before helping each other up and making our way back to our cozy house.

I ran into Newbold at the post office a couple days after my wife left town and told him what happened.

He looked at me drew a line in the gravel with the toe of his boot. “Keep your life on your side,” he said. “And I’ll keep mine on mine.”

It turned out my side of the line was bigger than I could imagine at the time. But for his line in the gravel I might be there still, living the same life, hanging out with my semi-retired friends and the toothless goobers at Dunbar’s Store. I might never have left the beautiful three mile long peninsula on Frenchman’s Bay I called home. I might still weigh 190 pounds, be pushing 60, drinking too much at summer cocktail parties, spending too much time time in winter watching how the snow falls and little by little accepting my shrinking world as I got old.

The last I heard, old Newbie had sold the old family house on the water and moved across the road to a little prefab he put up next to the boatyard. The summer people and the fisherman moved their boats to the new place on the next cove. Winters are long in Maine and locals take pride in how they tough it out. The standing joke to people from away is you can’t get there from here. What they don’t tell you is that here is all they have.

So it was up to me to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. At first I didn’t have a clue. When my job with the Census ended I left Maine, and headed out west where I had family and friends in Seattle. I took a couple of a couple of dead-end jobs to have something to do and make a little cash. I started a master’s in counseling program but dropped out after a semester. Turned out I didn’t want to be a counselor, I just needed a some therapy. Probably drank too much. For a midlife crises, it could have been worse but I did manage to dive blind into rebound romance that broke my heart all over again. I should have known better than to chase after an Irish fairy princess. I found her enchanting but when she dumped me she gave me a chance to further embarrass myself with my friends and relatives. Meanwhile, I was writing about all of this, thinking it might help me make sense of my predicament though I wasn’t making much progress.

It was that final humiliation that drove me to seek some answers in a church basement for the regular Tuesday night CODA meeting. But what I found was not answers. Instead for the first time in months I felt accepted by a bunch of people who could really understand what a hole I was in and not make me feel worse about it. It gave me a chance to tell my story, many times, to people who had been through far worse.

What I learned in that room is that spilling your guts is just a starting place. It’s what you do with what you learn that makes a difference. Everything shifted for me one night after the meeting at the coffee urn, talking with an older woman in a leather jacket. With a tough smile but kindly eyes, she asked, “How do you think your wife really felt about taking apart a marriage you’d had together for so many years?”

I took this question home with me. It got inside my head and got me writing, thinking, reflecting, asking new questions, and going deeper below the surface. It took time and maybe it wasn’t the most efficient way to get straight with myself. But reflective writing gave me a chance to take my wrecked story and see it outside of my own little self involved situation. It gave me some distance and objectivity. I was even able to imagine what my ex-wife might have been going through. One morning I realized from something I wrote, that our marriage had been falling apart for a long time. My ex-wife had been deeply unhappy for over a year but I didn’t want hear it.

In the new things I wrote, I was able to see a man so caught up in his work that he ignored what his wife was trying to tell him for so long that she got desperate. She either had to bust a big bold move or watch herself disintegrate into depression. She did the best she could at the time.

When she said things were over, I never imagined a new life for myself, living on a mesa in New Mexico, helping other people build new lives for themselves. When the monsoon rains fall here in summer, a wonderful musky new smell fills the air, the ground opens up and all the desert plants burst into bloom.

It hurt like hell but she set us both free.

An invitation…

Guiderly is a daily practice for living wisely. It helps people close the gap between what they know and how they live through a rhythm of preparation, reflective dialogue, and intentional action.

The September Practice Cohort begins September 1 and will bring together a small group of thoughtful participants to explore the Daily Dojo, Daily Muse, and the practice of integrating insight into ordinary life.

This is not a course, therapy, coaching program, or productivity system. It is a shared practice and a chance to help shape Guiderly at the beginning.

For more information about Guiderly here is a link to the Guiderly website

If you are interested in possibly joining the September cohort, reply to this essay or follow this link: Guiderly September 2026 Cohort

Subscribe now

The phone call came at 8 p.m. I was still at work on the year-long project I had for AT&T. It looked like another all-nighter.

It was my brother, calling from Kathmandu.

“Hey Marko, I’m calling you from the rooftop of the hotel where I’m staying.”

All my work dropped from my mind. I was transported out of my office and over the continents to wherever my brother’s voice came from.

“Listen to this,” he said. He held the phone out so that I could hear monkeys chattering, a call to prayer, street vendors, temple bells ringing, and people chattering away in Nepalese.

My brother had spent the previous six months traveling solo in India. We had a big trip planned to travel and trek in Nepal, and we were going to meet in Kathmandu in a week. This was the call to firm up plans and figure out where to meet.

Unfortunately, I had some bad news.

“Monty,” I said, “I’m not coming.”

“What?” he said.

I could hear the disappointment ringing in his voice. “I’m so sorry, brother,” I said. “The project with AT&T has gone off the rails. Corporate is pissed, and I need to stay and make it right.”

I knew while I was saying it that I was making a mistake.

But it was my first major corporate contract, creating an educational video for AT&T. Even though I had my visa, my shots, and my plane ticket, I couldn’t face disappointing my clients.

The connection got kind of staticky, and I knew there wasn’t much more time to explain things. I just said, “Brother, I love you so much. I’m so sorry I can’t meet you. I hope that we can do a trip like this another time.”

He said, “I understand. I love you too, brother. We’ll have more adventures together in the future. Be well.” And he hung up.

I felt like somebody had slugged me in the gut, but I kept working and planning next week’s shoot.

It didn’t matter how much extra time I put in. I never got back what it cost me.

You know how it is. You read the books, followed the right thought leaders, bought their courses — but you didn’t make the changes. Something always held you back.

It’s the job that was supposed to be just a stepping stone. But years pass, and now it’s hard to walk away from the steady check. Or the person you married who wasn’t your soulmate but who helped you build a family and a life that no longer fits. It’s all the conversations you’ve had in your head, where you kept compromising until there was no more you left.

And what stings is that you knew all along — you just didn’t know how to integrate it.

We assume that having all the information in front of us means we’ll make better decisions. Yet if that means giving up what’s familiar, leaving our comfort zone, or breaking the pattern, something keeps us from acting. Why?

We are trained from birth to follow directions and meet the needs of our parents, our teachers, our bosses, society, and everyone else in our lives. So when we’re faced with challenging situations, or making hard choices that buck what’s expected of us, it’s like we’re a Sunday softball player suddenly batting in the big leagues.

When the moment comes and the signal shows up, we don’t recognize it. Nobody taught us how to listen for what we know inside and trust it to make better choices for ourselves.

Unless we discover a practice that closes the gap between what we know and how we act.

Not too long ago, one of my business consulting clients came up with a very exciting way to use AI to create a digital office manager system for small businesses. He and his team were super experienced in the technology. They had a working prototype getting great feedback from early adopters. What they lacked was a marketing strategy for raising investment capital and scaling the business.

In the middle of one of our calls, my client said to me, “Marko, you understand what we’re doing, and you have the chops and experience for getting us to the next stage. Would you be interested in discussing working with our company?”

As a former software CEO, I instantly caught fire imagining the potential financial rewards of early-stage equity in a funded startup. We’d already cued up pitches to angel investors and business incubators to fund the next stage of development. I knew he had all the right story pieces together. We both knew it was something I could step into — craft the right strategy, make the pitch, and lead the campaign.

I tried to contain my excitement and said I’d sure think about it, and we agreed to talk again in a few days. Right away my mind raced with scenarios for pitching and launching this project. All the pieces were lined up. All the signs said go.

But for some reason, something didn’t feel right, even though the whole thing looked like gold on paper. I started to feel a little ball of reluctance knotting in my belly.

I’ve learned to listen to my gut on big decisions. So that night, after dinner, I turned to reflective writing. The first thing I wrote was, “What is it that I’m feeling in my body?”

At first I just wrote, “I don’t know, but something doesn’t feel right here.”

“What does that really mean?” I asked myself. “Be more specific.”

“Alongside excitement about this project, I feel a cold shiver of something is wrong. It’s like different parts of me are out of sync. It’s making me a little queasy.”

“What do you suppose is causing this?”

The more I wrote, the stronger my feeling of unease grew, and I started listening to a debate inside me. One part of me was cheerleading the potential upside. But another side of me kept asking more questions. After a couple of rounds of writing over the next few days, I found myself asking, “OK, but is this really how I want to spend the next five to ten years? Is this the way I want to show up in life right now?”

Without thinking first, I wrote, “No. I am done being a corporate business consultant, and I don’t want to spend any more time in boardrooms pitching to VCs. I like my client, and I like their product, but it’s not right for me.”

I kind of hated to see that — but once I did, I knew it was the truth. It’s not like I had something else clearly lined up that I wanted to do next, because Guiderly was still in the future.

It might have made a lot of money, but it would have meant going against my gut.

So I bowed out.

There’s probably something inside you that wants to be heard. Maybe it’s under the surface. But you can feel it.

No one can tell you how to live your life. But I can tell you that the difference between me at thirty-one and the me of last year wasn’t more information.

It was that I’d learned a practice for listening for what I know inside me, using writing to put it into words, and relying on what I learn to guide me to the life I want to live — not someone else’s.

My brother is still on that rooftop, holding the phone out over Kathmandu — the monkeys, the temple bells, the call to prayer, the vendors shouting in the street.

That’s what it sounds like when you pick up.

An invitation…

On September 1, 2026, I’ll be leading a small group of people to explore Guiderly as a path of greater self awareness and living more wisely.

It will be a thoughtful month-long practice of reflection, integration, and intentional living — a chance to explore what happens when we bring more attention to the gap between what we know and how we live.

I’m looking for people who are curious, sincere, and willing to engage their own experience with honesty.

To express interest in joining the September cohort, reply to this essay or send me a note with a few words about what drew you to it.

Subscribe now

You know the answer by now. You’ve known it for years — that the life you’re living and the life you’re capable of are not the same life. The only question left is whether you keep folding on yourself, or step up to the wheel.

Have you ever stood in some place magnificent, gazing at the vast starry night sky or a glorious sunset with all the colors you have names for — and felt the weight of your life instead of wonder and joy? Something amazing is right in front of you but instead you’re stuck in your head, stuck in someone else’s needs and expectations, unable to feel what you know you should.

That’s what happened to me last night.

I went outside in my backyard and stood under the stars. Actually, I was there to cool down after a fight with my partner. At first, my head was so hot and I was so mad that I couldn’t see straight. On top of that, I felt the heavy weight of other people’s needs, expectations, and deadlines piled up in my brain. If you looked up the word “dysregulated” in the dictionary at that moment, you’d see a picture of me.

I took a deep breath and noticed I was barefoot. The grass felt cool and moist under my feet. I live in New Mexico, and what we’ve got for grass is not what you call a manicured lawn. It’s bunch grass that is tough and a little spiky, but in a good way that tickles at first. These sensations gradually increased my body awareness. The air was cool and moist after another baking hot summer day. I took a deep breath. My mind began to cool.

I noticed Venus glowing brightly off in the western sky. Then I turned south. It was a moonless night, and a field of stars was scattered across the entire cloudless sky.

I wanted to just appreciate the moment. But instead, I felt twisted up inside. My guts were churning like I was a twelve-year-old stinging from a lecture from the principal. I knew intellectually that I was no longer an out-of-control little kid. I made an effort to focus on that magnificent night sky and remember I’d never have to stand in front of Principle Beasley again.

Which was enough good news to get me through the night. But I was still carrying the overwhelm without knowing what to do with it.

Maybe you can relate. You know something’s wrong but it’s not bad enough to make a major change. And the next thing you know another year has gone by and you’re still in the job you hate, the relationship that is not working, carrying the extra ten pounds you were going to lose last year.

• • •

In philosophy there is a concept called the “explanatory gap.” It describes the distance between knowing what is true and acting like the kind of person who actually lives that truth. This goes back to Aristotle who talked about something similar, the concept of akrasia — often translated as “weakness of will.”

· “I know I should exercise.”

· “I know this relationship is unhealthy.”

· “I know having that extra glass of chardonnay tonight won’t help me solve my problems but at least it will make me forget about them for a while.”

You know better, but you don’t follow through. Why?

The gap between knowing and doing is the most expensive place a human being can live. Most people spend decades there — reading the books, going to the retreats, saying the new year’s resolutions out loud — and still waking up inside the same loop.

The problem is that you would like the rewards without doing the work. And who can blame you? Like most humans, you like the idea of exercising more than actually doing it.

The question is how do you get across that gap? The answer starts with a redo on your relationship with yourself. For most of your life you’ve wisely looked to other people’s feedback to help you grow up, get a job and hopefully find love in all the right places — or at least one of them. This has helped get you to where you are now but it’s not going to get you any further.

The morning after my night under Venus, I woke up confused. But I decided I needed to figure out why I got so bent and what my intuition was trying to tell me. Something inside me needed to get out so I could see what I could make of it.

This called for reflective writing, so I opened Guiderly, and the prompt for the day hit me between the eyes: “What has sorrow opened up in you?”

I wasn’t expecting to start in the deep end with a question like that. I considered closing my laptop and going out to water the grass. The word sorrow cut close to the bone, but instead of chickening out, something inside me made me want to answer the question anyway. It’s like when your neighbors are on vacation and some dogs have knocked over their garbage can. You don’t look for a mess like that, but you know dealing with it instead of walking away is the right thing.

I started writing without thinking: “Life is short and precious. And I don’t want to squander who I am and what I’ve learned so far or what I can offer the world.”

I clicked the “Call the Muse” button.

The Muse thought a millisecond and this question appeared on my screen:

“What part of you still feels uncertain about what it means to truly not squander what you’ve been given?”

I didn’t see that coming. But it sure got me thinking about what squandering really means to me. I thought about it for a few minutes. I read over what I’d already written. I thought a minute and then I wrote,

“Uncertain about where I stop and where other people begin. The part of me that feels responsible for other people’s needs, requirements, and expectations. These are things that I have been trained to pay attention to all my life. But not always to my benefit.”

I stopped a second to ask myself why. And then I continued writing: “It’s more about my own fear of wasting my time chasing my tail and getting distracted from what really matters. What I need is a system and a set of practices that can protect me from habits that don’t serve my greater purpose.”

Oh shoot. Where did that come from, I wondered.

I called the Muse again, and it responded with this question: “What does ‘really matters’ look like when you strip away the sense of responsibility for everyone else’s needs?”

The words practically wrote themselves: “What matters most is doing the work I love, understanding and developing more conscious awareness and sharing what I learn with others.”

That was an unfiltered purpose statement straight from the heart. I’d never seen it so clearly before. It made me feel inspired and fired up. I suddenly felt confident that knowing what I wanted like that, I could overcome whatever challenges or barriers that got in my way — including saying no when I need to when other people’s needs start overwhelming mine.

I never got this much bang for the buck with plain journaling. Don’t get me wrong, a diary can be very helpful like keeping a ship’s log that tracks where you’ve been and what happened. But reflective writing goes much farther. It’s a process that guides you from the inside out by tapping into your own inner knowing.

I call it the jump from passenger to skipper. It’s the difference between riding on a sailboat, trying to keep your lunch down while tripping over the jib line and getting nearly knocked overboard when the boom comes about. Meanwhile the skipper manages the tiller with one hand while pointing to a pod of dolphins on the starboard. He or she is the kind of person who has taken charge of their life compared to everyone else aboard who are just along for the ride.

Once you step up and take the wheel, new horizons open that passengers can’t see from their seats in the stern. Listening to your inner sources helps you understand yourself and guide you to be the expert on who you are and what you need. You go from tourist to taking the lead of your life, sailing your own boat, navigating by your own stars.

Sometimes sorrow can help you understand where you are and also guide you where you long to be. When you go outside at night and see the stars, I hope you don’t feel small and insignificant like I did, compared to the infinite wonder of the Milky Way. I want you to remember that there are people, just like you, who are looking at the same sky and feeling happy and at peace. They’ve used self-awareness tools like reflective writing to identify the conscious and unconscious shackles that keep so many of us tied to the dock. They’ve learned to listen to their inner guidance and made the journey from follower to creator.

If you stood where I stood that night, barefoot, dysregulated, unable to see the stars for the weight on your shoulders, and you’ve been waiting for someone to tell you the way back to yourself is easier than you think, that’s exactly why I built Guiderly. Not as another productivity app. As the daily practice that closes the gap between the life you’re living and the one you know you were meant for.

. . .

If this resonates, the The Guiderly Daily Muse was built for exactly this kind of inner navigation — daily writing prompts and an AI companion designed to help you stay close to what matters. I’d love for you to explore it.

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Now that it’s over, I can say it’s like getting out of a bad relationship. It might seem almost impossible at first but feels so damn good when you’re done.

I did it the easiest way out for me, via text.

I admit ending a relationship by text is not a nice or considerate way to do it. But it’s different when you realize someone is willing to hurt you for their own agenda. Then a text can be a guilt-free, totally liberating way to stop it and say “No more”. Letting my therapist go without explaining or rationalizing to him was one of the most powerful breakthroughs I’ve gotten out of therapy, however unintentional.

He was my therapist for nearly six months. At first, his quirky combination of insightful comments and helpful suggestions was useful and supportive. Over time, I began to trust him. I shared intimate details. I opened up about wounds and troubled feelings. It was stuff that was hard to get out. But I was determined to look at my shit, “do the work” and hopefully make some progress on the knots that make me feel stuck and doubt myself.

To give him credit, my therapist was helpful for months until, one day, he threw me under the bus. It happened when my partner asked me to co-chaperone a trip for six teenaged girls on Spring Break to Playa del Carmen. I really didn’t want to go. And he agreed with me. Neither one of us could imagine how that would be any fun. He encouraged me to say “No way.” He said it would be good practice to assert myself. Maybe I’d see it was OK to disappoint my partner and survive.

So that’s what I did. But when my partner flew into a rage, during a couples session with the two of us, he backed way off. He sided with my partner. He advised me to find a way to be okay with going anyways. I felt ambushed and I caved.

When I returned, sunburned and roadrashed after getting the old man treatment for a week, the vibe in our sessions was different. I continued spilling my guts and talking about sensitive stuff that was raw and tender. And he still listened. But his responses began to shift. He began subtly putting me down for being too sensitive and taking things too personally. Then at the end of a particularly challenging appointment, he summed everything up with a harsh personal judgmental that hurt like getting poked with an ice pick:

“This may be hard to hear”, he said to me. “And I want to start out by saying, I don’t have a problem with you. I like you. But you are filled with resentments. You aren’t able to hear feedback from others. You blame everyone else in your life for what’s going wrong. I don’t think you even want to show up in these therapy sessions anymore.”

He paused on the zoom screen, then leaned forward, “Like I said, this may sound hard to hear. I don’t mean to be harsh. But sometimes good therapy hurts. It can mean the process is really working. So go ahead and be mad at me for a while and then get over it.”

I couldn’t think what to say. Getting attacked by someone I trusted like that, I choke, and lose my voice. He signed off. I clicked the end meeting button, closed my laptop, and felt a dull roar inside my head.

It was like the time I was doing a trust exercise with this guy named Bradley who was a Tibetan Buddhist.

He had me balanced on his back, my arms outstretched facing the sky with my eyes closed. Suddenly, he flipped me off and I landed hard on the ground. The wind got knocked out of me and I couldn’t breathe. I felt totally disoriented. I looked up at Bradley and he was smiling.

“I thought I’d teach you a lesson about detachment,” he said and offered me a hand.
I felt bad afterwards that I took it.

After that last appointment with my therapist, I decided to look up word “therapy” and see what it meant for myself. I have a copy of the two volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. It is printed in such dense text that you need a magnifying glass to read it. I found the word “therapy” and read that the essence of the word is to heal. This surprised me. Up until then I’d assumed it meant: how do you make sense of your life? Or how do you cope? Healing made me think.

I decided to do some reflecting writing about this situation. I asked myself, why am I in therapy in the first place? What came out was my desire to be a better human being and partner. Is that what you are getting from this therapist? The more I wrote, the more I realized that these sessions were not helping me anymore.

My therapist was wrong. Therapy is not supposed to hurt. Writing helped me see I didn’t need to buy my therapist’s attitude towards me. That was his story, not mine. I could stop and say “No more.” Letting go and just walking away felt new and uncomfortable but good. I felt a giddy sense of clarity.

The next morning, after a shot of espresso, I pushed send on a simple three-line text. I felt a sense of release. I felt glad I’d said no more than “thanks and goodbye”. I put on my running shoes, grabbed my sunglasses and earbuds, and walked out the door for a long walk listening to Michael Pollan’s new book about consciousness.

If this resonates, the The Guiderly Daily Muse was built for exactly this kind of inner navigation — daily writing prompts and an AI companion designed to help you stay close to what matters. I’d love for you to explore it.

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For weeks I’d felt lost, stuck, unable to focus. The endless bad news from Washington felt like a daily belt sander grinding up my attention. Overdue projects were piling up so high in my mind I was terrified they come crashing down and I’d never catch up. My partner and I were arguing all the time about stupid things like who left the dishes in the sink. An anxious knot pulsed in my stomach. Everyday I felt more lost and disconnected from what matters.

I needed to do something radical. I decided it was time take a vision fast - a three day self guided spiritual journey without food.

As much as I love to eat, and I do love to eat, I know from past experience that fasting is powerful antidote overwhelm and burnout. It’s a simple, immediate way create more space, do a deep internal reset, and reconnect with what’s essential - all without having to leave home. Purposely not eating is a traditional way to alter your consciousness without drugs and enter into an extended period of mindful awareness. Just what I needed.

The first 48 hours were a long, stretched out ordeal spanning the width and breadth of each day. 24 hours seem immeasurably longer when you aren’t taking time to eat. It’s not just hours spent shopping, cooking, and eating. It’s not just filling your belly. There’s also an emotional sustenance from food that is more primal. Something like, “No matter what else is going wrong, at least I am eating.

And if that something is also delicious, then we are feeding our senses like humming birds on nectar. Gushes of dopamine-driven pleasure chemicals flood your system while digesting carbohydrates, proteins, and fats along with salts, sweets, and sours. Beyond survival, food gives you a sense of well being that is completely missing when you don’t eat.

When you fast, you get empty inside, a hollow feeling rather than fullness. After a time, when you accept that you are not eating on purpose, a new depth of consciousness begins to flow through you. You enter into a dreamlike state, unmoored from time and meals. Your attention expands, you become very sensitive to sensations, smells, and sounds. Time slows and you begin to feel a connection to what is sacred and real again. Indigenous peoples throughout time, as well as mystics and spiritual seekers, have used fasting to cultivate this altered state of consciousness. It’s what I was seeking and by the middle of the second day, I felt totally immersed in this heightened state of awareness.

Yes, you get hungry, or at least I did. On day two for example, my daughter heated some curried Indian food in the kitchen. Our house is very open and the intoxicating smells wafting up to my studio made my nose open like I was a hungry lion on the Savanah smelling the nearby presence of prey. The sensation was painfully delicious but instead of following it or resisting it - I just let it fill my senses with longing.

All I had to do was go downstairs and help myself to something that smelled delicious. But my sense of purpose was balanced against my hunger, my fatigue, and the pangs of desire. Instead of acting, I got curious. I asked myself things like: What is real hunger? What do I really need? And what is this emptiness revealing to me about what really matters?

Once these questions bubbled up inside, I focused my attention on them instead of food and curiously, a sense of well-being and self contentment replaced my hunger.

I had purposely set out to recalibrate nervous system with this fast and certainly, nothing short of psychedelics or extended meditation retreats has given me the state of mind that allowed me to ask these questions and feel inspired to go deeper with the answers silently signaling from within.

A friend said to me, “I still don’t get it. Why would you want to go hungry on purpose?”

This is what came to me: Imagine you’re a sailor with a lot of blue water crossings behind you, and you wake up in the middle of the night during a storm. Not only do you not know where you are, but all your electronics have shorted out and stopped working. You’re surrounded by a big dark ocean.

You have to go back to the old ways of navigating - getting out your old paper charts and the brass compass you’ve haven’t used since they invented GPS. You find the North Start and it calms you while you being to recall what you learned about celestial navigation. You take readings and write down your points on the chart in front of you. Your hands shake a little bit because you’re afraid, but you keep breathing. You almost hear your dad’s voice reminding you to take your measures twice. Getting off by even a degree or two can mean the difference between a safe harbor and a reef that will rip out the bottom of your boat.

As you work, the fear retreats, and you start to feel conscious again because you are in tune with your tools and the world around you and the sense that you are making meaning out of what was before dark chaos. You remember that you’ve been lost before and you’ve found your way, and this is not different. By making your marks, you are making your way and finding a route based on where you are and where you want to go.

An extended fast is just like sailing out beyond site of shore, turning off the radar and navigating the old way. You put yourself in a position to challenge what you think you need and discover you can completely change your relationship to the world around you. If you let yourself, you break through to a depth of consciousness that is awesome, silent, and vast as the universe - right there inside you And this can all happen without leaving home. It’s quite a rich experience in exchange for an empty belly.

I woke up on the 3rd day, surprised with how my ego, my sense of what I needed, seemed greatly diminished. Instead, my mind felt calm and tranquil while simultaneously buzzing with kinetic creative energy. It was like having quiet pop rocks going off in my head with a background soundtrack of Coldplay.

I remembered that one of my overdue projects was to record a video for The Daily Muse. Sunrise seemed like the perfect time and since it was 5am, I jumped out of bed, got my camera and equipment together, threw it in the car, and arrived at the perfect location with just moments to spare. I felt like the universe was with me, everything came together like magic, and I got the recording I needed just as the sun was rising from behind Taos Mountain.

Michael Pollan says in his new book about consciousness, A World Appears:

“it takes a certain kind of mind for “the problem” (what is consciousness?) to arise--one that is self-conscious, or aware that it is aware, and marvels at this mystery (which is, when you stop to think about it, astounding).”

I read that and thought: this is the whole reason I write and why I want to share with Guiderly. To stay close enough to the mystery and allow it to keep astonishing me.

——————————

If this resonates, if you're someone who uses writing to get closer to the mystery of who you are, then you're the reason I built Guiderly. Every morning it gives you a real question and a private place to answer it and then something very interesting happens: it reads what you wrote and asks you a question back. Not advice. A question. The kind that opens a door you didn’t know was there.

If that’s the practice you’ve been looking for, it’s here.

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I started ditching class in first grade.

I hated sitting in a double desk next to Connie Coleman who smelled funny and behind Rickie Oshewski who farted all the time. It was impossible to learn anything in that classroom. So I started using a bathroom pass to hide out in the library. I loved books and I already read like a maniac whenever I found something great like Treasure Island or Hound of the Baskervilles. I would walk to school reading a book if I couldn’t put it down and I swear I learned more from books than any teacher, except Mrs. Hutchison. She wasn’t actually a teacher, she was the librarian, which was way more important than even the principal, in my book.

The first time I went into the library at Edmonds Elementary School, I felt so excited seeing all those shelves and stacks filled with more books than I’d ever seen anywhere. It was my first real library but I felt good there right away because my Grandma Ruth had lots of different books in her big house in Minnesota.

The school library had big windows, white linoleum tile, and smelled like a combination of paper and glue and binding and maybe the stinky smell of the ink pads open on the checkout desk where you’d get your card stamped. Mrs. Hutchison was usually the one who was behind the desk. She had gray hair she wore up in a bun and those cat glasses that kind of swooped up at the edges. She wore lipstick and nice dresses and always had a red sweater that looked like a cape buttoned at the top, but open. She also had a nice smile, like my grandma’s, that said she didn’t mind if I was sort of a delinquent as long as I loved books and kept my hands clean.

After a few times of getting caught in the library when I was supposed to go back to class, Mrs Hutchison made me a deal. If I stayed in first grade in the morning then I could come in after lunch and help shelve books.

At first the Dewey Decimal System was hard to figure out until she took me into the stacks and pointed out how the 900s were divided into different sections and that’s where you could find the books organized alphabetically by author. Once you understand the system you can find anything you want in the library just by knowing the numbers.

It was the best job in the world and a lot better than being stuck in class. Besides, by shelving them in the right place, you got to discover all kinds of new books you’d never heard of and Mrs. Hutchison didn’t mind if she found me standing next to the book cart back in the 900s reading about Teddy Roosevelt or Martin Luther King.

There is no substitute for holding a new book in your hands and opening it for the first time.

It kind of shocks me today when people say they don’t have books or even read them much. I guess for most people the Internet offers as much of a text experience as they need since it provides instant access to whatever you want to know faster than you can say google. But having access to all that content doesn’t have the same excitement for me that I used to have walking whole blocks while galloping a palomino with Billy the Kid or perched high atop the mast of a galleon full of pirates. There was something thrilling about having access to these worlds through the book in my hands that I’ve never experienced while holding an iPad.

Surrounded by screens and digital media, we can easily forget that something magic happens when our hands and bodies get in on the action of imagination and learning. I am certain that books with their heft, the turning of the pages, the smell of print on paper subtly engage our senses in ways that are missing from a kindle.

And then there is the almost illicit pleasure of writing and highlighting a book we own, especially for a new book. The only time I saw Mrs. Hutchison get mad is when she’d find someone had scrawled in a library book, especially in pen. “That ruins it for everyone,” she’d say. And she would frown. You never wanted to have that frown aimed at you.

Reading a real book gives you something closer to the actual process of an artist or writer through stirring your senses and imagination together into a kinesthetic buzz that can be a pure joy, even if you are sick, tired, hungry, or horny.

I’m not sure Mrs Hutchison would have put it that way, exactly. But I’m not sure she would have disapproved. Great books have a way of changing your life and I think most librarians believe in this. Even though they have a reputation for telling everyone to shush, Mrs Hutchison explained it’s only so readers have a chance to find the next adventure of their lives - in their books.

She taught me how to find my own way in a library which gave me the confidence to approach any book, even “The Iliad” or “Great Expectations” like it might be a passage to my next learning journey. When I think back on all the great teachers and mentors I’ve had, I feel grateful she shared a lesson that is just as important to me now as it was in first grade: it’s not what’s inside a book that matters - it’s how you let it change you.

Going to the library after lunch instead of back to first grade felt like I was getting out of jail, getting to do something important that made me feel special instead of a discipline problem. Mrs. Hutchison chose me for something better, and I didn’t know yet what it would become. I just knew it was the beginning of something a lot more fun than school.

---------

I’ve been thinking about Mrs. Hutchison a lot lately, because I’m trying to do for writers what she did for me: create a space where someone can find their own way in, discover what’s already alive in them, and trust that it’s worth following. If you’re curious what that looks like in practice, it’s here: The Daily Muse

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“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do.”

The office manager looked at me with professional sympathy over the top of her computer. The red letters on her M&M Motors shop jacket read, “Donna.” She handed me a copy of the computer printout detailing what was wrong with my car. It was many pages long with a bill stapled to the top.

“You came in with an acceleration issue, right? Our technician ran the initial diagnostics and determined that the engine was not enough air getting to the cylinders. We replaced the air filter and changed the oil. We also replaced some bulbs.”

“But it still doesn’t run?” I asked looking at the report and the bill for $595.75

“After that, we ran a second set of diagnostics and found that there are so many things wrong with this vehicle starting with a defective catalytic converter and exhaust system that is simply not functioning. That means the engine is choking for air.

“Look here,” she said and she pointed to what the technician had written.

Catalytic converter non-functioning. In black and white.

“Can’t we just replace it?” I asked.

“We don’t do exhaust work and I don’t know anyone in town that does.”

She went on, “Honestly, if I were you, I wouldn’t put any more money into this car.” Her tone was like one you hear in movies when it’s time to take the patient off life support.

“Isn’t there any kind of short term fix like drilling a hole in the catalytic converter so I can at least drive it home,” I asked.

This was from something I’d seen posted on Reddit.

Donna pursed her lips slightly. “That would be illegal.” She looked at me like I’d suggested we pass a bad check together at the 7/11.

She said, “I’m giving you a break on all the technician’s time we spent on all these diagnostics.”

I looked at the final bill and saw that they’d knocked $50 off the initial price. But still, it was basically 600 bucks to hear I was supposed to give up on a good dependable car that had been with me since I drove it off the lot in 2001. We had covered a lot of miles together, this car and me and I’m not just talking about the ones on the odometer.

Marriage, divorce, relationships, several careers, life in three states, cross country roadtrips - I’d spent more time with this car than just about anyone outside of a blood relative. That car had always treated me well, in good weather or bad, and never broke down or left me stranded.

But last week she faltered. It started when I stepped on the accelerator and she would hesitate, cough, and then fumble forward. But it got worse. Soon she would gasp for breath and shake like a punch drunk boxer struggling to rise when I gave her some gas. Her engine started hacking violently like an emphysemic asthmatic puffing off a collapsed lung. I felt bad trying to goose her along hoping she’d snap out of it. She had a particularly bad time on that last drive to the repair shop. She could barely get up to speed before losing power and wheezing and shuddering like she was on her way to the chop shop.

From the beginning, purchasing a Subaru Forester was about one thing: solid reliable transportation, nothing more. She was never pretty. She was practical. For some reason my ex-wife named her Tar Baby and it stuck. Her job was getting you where you needed to go without complaint or stumble. And she always performed efficiently and economically, starting right up enthusiastically even when the thermometer dipped to 17 below or plowing through three foot snow banks, fording streams, even keeping her track getting up mountain roads in mud season, passing other cars slid in a ditch.

She was also discrete. Like the time I was driving home late at night when a large dark shape lumbered in the beams of my headlights. It was the biggest raccoon I’d ever seen. I threw the car in reverse to get a better look but next thing I knew I upside down looking up at the stars through the trees. I’d backed over an embankment and down into woods. I turned off the engine and walked the rest of the way home. The raccoon was nowhere to be seen.

The next day I got Crosby Noyes, who ran a boatyard, to haul me out. We hitched a big steel hook to the front axel and hauled her back to the blacktop like a seal sliding up on a rock. The Subie started right up while Crosby winched his chain and none of us ever mentioned it in the future.

Then there was the time I was driving up the curvy steep side of Blueberry Hill in January. The road was icy but I wasn’t paying attention when the front wheels hit a patch of something slick. I turned against the slide, the wheels fought for traction, but it was too late. We were over the speed limit on a blind curve and there was nothing but dumb luck in the driver’s seat. One side is a sheer drop off into an arroyo, no guardrail. The other side was the rock face of the hill. By the grace of god we slammed into the cliff with a sickening crunch. The engine stopped, there was the sound of steam and pounding in my temples. Miraculously though, Tar Baby turned over and ran enough for us to limp home battered and bruised with no headlights.

It took a lot of backyard bodywork to make things halfway to right for the front end and even today the hood doesn’t close right. But she is a tough piece of work and with the right kind of care, she still ran strong and had the pick up of a vehicle half her age. So we stuck together, servant and master, in happy concordance until one day, she took sick and went down fast.

“I’m really sorry to leave you with a car that won’t run.” Donna said. “Will that be cash or check.”

My face was hot and I felt stupid. They were supposed to be the best mechanics in town. I didn’t know what to do so like an idiot, I meekly paid and walked out, sat in the car. I turned the key and she started right up. For a moment I thought she’d staged a recovery, but in a second the check engine light started blinking and she started coughing and my hopes were dashed. I babied her out of the parking lot and on the road home. O’Reilly’s Auto Parts store was on the way and without thinking, I turned in, parked, and walked up to the counter. A young Hispanic guy named Raul asked me what I needed.

I said, do you have the name of somebody who does exhaust work?

Here in Taos, there’s a bunch of what we call backyard mechanics who may not be licensed or bonded, but have the tools and know-how to get you back on the road.

Raul wrote the name Jacob on a piece of paper with a local number. “Here, call this guy but don’t tell him I gave it to you.”

I texted Jacob, and he got right back to me, giving me his address. It was only a couple blocks away, so I thought, “What the heck?” I steered Tar Baby car over to Jacob’s place, which had a bunch of cars out in front of it, all in various stages of repair. There were two guys bent over a pickup truck, their arms buried up to the elbows in grease. One was a tall guy with very serious eyes and tattoos on both his arms.

“You, Jacob?” I asked. He nodded. I said my name and reached to shake his hand. He hesitated a second, and then shook it. I didn’t mind a little grease.

I tell him about what’s going on with my car, and I showed him the paperwork. He glanced at it, and asked me to start it up. He stopped what he was working on in the pickup and listened to the engine for a few moments.

“There’s nothing wrong with your catalytic converter,” he said. “That’s bad spark plugs and wires.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

He said, “She tells you by the way, it’s running. By the way, it’s so uneven. Bad converter, and she wouldn’t even start.”

I thanked him, went back to O’Reilly’s and $59 later, I took home new plugs and wires, popped the hood, and with the aid of ChatGPT, carefully replaced the old ones with the new ones. By myself. Then I plopped in the driver’s seat, said a quick prayer, turned the key, and she turned over and started purring like a kitty.

I drove back to Jacob’s place. One of the tattoos on his forearm said “In remembrance of Ivy.” I gave him $50 and said thanks.

“Don’t mention it, he said.

I drove away feeling proud. I noticed I still had grease on my hands. I didn’t mind.

If this essay resonates with you,

The Daily Muse is an online application designed to support this kind of inner work: self-transformation through a daily writing practice with the support of a writing companion that listens, reflects, and deepens your insight over time. It’s journalization in action.
You can check it out here → The Daily Muse

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“Is this a good time to talk?”

I am on my morning walk, thinking out a piece of writing and trying to ignore the cold lodged in my lungs like day old dirty dishwater.

It’s my brother calling.

He got out of prison a month ago. I’m trying to help him stay out of jail. I paid for him to stay in hotels until a bed opened up at the local shelter. He’s there now, safe, hopefully.

I stop walking.

“Hey brother, how’s it going?”

“I can’t stand being here; it makes me feel like shit. I feel like I am losing my mind. I can’t talk to any of these people here; they remind me of what losers they are. I don’t know how to get out of here. I need transportation and a place to live ...”

Every time I talk to him, he tells the same story.

“I’m lonely. I’ve got no one but you. I need to get out of here...”

I hear the mumbled sounds of people behind him. Water running Someone shouts.

“I understand it’s tough. What can you get going? Maybe you should try making some friends...”

“I don’t want anything to do with anyone here - they’re all losers and I don’t belong here.”

“I hear you’re struggling brother, but if you want something different, you gotta take some steps on your own...”

What I want to say is “I can’t save you.”

Instead I encourage him to try to find a job, or maybe volunteer, the pet shelter is right next door, or do anything other than sit around and feel miserable.

“I know you’re right, he says. “but I can’t stand where I am and what’s happening to me. I have nothing and I can’t see any way out of this...”

It’s the same story I’ve heard for years, whenever he has been in trouble - that he is trapped and helpless, there’s nothing that he can do about it, and begs me for money to buy a car and get a place to live. He is 66. It’s the same story he’s told since he was a teenager. He thinks there is nothing he can do for himself but find someone to take care of him. He believes in this story so much that he is willing to suffer for weeks, months, even years, rather than write a new one.

I turn away, look up at the sky and watch a crow wheel away over the mesa, stifling a cough.

After I tell him again that I can’t buy him a car to live in, I say good bye and I continue my slow walk down the dirt road out on the mesa. I don’t tell him his life would change if he got off his ass and stopped pretending the world was standing on his chest holding him down.

I don’t tell him about the people I’ve loved who lost the fight trying to get back up. Whether it was cancer, AIDS, depression, or the fatal unexpected, none of them went down without a fight. Peter beat cancer for seven years as it methodically spread throughout his body. Martha the farmer had but a few fierce months. Cancer got them anyways. My cousin Janet was a brilliant writer for Time magazine until a brain tumor silenced her. Richard loved fast motorcycles, and that’s what he was riding when he ran head-on into a semi-truck coming downhill in Hong Kong.

A homeless man bit Dean on the shoulder after a downtown party in Soho. He contracted AIDS, and three years later, barely able to walk, but still able to crack a mischievous joke (It’s not being sick that is so bad darling, it’s what it does to your complexion) he took the morphine express.

Visudha will never play her giant gongs. Leslie will never create another life-sized puppet, and Layla will never finish that novel.

None of them chose their story and each of them died refusing to let what killed them define them. That makes it hard for me to buy my brother’s story.

My dad got hit by a car and thrown down in the road when he was 94. He was still living on his own and talking about our next trip we’d take together. He refused to go to the hospital until the neighbors called an ambulance. He always did things his way as long as he could.

When I was 5 years old, he took me on my first backpacking trip to Lake Janus, an alpine lake high up in the Cascade Mountains. I don’t know what my Dad was thinking, because when I repeated that trip 12 years later with my friend Richard (see above), that trail kicked our asses. But he got me up there somehow through joking, telling stories, singing, and sometimes taking my hand in his big one and leading me on. We made it to the lake just before dark and pitched camp.

The next morning, I woke up, crawled out of my sleeping bag and pushing aside the tent flap, was surprised by how big and close up the purple mountains had gotten in the night, glistening with snow just turning pink from the sunrise.

“Isn’t that marvelous?” my dad said. “That’s why I brought you up here.”

He already had a fire going. I stood in front of it in my pajamas feeling the heat on my face and front, cold on my butt and back. Eggs were frying in a cast iron skillet and coffee in an old beat up percolator pot we always took camping. Smoke from the fire made my eyes sting for a moment, so I’d move from side to side. I was hungry and happy.

Then down the trail came a strapping young backwoods ranger with a big smile on his face.

“That smells good,” he said.

“How about a cup” my Dad said.

He swung off his big canvas pack, set it on the ground, and squatted on his boot heels while accepting a metal cup of steaming black coffee.

He blew on his coffee, sipped, and then asked me “Did you make that trail up here all by yourself?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good man,” he said.

**

Walking gets me out of my head and in my body. The sun was trying to emerge from behind a bank of dark grey clouds with little silver edges. I sneezed but I knew it wasn’t going to kill me. I felt lucky to live on a dirt road where I might see a fox cross my path or the solitary crow wheeling and soaring overhead.

When I saw my dad for the last time, he’d lost the power of talking, which he’s always loved to do. His body was a wasted version of the vital adventurous guy I’d known all my life. I kissed him on his forehead.

“Good bye Dad.”

I stood at the end of his hospital bed, looking down on him.

He couldn’t say a word, but he raised himself up, a little bit on one elbow, and blew me a kiss.

There’s an old crow who often perches in the top branches of the tall, ponderosa pine in my backyard. He mainly just talks to himself and shows no interest in the magpies, robins, finches, and other assorted birds flitting about in the trees below him.

I imagine if we could understand his crow talk of caws and cackles, he’d say something like:

“I hate to tell you this, caw, caw, caw - but all you down there are going to die. Maybe not today, but certainly sometime soon. Caw. All your pains and complaints will be gone before you know it. Caw. So you damn well better make the most of what life you’ve got left to live, brother, because, Caw, Caw, nothing beats death like dying.”

If this essay resonates with you,

The Daily Muse is an online application designed to support this kind of inner work: self-transformation through a daily writing practice with the support of a writing companion that listens, reflects, and deepens your insight over time. It’s journalization in action.

You can check it out here → The Daily Muse

Your genius is real.

Let’s give it the attention it’s been waiting for.

Slow & Sacred: Writing for Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It was Spring in Big Sur as I ambled down a dirt track carpeted with eucalyptus buds, past the old Cooper cabin and into the thick grove of tall eucalyptus trees where Monarch butterflies used to winter by the thousands on their annual migration from Mexico. Past the tall somber gray trunks and bunches of silvery green leaves that hang like bunches of little sickles, I continued through a little grassy meadow beside the banks of the Little Sur River. From there, the trail curves and meanders into a dense forest of oaks, poplar, and poison oak before leading down to the Pacific Ocean and I thought, I’m going to take a shortcut I remembered from years ago.

Following a foot trail, I struck off into the woods from bright sunlight to dense mottled shade. The forest floor beneath my feet was a dense packing of leaves that crunched and all the trees were hung with brambles and vines.

I was walking through a riot of new spring growth leafing up and over the last year’s old growth. Trees, branches, and bushes wove into continuous shapes and forms shot through with shadows and shafts of light.

I was thinking about the many times I’d been to this part of the world, particularly when my brother lived nearby. He lived a rented shack with no plumbing surrounded by manzanita trees. It was located in back of a ramshackle house owned by two sisters from Virginia who tended bar for Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn. We’d all go drinking and carrying on at local parties and the all night dances at Nepenthe.

My brother got a job planting trees for a conservation outfit - in fact he’d planted a lot of the trees back in the oak grove that I’d just walked though. Now those trees are grown, the sisters moved to Texas, and my little brother is a senior water scientist with kids in high school. A lot can happen in 20 years. But I still love spending time in Big Sur.

It was about then that I happened to look down and notice that the the trail I’d been following had petered out under my feet.

I stopped and looked around me. There was no trail in front of me. I turned around and saw no trail behind me. In fact, I couldn’t even see where I had come from. I started back a few steps but still, no trail.

Stopping still, I looked all around me. It was all a tangle. My heart began beating faster. The dense foliage around me and above me was so packed in I couldn’t see the sun’s direction. I couldn’t hear the ocean. My face felt hot. I turned off in one direction, and walked forward a little bit further, but nothing felt right. It was like being 6 years old and losing my mother at the state fair. I couldn’t see her for all the big legs around me until she took my hand and then everything was ok. How could I feel that way now? I told myself I couldn’t be lost. I knew a quarter mile one way or the other, I would run into something familiar - either the river or high dirt bank that ran east to west down the shore.

But just then, I noticed that I was surrounded by poison oak. There were new green bushes of it waving slightly twining with mature old vines with withered red leaves, still toxic to the touch, weaving into the trees and hanging down from the branches above. I am super allergic, just a grazing can leave welts that fester and blister for weeks. And here it was all around me twisted around trees and fallen branches. I could see no way forward or backward.

I felt stupid. I hadn’t been paying attention. This isn’t how I’d learned to be in the woods. Little pricks of panicky energy throbbed under my skin. I’d been in this forest so many times before when I was younger. What was wrong with me now?

Thats when I had to admit, I was lost. A cold surge of dread, shame, and a little bit of fear swept though me. I was glad that nobody else could see me. Without thinking, I lunged under a fallen tree truck, got my shirt caught on a branch and I started to fight with it. I struggled with an impulse to rip my shirt free. That was the wake up call I needed to slow down. In fact, find a place to stop and collect myself.

I found a fallen tree I could sit down on. I pulled my attention to my breathing. I made myself breathe slowly, counting to 4 between breaths for in, for hold, for exhale, then for out. It’s the box pattern used by special forces and Marines to get control of themselves when they’re peaking out during intense training and operations.

I forced myself to look around me and focus on specific details like leaf shapes and individual tree trunks. Slowly my breath calmed, my heartbeat slowed, and I began to get grip on myself.

I wasn’t hurt, I was just lost. As I calmed, my senses began to open up. Colors and sounds became more vivid. Then far off, faintly, I picked up sound of the ocean. More of a whisper and a sigh, but steady.

The sound seemed to be coming from my left side. I decided I would follow this sound and let it guide me. I stood up, turned in that direction and took one step. I stopped and listened. I could still hear the soft dull roar of the ocean. I took another step in that direction. I also kept an eye out for the sun because it was afternoon, so it should be overhead, but a little bit to the west.

Step by slow step, weaving and avoiding tree trunks and strands of poison oak, I made my way, one foot in front of the other, listening for the ocean, and course correcting as I went. 10 steps later and I definitely heard the ocean breaking a little bit louder. Then the sun peaked though the branches above and told me which way was west and I began taking more confident steps in that direction.

In this way, I came across a deer path that I followed, carefully noting the pattern of little bare dirt patches leading forward. I felt very alert and connected to everything around me. The path became more true and soon it emptied our into to a clearing. Sunlight flooded down all around me and some 30 feet was a cut bank and the Little Sur River flowing serenely under an big blue sky.

It was running high from snowmelt, clear and sparkly. I slid down the bank to the edge of the river, watching it gurgle and rush past my feet, then I waded right in up to my waist. It was a shocking cold and made my balls ache.

I laughed and felt the sun fully on my face.

If this essay resonates with you,

The Daily Muse is an online application designed to support this kind of inner work: self-transformation through a daily writing practice with the support of a writing companion that listens, reflects, and deepens your insight over time. It’s journalization in action.
You can check it out here → The Daily Muse

Your genius is real.

Let’s give it the attention it’s been waiting for.

Slow & Sacred: Writing for Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I like to wake up while it’s still dark outside. I say a prayer silently to myself and hope I don’t wake up my wife. She likes to sleep later and tends to want me to stay under the covers and cuddle with her. Instead, this morning, I slide carefully sideways from under the warm duvet and slip quietly out the bedroom door stealthily as I used to steal out the window when I was teenager.

Naked, I padded silently down the stone hallway. The uneven slate stones were cool beneath my feet. The house was dark. Everyone was still thankfully asleep. A big bright moon shone through the floor to ceiling windows splashing moonlight on the furniture and all the flat places facing up, like the work of a drunken painter with a big wet brush of ivory white.

I flicked on the switch of my cranky Italian espresso machine. The amber light glowed indicating it was awake but not yet up to heat. That takes the few minutes I needed in the bathroom to wash my face and shave.

Afterwards, I pulled on a wool sweater and an old pair of gray sweatpants that belonged to my Dad. I unlocked the door to the backyard and walked outside. It is colder and damp air meets my cheek while the smell of dirt and sage tickles my nose. I bend and touch the ground feeling the cold moisture of last night’s dew. Far away, a rooster crows hesitantly like he’s new at the job and not sure he’s got the time right. The tree trunks and bushes ahead are spooky black shapes in contrast to the silver white disc in the sky.

Still barefoot, I half enjoy half endure each footstep on the almost freezing dampish grass and mulch out to my writing shed. The metal latch on the rough wood door is cold textured to the touch when I push it sideways to release the bolt. The door opens easy on oiled hinges. I built the shed myself of red cedar boards and shingles and that slightly spicy scent greets me when I enter. By the light of my phone, I searched for my black metal fountain pen, the German one with the smooth lacquered hexagonal barrel and steel point.

I love this pen so much that I keep two of them, one filled with black ink, the other of blue. They each have a weighted balance that feels formidable like a dangerously sharp knife made from drop forged steel. Each dispenses a righteous flow of ink that you must be ready for or risk ink staining your fingers and bleeding through your paper. It was the black ink pen I was after and since it had spent the night alone in the unheated shed, it was cold as a tombstone to the touch. Grasping the smooth black barrel, chilled and inert in my hand, not yet awake, like a caught snake gone still for a moment before darting away into the grass.

At this point, my pen was as if asleep and dreaming while I reached for my red writing book. This is a hardbound journal with good weight paper, lightly lined with fine gray lines. This paper takes ink well and is thick enough to keep the stain from bleeding through so that one can write with a fountain pen on both sides of the page.

I could see my breath though the beam of my light. My fingers were already aching with cold. My shed is just a shed. Uninsulated. Rough unsanded boards. Nothing fancy or civilized. Just a space away from the rest of my home and family but too cold to think straight this early in the day.

I closed up the studio and walked quickly back to my house, eager to begin the morning writing. Already the movement of my body, the cold air, and the moon were all acting on my imagination and with tools in hand, I was getting eager to get to work. I gratefully pulled a thick shot of espresso making the machine groan and complain yet deliver a perfect stream of crema as competent and careful as a grouchy old French cafe barista.

There is a space off the big room of my house that is in between all the rooms of sleeping people. I sat on the deep pale creme couch, and with just one light to the side so that my house stayed dark and everyone else could stay sleeping. I took a sip of the hot bitter espresso and set the cup on the birch side table. Unscrewing the metal cap on my pen, I set it beside the cup. My pen began to warm in my hand. This moment, when the particular chill of my pen began to absorb my heat was like a meeting of worlds between the cold still world of my pen and the lively presence of my body.

The smooth barrel felt polished and almost slick under my thumb.

The nib holder, a machined metal section that screws into the barrel and holds the steel nib, fits perfectly in the grip of my index finger and middle finger, with my thumb providing the muscle. All three fingers work together like a team of horses, each complementing the other in the common task of pulling the cart or the just shaping of the letters as I write these words.

I feel muscles in my forearm rippling beneath my skin as my elbow presses against my ribs. From my shoulder, slight signals pulse down through my biceps all the way through my wrist and arm, translating into the loops and dashes and marks made through the dancing point of my pen.

Researchers call it the encoding effect - the visual challenge of forming each letter by hand makes a more vivid impression on the mind and engages more areas of the brain. I just call it the practice I’ve come to trust that consistently yields my best ideas and insights.

When the writing gets going, I feel the energy pulse through body, arm, hand, pen, and paper. The pen point seems to have a mind of its own, dancing across the page leaving a trail of marks and letters. When I am warmed up and the work is going well, sentences appear from words almost effortlessly and my hand takes flight across the lines like wild geese heading north.

The sky is growing a light platinum blue of pre-dawn through the windows. The tactile sense of nib point gliding across the paper. The dense trail of shiny ink glistening, almost iridescentl, and I follow it, eagerly as it guides me deeper into the page.

If this essay resonates with you,

The Daily Muse is an online application designed to support this kind of inner work: self-transformation through a daily writing practice with the support of a writing companion that listens, reflects, and deepens your insight over time. It’s journalization in action.
You can check it out here → The Daily Muse

Your genius is real.

Let’s give it the attention it’s been waiting for.

Slow & Sacred: Writing for Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The taxi to the beach dropped us off in a crowded beachfront in Playa del Carmen. After 6 days of accompanying my partner, daughter, and five more teenage girls for spring break, I felt overwhelmed and out of sorts. After the day excursions to Chichen Itza and Cozumel, wading through hordes of tourists on 5th Avenue, and baking on the beach, I was ready to head back home and back to my quiet life as a writer and artist. I don’t like to claim age this ordeal convinced me I am too old for family vacations with more than two teenagers.

Standing at the edge of the beach, the sun beat down so hot that it was hard to think, and it had nothing to do with the tequila that I or anyone else drank last night. The group of us were confused about which way to go to find a stretch of beach to lay down our towels. The sand was crowded with hot glistening bodies and there were no available umbrellas or couches. The blue green ocean and gentle waves looked cool and inviting. I wanted to just go in and cool off but a decision was made by the girls to set out up the beach in search of better sand and proximity to a bar. I followed from the rear, putting one foot in front of the other on autopilot.

We did find a little beach in front of a lovely boutique hotel that offered a shady place to relax under a tall thatched roof. The girls were allowed to find seats at the bar in their string bikinis. I rented a big umbrella from an anxious to please beach hustler named Delphino. I read my book and dozed.

Thankfully, the day went well without any major disruptions, other than some of the normal emotional ups and downs that seem to be a constant between teenaged girls. I think we did pretty good, and that good feeling carried us through the day and the next night and packing up. The next morning I did manage to steal away while everyone else was still asleep and trip down the limestone jungle path that led down to a little pocket beach that was deserted except for another man like me coming to greet the sunrise. I meditated with the waves gently lapping the shore. The sun came up. I tore off my clothes and dove into the sea for a brief swim. I felt a modicum of peace, and savored it but it was like a lovely single stuffed olive after the all you-can-can buffet of stress and emotional turmoil of the last week.

Then back to the condo for us all to pack up, take the shuttle to the airport, go through customs, two back to back flights, another set of customs. Back in the good old USA.

The drive from Albuquerque to Taos is one I know well. Even though it was 11:00 at night, I’d had enough sleep on the plane. It should have been an easy drive. But because my nervous system was still on overdrive from the previous week, it was actually kind of nightmarish. I felt a sense of dread and dissociation. My fingertips felt kind of numb, and my shoulders were raised, and it seemed like there were a lot of speeding weirdos out on the road that night. It was with a great sense of relief that we came up over the lip of the mesa and drove towards the lights of Taos.

The next day was supposed to be a work day - bad planning.

To begin with, I confused Tuesday with Wednesday and so missed a number of meetings and disappointed some people. In addition, I was still pushing towards my weekly Tuesday publishing deadline on Substack. And because I rushed it, the essay went out incomplete, with spelling mistakes and missing through lines, and to top it off a day late anyways. As they say in Spanish, Me quierdo comer la tierra. Literal meaning “I want the earth to swallow me” (I want to disappear).

The next day, I asked my daughter if she could give me a ride from the mechanics back home. I rarely ask my daughter for anything, just because. But my partner was at work and my daughter was taking the day off from school - so I asked. She wouldn’t say yes because she wasn’t sure what else she was doing. But she wouldn’t say no. She got totally snippy and annoyed with me for trying to get a straight answer. Then when I pointed out all the times I’ve given her a ride she snarled

“Everything with you is tit for tat.”

“Is that what you think?” I asked incredulously, beginning to get hooked.

“Yeah - everything.”

I bit and blew up.

I am sure we were all still disregulated after that but not talking about it. We were polite, tip toeing around each other and avoiding anything that might kick up more conflict. Until the end of the workday on Friday, my partner calls to tell me that our daughter is having a sleep over that night and inviting a bunch of her friends.

“No!” I said. “I need the house to be quiet tonight. Today was rough and I need some down time.”

But my partner said kids were already scheduled to come over at 7. She had more reason why it couldn’t be canceled but I couldn’t hear them. I didn’t have the starch to argue or plead my case. Instead I hung up and did the only thing I knew how to do which was throw some things in my VW camper and head out to some place wild.

That first night at Wild Rivers, a national monument on the Rio Grande, I still felt angry and shook up that my partner let our daughter get her sleepover instead of hearing what I needed. It was a big wake-up call that my hyped up nervous system needed care and attention. Intuitively I knew no one could take care of me better than myself.

I found a good campsite for the van between two old piñon trees. Even though I was in a place that was familiar and quiet, my nervous system was still on high activation. Food, clothes and equipment were thrown about in the van instead of neatly stowed away. I tucked into my sleeping bag still restless and didn’t sleep well that night.

I woke up the next morning cold. I couldn’t find my coffee grinder. It wasn’t in the bag with the other coffee making stuff or out on the counter next to the camping kettle. I briefly panicked seeing those good dark roasted coffee beans but no way to grind them. Taking everything apart in the pantry, I ransacked through all the food bags, took everything out of the ice box, and cursed my self for forgetting the grinder before finally discovering it in hidden behind behind the container of rice in the back of the built in food bin. I gratefully wound the grinder by hand realizing I was a little too amped up and still needed to slow down.

I pulled on a jacket, walked over to the edge of the canyon and sat on a flat rock by a twisty old juniper tree. I waited and watched for the sunrise, sipping hot strong coffee. Bit by bit, I could feel myself wanting to relax and get back in touch with with the beauty around. I gazed at the piñon trees and the deep purple shadowed rock and listened to the canyon wrens and the crows talking me down from my elevated, hyper-pitched emotional state. It took a long time, pretty much the whole day, before I finally started to feel like I was back in my body.

And in fact, the smartest move I made was to extend my time here for another day. I had intended to spend just two nights, but by the end of the day I knew that was not enough. I needed one more day of this quiet sacred place to really coax myself back into a my natural state of well-being.

I slept well last night, and when I woke up, I found all of the things for making coffee easily. I ground some fresh coffee, boiled the water, and then set up a chair outside where I could see the horizon. I arranged my sleeping bag around me like a comforter and sat quietly, steam rising from my cup, enjoying the dawn light slowly lightening the skies over the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Soon, the sun tipped over the highest part of one of the mountains. I stood up, bowed, and said a prayer of appreciation and gratitude for the morning and being back in my body, harmonious and whole again.

If this essay resonates with you,

The Daily Muse is an online application designed to support this kind of inner work: self-transformation through a daily writing practice with the support of a writing companion that listens, reflects, and deepens your insight over time. It’s journalization in action.
You can check it out here → The Daily Muse

Your genius is real.

Let’s give it the attention it’s been waiting for.

Slow & Sacred: Writing for Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Soft sunlight filters through palm trees of a Mexican morning. I am sitting outside and sipping a cup of strong fresh black coffee from Chiapas.

A skinny stray cat washes herself. She is stretched out on the hand-poured cement slab off the patio of our rented garden apartment. Half in shadow and half in the sun, she bathes herself with the patient lick of one who has all the time in the world. She stops a second to regard a minah bird squawking at her from a nearby hibiscus bush. She turns back to licking a paw. She ignores me and the bird.

She is content.

I wish I could say the same.

When our daughter first raised the idea of chaperoning her and five of her friends for a week in Playa Del Carmen, I did not want to go. I am a 69 year old artist and writer. I moved to Taos to get away from the crowds and live closer to the earth. My idea of a good time is getting up with the sunrise and brewing a cup of a fresh ground coffee.

My friends my age rolled their eyes and questioned my sanity for contemplating taking six teenaged girls to Mexico. Plus there would be the only guy amongst seven women, thing that guaranteed I’d be the odd man out. But my partner pleaded with me to come and back her up. She looked me with that “I can’t do this without you” look. What could I say?

So here we are here on Spring Break in this charming beach town located on the sacred land of the Maya.

The last time I was in the Yucatan was in 1979.

At that time a girlfriend and I spent six months hitchhiking and riding busses around the country, visiting Mayan ruins, and camping on beaches and in the jungle. There were coconut plantations and Mayan families living in thatched roofed casas on the future site of the mansions and resorts that they now call the Mayan Riviera.

It was a different country then. I’m a different man now, too. But the beauty and the mystery of Mexico can still enchant you - from the soft brown eyes of the people, the lyrical rhythm of Spanish in the streets, the calls of the parrots and wild parakeets - all wrapped in the warm moist breezes of the gulf.

Today at 5:30 in the morning, eight of us trudged in the dark like a flock of lost sheep down the sleepy streets of Playa del Carmen. Our destination was the fabled Mayan archeological marvel of Chichen Itza. We were on our way to a meeting spot to catch a tour bus that promised an all day adventure to not only the ancient pyramids but also side trips to a Mayan Village, a cenote, and tequila tastings in the traditional town of Valladolid.

We were very early and the first to arrive at the meeting spot. There were still stars in the sky. A pair of workmen with buckets of tools, balancing a long ladder crossed the street. A drunk wobbled unsteadily down a sidewalk, his buddy using an arm to keep him from stumbling into the street. It was still the time when most people are asleep. The girls and I settled down to wait. I shivered and found a cold concrete bench to sit, watch, and wait patiently.

Eventually the bus arrived, on mañana time. Our guide, Alberto, a stocky Mayan man with big dreadlocks leapt out of the bus. “Bienvenidos amigos! Welcome my friends, we are going to have a wonderful big day together.”

Once we were all packed in and got going, Alberto informed us he was not only Mayan but also professor of anthropology. He began enthusiastically sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of his people’s rich history and facts about the Yucatan as our bus barreled down the jungle lined highway.

We learned that 66 million years ago an asteroid struck the Gulf of Mexico, creating the Chicxulub Crater which is now the Yucátan Peninsula, causing the extinction of nearly 75% of Earth’s species, including all the dinosaurs. This marked a pivotal moment in the planet’s history, paving the way for the rise of mammals and the eventual evolution of Homo Sapiens including the indigenous peoples that walked all the way from the Bering land bridge 20,000 years.

As we pondered these facts, our tour bus made its first stop: what Alberto called a traditional Mayan Village - complete with extensive parking for tour busses, and multiple shopping opportunities. This was our first introduction to the subtext of cultural excursions today, which is of course, shopping.

Each stop along the way included opportunities for hustling by vendors peddling everything from straw hats, jewelry, painted masks, replicas of mayan artifacts, and kinds of souvenir paraphernalia that gringo tourists - slightly addled from tequila tasting and the bright sun - might be tempted to buy.

Usually you can politely say, “no gracias” and keep walking, but the hardest to ignore were the actors made up with feathers and faceprint to look like extras from Apocalypto, or the guys with the brightly colored macaw or a nervous spider monkey perched on an arm they’d thrust in your face and inquire “fotograph?”

For a moment one can get caught by surprise and temporarily enchanted by one of these folks appearing out of nowhere. The hustlers count on this and work together like coyotes, one guy smiling and guiding a creature into your arms while his compadres hover nearby ready with the cameras. You must stay light on your feet and keep moving or you may find yourself clutching a creature, picture taken and obligated to part with your pesos for a photo of you both looking like monkeys.

This is hard enough alone, but when you are traveling with a posse composed of your partner, and 6 teenage girls, it turns out to be mostly impossible. Squealing surges of enthusiasm or dismay rush up from the feminine collective and then just as mysteriously, dissipate. Should we stop? Who is hungry? Who needs a bathroom? Who has a tampon? Giggling, pointing, pressing, pouting, vibrating with ever changing spans of attention like flickering frames of a film. Then one girl points and shouts, and all of them turn like flamingos to the monkey, or the ice creme shop, or the teeshirts with the voluptuous body cartoon print that come in different colors. They swarm inside to purchase.

I realized I was dealing with energetic forces that I can’t anticipate, much less control. My role was to stay calm and available but a bit to the side, visible but out of the way, present but only if needed.

“How does it feel to be the old man in a group of young girls?” my daughter laughingly asked me before the bus came. The girls stopped for a moment and all looked at me. I shook my head. (Do they really just see me as an old guy, not me, Marko?) What could I say? I could think of no ready reply to what felt like a teasing insult to my age and my vulnerable masculinity. I disassembled but they had already moved on. One girl held out her phone with a new tik-tok video and they flocked to hover and watch.

I was reminded of a woman writer’s discovery that she’d become invisible. She realized that most men and younger women had stopped actually seeing her. She saw in their eyes she’d ceased to exist as an individual woman - attractive or not. Instead she’d become just a type: old person. Not personally interesting. Likely in the way and moving too slow. No need to include in the conversation because she probably wouldn’t get it anyway.

This cruel and startling understanding is impossible to condemn. File it under karma. I myself used to treat anyone over the age of 40 as old, out of touch, and ignorable unless I needed something like a job, car keys, or assistance with my homework.

I cringe now to think how I failed to treat older people with the care and regard I secretly long for from my daughter, her friends, and even my own partner who is a decade younger than me. But aside from a few treasured moments, sometimes preceded by tequila tastings, I sense at times on this trip, I am no more real to them than my own parents were to me.

Checking in with the girls, I poked my head into the room where they were gathered - chatting and primping for our next day’s adventure. “Are you guys ready?” I asked. There was giggling and I felt like I’d interrupted something. “Hey, Chey, are you guys ready to go?” She glanced at me in the mirror and said, “Maybe? I don’t know. We’ll let you know.” She paused. I waited. “You can go,” she said.

“I can’t wait until you have kids of your own,” I thought as I slunk down the hall and out onto the patio, startling the cat, and looking for my notebook.

I understand now why artists such as Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, and others kept working and staying productive even into their 90s. It’s how you hold yourself up, erect as you can manage under the circumstances. It’s about keeping your hand in the game and giving the finger to mortality.

Waiting in the dark, for that early morning for the bus to Chichen Itza, I was thinking about cats and friends who’d passed, and the way Spaulding Gray used to say there was one thing that made his work as a writer worthwhile: seeking perfect moments.

Meanwhile, now wide awake, the girls began chanting a chant about waiting for the bus, clapping and rapping, and soon they were dancing, synchronizing steps, doing handstands, with their laughter and squeals echoing off the cold dark walls of the old colonial buildings. Morning was slowly appearing in the east.

But these girls were not waiting for anything. They were making the most of the moment, who they are right now, and the wide open possibilities of everything to come when you’re not yet 20 and you feel immortal.

I took out my pen and notebook and began to write.

If this essay resonates with you,

The Daily Muse is an online application designed to support this kind of inner work: self-transformation through a daily writing practice with the support of a writing companion that listens, reflects, and deepens your insight over time. It’s journalization in action.
You can check it out here → The Daily Muse

Your genius is real.

Let’s give it the attention it’s been waiting for.

Slow & Sacred: Writing for Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I used to always lose my keys. And you never know where your keys are hiding until you are getting ready to go someplace. Often that meant I was also late because I rarely built in extra time for transitions and unexpected setbacks like losing your keys or a flat tire or who knows what.

Fortunately, I trained myself after only a couple of decades to always put my keys on the hook. The hook is the place where the keys always go. If I don’t put my keys on the hook, a little alarm goes off in my brain. I have even found myself waking up in the middle of the night, fetching my keys from of my pants pocket, schlepping them down the hall and putting them on the hook where they belong. Keys are on the hook; all is well. Back to sleep.

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But anxiety is different. It’s a nameless fear that lives inside of you - without any particular cause.

First thing: Anxiety isn’t your fault. Even if you don’t know why you are anxious it’s not necessarily there because something wrong with you. Your mind is programmed to be on the lookout for what could go wrong or what would go wrong or what is going wrong instead of what’s going on, and that can make a person uptight. This goes back to our ancient ancestors who were swinging around in trees. The guys that were laid back, saying, “Everything’s groovy, here, let me share my mangos,” POUNCE - they’re the ones that got eaten. It was the selfish, suspicious, paranoid ones always on the lookout for any possible threat that we inherited those genetic predispositions to be angry, cranky, and worried about who gets the biggest piece of pie all the while scanning the environment for what can go wrong even if there is no visible threat or saber tooth tiger on the horizon.

My anxiety about writing this essay, for instance. Right now there’s a boa constrictor in my imagination hissing: “you don’t know what you’re talking about. You aren’t a real writer. Why don’t you just quit.”

It’s not a real boa constrictor of course because if it was then I could wrestle with it and capture it and flush it down the toilet or sell it back to the pet shop. Which is hopefully what you’d do to a real threat - like finding a boa constrictor under your desk. But actually, since it lives in my imagination, it’s an anxiety. It may not appear real, but it sure feels like it. And that makes it a lot harder to grab ahold of than an actual boa constrictor.

A bigger anxiety is when you know something’s lost, but you aren’t exactly sure what it is. You just know that there’s something big missing. That gets back to the way that we are genetically programmed, because while our ancient ancestors are indeed the cranky ones, they often had no problem answering the question: what’s your purpose? Your purpose was to eat as many bananas as you could and fornicate. After that, it was really just to survive. Life was so much simpler then. Nowadays we get anxious about all kinds of things.

Anxiety, at its root, is fear. Fear of something totally outside your control. It is controlled by a part of your brain called the amygdala which is supposed to regulate your emotions. But when you feel threat, such as the presence of the saber toothed tiger, it reacts instantaneously by triggering the flight, freeze, or flight response. Your nervous system runs awash with cortisol and adrenaline, your heart rate goes into overdrive, and your frontal cortex - the rational thinking part of your brain gets partially shut down. If this feels like you, whatever you do, do not operate heavy machinery or sharp instruments.

The devastating thing about anxiety is that there doesn’t even need to be an actual saber toothed tiger. All these alarms can be set off by something that just feels threatening like a saber toothed tiger - such as being summoned by the boss for an unexpected performance review or meeting your future mother-in-law for the first time. These may or may not be actually life threatening experiences but don’t try to explain that to your nervous system because that train has already left the station.

So the question becomes, how do you get to know yourself well enough to work with your anxiety so that it doesn’t drive you crazy.

When I first quit doing entrepreneur coaching and corporate work I felt rudderless and anxious about how to structure my life. Mornings made my stomach clench. My body felt cramped and my stomach ached. It took forever to get my mind in gear. I felt lost like I didn’t know which foot to put next.

With no email to check, no meetings to prepare for, or reports to write. If I wasn’t careful, I could blow a whole morning on the New York Times, followed by the Post, Google News, even the WSJ if I was really lost - and then I’d feel like crap wasting my time, making no progress on what I was supposed to be doing - which wasn’t clear at the time.

I learned to create a daily dojo of morning habits that helped me get in tune no matter what was happening. Not having to decide what to do every morning - a routine of exercise, meditation, writing - tuned me up and made me feel like no matter what, I was at least showing up. that was my way of putting a problem on a hook - it just became my habit. I didn’t have to think about it anymore. But I still didn’t know how to grow as a writer or find a direction independent of the work identity I’d left behind.

Somehow the journaling began evolving from reporting on my day or whatever was rattling around in my mind to something that looked more like a dialogue with a new voice that was speaking and asking me questions - like why are you here. What is it that you want to do if it’s not corporate work? How do you want to spend the rest of your life? What do you want to accomplish with the finite time you have left? These were new questions that I didn’t have answers for at first, but they seemed to be guiding me toward some kind of new sense of knowing.

This hit me one morning at an outdoor café table. People were hurrying past with their briefcases and strollers, that particular look of lateness on their faces. I saw myself in them -- but I was staying seated. I had slowed down to listen to questions calling from somewhere different. I didn’t know the answers yet. But I felt, for the first time in a long time, that I was doing the work I was called to do.

Once I started putting more time into the writing part of my morning, I slowly started to sense that there was something guiding me from inside. And that made me curious and wanting to know more. At that point I didn’t have the answers but I knew I was on the right track because that cold shivery feeling of lostness was replaced by a feeling of curiosity and interest, like seeing someone waving to you from across a crowded room beckoning you to come over and see what they wanted except this was happening inside me.

Writing is an act of faith. I don’t feel relaxed and confident about what I am doing. But I feel a sense of purpose inside like a gulp of hot coffee spreading warmth in my chest. I am like a climber facing an untried pitch of rock. I’m not sure of my route to the top but I am learning to trust myself to find the handholds and ledges I’d need to keep going. Each repetition, each reach past what I thought was possible yesterday, gives me more muscle and confidence to stay the course.

Then something always shifts. The insights arrive. A sense of belonging and pride moves through me like weather moving through.

I may not be a champion yet, but now I am in the arena.

My keys are still on the hook. However, these days when I wake up, I feel a sense of purpose, curiosity and excitement to see what I will discover next. Sometimes the boa constrictor still shows up but it never keeps me from doing what I love. I write.

That is the practice.

If this essay resonates with you,

The Daily Muse is an online application designed to support this kind of inner work: self-transformation through a daily writing practice with the support of a writing companion that listens, reflects, and deepens your insight over time. It’s journalization in action.
You can check it out here → The Daily Muse

Your genius is real.

Let’s give it the attention it’s been waiting for.

Slow & Sacred: Writing for Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

For the last week I’ve been working on an essay for Substack about anxiety relief and writing.

But I’m not ready.

The ideas are there. The facts are there. Notes, fragments, half-formed paragraphs. But I can’t yet see the spine of the piece. I don’t have the parts pulled together into a coherent whole that feels worth sharing.

And I feel a temptation to take the easy way.

I could take all those notes, drop them into ChatGPT, and ask it to organize everything into a clean, competent essay. In a few seconds it could produce something structured and readable that would probably satisfy my goal of publishing every Tuesday.

But I’m not doing that.

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Instead, I’m sitting with the discomfort of missing my deadline. More than that, I’m sitting with the deeper discomfort of not knowing yet what I really think.

There’s pressure in that space.

Because the solution is right somewhere around here - but I haven’t found it for myself yet.

With a few clicks I could relieve the tension, produce something polished, and move on. But I suspect that if I do that right now, I won’t actually discover what it is I’m trying to say.

And discovering that is the whole point.

The temptation of outsourcing your thinking

I don’t know how many new writers are wrestling with this tension right now.

But I am.

For someone trying to build a disciplined writing practice, tools like ChatGPT are incredibly seductive. They can help you move faster, organize ideas, fill gaps, smooth rough edges.

The danger isn’t the tool itself.

The danger is using it before you’ve done the thinking.

Because if I let a machine organize my thoughts before I’ve wrestled with them myself, then I’m not actually learning how to think through complex ideas. I’m just learning how to prompt.

It’s a little like copying someone else’s homework.

When I was in school, I could have copied Suzanne Butler’s algebra homework and turned it in. The assignment would have been completed. The grade might even have been fine.

But I wouldn’t have learned algebra.

And right now, what I’m trying to learn isn’t just writing.

I’m trying to learn how to think clearly enough to write well.

The panic of the missing structure

There are moments when I feel lost while writing. It feels like panic.

Not panic about ideas, I have ideas. Not panic about words, I can find words.

The panic comes when I try put it all together. The structure.

The invisible architecture that holds an essay together.

I don’t feel this when I’m making art. I don’t feel it when I’m playing music, or even when I am coordinating a project with other people. In those situations I know intuitively what to do and I don’t doubt my process.

But, for me, writing is different.

My lesson today is to slow down enough to care about only one thing: to write somthing real and meaningful however long it takes to learn how to make that happen.

And that’s uncomfortable.

Deep learning feels like struggle

When I was an English teacher I used to tell my students:

Learning can be as much fun as sex - if you do it right. Which is true but the deeper truth is that real leal learning often feels like struggle - just like finding true love.

Deep learning is messy, frustrating, and confusing and only occurs at it’s own pace.

Another analogy, it’s like trying to learn how to swim as an adult.

Most of us learned to swim as kids, so we take it for granted. But talk to someone who tries to learn later in life and you’ll hear a very different story.

You’re suddenly a land creature trying to become a water creature.

Your instincts are wrong. Your body fights the environment. Everything feels awkward and unnatural.

But eventually, if you stick with it, you learn to move through the water.

What once felt impossible becomes fluid.

I suspect that’s where I am with writing.

I’ve written all my life, but writing deeply, taking a complex subject with many moving parts and extracting the inspiring essence is a different skill entirely.

And skills like that only come through repetition and patience.

The Petroglyph Approach

When I think about writing right now, I picture a petroglyph.

Those ancient images carved into stone.

They weren’t rushed. They weren’t optimized. They weren’t generated.

Someone sat with a rock and a tool and slowly carved meaning into the surface.

Mark by mark.

It took time.

And the marks lasted.

Writing, at least the kind I aspire to, is something like that.

You sit with the material. You chip away. You remove what doesn’t belong. Eventually the shape appears.

But you can’t speed up the process.

Learning at your natural pace

Part of learning is repetition.

But another part is something we’re not very good at anymore: going as slow as necessary.

That means setting aside the internal critic.

The negative self-talk.

The internal critic that says you’re not good enough, or fast enough, or smart enough.

Those voices don’t help you learn. They hijack your ability to relax into the process.

And deep learning requires a particular combination of difficulty and flow that only you can calibrate for yourself.

Like intimacy.

Like swimming.

Like any meaningful human growth.

No training wheels

So the essay I planned to publish today isn’t ready.

And maybe that’s okay.

Instead, I’m sharing this small account of the struggle itself—what it feels like to try to become a better writer without leaning too heavily on ChatGPT’s training wheels.

The tool is extraordinary.

But the thinking still has to be mine.

So I’m going back to the unfinished essay.

Back to the notes.

Back to the messy process of figuring out what I’m actually trying to say.

One mark at a time.

Like carving a petroglyph.

If this essay resonates with you,

The Daily Muse is an online application designed to support this kind of inner work: self-transformation through a daily writing practice with the support of a writing companion that listens, reflects, and deepens your insight over time. It’s journalization in action.
You can check it out here → The Daily Muse

Your genius is real.

Let’s give it the attention it’s been waiting for.

Slow & Sacred: Writing for Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

At first I can’t think.

The sky is turning gray and darkening, sunset past, night bearing down and I still can’t figure out what this essay is about.

The roof creaks. Silence fills the spaces around me. I get up and stretch my arms up to the sky and feel my stomach muscles clench, then loosen.

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I am an animal again. I am a writing animal. I drop back down in my writing chair with limbered fingers. Reaching for my pen, I slow down my hand, and notice my fingers lightly grip the barrel like a sailor at the tiller.

My thumb supports my index finger. There is a slight buzz in the air as the refrigerator farts and stops humming. The whole house is shutting down for the day as the temperature drops outside, the horizon fades into darkness and the rafters quake as though adjusting hat and coat against the cold of late february twilight.

These small adjustments build up and release. They allow my breathing to slow down, my forehead begins to lengthen, my gaze soften, and before I know it, my imagination opens like letting go of the mooring when you’ve set off sailing.

There is a sequence of certain steps; you fasten the jib, coil the ropes, unlock the tiller, haul the mainsail, then sit squarly down on the transom seat as your little boat leaps forward as your sails full with air. Often you feel shivers of fear and excitement in your belly mixed up like coffee and cream. With an eye on the weather and noting the tide, you set off to explore the bay or if you feel brave, the wide open ocean beyond.

Writing by hand primes my imagination and calms my jitters just like rubbing the polished woodgrain of the varnished tiller handle. The shape and texture reminds me of its familiar dimensions which I’ve sanded and brushed with the amber varnish that smells like piney alcohol.

Tactile awareness connect you through your senses to the task at hand: The faint iodine odor of the ink, the scratch of the steel nib on the fine Italian cotton paper, the smooth precise shape of the pen in your hand can guide you into the seamless flow of thinking and writing that begins to feel effortless because you are so absorbed.

The right tools are waiting where your mind meets your hand.

The mentors who made you, whisper, now’s the time to make your mark.

They’ve guided the hands and minds of writers and sailors through out history.

They’re tuned to tell you the tale of what it means to be human.

If this essay resonates with you,

The Daily Muse is an online application designed to support this kind of inner work: self-transformation through a daily writing practice with the support of a writing companion that listens, reflects, and deepens your insight over time. It’s journalization in action.
You can check it out here → The Daily Muse

Your genius is real.

Let’s give it the attention it’s been waiting for.

Why work?

Let’s get one thing straight: you work because you choose to.

Nobody makes you.

You don’t have to get up, do your thing, get dressed, answer the phone, punch the clock, and be productive.

It’s a choice.

You could opt out, live in a teepee, sleep in a gutter, ride freight trains, or any number of other marginal ways of living, which may be uncomfortable, wet, and dirty, but they exist as alternatives.

But that’s not the way we were brought up, right? We were taught to respect the nobility of getting a good job, paying our bills, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, and being a good consumer.

Reality check: the way most of us live, work looks less like a noble calling and more like a high interest pay-day loan contract with email. We work more hours for less money and security than our parents did (or their parents), and we’re not packing it away for retirement and time off on the golf course; we’re just trying to keep ahead of the collection agency. I’m pushing 70 and I’m still paying off student debt—so remind me again how this was supposed to pencil out.

The life that’s all work

I’d like to find the guy who said “Hey, let’s organize human life around work”, and sock him in the nose because this work thing never stops. There’s work-work, which starts before you’re even out of bed, with texts from your boss about the emergency of the morning. There’s the “working out” you’re supposed to squeeze in so you don’t age like a neglected houseplant. If you work from home, maybe your office is just upstairs, so you save on your commute, but that just means more time for more work-work.^[1]

After that, there’s family work: shopping, cooking, cleaning, scheduling, refereeing, managing the endless logistics of home life. If you’re a modern sensitive man, you are painfully aware of generations of unpaid domestic labor by women, so you try to pull your weight by screwing up the housework. If you’re a professional woman, you’re doing your job plus tiger mom, soccer mom, sometimes hot mom, and unofficial chief operating officer of the household. In either case, both of you fantasize about a live-in cook, cleaner, masseuse, and nanny, but your house is too small and you can’t afford her anyway—especially after the Trump administration deported half the people who can do that work.

And just when you start eyeing an hour of “me time,” your partner reminds you that it’s time to “work on the relationship.” Of course it “needs work”; what relationship thrives when both people are exhausted, anxious about the future, overweight, in debt, and wondering if this is actaully the other person’s fault? You answer one last text from the office, scroll past a message from your brother asking for money, and collapse into a crappy, restless sleep before getting up to do it all again.

What’s so great about this picture? Forget about it.

The old deal and the new reality

Part of the problem is that we’re still living by an old story about work that no longer fits the facts. The traditional deal was simple: work hard today, and tomorrow will be better. Better meant a house, vacations, college for the kids, and some kind of retirement where you finally get to exhale. Today, though, we’re working not just to fund the future, but to service the past—student loans, credit cards, medical bills, the costs of all the “investments” that were supposed to pay off and somehow didn’t.^[1]

Meanwhile, the volume keeps getting turned up. Officially, we talk about a 40–43-hour workweek, but once you factor in late-night emails, weekend Slack, and the constant low-level hum of availability, a lot of knowledge workers are effectively logging 50–60 hours. Many of us can’t quite remember what it feels like to have time that isn’t being optimized for productivity.^[2]

Here’s the kicker: this is not how humans always lived. Anthropologists estimate that traditional hunter-gatherers worked roughly 15–25 hours a week—just enough to gather food, wood, and not get eaten by saber-toothed tigers—which left the rest of the time for play, storytelling, hanging out, and ritual. Work, play, and worship blurred into one continuum instead of being chopped into weekdays vs. weekends.^[2]

Even medieval peasants, who we like to imagine as mud-covered extras in a Monty Python sketch, often logged fewer total workdays per year than the modern salaried employee. Economic historians estimate many early modern European peasants worked roughly 80–180 days a year, about 1,000–1,400 hours—significantly less than the roughly 2,000 hours today’s “affluent” worker puts in. Somewhere along the way, we swapped holy days and long winters for back-to-back Zooms and performance reviews.^[2]

So again, the question: what exactly are we getting out of all this?

The future is coming for your job

As we look ahead, SURPRISE: It only gets worse! If this was a Mission Impossible sequel we’d be discussing one of two ways the world can end before Tom Cruise saves us.

In the first, we just keep doing what we’re doing now: working harder, faster, and cheaper until we collectively flame out from overwork and overproductivity.

In the second, the robots show up and do almost everything we do—but faster, better, and cheaper.

Spoiler Alert: Tom isn’t coming to save us. So, which scenario sounds more likely to you, unless you work with your hands as, say, a potter, a plumber, or a proctologist? (Some jobs require a human touch.) Corporations are already actively outsourcing anything they can to AI. This is not a thought experiment; this is the pilot episode of the new season, and it’s coming for you..

What work is really for

All of this might sound like an argument against work, but it isn’t. It’s an argument against this particular, joyless, anxious, debt-driven version of work most of us call reality. The truth is that we need a better reason to get up in the morning.

If your life looks like one continuous blur of work, getting ready for work, or recovering from work that probably only ends when you can no longer punch the clock, maybe it’s because you’re still chasing the cheese at the end of the treadmill.

Disclaimer: You aren’t a mouse. You are a human and we are designed to make things, to serve, to care, to solve, to build, to tend and enjoy this wild ride called life. They don’t teach it in school but you’re smart, you can smell the coffee.The point of work is not to prove that you were sufficiently busy before you died. It’s to express what you have to give before you are forced, like all of us, to punch out for good.

The question that actually matters

Nobody ever said on their deathbed, if only I’d spent more time at work. It’s not going to matter how many emails you answered or how many performance reviews you nailed. What will matter is what you created, whose life you touched, and who you became in the process.

So what’s so great about work? Potentially, everything—if it’s where your time, your talent, and your values line up, instead of the place where your soul goes to die on a conference call. People might say lovely things at your funeral, but honestly, who cares? You won’t be there to hear it.

Don’t you want to get more out of life while you’re here?

So the real philosophical question becomes:

• What could your life look like without work, or at least without work as we currently define it?

• Can you imagine orienting your days around what actually matters to you?

• Do you have any idea what I am talking about or how to figure this out?

• The future is coming toward us fast.

When are you going to start thinking about it—when the robots show up with a pink slip? I hope not.

Just answer this:

What do you actually want your work to be for?

If this essay resonates with you,
The Daily Muse is an online application designed to support this kind of inner work: self-transformation through a daily writing practice with the support of a writing companion that listens, reflects, and deepens your insight over time. It’s journalization in action.

You can check it out here → The Daily Muse

Your genius is real.

Let’s give it the attention it’s been waiting for.

Subscribe now

All images property of CHARLIE CHAPLIN in MODERN TIMES -1936