Last night I sat on the dock at midnight, under a trillion stars, and did the math.

Another thirty-seven years puts me at seventy-four. That’s the whole span again. Everything I’ve done and everything I’ve been, laid end to end one more time. And seventy-four felt young. Not brave-face young. Actually young. With another 20+ years likely (Since I’ll be half-robot by then)

Two years ago that math would have wrecked me.

The Press

I’m willing to bet most people who’ve taken an unconventional path, and plenty who haven’t, find themselves around thirty-five feeling a very specific pressure begin to settle on them. Thirty-five is an interesting age. The world stops giving you as much grace for your ignorance.

My mind still feels twenty-five most days. Excited about new things, wanting to press on boundaries, not quite sure what direction feels like, following the pull of spontaneity, unable to see past the current moment. But it also carries an inkling of deep maturity. A closer connection to health and longevity. A desire to make things that matter. A release of old patterns. An empathy for the adults and humans around me.

And underneath all of it, a fear rumbling in my ego: that I haven’t got my shit together.

As the ceiling lowers on “fucking around and finding out” being an acceptable course of life, I start to hear the whispers. I should have an asset by now. I should have a wife by now. I’m getting too old to have kids. When they’re twenty I’ll be almost sixty. I should have savings. I should have a career path. I should, I should, I should.

I spiral. More often than I care to admit.

No one really put these expectations on me. Not out loud at least. I assembled it myself out of decades of small comments, raised eyebrows, the way a room goes quiet when you say what you actually do for a living. I built the ceiling myself, one nail at a time. Then I called it the sky.

What’s Actually In There

For lack of a more profound metaphor, that ceiling feels like a sandwich press.

I am the sandwich. The press above me is the life I was supposed to have established by my late thirties. It comes down against my bready goodness, and the peanut butter and jelly goes everywhere.

Now, an oozing sandwich is not a beautiful thing. It’s a mess. It gets on your hands and down your wrist and you eat the whole thing standing over the sink. But it’s also the only part of a sandwich anyone actually wants. Nobody was ever in it for the bread.

To continue the whimsy of this analogy; I didn’t put the peanut butter in there.

Whatever came out under that pressure was in me before the press ever arrived. It didn’t get made by the crushing. It got found by it.

My parables are quite Christ-worthy, I know.

The Break

For two years I watched that ceiling come down and genuinely believed it was going to crush the hope out of me.

Then, sometime in the last six months, it stopped. Not with a revelation. Not on the dock, not in a church, not in any moment I can point to and say there, that’s where it happened. I just noticed one day that I’d been walking around for a while without the sound of it.

Nothing changed. That’s the strange part. I have the same bank balance, the same empty ring finger, the same unorganized adventure before me. The only difference is that the little voice that gave-a-shit has gone quiet.

I no longer care how old I am, or whether I’m too late. I crossed the threshold and I’m still here to tell you about it. I did not succumb.

The idea of being a fifty-year-old artist with a tiny home and not much to his name, no wife, no kids, actually sounds perfect to me now, so long as I’m aligned with the resonance of my heart. (Though my resonance foresees other circumstances)

I’ve stopped trying to tune the frequency of my soul to the expectations of the world around me. I love the world. I love the people I have. I love the guidance people want to offer. But there’s a knowing underneath all of that which doesn’t argue with me. It doesn’t raise its voice. It doesn’t need me convinced. It just tells me, quietly and without much ceremony, which way to go. And it has never once been wrong.

I was born with an artists soul, and I will live in devotion to that purpose with all of me. There feels no more an honourable pursuit.

Plus, I kind of like being the rebel.

This Morning

The sun came up on my thirty-seventh birthday and I sat with all of it again.

I know more about how the world works than I did. More about how my heart works. More about my art, my resonance, my reverberation through this world. Whatever knot tied me to the dock of normalcy is untied. It took years to work loose.

If I died tomorrow I’d be sated beyond belief. Truly. The next thirty-seven are bonus years. It’s hard to fathom how long a life can be. How much room there is in it for beauty. For creation.

To anyone reading this who thinks they’re late to anything — don’t. Fall in love with exactly where you are. I know it’s cliché. It’s also the only thing I’ve found that’s true.

I love that you’re here. I love that people still read. I love that a small spark of electricity is causing your heart to beat in this exact moment, and that we’re sharing in that miracle together.

Watch the next breath you take. Isn’t it scrumptious to breathe?

Jesus Murphy, life is incredible.

Here’s to another 37.

There have been several moments in my absence where I’ve thought to myself “oh, that [insert interesting idea] would be a great substack!” After which I would proceed to not write the article.

But this morning, as I sit on a back porch, rain lightly falling through the lush trees and thunder rolling in the distance, I can’t help but feel pulled to write.

I am someone who is constantly looking for patterns and seasons of life. I am fascinated by what pulls my attention and what resonates in moments throughout the year. I journal daily in a 5 year journal. I love this book. Each page has a line dedicated to the date, and beneath that, 5 sets of lines each a small paragraph long.

The entries are simple and rarely profound. “July 12th - Today I met with my friend Snuffleufagus. We went to the park. I submitted a new grant application. Day ended with phone call with mom”

Some days they are more emotional. “Today was a hard day. Couldn’t really get out of bed and the weight of guilt had me in a bit of a spiral”

But what I find truly interesting is the cycles of life I seem to fall into. I never look ahead while writing. I enter today’s details, then look above to years prior to see where I was or how I was feeling. More often than not, as in an eerie amount of the time, I will have been experiencing the same emotional cycle the year or years before as I am today.

I notice this most in the energetic waves. An entry that reads, “Today I felt incredible! The sun was shining, I got up and went to the gym. I feel focused and inspired.” Will be matched in energy and words almost to the letter in the years prior. And the same experience happens for hard days. Days where I got into an argument with someone. Days where I was feeling especially lonely. Days when I felt that my dreams were impossible to reach. Often those days would happen within the same week of the year, the year before and the year before that.

I’m about to enter year 5 of the journal, so I have a stack of evidence proving this phenomenon.

I am baffled every time I see it. And it can only draw out of me one conclusion; we are more of nature than we believe we are. When I read these entries I feel like I am a tree going through its annual cycles; “This week last year was the same time I shed my first leaf during fall”, “This day last year I blossomed my first flower and I did today also!” “Here again is the wind that takes my leaves. Here again is the light that calls them back.”

I truly believe we are seasonal. We are moving with and of the earth and Her cycles. As someone who has a spiritual connection to nature, I’ve somewhat always known this, but to have this personal data backing up the theory feels validating, and an unexpected gift from this journal.

Admittedly, I’ve started reading ahead now. To the weeks coming up. To see if there are trends arising. Cycles headed my way.

I can’t imagine there isn’t benefit to knowing that for a week in August EVERY year I seem to have an extra blast of joy and abundance. Or that in a certain week in April my life always blows up in a pretty substantial way. The wisdom reminds me of the magic I feel from a great astrology reading. Something feels familiar in the knowledge. It’s a leap, I know, from journal pages to the stars. But the journal has made the premise feel less like belief and more like memory. If you open yourself up to the possibility that the stars that appeared in the moment of your birth are an anchor tying your soul to nature at a specific time, then you can begin to surrender to the notion that you now move with nature from that anchor point. Certain times of year will feel like “your spring”, or “your fall”. Cyclical dates will reveal when best for you to plant seeds of potential, and when best to reap that work.

We are not separate from Her. We are of the earth and sky more than society has led us to remember. More than 40 hour work weeks and expectations and savings accounts and capitalism would have us believe.

If you wish to track your natural rhythm with a bit more consciousness, or simply be enamoured by how much happens in one’s life when you witness it; I encourage you to look for 5 year journals anywhere online. I ordered mine from a company called Letts in the UK, but they don’t seem to be selling the original one I purchased. I’ll have to look elsewhere next year when I begin again anew.

Have I distracted you enough from remembering my earlier confession? I’m going to come back to weekly writing beginning now. It feels like the right season.

I’ve missed you all.

With love, Isaac

It’s been a beautiful month off. I’m back now. But before I return to the Myths That Make Me series. I wanted to freestyle a little.

I’ve been tasked with a new chore since being home, given that spring has sprung here in Canada. While the word “chore” is often weighted with the begrudging huff of annoyance, I assure you this is anything but. This task has become more of a devotional practice.

Every morning I water our garden.

I knew before beginning that I would have an affinity toward this assignment. Any time I spend in nature is time I feel abundantly grateful for. I am also one who longs for quiet mornings, so to find an hour each day dedicated to nature, morning stillness, and the forced application of petrichor on the air brings a bliss about me that’s difficult to explain.

And that’s why I write, I suppose. To attempt.

The First Week

I’ve only been at this practice about a week and it’s been remarkable to watch the garden become an entity unto itself. Changing, growing, claiming, fading. I believe I started at the most opportune time. The apple trees and cherry blossoms were just beginning their bud, and the little personalities who push up from the earth were just beginning to peek their heads through.

I didn’t mean to, but it didn’t take long for me to begin naming and speaking to the plants.

Each morning I start in the same corner of the garden and work my way around.

The Ladies

I begin with a patch of ferns, tightly coiled at first, now expanding into giant palms, whom I refer to as The Ladies. “Good morning, ladies,” I offer alongside the first spritz of the hose.

They seem to have a peckish energy to them. Henning about, intertwining with one another’s business. They are beautiful in a way that took effort, and they seem to know it, spreading long and wide into available sunlight. The way they curl open reminds me of a damsel waking after a long magical sleep, rising and unfurling with grace and beauty. Once awakened, they seem to know the gossip about town, and they will not cease taking up space. No one desires them to.

The Ladies know their worth, and it shows.

The Young Ones

Small Hostas peak up through the stones and anywhere sunlight is made available by the Ladies. Coy but firm, they feel like youngsters. Poking through with a shy but with excitement. In honesty, I don’t know what these littles will become. I purposefully do not look it up. Some things are better left as surprise gifts. They will grow slowly but with eager energy, eventually becoming strong and large. They feel protected by the surrounding vegetation. I encourage them that they are safe and loved.

The Crone

At the centre of this plot of soil is the largest specimen in the garden: the Crone. An oak tree that was here long before these homes and, with luck, will be here long after. She doesn’t seem to have a name. She is older than names. She simply is, in her presence and watchful, towering knowing.

I imagine how deep her roots extend into the earth. How her reach likely touches every corner of this modest yard. Every plant connected to her, held by her, through a network of mycelium fascia. She is the mother and grandmother and great-grandmother. Her wisdom of the seasons, of change, of growth, is etched into the deep crevices of her bark.

As the cherry blossoms begin to shed their magenta, the Crone begins to bud her distinctively shaped oak leaves. I imagine she waited to exert the energy needed to bud, in exchange for admiring the flower offering of her cherry and pear cousins. But now that their ritual is over, she extracts what she needs from the soil and begins her rebirth. Her bright green canopy only now beginning to take significant shape over the small plot of land.

She is kind. I can feel it. She’d be lovely to sit with on a porch and share a hot tea.

The Sentries

A sentry of White Cedar trees lines the fence behind her. Steadfast and sure, they are grounded solid in the land. Protecting the small garden from the elements. They do not look much different than during the winter months, their tough needled exterior keeping pace with the seasons. And yet, to the trained eye, you can begin to see them puff out their chests. Swelling in size ever so slightly. Bellies full of water and sunshine.

Masculine in nature, they smell of the woods: of spice and warmth. Their gift is one of my favourite scents. Reminding me of the north shores of Lake Superior. Briefly sending me home in my heart.

I’m grateful.

The Patient Ones

There are bushes that will one day carry berries for us to feast upon. Still looking ragged, they will be late to the parade. Late only in the sense that comparison matters, which it doesn’t. They’ll bloom exactly when they’re supposed to, because that’s their nature.

The metaphor hits me harder than I expect it to.

We bloom when we’re meant to. We cannot force these things. More water and more sun will only damage the process. And if everything bloomed in the same week, we wouldn’t be able to enjoy it all. The Creator of this tapestry has paused in consideration of this.

I’m grateful for that also.

Toe-May-Toe

Lined against the garage are boxes dedicated to the delicate delicacy that are tomatoes. Multiple varieties; Roma, Cherry and Beefsteak, I find them all in bud. Tiny, meek yellow flowers punch their way past the large sweeping leaves of the stalk.

I find it interesting that these three plants have chosen to bloom together. Distant cousins in genetic makeup and yet, as though in communication with one another, they present their canary posy almost simultaneously.

Is it written somewhere that within these four days they must bloom? Should I not be amazed by the synchronistic dance of this? If all three were Cherry, or all three Roma, I perhaps would not be so intrigued. But these plants have no reason to bloom together other than their proximity to one another. Maybe we all flourish more when in community—when we decide with one mind.

I water each root and move on, my heart fuller for the reminder.

Woman In Pink

A small stone path leads me around a walking cul-de-sac lined with the fruit trees. When I began a week ago, they were vibrant and intoxicating. The sweet scent of vanilla on the air and the electric white and pink of their blossoms. I pause in awe.

It’s difficult for me to fathom that these plants annually explode into an ecstatic expression of saturation. A divine courtship with nature. A yearning-filled romantic inception of procreation. A full surrender of erotic ethos painted in electric palettes.

Nature is the ultimate seductress. I am not the subject of her desire, and yet even I am pulled into her embrace. Her scent causing me to move as close to her as I can.

Today the ground at her feet is filled with those petals, like a silk pink dress she wore now settled on the floor around her ankles. She stands bare and will soon be with child.

I am without words for her most days. I simply admire and ensure she’s fed.

The Unborn Bushes

The garden closer to the home hosts rose and hydrangea bushes. Both slow to begin their journey toward bloom. They appear as twigs, resting still as they gather nutrients into their bellies. One day they will both begin their own dance. I eagerly await that morning.

And I am also grateful that I have an offering to look forward to.

I water them both now, trusting they will grow. I can’t say for certain they will. I do not know the inner workings of each stem. But I know that my showing up today ensures they can be birthed in the future.

Another metaphor writhes its way into my mind: the work today yields results tomorrow. Trust is needed in most every sacred act.

No One Forgotten

I turn to the last section of the garden. The last stop on my tour. There have been many persons I have encountered along the way. Each of them changing each morning. Growing taller, fatter, lusher.

I take immense pride in their growth. I feel my contribution to be barely enough, but the proof is in their vibrancy.

One of my favourite personalities, and my last stop, is a wiry cedar tree I’ve affectionately named Larry. He, unlike his sentinel counterparts, has grown toward the sky in wobbles and curves. I imagine he was transplanted here from Whoville. His top peak especially turns and curls with whimsical coil.

While he seems to be growing strong, his entire left side hosts a rough brown splotch that looks unhealthy. I do not know enough about this species to know the truth, but the needles have mostly abandoned their post, and what’s left is dark brown and dry.

Though his look is whimsical, his energy is disgruntled. He feels like the Eeyore of the garden.

I ask him each morning how he is feeling, and his response always resembles the adage: “Same day. Same shit.”

Larry feels the world is against him. He feels his patch is an eyesore and that he is ugly because he is not beautiful.

I water him a little extra and remind him that he is perfect exactly as he is. In fact, I often prefer the caprice of his trunk, the tilt of his tip, the brown in a sea of green. There is beauty in all of it. Even his personality.

He rolls his proverbial eyes, but I think he feels at home here. And that’s what matters most.

It wasn’t until several days later, curiosity finally pulling at me, that I looked up what species Larry actually is. I uploaded a photo and waited for the results.

Weeping Cedar.

I had to read it twice.

A weeping cedar. Not just a tree with a quirky form, but a tree born to weep. A tree whose very nature is to droop and curve and bend under the weight of its own being. A tree that carries melancholy in its botanical blueprint.

I’d named him Larry before I knew. I’d felt his truth before I understood it. And I’d been telling a weeping tree that it was perfect exactly as it was, without realizing how literal that statement needed to be.

Some trees are meant to stand tall and proud. Larry was never going to be that tree.

But he’s a weeping cedar. And weeping cedars are extraordinary precisely because they weep. Their drooping grace is their gift. Their cascading form is not a defect to overcome but a feature to behold.

I like to hope I can convince Larry of this over time.

The Reciprocal Relationship

I find it no coincidence that when I was given this task, I just so happened to be reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Robin is a Native American biologist steeped deeply in both Aboriginal wisdom and the rigorous study of science. Throughout the book, she explains her people’s relationship to the plants that surround them.

And when I mean relationship, I mean true relationship. Intimate, alive, intentional, ceremonial. The relationship you’d have with a friend or loved one. They are plant persons with whom we interact, not objects to be used at our will.

This book is an absolute gift.

The way in which I walk through nature after being reminded of our inherent connection to her has changed me. We are family. Us, the animals, the plants. Distant cousins formed of the same clay. We may speak different languages, but we can communicate. And the natural world knows much more than we allow ourselves to remember.

I give to them, they give to us. Neither taking more than they need.

It’s raining today, and will likely rain the next few days. Eliminating the need for my morning devotion. And even though I know my friends are being well tended to by the clouded skies, I can’t help but miss them.

Maybe I am being fed more by their presence than I realize.

Maybe this act of watering the garden is more reciprocal than I’ve allowed myself to believe. All I know is each day, when my duty is fulfilled, I feel more full.

What we feed feeds us.

I am forever grateful for the Mother Earth we call home, and may we all find ways to acknowledge what we receive and find ways to give.

I spent yesterday morning (Easter) at a Christian church service. I was craving worship, and community, and Divine teaching. Yet, when I left the ceremony I felt discouraged. I suppose discouraged is the wrong word, it was actually more affirming. The Biblical Christ-centric doctrine truly doesn’t speak to my soul the way it used to. To clarify, I friggen love Christ. I believe the power and wisdom he wielded. I believe his moment on this earth was significant for many reasons—but when I sit amongst these services, I feel such a collective outsourcing of each individual’s power. Jesus is put on the almighty, all-saving, “without Him I am impure” pedestal and it breaks my heart. I can just imaging God, as the Father, looking down on the congregation and saying “You and Jesus are the same. He is but an example, not an idol.”
Not a prerequisite to receive God’s love. Not a “do this or you won’t have happiness.”

I also struggled with the idea of surrendering everything to God or Christ.
“Life hard? Give it to God”
“Wife cheated on you? Give it to God.”
I don’t know. The pragmatist in me kept repeating “But what does that actually mean? How does that actually change my circumstance?” It didn’t feel empowering. It felt like giving up the sovereignty of the God within us.

Anyway, I’m incoherently ranting—below was the substack I’d prepared for this week. It is but a snippet of all the cosmology I believe, have experienced and have integrated. I’d have to write a book to truly go through it all, and it’s ever changing so that book would need many revisions.

In my previous substack, I shared how Conversations with God gave me permission to trust myself, to distance myself from institutional religion, and to believe I was loved without condition. It was the emotional and psychological liberation I’d been starving for.

But the book also offered something else: a complete cosmology. A framework for understanding not just who God is, but what existence is. Why we’re here. How it all works. The mechanics of reality itself.

I’m going to feebly attempt to lay out these concepts as clearly as I can, knowing full well that I’m compressing thousands of pages of nuanced philosophy into a single essay. I’m going to butcher it - undoubtedly. I’ll also say upfront: if any of this resonates, go read the actual books. Conversations with God Books 1, 2, and 3. I’ve read them cover to cover more than a dozen times, and each reading reveals new dimensions.

Also, a disclaimer: This is my understanding. My interpretation. The belief system I’ve built from these concepts and my lived experience of them. I’m not claiming objective truth. I’m sharing what makes sense to my soul.

With that said, here’s the meaning of life as I understand it.

I Am God. You Are God.

Let’s start with the big one.

When I say “I am God” and “You are God,” I don’t mean we’re gods in the egotistical sense—omnipotent beings who control reality through sheer will, separate and superior to others. I mean something far more radical and far more humble.

God is not a being. God is being itself. God is the fundamental fabric of existence. The frequency that vibrates through all things. The consciousness that animates matter. The space between atoms and the atoms themselves.

God is not separate from creation, observing from outside. God is creation. All of it. The stars and the dirt. The oceans and the emptiness. The light and the darkness. The love and the fear.

All That Is.

The best metaphor I’ve found—and it’s imperfect, like all metaphors—is the ocean and the wave.

You are a wave in the ocean of God. I am a wave in the ocean of God. Each wave is distinct. It has its own shape, its own movement, its own momentary existence. But the wave is not separate from the ocean. It is the ocean, expressed in a particular form.

When the wave crashes on the shore and dissolves back into the sea, it doesn’t cease to exist. It simply returns to its source. And another wave rises. And another. And another. Endlessly.

We are waves. God is the ocean. And we are never, ever separate from what we are.

The Problem God Faced

Before there was individuated consciousness, before there were souls, or beings, or anything we’d recognize as “separate”, there was only God.

God was everything. All of it. Simultaneously.

God was love and God was fear. God was light and God was darkness. God was being and God was non-being. God was infinite potential with nothing outside of itself to experience.

And here’s the dilemma: when you are everything, you cannot experience yourself.

Think about it. If you wanted to know what it’s like to interact with yourself—to truly experience yourself from an outside perspective—you’d need to be separate from yourself. You’d need an “other” to encounter.

But if you’re All That Is, there is no “other.”

God, being all things, could conceptually understand everything. God knew love and fear, light and dark, joy and sorrow. But God had never experienced these things. Not the way a being experiences them—in contrast, in relationship, in the unfolding of time.

And so, God created a solution.

The Great Splitting

God split itself.

Not into pieces that are separate from God—you can’t separate the ocean from itself—but into individuated expressions. Distinct perspectives. Points of consciousness that could experience themselves as “not the whole.”

These are souls.

You are one of these expressions. I am one of these expressions. Every person, every being, every consciousness is one of these expressions.

We are God experiencing God. We are the ocean pretending to be waves so the ocean can know what it’s like to crash on the shore.

And why would God do this? What’s the purpose of this elaborate cosmic game of hide-and-seek?

Experience.

The only thing God wanted—the only thing God could want, being already complete—was to experience itself. To know itself. To feel the infinite potential of existence as lived reality.

And the only way to do that was to create contrast. To forget. To become finite so that infinity could know itself through limitation.

Your Higher Self and the Soul’s Desire

Here’s where it gets layered.

You, as you experience yourself right now—Isaac sitting at a computer, or you reading this on a screen—are not the fullness of who you are. You’re a temporary expression, a single lifetime, a particular perspective.

Your higher self—your soul, your eternal essence—is vast beyond your current comprehension. It has lived thousands of lifetimes, millions even. It has been male and female, rich and poor, victim and perpetrator, saint and sinner. It has experienced love and loss and joy and devastation across countless forms.

And your higher self has one driving desire: to experience all that God is.

Not just the good parts. Not just the pleasant, holy, enlightened experiences. All of it.

Because God is all that is, and to fully know God is to experience everything there is to experience.

This means your soul will, over the course of many lifetimes, experience every facet of existence. Wealth and poverty. Power and powerlessness. Health and illness. Love and abandonment. Creation and destruction.

There is no judgment in this. There is no “good lifetime” versus “bad lifetime.” There is only experience.

Some lifetimes will be gentle. Others will be brutal. Some will feel like heaven. Others will feel like hell. But all of them—all of them—are sacred. All of them are the soul learning what it came here to learn, experiencing what it came here to experience.

The Soul Contract

Before you are born into a particular lifetime, your higher self creates a contract with itself.

This isn’t a contract in the legal sense—it’s more like a creative brief. A set of intentions for what this life will explore.

The contract might look something like this:

“In this lifetime, I would like to experience what it’s like to be born into poverty and claw my way to success. I will know both hunger and abundance. I will learn resilience, determination, and the bittersweetness of achieving everything I thought I wanted only to realize it wasn’t what I needed. I will form deep friendships that will betray me, so I can learn discernment. I will fall in love with someone I cannot have, so I can learn the difference between attachment and love. And at the end, I will look back and see that every moment—even the suffering—was perfectly designed to give me the experiences I came here for.”

Or:

“In this lifetime, I want to be born into privilege but struggle with mental illness. I will know what it’s like to have every external advantage but feel internally broken. I will experience the isolation of depression, the terror of anxiety, and the slow, hard-won journey toward self-acceptance. I will learn that healing is not linear, that vulnerability is strength, and that my struggles will eventually become the medicine I offer to others.”

Or:

“In this lifetime, I want to be born and die tragically at the age of 5. Providing my parent’s souls an opportunity to experience profound grief, and also the life altering experience of divine forgiveness and love.”

Or in my case:

“Dear Isaac, we have yet to experience what it’s like to be an existential writer, poet, musician who doubts himself constantly but still manages to create moments of magic in his life. We could tie in deep heartbreak and hope simultaneously. Let’s also have a deep desire to heal others and have enormous influence, but have that doubt in his mind stifle his purpose until he can break through it himself. That’s something we’ve never experienced before. But we’ve already played the level where we deeply know and love God, so we can keep that knowledge at the surface. No need to learn that lesson again.”

And so I was born into a life that would create exactly that environment. Upon birth, I forgot the contract. The veil of forgetting descended, and I’ve been working toward that silent, quiet tug on my heart ever since.

Why the Forgetting?

You might ask: if the soul knows all this, why do we forget when we’re born?

Because if you remembered, the experience wouldn’t be real. It would be like watching a movie you’ve already seen, knowing every plot twist before it happens.

The forgetting is essential to experiencing. It’s what makes this realm so powerful. When you don’t know who you really are, when you experience yourself as small and separate and fragile, every choice becomes meaningful. Every moment of connection becomes profound. Every glimpse of the Divine becomes a revelation.

If you walked around consciously knowing “I am God experiencing God,” you’d lose the contrast. You’d lose the tension. You’d lose the exquisite vulnerability of being human.

The game is to forget completely... and then slowly remember. To be lost, and then found. To experience separation so that reunion feels like coming home.

What About “Bad” People?

I know what you’re thinking. Or at least, I know what I thought when I first encountered these ideas:

“If everyone is God experiencing God, and there’s no judgment, does that mean Hitler was just ‘experiencing’ being a mass murderer? Does that mean rapists and pedophiles and war criminals are all just souls having Divine experiences?”

Yes.

And before you close this substack in disgust, let me explain.

First: There is still cause and effect. There is still karma (though not in the punitive sense religions teach). If you cause suffering, you will eventually experience suffering—not as punishment, but because to fully know God, you must know both sides of every experience. The perpetrator will, in another lifetime, be the victim. Not because God is vengeful, but because the soul chooses to understand the full spectrum.

Second: Just because someone is having an experience doesn’t mean you have to participate in it. You are free to protect yourself, to establish boundaries, to say “no” to anything that doesn’t serve your highest good. Compassion doesn’t mean allowing harm.

Third: Understanding that someone is a soul having an experience doesn’t require you to condone their actions. It just means you can hold them with more complexity than the simple binary of “good person” versus “evil person.”

The truth is, we’ve all been the villain in someone else’s story. We’ve all caused harm, intentionally or unintentionally. We’ve all had lifetimes—if you believe in reincarnation—where we were not on the side of love.

This doesn’t excuse anything. It just reframes judgment into understanding. Punishment into growth. Condemnation into compassion.

And for me, this framework has been liberating. It means I can look at anyone—no matter what they’ve done—and recognize the Divine spark in them. Not because I approve of their actions, but because I understand that underneath the temporary form, underneath the trauma and the conditioning and the pain, there is a soul. A piece of God. Just like me.

The Ascended Masters

It becomes easier to understand when you look at the ascended masters—Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Yogananda, and others who’ve walked among us radiating divine consciousness.

These souls are old. Ancient. They’ve lived so many lifetimes, experienced so much, that they come into this realm already knowing who they are. They don’t need to learn basic lessons about love or fear or power. Or at least their veil is thinned so much upon returning that it takes them but a few years of existence to remember who they are—as opposed to my 30, or another’s 90.

They incarnate with a singular purpose: to teach. To remind the rest of us who we really are. To hold up a mirror and say, “You are this too. You are what I am. You just don’t remember yet.”

When Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father, but by me,” I believe he was speaking as the Christ-consciousness—the awakened awareness—not as the individual person named Jesus.

He was saying: This consciousness that I embody—this remembrance of oneness, this alignment with love—this is the way. And you can embody it too. You ARE this. You just haven’t realized it yet.

“All these things I do, you can do also. And greater things than these shall you do.”

He wasn’t special because he was different from us. He was special because he remembered what we’d all forgotten.

And when a soul has experienced everything there is to experience—when it has known every facet of God-consciousness across countless lifetimes—it merges back into the Source. It dissolves back into the ocean, fully conscious, carrying all the wisdom of all its journeys.

This is ascension. This is Samadhi. This is enlightenment. This is the ultimate homecoming.

Why This Matters to Me

There has been so much integration surrounding this doctrine. Years of it. But the things I feel I’ve gleaned the most, so far, are these:

a) Zero judgment. When I understand that every person is a soul on their own journey, experiencing exactly what they came here to experience, I stop needing to fix them or change them or judge them. I can meet them where they are with compassion. Even when they hurt me. Especially when they hurt me.

b) Purpose and direction. I don’t need an external authority to tell me what to do. I can look inward, listen to the quiet pull of my heart, and trust that it’s leading me exactly where my soul wants to go.

c) Infinite patience. If I have forever—if this is just one lifetime among thousands—then I don’t need to get it all right now. I can make mistakes. I can fail. I can take my time. The pressure to be perfect dissolves.

d) Deeper love for God and others. When I see God in everyone and everything, when I understand that hurting another is hurting myself because there is no separation, my capacity for love expands exponentially.

e) Life becomes play. When I stop taking it all so seriously—when I remember that even the suffering is sacred, even the pain is part of the design—I can hold it all more lightly. I can laugh. I can dance. I can live.

Only The Beginning

I’ve condensed a sliver of a massive, intricate cosmology into a single essay. I’ve left out nuances. I’ve simplified concepts that deserve entire books.

Again, if any of this resonates, I cannot encourage you enough: read Conversations with God. All three books. Multiple times. Let it speak to you in the language your soul understands. It is only in experience, not conceptualization, where one can truly connect to anything.

And if none of this resonates? That’s okay too. You’re on your own journey. Your soul knows what it needs. Trust that.

For me, this framework changed my life. It gave me a way to make sense of my suffering, my questions, my doubt. It gave me permission to leave every church that tried to cage me. It gave me a God I could actually love, and who actually loved me; without condition.

It gave me myself back.

Coming next: Navigating the world through a lens that felt painfully rare. Coming to understand what love is and years of feeling alone, before finally finding like minded humans.

I split this chapter into two parts. The first is the discovery; the second is the cosmology. I tried to force it into one but the concepts felt too large to suppress.

The next several years were spent in quiet rebellion against any church. I’d been scorned enough that I didn’t want rules or scriptures or to witness people believing one thing and acting another way. I was tired of hypocrisy and “grey areas.”

How was it that these religions had existed for hundreds of years but were so impossible to follow perfectly? The rules were simple. They were written right there. So why did everyone struggle with them? Why, if followed perfectly, did life suddenly become far more difficult?

I was exhausted.

And so I became a teenager. I released my responsibility to spirituality and attempted to cultivate my social status. Drinking, parties, girls, dating. And honestly, I enjoyed myself. I fell madly in love. I started having sex, which was a game changer. I started living my life more fully and, with a foundation already built in my relationship to God, I felt happy.

Twinges of guilt would arise when I’d think of all the “rules” I might be breaking, but I only felt guilty when the voices of the people governing them slipped into my psyche. I also had to contend with one person’s version of law allowing for one thing, then another person’s allowing for something else.

Here I could drink coffee, there I couldn’t. Here I could have sex out of wedlock, there I couldn’t. Here I could drink alcohol, there I couldn’t.

If God was all-powerful, why was He so inconsistent? Why did everything need to be parable?

Moses essentially came down and said: Do these ten things and God’s kingdom is yours.

History continued to add asterisks.

The Infuriating Search

In my time alone, I began to devour spiritual texts. Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, The Tao of Pooh, The Alchemist, The Secret. I just wanted context. I wanted singular direction.

Everyone claimed they were right and the rest were wrong. Every. Single. One.

The pattern was maddening. Each book, each teacher, each tradition would offer something beautiful—and then inevitably claim exclusive access to truth. Even the more universalist texts carried a subtle superiority: “We’re not like those dogmatic religions. We’ve transcended that. We know better.”

I was tired of better. I was tired of right and wrong. I was tired of the spiritual Olympics where everyone was competing for God’s gold medal.

I just wanted to know if God actually loved me. Not loved me if. Not loved me when. Just... loved me.

Right Under My Nose

This infuriating pursuit eventually led me back to Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch.

I’d skimmed through this book a couple of times already, having been given it by my mother at a young age. But I’d never really devoted my heart to the read. Or should I say, it never spoke to me the way it needed to. I wasn’t ready for it yet.

At thirteen, when my mother first handed it to me, I’d read it looking for answers to specific questions: Is this the right path? Will I go to hell? Am I doing it wrong? The book didn’t answer those questions because it refused to accept their premise. It dissolved the questions themselves.

But I wasn’t ready to have my questions dissolved. I was still looking for someone to tell me what to do.

Now, several years later, exhausted from trying to earn love I could never quite secure, I picked it up again.

This time, it was a literal godsend.

Unconditional Divinity

The concepts in the book spoke to me in a way that no other scripture had. It was clear, finally. Concise modern language and subject matter that actually applied to my day-to-day life. Not how many goats I should sacrifice for Passover. Not parables about vineyards and fig trees that required a theology degree to decode. Just straight talk about relationships, money, sex, death, fear, and love.

But more than the accessibility, it was the tone.

Every religious text I’d encountered spoke with authority. “Thus saith the Lord.” “It is written.” “The truth is...” Even the kindest, most inclusive spiritual books carried an undercurrent of instruction: Here’s what enlightened people do. Here’s how awakened souls behave. Here’s the ladder you must climb.

Conversations with God didn’t instruct. It invited. It questioned. It explored.

The God in this book wasn’t handing down commandments from a mountaintop. He was having a conversation. An actual back-and-forth. He listened. He acknowledged confusion. He even—and this nearly broke me—laughed.

God had a sense of humor about the whole thing.

But the concept that shook me deepest was this: I was finally introduced to a God that wanted nothing from me. That needed nothing from me. That truly, undeniably, loved without expectation.

No demands. No rules. No laws. No judgment.

Let me pause here and let that land, because for most of my life, every God I’d encountered needed something:

• The Catholic God needed my confession, my obedience, my attendance at Mass.

• The Evangelical God needed my verbal acceptance of Christ, my purity, my evangelism.

• The Mormon God needed my baptism, my mission service, my adherence to doctrine.

Even the softer, more mystical versions of God I’d encountered—the God of my mother’s SRF teachings, the God in Eckhart Tolle—seemed to need my practice. My meditation. My presence. My consciousness.

And I was so tired of being needed.

The God in Conversations with God didn’t need anything because God lacked nothing. God was whole, complete, perfect. God was All That Is. How could All That Is need something from a tiny piece of itself?

This God loved me the way the ocean loves a wave. Not because the wave does anything to earn it. Not because the wave behaves correctly. But because the wave is the ocean. There’s no separation. There’s nothing to earn. There’s only what already is.

What God Wants

But here’s what cracked me wide open: God’s greatest desire?

God wanted me to experience.

Not to be happy all the time—that’s a toxic spiritual bypass that flattens the richness of existence. God wanted me to live fully. To feel everything. The joy and the grief. The ecstasy and the despair. The love and the heartbreak. The expansion and the contraction.

God wanted me to stop treating my humanity like a problem to solve or a test to pass. God wanted me to stop spending my life trying to be good enough to earn the next one. God wanted me to follow my heart, trust my desires, honor my pain, and stop treating sadness like failure.

God wanted me to know that every emotion—even the ones that hurt, even the ones that felt like they’d destroy me—was sacred. That the darkness wasn’t something to transcend or bypass or “positive think” my way out of. It was part of the wholeness. Part of what it means to be alive.

God wanted me to know that I was already free. That I’d always been free. That the entire game was just forgetting and remembering and forgetting and remembering, over and over, and that both the forgetting and the remembering were equally sacred. The pain and the pleasure. The breaking and the healing.

All of it. Not just the easy parts.

The Permission I’d Been Waiting For

Reading this, something unlocked in me.

I realized I’d been waiting my entire life for permission. Permission to trust myself. Permission to question. Permission to leave churches that hurt me. Permission to love who I loved. Permission to explore, to fail, to change my mind, to not have all the answers.

Every religion I’d encountered gave conditional permission: You can question, but only within these boundaries. You can explore, but only these approved paths. You can be yourself, but only the version of yourself we deem acceptable.

Conversations with God gave me unconditional permission.

It told me that my doubts were sacred. That my questions were prayers. That my confusion was part of the process. That my desires weren’t sinful distractions but divine whispers showing me where my soul wanted to grow.

It told me that leaving Christianity wasn’t abandoning God—it was following God more closely.

It told me that my mother, who loved more purely than anyone I’d ever known, was not going to hell. She was already living in heaven, because heaven wasn’t a place you earned. It was a state of consciousness, and she’d been inhabiting it all along.

It told me that I wasn’t broken. That I’d never been broken. That the entire concept of being broken was a lie designed to make me dependent on systems that claimed they could fix me.

An Attempt At Integration

I read the book cover to cover. Then I read it again. And again.

Each time, new layers revealed themselves. Each time, something I’d glossed over suddenly cracked open and poured light into a dark corner of my psyche.

I started journaling my own conversations with God. At first they felt forced, like I was making them up. But the more I practiced, the more I realized I wasn’t making them up any more than Neale Donald Walsch was. I was tuning in. Listening. Allowing the dialogue that was always happening to become conscious.

The answers I received were gentle but firm. Loving but honest. They never told me what to do—they asked me what I wanted. They never judged my choices—they helped me understand the consequences. They never demanded obedience—they invited alignment.

For the first time in my life, I had a spiritual practice that felt like mine. Not inherited. Not prescribed. Not performed for the approval of elders or the salvation of my soul.

Mine.

The Foundation

I didn’t know it at the time, but this book was laying the foundation for everything that would come next. It was building the scaffolding I would need to navigate heartbreak, addiction, loss, ecstasy, and transformation.

It was teaching me that I could trust myself. That my inner knowing was more reliable than any external authority. That the still, small voice inside me was God, and I could follow it even when it led me away from everything I’d been taught.

It was showing me that spirituality didn’t have to mean suffering. That devotion didn’t have to mean denial. That loving God could actually feel like freedom instead of a cage.

And most importantly, it was beginning to teach me what would take many more years to fully embody: that I was not separate from the Divine. I was not a broken sinner grovelling for scraps of love from a distant deity.

I was God experiencing God. A wave in the ocean. A drop of water in the infinite sea. Distinct, yes. Separate, no.

But those deeper cosmological concepts—the mechanics of how it all works—I wasn’t ready for yet. I was still integrating the emotional truth: I am loved without condition. I am free. I am enough.

That was enough to completely reorient my life.

Next: The cosmology itself. What Conversations with God taught me about the nature of reality, the purpose of existence, and why we’re all here. The soul contracts, the reincarnation, the meaning of it all. The God who split itself into infinite pieces just to know what it’s like to come home.

Be it me here

Soft gaze and easeful heart

That I look upon the foothills to my back

Mossy knolls of varying heights

Some tread hard to near black

Another combed by spring wind

Dances there wildflower and clover’s luck

But by and by

Though softness yearns

It’s ahead the dream wanders

Towards the rising sun

Hard be it to hope upon the valley

Hidden dark beyond the jagged peak

One can wish, one can wish

Again toward the wandered hills I spy

Fellow traveller having taken stake

His body ease in comfort root

A babe in lover’s bloom

Eyes fixed upon their seasoned place

Though known within

The eye unseen

Mourns the hope of the hidden valley

Which path to chose

To walk or wait

Man’s greatest war

And so

To the light kissed morn I turn once more

It’s siren call too pierced to fade

And gift my life, my foot, my soul

To the blackened earth and mossy knoll

After the Bible camp experiences (read here) and the traumatic excursion through drug use (read here), I tumbled into the throes of high school. Girls and social groups became the most important items on my list. I was lucky that my good Christian-natured self didn’t abandon its foundation entirely. I still approached life with kindness and love. I still skewed toward spiritual groups and conversations, but I began to wear my association less and less on my sleeve. Only admitting my devotion to those I thought might understand, or even listen.

I began to witness the spiritual flicker in other kids’ eyes slowly but surely be snuffed out as popularity became a new sort of religion. I didn’t quite know what I was or what group I belonged to. I played sports, did school plays, loved art, loved the tech and computer classes, loved English and writing, and also loved student council and leadership groups. I started to develop my jack-of-all-trades mentality. Flowing in and out of social groups and friend circles.

This proclivity eventually led me to making friends outside of my own high school. This exploration introduced me to my good friend Tom.

Tom, from my perspective, was a cool kid from another high school. I wasn’t sure if he’d like me at first given his elevated status, but we eventually became good friends. One of the greatest summers I ever had—filled with memories I’ll never forget—was spent with Tom. He was the first to get his license, so we would spend our evenings and free summer days driving to lakes and rivers for adventures. Crashing parties and chasing girls all over town.

But aside from the normal boy activities, Tom and I had one important thing in common: we spoke openly about God (when the right people were listening - which wasn’t often).

Tom had been born into a Mormon family and, though he was in a fair-weathered season of church attendance, he admired the familial sense of community and the depth of faith within the church.

The Real Mormons

I’ll clarify quickly for anyone unaware: the current and “true” church of Mormons is called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and holds the nickname “Mormon.” Many will associate this church with the more sensational labels like polygamists or the reality show Sister Wives. There are still “Mormons” who practice these things, but they aren’t associated with the Latter-day Saints. They are two different sects with the same origin story.

Tom belonged to the Latter-day Saints and insisted the church was not polygamist. He didn’t attend church every Sunday, but he would now and again. He was in his own contemplation over his relationship with spirituality and was questioning his own faith. We spent many sleepless nights debating the scriptures or teachings of God and Christ and how they applied to modern life. These conversations were always a joy for me to explore, and I think part of why Tom and I became so close—paired with our insatiable need for adventure.

Tom had mentioned that there were other kids I would know from the church, one in particular being a beautiful, popular girl from another of the larger high schools in town. We’ll call her Nicole. Her reputation preceded her as being one of the prettiest girls in town and an aggressively devout Mormon. Her father being the bishop presiding over the local church.

Eventually, Tom asked if I’d be interested in going to a Sunday service to see what it was all about. I happily agreed.

The First Taste of Faith

The service itself was stunning. Filled with passion and liturgy. It held aspects of the Catholic ceremonies that felt a bit drawl, but it wasn’t without sincerity—not only from the leadership holding the ceremony but, as I looked around the audience, from the members of the church as well.

The people of this congregation cared. Really cared. They were attentive and intentional. Even the kids, for the most part, paid attention to the ceremony with interest.

After the initial full communal address, the members would split into smaller groups with lessons and talks geared specifically toward them—all led by community members charged with preparing a lesson for that week. Young kids, teens, young adults, and adults split into groups. The group attendance wasn’t a requirement, so Tom and I decided to leave after the initial ceremony.

I’d spent sixty percent of my time that morning listening to the lecture. The other forty percent ogling over Nicole, seated in the second row with her family. She was stunning, and a woman of God.

I was smitten almost immediately but understood the roadblocks between us. Her being Mormon as one, and her being beautiful and popular, the other.

As Tom and I exited, we shook hands with the bishop, and Tom went to make small talk with Nicole. I was introduced, hands likely sweaty and shaking.

The Integration

The summer rolled on, and Tom and I would attend the odd Sunday service. I would talk more and become more acquainted with the families, and Nicole.

One of the founding principles of the Mormon church was recruitment, so having a young, enthusiastic Christian boy attending services was like catnip to the congregation. I gleaned a lot of “potential” attention—I didn’t mind it. Not when it came from Nicole and her family.

Through service and other church social events, I ended up becoming close with Nicole’s family. They were the idyllic nuclear God-fearing familial unit. They were beyond kind to everyone. They had built intentional devotion into their home. Praying constantly, volunteering, family Bible studies. These were all things encouraged by the church but not always walked out—Nicole’s family was the Mormon Poster Family. All beautiful, all incredibly Christian, and all obedient to the teachings.

I became infatuated with what they’d created. A home that loved God, a home that didn’t feel nerdy or recluse because of that love. A place to succeed and be known and have a foundation in spirituality.

I began to spend more time with the family than with Tom. I became close with Nicole’s brothers, with her parents, and with her. Slowly I started to integrate into their family. Attending dinners throughout the week, family movie nights, Bible studies, and attending church nearly every week with them. Not only had I been welcomed into a picture-perfect family, but also one where every member spoke openly and freely of God without hesitation.

I would stay at their home for days and weeks on end.

Another important foundation of the LDS church was missionary work. For young boys, it was especially important. A rite of passage for any Mormon teen. I had begun looking into the act of service and exploring my own desires for it.

I was enraptured by the scripture, the new version of the story of Christ, by this group of people who were so incredible, so loving, so normal, and yet so devout. Not to mention, my feelings for Nicole were being stoked each and every time we’d spend time together. I’d, through subtle and not-so-subtle advances, explained my admiration to her (as best as a boy struggling through puberty could), but they were always turned down. Kindly, though heart-shatteringly. I didn’t want to compromise our friendship or my relationship with her family, so I respected the outcome.

Over time, my love of the church grew, and the desire to serve a mission grew as well. The caveat being I couldn’t serve unless I had been baptized into the church.

It wasn’t a difficult decision for me to make, and eventually I took the plunge. Dressed in all white, with Nicole’s father overseeing the initiation, I chose the LDS church and committed myself to the church teachings. I was beyond thrilled at the community I’d found. The family I’d found. The life filled with God that I’d found.

And as a glorious cherry on top, one night, sitting alone snuggled up on a couch, Nicole and I shared a kiss that blossomed into a thrilling relationship. Abstinence before marriage would be at the heart of our dating, but that didn’t stop our passion for being as close to one another as clothes would allow.

For the first time in a long time, I felt truly aligned. I had God in my life, I had a community that loved and supported me, I had a girl who was beyond stunning and funny and ambitious and loving and God-fearing. I had purpose and direction.

I was happy. Really happy.

There was only one problem.

The teachings themselves.

The Doctrine

For anyone who doesn’t know, Mormonism is an off-shoot of Christianity. The foundational belief being that there were many divinely inspired events happening on the American side of the world at the same time as the Old and New Testament. Most notably, after Jesus’ crucifixion, he appeared and ministered to a people named the Nephites. Over time, these collections of stories were gathered and abridged by a man named Mormon (hence The Book of Mormon). He wrote the stories—organized in books similar to the Bible—on golden plates and had them buried by his son. Then in the early 1800s, a man named Joseph Smith was visited by an angel and shown where these plates had been buried. He translated the stories into the book that’s seen today.

The LDS church, by this definition, is one of the newest religions on earth and, with an aggressive focus on missionary work, has grown quite significantly.

For me, all of this was fine. I had no issue with immaculate intervention. Catholicism and Christianity were filled with wild tales all the same. Christ and God were full of miracles.

The Mormon church had other rules that were strictly enforced: they didn’t drink caffeine, didn’t drink alcohol or smoke or do drugs, didn’t approve of homosexual relationships, and—much to my chagrin—abstained from sex until marriage. I didn’t think a truly loving God would have these rules, but I was still subscribed to my heart being sinful, so I kept steadfast in my faith in hopes of winning God’s approval.

(I will say that a lot of members turned a blind eye to the homosexuality aspect, and other rules. Another crack in the church’s foundation. Members would just brush it off as their own opinions conflicted with that of the book.)

The Ethical Tipping Point

Where I felt myself shudder and resist the most was against one of the main talking points of missionaries around the world: that the LDS church is the one and only true path to God.

This had always been my sticking point. It was such an audacious and prideful claim. That there was one true path to salvation and that, if not followed, you would suffer in eternal damnation.

I’d been raised in a house that accepted all paths to God. That endorsed a God who loved truly without exception. And by a mother whose love permeated deeper than anyone I’d known, not only for me but for anyone who had the privilege of meeting her.

Was I to claim that she would be burning in hell after all this was said and done?

It simply wasn’t an option. She was more committed to God than any member of this church. The crunch in my chest ached as I prepped for serving my own mission.

Over the next several months, a fissure began to form inside of me. I was in love with Nicole in a way I’d never been in love before (teenage infatuation). I had a family who loved God. I was getting attention from church leadership for my enthusiasm and how valuable I’d be as a missionary. I was excited about the exotic places I might travel to on my mission.

And yet, I was being untruthful.

I couldn’t bring myself—literally—to speak the words “This is the one and only true path to God.” I couldn’t in good conscience tell a young gay teenager that I’d pray for him to turn straight. I couldn’t grasp why following God meant denying life. Denying experience. Why God wouldn’t love me if I had a beer.

The Slow Ending

I began to drift. I began to spend less time at Nicole’s house. I began to skip going to church. And, like a coward, I began to ghost Nicole. I began looking at girls who weren’t so bound by their religion. I began to rebel. Subtly, quietly, but it crept in.

Though the memory is foggy for me (a trauma response, I think), I’m pretty certain I shattered Nicole’s heart in the process. She went on to marry a beautiful man and have an enormous Mormon family. My heart swells knowing the life she’s created.

Eventually I stopped attending all together. Stopped visiting her family. The family I’d grown to love with all of my heart. I felt I wasn’t worthy of their love, now that I wasn’t following the doctrine. Now that I couldn’t be what they all wanted me to be. I was ashamed. But I couldn’t ignore the truth in my soul. That this wasn’t my way closer to God.

Though the LDS church can be encumbered by the same distortion as any major religion (and there is much I didn’t touch on), I’d never regret my time there. It was a community of deep support and familial foundation. For people in the season of their soul where instruction and structure are needed, it can prove to be a safe haven.

My heart, however, swooned for a God who loved without condition. Loved one’s journey through lived experience. Loved without control and rule. A God that allowed you to return to Her instead of forcing you. And a God clever enough to speak the language of all paths, to guide the soul through whispers far broader than one interpretation.

I’d continued to witness the arrogance of man plunge its fingers into the dealings of the Divine, and I wanted no part of it.

Coming next: I go inward and cultivate “The Church of Isaac”

In the wake of the Bible camp debacle, I was feeling sheepish. Letting people down was already a point of deep trauma for me, and letting down God, the people I cared about at camp, my parents, myself—I was devastated.

Luckily, my parents didn’t feel a need to punish me. (In fact, upon retelling this story to them years later, they both seemed to have little recollection of it.) They continued to support my friendship with Dave. We were both good kids at heart. And our parents knew it more than anyone.

Dave and I kept in touch, and one day he asked if I wanted to hang out with him and a friend at his friend’s house. My parents drove me to an area of town that wasn’t the greatest. I’d been in homes of people who weren’t very well off before, so while I took note of the neighbourhood, I knew that good people lived in these homes and there was nothing to be fearful of.

Dave met me at the door and waved to my mother in the car.

Inside, the house was a mess. Clothes strewn about, the smell of cat urine, windows covered with psychedelic tapestries. And covering every inch of the living room coffee table was weed paraphernalia. (Upon typing “paraphernalia,” I immediately felt I sounded like a prude—but it wasn’t just a bong. It was several bongs, grinders, pipes, one-hitters, carved-out apples. You name it.)

A portly teenager whose name escapes me was sitting on the couch. He lowered an enormous bong from his lips, tilted his head to the sky, and held his breath. Dave and I stood in silence. It felt like we were in a movie when he finally released the plume of smoke and coughed out a “Hello!”

I can’t remember if he actually had dreadlocks (out of place on his aggressively Caucasian head) or if he just assumed the personality of a Rastafarian so deeply that I’d imagined he did. He and Dave hugged and he introduced himself. A huge smile spread across his face. His eyes characteristically arched in the way all high people’s do—conveying a sense of peace and love and joy.

I liked him. Mikey might have been his name. I’ll call him that for this story.

The Initiation

There were no parents at the house. Apparently they’d gone out of town and it would be just the three of us. Up until this point, I’d never smoked pot or done any drug. I puffed the end of a cigarette once in grade school to feel rebellious, but I didn’t run with circles cool enough to actually have access to anything real.

Mikey sat back down and from behind the couch unveiled a monstrosity of a bong. A new addition to the collection and the reason for inviting Dave over. They admired the enormous chamber, filled with murky yellowing water, and explained just how much smoke could be created if done right.

Dave was eager to jump in. Putting his lips to the spout, he sat the bong in his lap and simultaneously breathed in while lighting the weed tucked into a small bowl in front of his face. The chamber and neck of the gargantuan pipe began to fill with smoke. I didn’t know what was happening. I thought the smoke went directly into the body, not that it gathered first. Was he doing it right? Had Dave done this before?

It was only when the chamber was nearly full that Dave looked at Mikey. His eyes widening as Mikey instructed, “Let ‘er rip!”

With permission to pull, Dave lifted the bowl from the pipe, opening the airlock seal. With a whoosh, the chamber emptied into Dave’s lungs. He pulled back and tightened his lips. Holding his breath. “Hold it! Hoooold it!” Mikey was cheerleading the experience.

Finally, Dave exploded into a coughing fit. Laughing and coughing. Sounding as though something had gone terribly wrong, yet there was zero concern on his face.

He finally sat back and relaxed into the relief of a calmed diaphragm.

Mikey looked at me and gave a subtle nod. You going?

I told them I’d never smoked, and they were kind in their explanation. Walking me through the process. What to expect from the pull, the smoke.

I trusted Dave. And if Dave trusted Mikey, then I trusted Mikey. Again—we were good kids. The pictures of Bob Marley on the wall gave an air of divine peace and universal love. This would be just another adventure toward experiencing the fullness of life.

I did as instructed and assumed the position. Dave would light the bowl for me so I could concentrate on my breathing. As he lit, I inhaled in long, sensual puffs. Filling the chamber halfway, three-quarters, right to the top. The thin haze became a thick fog, impossible to see through. I continued puffing and puffing as instructed before I looked to Mikey and Dave, who both had bewildered eyes.

Mikey said, with a hint of surprise in his voice, “Let ‘er rip.”

Dave pulled the bowl from the glass and I swiftly breathed in the dense smoke. I’d been involved in my singing practice lately, and my lungs were primed for deep breath. I felt my ribs expand, my back widen, my diaphragm lower. In and in, deeper and deeper I inhaled. Exactly as I thought I was supposed to.

When my capacity had been reached, I pulled away from the pipe and held my breath. Again, my trained lungs pulled their weight. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds. Neither Mikey nor Dave had instructed on when to stop holding, so I just went until I couldn’t any longer. Forty seconds. Forty-five. Fifty.

Dave and Mikey were losing it. Cheering me on as though I was achieving the absolute unachievable.

Eventually my lungs gave out and the devastating fire of the smoke ripped into my throat. Everything convulsed. I had never coughed so hard in my life. I thought my lungs were going to spill from my mouth. I was sure blood would follow. I was dying. This was it. I had done it wrong. I was dying.

I looked to Dave for help, and his laughter and joy calmed my nerves. I laughed in return at how insane the feeling was. How painful. Why would anyone do this to themselves? This was insane.

Eventually the coughing subsided. Dave and Mikey agreed I probably shouldn’t smoke anymore until it “hits me.”

Hits me? What did that mean? How would I know?

The Descent

I watched Dave and Mikey pass the bong back and forth for several minutes before the urge to use the bathroom fell upon me. I got up—the rise feeling slightly off, but nothing extreme. I climbed the stairs to the second floor where the only bathroom was. I stood in the mirror and began giggling at the redness of my eyes. Bloodshot to the point of rosé. I knew something was happening to me, but it didn’t feel too discombobulating yet.

I found myself (truly “found”) standing at the top of the stairs. Looking down at the low ceiling I’d need to duck under to avoid.

Then my brain caught up to my body.

It was as though my consciousness had been somewhere else and had only just popped back in to process what was happening. I began to descend the stairs. Slowly. One foot. Second foot. Where am I? How many stairs? I might be at the bottom. Third step.

Black.

I don’t remember anything else from that day. No details. Turns out I had whacked my head against the low roof and tumbled down the stairs, laughing uncontrollably the entire time.

All I do remember was the observation of time dilation. The constant looping of my awareness “returning” to me, as though my body and eyes had been on autopilot and then suddenly my mind stepped back behind my eyes and said, Whoa—we’re here already?

Time slowed. Time rushed. Time looped. Everything was funny. Pizza was the nectar of the gods. I was filled with profound, unencumbered joy and peace.

I was a mess. But I was in love.

The Event

Dave and I continued to smoke regularly that fall and into the winter. Hiding away in basements. Going for “walks” in minus-forty-degree weather to smoke. It was strange to be in and amongst the dingy drug exchanges and late-night park deals, but it also felt exciting and dangerous.

Once home, we would wax poetic about Rasta life, love, peace, God, and girls. The weed only enhanced our intensity of devotion. Weed was the answer. The hippies understood it. If everyone smoked, then war and hatred would be eradicated from the earth. Did I mention pizza was the best?

It was a blissful escape from the world. And it made functioning in the world far more difficult.

We found ourselves at Dave’s house one night. It was the first time I’d ever been there, having only ever smoked at Mikey’s or at my house. His mother was home and had a strict air to her. We went for our walk and returned with a significant high, making our way to his room to listen to the Exodus album for the nine-hundredth time.

As I sat on his bed, I started to feel strange. My stomach gurgling. A nausea beginning to rise in my throat.

I felt my mind slip into a severe panic.

The thoughts came rapid-fire: You’re going to throw up. You can’t throw up. Not here. You can’t control it. You have no control over your body. This is fear. This is panic. You’ve lost control. You can’t control this.

The thoughts echoed and screamed in my head.

Vomit projectiled across the room.

Instantly I was crying. My body wasn’t just purging from nausea—it was reacting. Reacting to what, I’ll never know. Fear consumed my thoughts. I had no control. I continued to throw up and cry and shiver until Dave’s mom burst through the door.

Instantly screaming at us. Calling us potheads. Demonizing our actions and berating our choices.

Her voice was like gasoline on the fire of the voices in my head. Evil, terrifying voices claiming my innocence. Stealing any control I had over my bodily autonomy. My legs stopped working. My arms went limp.

Dave’s mother all but dragged me out to her car and threw me in the back seat. I could barely process what was happening.

The Longest Drive

It was about a thirty-minute drive home. The beginning was an onslaught of motherly lecturing. None of it felt loving. All of it felt angry. Disappointed. Disgusted. Appalled.

I sat quiet, slumped in the back seat, trying to corral the demons forming in my psyche.

As her speeches subsided and we sat in deafening silence, the voices in my head began to form into visions. Flaming beings of rage and spite consumed my thoughts. I fought desperately to retain control over my body. I’d already pissed myself. I was barely holding onto the thread preventing my bowels from expelling as well.

I’d broken myself. My mind was not my own.

The voices that tried to seduce me into giving up grew louder. Voices filled with hatred and fear and loss and devastation. My mind curled and cowered in the darkness of my psyche, clinging to what little sovereignty remained.

By the time I got home, my parents were at the door. Springing into action to relieve the symptoms as best they knew how. Water. Bread. Sugar. Anything.

The stark contrast—from aggressive, exhausted disappointment into loving, compassionate non-judgment—was significant. I cried more. Allowing the fear I’d been holding in to spill out of me.

I was scared this would never pass.

I looked to my parents and asked them to take me to the hospital. I needed help.

The Constant Whisper

By the time we reached the emergency room, body function was returning. It was difficult to manage, but I stayed as cognizant as possible. The war in my mind still very much raging.

The last memory I have of that night was sitting on the hospital bed. My mother to my left, a doctor seated before me. They were discussing the possibility of laced drugs and other things. I could barely follow the conversation. My awareness was too deeply engrossed in my body.

I could feel my thoughts.

With eyes closed, I could feel and observe the electrical pulse happen in my brain, move down through my neck and arm, and into my finger as I wiggled it slightly.

I had gone from zero autonomy to ultimate autonomy. I felt like I had cracked a code of mind-body connection. But my mind—my mind wasn’t my own.

As quickly as the awareness came that I had complete control, the seduction re-emerged.

You know... you could stop your heart from beating right now if you concentrate enough.

A deceptive, taunting whisper from the depths of me.

You can control everything. Why not test it? See how powerful you are. See what you can truly do.

It snickered and teased and lulled. I considered the immaculate nature of that kind of control. Gurus could control body temperature. They could float. They could dematerialize and re-materialize elsewhere. Maybe I’d tapped into a Divine source of awareness.

Yes. Exactly. You have transcended the body. I bet you can’t make your heart stop beating.

I held onto the thread of critical thought like a man gripping a sail in a tempest.

Just let go. Let me show you what we can do.

No. No, no. I know this isn’t right. I’d die. I can’t try this.

Do it. Try it. It’ll be extraordinary.

No.

The Aftermath

I don’t know when I woke. Or what day it was. Or what the next days, weeks, months really held.

I remember depression. I remember fear. I remember embarrassment. And flickers of those voices.

A part of me had broken that night, though I was too young to truly understand it.

I attempted to smoke again a couple of years later. One puff and the voices returned, aiming immediately for my heart.

I didn’t smoke again for twenty years. And it’s return brought about one of the most unbelievable experiences I’ve ever had in my life. (You’ll have to wait for that one)

Dave and I stayed in touch after that night but quickly fell apart from one another. I don’t know if it was the trauma I had experienced or that weed was our main point of connection, but the friendship dwindled. His mother made a point to create distance.

I can’t speak to where life took him fully, but I believe he is now married and happy.

Next week: I become a Mormon.

Coming home from the SRF camp in California instilled in me a subtle, internal juxtaposition. I still found myself drawn to Christian communities because there was a tangible desire to know God, but I struggled with the continued narrative of sin and damnation. The groups took the Bible verbatim or cherry-picked certain interpretations to bolster their own ideologies. There was much less stillness. No time with nature. No focus on breath or the internal world that housed the most intimate sense of Divinity we as humans had access to.

Christians were looking for a saviour, and Christ held that torch. And yet, the notion of being one’s own saviour—the scripture of Christ saying “All these things you can do, and more”—seemed to be glazed over entirely. My Christian foundation was beginning to crack. Small fissures in the footholds that, while not consciously formed, were affecting how I interacted with my pursuit of God.

But as I stated above, I was desperate for communities who spoke freely of the Divine. So I continued to seek them out, and subsequently, continued to go to Bible camp.

Behind the Curtain

Once you reach a certain age at camp, you have to make a decision. Either you stop going, you work toward becoming a counsellor, or you join the volunteer maintenance team. I definitely did not want to stop attending, and I was too young to step immediately into being a counsellor, so I decided to volunteer my summers taking out trash, clearing brush, and cleaning bathrooms.

I absolutely loved it. I got to see all the behind-the-scenes of how the camp worked. Sit in on meetings with the older staff. Hear about all the camp gossip. I felt included and part of something important.

The maintenance team was small and we all shared one cabin on the outskirts of the property. I believe there were six of us, with our boss sleeping in a cabin next door. Our days would start at sunrise and we’d work until evening. Looking back on the experience now, I don’t have much memory of the days. A part of my brain must have blocked it out.

What I do remember, however, were the girls.

Parallel to the maintenance boys (the entire team comprised of men) were the kitchen staff (a team comprised entirely of women). Being around the age of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, we were all starting to have the same sinful thoughts and desires. The boys would gather in the cabin after work and discuss the flirts and winks and whispers that happened throughout the day. And I can only assume the girls did the same.

I quickly fell into friendship with another boy on the team named Dave. He was a tall, goofy guy with a disarmingly kind demeanour. Brutally kind, and almost dopey in the way he cooly flowed through life, everything seeming to roll off his shoulders without a care. He had a nerdy cool about him that he put zero effort into.

Dave wasn’t just another hot-and-bothered teenage boy, however. Dave was in love. Madly in love. With one of the kitchen girls named Julia.

The Nature Boy

Dave and I would spend all day working together and he would gush over her. Reciting poetry he’d written about her. Telling me about the family they were going to have. Blushing over the progress building in their relationship. It was the kind of love that defines your early-teens. The kind that takes over your life, your mind, your body. You feel it ripple through every breath as though this person is your literal lifeblood. Without their love, their touch, their validation—everything you know would crumble from existence.

It was a cool, love-drunk obsession, and I was enamoured by it.

Dave talked about love with the same drunkenness that I loved to steep myself in. We would sit in quiet contemplation together and discuss the philosophical nature of love. Its impact on culture. The woven dance of Divinity and God’s hand in the moulding of love. We would debate scripture, and together we would paint outside the rigid box of Christianity, using instead the colours of sacred poetry. We talked of music and its ability to express love. He introduced me to Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy,” and we would sing the last line as though it were the greatest piece of scripture ever written by mankind:

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.

Part of us were entirely teenage boys driven by the fire of puberty. Another part of us were enormously gentle, bright-eyed, old soul love enthusiasts. There wasn’t an ounce of maliciousness in us. We wanted to love, and be loved in return.

The Pebbles

One night, Dave and I were sitting on the porch of the cabin as the first stars began to poke through the dark sapphire sky. We dreamed into the constellations and admired God’s creation—laughing and waxing poetic. Dave had been telling me he was close to winning Julia over. She was resistant, being a good Christian girl and all, but his heart was so definitively made up that he knew she’d come around. And in his defence, she had been showing signs of interest all week.

Then Dave jumped to his feet and said, “That’s it! I need to see her.”

It was late, far past curfew for us to be wandering the campgrounds. But there was a lovestruck rebellion in his eyes that fired me up. This man wanted to see the love of his life, wanted to hold her, whisper to her. It was beautiful and courageous and everything Shakespeare wrote about.

So like ghosts, we snuck our way through the lightly forested borders of the campground to where the women’s staff cabins were located. Dave knew where Julia’s bed was, conveniently next to a window. The lights were still on, so the girls were assuredly sitting together, chatting about the day.

Quietly, we threw small pebbles at the glass.

A startled yelp echoed through the cabins, followed by the playful and genuine screams of six other girls our age. In that moment, we realized this mission of love had become a hilarious, harmless prank. A little fright never hurt anyone, and it was adorable to hear all the commotion from inside the cabin. Dave tossed one more small stone at the window before we bolted back to our own residence. The screams and chatter fading behind us.

Completely out of breath from the sprinting and the laughter, we collapsed on the porch in stitches. Just two boys getting utterly acquainted with the thrill of love.

The next day, gossip ripped through the camp staff like wildfire that the girls had been “pranked” that night. Dave and I exchanged glances—some a little too mischievously with the girls—but kept our secret.

With everyone riled up, we knew we had to sneak out again the next night and continue the prank. To us, it wasn’t really about scaring the girls. This was flirting. This was us breaking a tiny rule to show them we were interested. That we were thinking about them. That we wanted them to think about us. The tense giggling that followed the screams as we again sprayed the window with pebbles made our hearts swell.

I’d never laughed so hard with a friend in my life than I had those nights with Dave.

The Line

The next morning, a meeting was called for the maintenance team. Dave and I hadn’t told a soul about our secret missions, but the camp was abuzz with a serious tone as to who could be terrorizing the women’s cabins. Being we were a group of young pubescent boys, they deduced it was likely the maintenance team. The leadership weren’t ignorant to the fact that we had been flirting with the girls for weeks.

While we weren’t blatantly outed, our boss’s eyes lingered on Dave and I longer than the other boys when he announced the new rules. No one was allowed to leave their cabin past curfew. No exceptions. Security patrols would be doubled, and if anyone was caught, there would be very serious consequences.

Dave and I snickered, but we understood the levity of the situation had passed. They were taking this seriously, and we honestly respected that

In retrospect, I understand that the camp leadership may have assumed there was a more predatory aspect to this prank. That perhaps we were trying to spy on the girls as they slept or changed. But at the time, the thought didn’t even occur to me. The idea of just kissing a girl made my head explode, let alone seeing one naked. We were young and naive but perhaps without the larger insight to see the potential risks.

Regardless, it was clear a line had been drawn. The prank was to cease. And so we complied. We had no desire to be that rebellious. We weren’t doing this as a “fuck you” to authority. We were just giggly, in-love boys.

Under the Stars

That night, we sat in our cabin and discussed scripture, God, and life. We laughed about girls and the camp gossip. It was a particularly hot summer night and none of us could sleep well. Between the staggering heat and the snoring of several teenagers, it was unbearable. The sky was also magnificently clear, and around midnight, looking out the window, you could tell the stars were breathtaking.

Dave whispered down from the top bunk: “I think we should bring our sleeping bags out on the porch. Just for a few hours and lay under the stars!”

It was the perfect idea. The thought did cross my mind that perhaps it existed in the grey zone of the new rule. We were technically leaving the cabin, but we weren’t actually going anywhere further than the porch and we’d come back inside afterwards. Surely it wouldn’t be an issue.

So we snuck out—blankets, pillows and all—and set up under the night sky. We must have stayed up until nearly dawn before falling asleep. Philosophizing on love and life and the depth of human existence. Two old souls who had found each other, trying to articulate the wisdom our hearts held while also navigating the confusion our young human minds & bodies were experiencing.

It was beautiful, innocent bliss. Filled with love and joy and God.

Sunrise

I woke to the sound of a truck grumbling along the dirt road in front of our cabin. I cracked open an eye to see the truck being driven by the camp leader—his eyes fixed on us, filled with ire.

Our intention had been to go back inside before morning. But we had fallen asleep. And now we had been seen.

We scrambled inside and prayed the leadership wouldn’t see this as breaking the rules. Literally prayed.

I had been there two weeks already as staff, mid-way through my third week with plenty of time to go. Before I could set off to my daily duties, our boss came into the cabin with a solemn look on his face.

“You two,” he nodded at Dave and me. “Come with me.”

I knew immediately what was happening. This wasn’t going to be good. I really didn’t want to be lectured by a pastor or any of the staff I’d come to love. I imagined all the possible punishments; extra toilet duty, or not being allowed to participate in the week-end games or competitions.

As a young, kind empath, I hated doing anything wrong. It was my literal nightmare to make people upset. My internal dialogue was already scathing.

I was sat down, alone, in front of the leader of the camp. I don’t particularly remember the exchange, but it felt more like an interrogation than anything. Like some great atrocity had been committed. I was such a sinner that my bones ached. My mind was also in a state of rebellion—desperately wanting to argue that sleeping on the porch barely broke the rule, if at all.

But that part of me kept quiet. Silent. Simply taking the lashing.

“We take this kind of stuff very seriously, Isaac. And unfortunately we have to set an example for everyone else here at camp. So, we are sending you and David home today. And you can no longer return to this camp.”

The Collapse

The words hit me like a freight train.

I couldn’t make sense of the punishment compared to the crime. All Dave and I had done was love with wild abandon. All we’d done was giggle and flirt and joke and tease. All we’d done was talk about how beautiful God is and how beautiful love was and how together they could create such magnificent things as girls. We’d contemplated the miraculous nature of stars and planets and the joy of being alive.

And now I was being ripped away from not only one of my favourite places on earth, but my only real refuge for God-consciousness. The only place I felt completely safe to love the Divine without judgment.

I was such an incredibly evil and malicious child that I was being banished from my place of love. My place of God.

The cracks that had formed in my foundation of faith cleaved wide open as the punishment landed on my heart. And in that moment I hated Christians. In that moment, I hated the hypocrisy of Christianity. These people who didn’t know love. Didn’t know the fullness of it. Who were bound by expectation and rules and fear. I choked back tears of embarrassment, sadness, anger, grief and confusion all at once.

My world crushed down around me. I felt my shoulders roll forward and my head lower. I don’t know if I made eye contact with anyone for the rest of the day.

The ride home felt like a prison bus. Dave and I sat alone in the back seat. Barely breathing. Eyes lowered to the floor. Whoever drove us home didn’t say a word the entire two-hour ride.

Another Seed Planted

I had done the unthinkable. I had broken my relationship with Christ and with my community. And worst of all, I still didn’t understand what I’d done. The contrast between what I was experiencing and what I’d felt in my heart to be true were so stark that it hurt.

But I must have been wrong. My truth must not have been real truth. These people had to know better than me. They’re older. Closer to God. Better. Less evil.

And so I began to learn how to ignore my truth, because sometimes it’s not true. I learned to pay closer attention to what others really wanted from me. I learned that day that following love isn’t safe. Isn’t always true.

The crumbled bedrock of my faith lay obliterated, dormant and ashamed.

Next week: I turn aggressively to drugs! Stay tuned.

As previously mentioned in this series, my mother belonged to a spiritual group called The Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF), founded by Paramahansa Yogananda—one of the first to pioneer Kriya Yoga in the West.

To quote their website: “The teachings of Self-Realization Fellowship are founded upon the original Christianity of Jesus Christ and the original Yoga of Bhagavan Krishna. The spiritual lineage of SRF consists of these two great avatars and a line of exalted masters of contemporary times: Mahavatar Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya, Swami Sri Yukteswar, and Paramahansa Yogananda (last in the line of SRF Gurus). Each of these Great Ones played a role in Self-Realization Fellowship’s mission of bringing to the modern world the spiritual science of Kriya Yoga.”

What fascinated me most was the beautiful amalgamation between Eastern and Western teachings. Sermons would leap from quotes by Jesus to parables by Buddha to grand tales of Krishna the blue boy. There was no prejudice, no “we are right and you are wrong.” There was only God-consciousness. Only the pursuit of relationship with the Divine.

Kriya Yoga was the primary discipline—an ancient technique of meditation designed to prepare the mind and body for deep God connection. This technique was held behind lessons that one must complete before being granted access to the Kriya teachings. My mom encouraged me to take the lessons, and for a while I tried to engage, but I was young and wanted answers quickly. I stubbornly resisted anything hidden behind a wall—something about the exclusivity pressed on the wound still festering from years of following Catholic and Christian “rules.” As soon as the notion of “you can’t learn this unless it’s through us, the proper way” was presented, a part of me would shut down.

This was subtle at first, but looking back, I recognize this pattern as a larger arc in my spiritual life. A resistance to gatekeeping that would eventually lead me far outside any institution.

Regardless, I was still eager to understand God, and this path was compassionate and caring. So I stayed engaged as much as I felt called to.

The Invitation

I was in seventh grade when my mom came to me with an exciting opportunity: attend an SRF boys camp in the San Bernardino Mountains of California. The church had put out a call saying they would sponsor any youth who wanted to attend. We were lucky enough to be chosen.

I had never really traveled outside of Canada, let alone flown by myself. I was over-the-moon excited for the adventure alone, not to mention the opportunity to explore God in a new environment with other boys my age who, hopefully, were also hungry for the Divine.

At that age, I was in my heyday of Christianity, despite any of the traumatic experiences. Outside of school, I was spending time with people from Bible camp and Christian churches, participating in potlucks, capture-the-flag nights, and Bible lessons. I was so deeply engaged that I even brought my favourite book, Jesus Freaks, to class one day for show-and-tell. A book entirely about martyrs for Jesus—people so faithful they died in the name of Christ.

(Starting to make more sense why I didn’t get invited to the cool kid parties.)

But Christ was still a major component of SRF, and therefore this adventure could only help bolster my relationship with Him. Plus I got to miss the last week of school. Bonus.

A New World

I had just procured a brand spankin’ new Zune MP3 player, chock-full of songs that, if I listen to today, immediately transport me back to the three-hour bus ride up the California mountains. Hoobastank’s “The Reason,” Amos Lee’s “Keep It Loose, Keep It Tight,” Nickelback’s “Hero”—I wasn’t your average music consumer even then.

I kept to myself mostly. Observing the other kids on the bus. Watching the ocean give way to suburban houses, give way to dry mountain.

When we reached the camp, we were greeted not only by the camp counsellors but by monks. Real-life, orange-robe-wearing monks who, with palms pressed together at their hearts, bowed to us as we exited the bus.

It didn’t feel real. And yet there was a peace about the space that settled into my bones before I’d taken ten steps.

I couldn’t believe the diversity of the boys attending. Kids from all over the world, though mostly American. Boys from a hundred different backgrounds. Until then, I’d really only experienced Thunder Bay, and aside from being Italian or Finnish, I hadn’t encountered much cultural variety. I quickly became fascinated by the beach-knotted, sun-bleached, tanned-skin California surfer boys. Especially a trio of brothers—one now a camp counsellor—who looked like they’d stepped out of a surf magazine. Upon befriending the one my age, I learned that they did, in fact, surf every morning before school.

They were the coolest people I’d ever met.

My young heart was a little disappointed girls weren’t allowed at the camp, but I quickly realized how much more focused I was on the spirituality of it all without the distraction. We still teased and joked about them, as boys do, but ultimately we were here for Divine practice.

The Taste of Validation

Every morning, we would wake before dawn and be led by our counsellors in morning exercises followed by group meditation. Though I was meant to keep focus inward and eyes closed, I couldn’t help, for the first few days, to peek mid-meditation and gawk at the twelve boys in my cabin—all sitting silently in deep practice.

These weren’t the geeks or losers or misfits who loved God like back home. These were boys who were likely seen as totally normal, if not popular. These boys also didn’t fear God—they loved God. Fiercely.

Something unhitched in me. Some deep, clenched part released as I allowed my truth to be seen in a way it never had before. It was safe to be stoked on God here. Safe to explore a divinity outside of rules and regulations and single paths. Safe to ask questions and wonder without fear of getting it wrong.

After meditation, we would gather as a camp and eat a vegetarian meal. I was nervous at first but quickly realized that vegetarian food could be incredible. The rest of the day would consist of SRF teachings, games, hikes, and meditation. One day was dedicated entirely to hiking to the top of the mountain. We turned the final bend to find snow blanketing the shores of a small glacial pond. Some of the boys had never experienced snow in their lives.

I earned all of their respect that day as I slid confidently into the frigid waters and showed off my Canadian resistance to the cold.

The Quietest of Places

Some mornings—my favourite mornings—we wouldn’t meditate as a cabin alone. Instead, everyone would gather at a small outdoor amphitheatre at the edge of the campground. The space had a sweeping view out over the mountain’s edge, revealing forest and range for miles and miles.

We’d sit in silence together and feel the vibration of the earth waking.

A monk would usually lead these meditations, and as with all gatherings, we would close the ceremony with a united chanting of “Om. Peace. Amen.”—our collective frequency reverberating out over the valley and into the world.

I hadn’t known peace this profound before. That little amphitheatre became my favourite place on earth. It still might be.

There was one monk in particular who I was intensely drawn to. The eldest of all the monks, the old shrivelled man hunched as he walked, his eyes smiling more than his mouth more often than not. When he looked at you, you felt as though he was beholding the luminance of your soul. Like he was in on a gleeful prank that only he and God knew the details of.

He was peak bliss at all times.

One of the caveats of meditation is that you must sit with a straight spine, which was difficult to maintain for two-hour sessions. I remember watching this monk, deeply engaged but with a severe arc to his back, and thinking: If he can find peace without holding a straight spine, then surely I don’t need to either.

(I was always too smart for my own good.)

The Unraveling Begins

The week continued in bliss. Surrounded by nature. Everyone—monks, counsellors, boys of all ages—peaceful, compassionate, grounded. Of course our nature as fourteen-year-old boys surfaced now and again, but it was always held by a net of love. A serenity most certainly maintained by the monks who walked the grounds like quiet guardians.

More than once, I found myself sitting alone in the amphitheatre. Staring out at the valley. Watching the clouds drift across the azure California sky. The breeze soft against my cheek.

I’d whisper gratitude to God. I’d feel the love of all the masters who had built this space. Reflect on how impossibly lucky I was to be there—this nobody kid from Thunder Bay, Ontario, perched on a mountain, talking to the Divine like an old friend

This story holds no trauma. It holds no fear or damnation.

This experience planted a different kind of seed. A seed of freedom. A seed of hope. A seed of Divine love that asked nothing of me but my presence.

Did they want us to meditate daily? Sure. Did I feel I would burn in hell if I didn’t? Not even remotely.

Something began to shift in me. My conditional relationship with God began to unravel, and the God on the other side of that unraveling was peeking through the keyhole.

It would take years for me to let go completely of my early conditioning, but the process had begun. High above the world. Closer to God than I’d ever been. Instilled deeply in me by the quiet, mischievous smile of a monk with a curved spine.

Coming up next: We return to Bible camp, and they decide I’m too awful to keep.

My journey with Christianity will be written in two parts:
Before being kicked out of Bible camp—and after.

Let me explain.

Is This Love?

I must have been eleven or twelve when I first started attending Bible camp. Old enough to start liking girls.

Her name was Jamie, and I think she was the first girl I ever had a serious crush on. The memory of her and those early camp days are so few and far between that I couldn’t tell you how we met or how much time we actually spent together. But I remember thinking she was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Her friends constantly following us around, giggling as Jamie’s and my fingers would slightly touch walking from event to event.

Rules be damned—I was lovestruck at summer camp. I mean, Bible camp. Dammit. Jesus is watching. So is the camp counsellor, particularly fixated on the exchange happening between Jamie and me.

I was being sinful. Shame again began to coil its claws around my young romantic heart. Like a slick film, it coated my love in heaviness. I was too young to know what lust really was, or sex, or desire for that matter. All I knew was that my heart fluttered when Jamie was around. It brought me joy and excitement. I felt light on my toes and wanted to dance and smile all the time.

The look in the camp counsellor’s eyes told a different story. One of strict adherence. One of control. One of guilt and shame. He was my elder, and not only that—an elder in the name of Jesus. I had to respect his insight.

Jesus My Brother

Christianity, for me, was almost more traumatizing than Catholicism.

Where the Catholics believed in a more benevolent, omnipresent being and His miracle spirit child—unattainable and broad—the Evangelical Christians made the entire ordeal personal. Really, really personal.

In some ways, it’s beautiful. You begin to cultivate a direct relationship with God, and more importantly it seemed, with Jesus. You start using phrases like “Jesus my brother,” “Jesus my saviour,” “Jesus the son of God, made flesh just like me.” They managed to make Jesus tangible, physical. They made him part of your family, convinced you that he knew you personally. You were allowed to love Him. As a human would love another human. He could be your caretaker, your guide, your friend.

Beautiful, right?

As a child, it was beautiful. Finally, God wasn’t this mythic creature. He was someone I could talk to, confide in, love with my human heart in a way that felt normal. In the way I felt about Jamie. My heart could flutter around Jesus because he was a beautiful, perfect, symmetrical white man. What more could my “little boy looking for role model” ask for?

But the same rhetoric formed the foundation of Evangelical Christianity as it did Catholicism. You were born flawed—Eve made sure of it. And you live every day in sin UNTIL you find Christ. Until you realize that Christ has been with you this entire time, watching from afar. And once you devote your undying allegiance to him, then you could walk into the kingdom of heaven with his father, Big G. The Christian path was new, and hip, and all the cool kids were doing it.

However, if you don’t commit your absolute fidelity to him? You’ll still burn in hell forever.

But I mean, God also gifted you free will, so you can choose however you’d like. You’re so welcome.

Another trap. Another perfectly curated way to corner a soul into devotion. The illusion of free will, the threat of eternal damnation, the gift of unconditional love—on one condition. Unwavering faith in the one and only way to God.

The Hesitation

I was enamoured with Jamie and ready to drink the Kool-Aid. Whatever I could do to make Jesus happy and ensure that I could keep holding Jamie’s hand when no one was looking—I just wanted to feel light and happy and giggly. So whatever it took, Jesus, I would concede.

I was contemplative, even at a young age. Overtly poetic. I would find myself sitting on benches alone, staring out into the field or nearby lake, feeling the wind on my cheeks and talking to God. Weighing the pros and cons of accepting Christ as my one true saviour and devoting myself to him.

In reality, there was no struggle against the notion. Jesus was a great dude who taught incredible kindness and compassion for the world. And yet, there was hesitation. My soul held fear, not freedom, in its deliberation.

Something about the arrangement—this deal I was making—felt unkind. Felt conditional. Felt forced. Jesus was saying, “Love me, or else...”

That didn’t feel like love to my young heart.

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the biggest struggles I sat with was the observance of my mother. By miles, she surpassed every counselor or leader or pastor in her practice of kindness and compassion and depth of relationship with God. She loved without condition. She trusted the path of the soul without definite rules and “have to’s.” There was no burning in hell for her. The concept was outside the realm of understanding for her Jesus. Her God.

To choose this Christ as my path meant, in a lot of ways, defying the truth I knew of my mother. At least that’s how my heart had to frame it. This way—this Jesus—meant denying her Jesus.

I carried this with me like a boulder in my pocket all through the two weeks I spent there.

And yet, I felt the energy of Christ every day at that camp. In people’s testimonies—wow, did the power of testimony move me. In the way people sang in church service. In the way we prayed gratitude before each meal. Jesus was present at this camp. I knew it. I felt it.

So, midway through my visit, I sat on my favourite bench on a warm summer day, closed my eyes and told Jesus I accepted him as my saviour. That I knew him to be my Lord and that I opened my heart to him completely.

I waited for the Holy Spirit to ignite my veins with electricity. I waited for my aura to expand into pure light, for every kid at camp to witness my ethereal, miraculous union with God in real time.

I waited.

And waited.

Nothing.

I peaked open my eyes. The scene was the same. Kids ran past. The wind swept through the pine trees as it always did.

Did I do it wrong? I don’t feel any different. I guess that’s it? Isaac, you shouldn’t expect grandeur—that’s just the devil trying to trick you. You did the thing. You said the words. You did it. You’re saved.

I got up, unimpressed, and went about my day.

Testimony By Fire

Two nights later, we had the end-of-week testimony fire. It was, by far and away, my favourite night of camp. A large bonfire was built and all the kids were allowed to stay up later than normal to enjoy songs, treats, and most importantly, campers were given the opportunity to share their testimony. To tell the story of how God saved them. How the Holy Spirit moved them and how they’d accepted Jesus into their hearts.

For me, it was often a strange mix of wonder and guilt. I’d hear other campers tell their stories and be moved by the tears in their eyes, the conviction in their voice, the truth in their recollection.

But, why hadn’t I had that? Why was my experience so mundane? I must have done something wrong.

Maybe if I went up and shared my love of God, it would hit me. Maybe I needed a deeper commitment.

I got up from sitting next to Jamie. Moments earlier, sharing a blanket on the small bleacher-style seating, I’d wrapped my arm around her waist to feel her closeness. The slew of awws and giggles from her friends sitting behind us made me feel especially confident.

I joined the line of terrified youngsters. Next to the fire, a pile of sticks had been gathered. The intention was to take a stick, confess whatever was on your heart or express your love for God, and throw the stick into the fire. It really was a potent ceremony.

I don’t remember what I said when my turn came. But I think I said I loved God and thanked Him for my life and for all He’d done for me and the world. Simple. Cumbersome. But brave, for me.

I returned to my seat and Jamie snuggled in close.

The night continued as camper after camper approached the fire and thanked God. Some kids came from broken homes and thanked God for the escape. Some thanked God for their parents. Some just said they love Him. Others thanked God for this camp and for what it meant to them.

“ENOUGH!“

The scream echoed through the dark forest in stark contrast to the calm love that had held the ceremony.

Every eye darted to the resident pastor standing a few yards behind the fire. His face was cast in amber light and deep shadow from the fire, contorted with tears and anger and frustration. This man had been with us all week. To me then, it seemed he had been brought in as a guest pastor or a summer resident—I wasn’t sure. But he was new to the camp, and his outburst surprised everyone.

I searched for the counsellors and leadership. An equal amount of shock was on their faces as the campers.

“No one! NOT ONE PERSON! Has mentioned Jesus’ death tonight! JESUS CHRIST! WHO SUFFERED, AND BLED, AND DIED FOR YOU!” his words like pointed daggers in our young hearts.
“He CHOSE to come here FOR YOU. He was TORTURED. STABBED. HUNG TO BE CRUCIFIED. All for YOUR souls! And no one has the decency to thank HIM for his sacrifice! Does NO ONE understand the truth?! I AM APPALLED and DISAPPOINTED in everyone here! This week has been WASTED!”

He choked through his monologue amidst a torrent of tears and rage. He looked ten-year-olds directly in their eyes as his fiery expression rose to meet the firelight painting his distorted face. He looked to the leadership with disgust. He looked into the fire with a plea of forgiveness in his eyes.

When he finished, the world went quiet. Even the forest and the fire seemed to stop moving; not wanting to be the first to breathe.

The pastor pushed through the crowd of children and stormed off into the night toward his cabin.

In The Wake

Frozen with confusion and guilt, a small murmur began amongst the campers. Those who were at camp simply to play games and swim with friends broke into scattered giggles and whispers.

Those of us here for eternal salvation, however...

I plunged into a deep and dark recalling of all I’d said around the fire. He was right. I didn’t mention Jesus once. No wonder I was so bad at this. No wonder my acceptance of Christ as my saviour hadn’t been miraculous.

I was an awful Christian.

The juxtaposition in me was palpable. I knew the outburst was uncalled for, and yet, it was an act of passion. Of faith so profound that it needed rage to be expressed. As a kid, I didn’t yet know how to recognize a wounded soul—and so I shamed myself. I turned his disappointment onto my own heart.

Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be saved by Jesus. Or maybe being passionate for Christ meant looking like a fool.

More seeds planted in my young heart.

I would continue to attend the same Bible camp for a couple of years after this first incident, but it never felt as spiritual to me. It became more about being cool, flirting with girls, getting badges, and enjoying the outdoors.

I’d failed Jesus, and so I’d stop trying. Not because I was scared of God, but because I was scared of being yelled at again for loving Him the wrong way.

A character arc of mine that I’ve carried for decades since.

I’m not done with the Bible camp stories just yet.
I will return to camp, and in an incredible journey of shame, I end up being kicked out.

But to keep these entries chronological, the next will be about my journey to California to have my first real taste of Eastern spirituality and yoga.

Namaste-tuned.

“Peace be with you.”

“And also with you.”

“Lift up your hearts.”

“We lift them up to the Lord.”

“Let us give thanks to the Lord.”

“It is right to give thanks.”

Did I say it right? I sort of mumbled the last part. Spencer sitting next to me knew it verbatim—he was always smarter than me. The monotone, lifeless repetition echoes through the cathedral. Gosh, those stained glass windows are beautiful—and make me feel sad for some reason. The tendrils of old and hot wax caress my nostrils as my mouth begins to water, knowing the metaphoric body of Christ wafer will soon expand in my voraciously hungry belly.

Did the apostles actually eat parts of Jesus at the Last Supper? I wonder if he tastes good.

I’m seven. And utterly terrified of God.

An Introduction to the Divine-Adjacent

My mother enrolled me in the Catholic school education path because she wanted to instill at least some presence of God into my academic upbringing. In a lot of ways, I appreciated it. We would start our mornings with the Canadian national anthem (sung in either English or French depending on the day) and an “Our Father” or “Hail Mary.” It was nice to talk to God every morning, if I’m being honest. Tucked behind my desk, hands folded, eyes closed, I would feel a tingle of Divine presence.

When I was young and the Confirmation and First Eucharist ceremonies were the hot topic of initiation, I was sure every student was experiencing the same feelings I was. Deep understanding that God wanted us to be good. An existential fear that I was never going to be good enough. That my whole life would be judged according to how well I tried to be good enough. That most of what I did, thought, or said wasn’t good enough.

You know, normal kid stuff.

The Line Is Drawn

Back in church, on our day of First Confession, the priest asks all the children to rise from their seats and form a line down the centre aisle. I squeeze by my parents—I think that’s pride on their faces?—and fall into the queue.

It feels like time has halted. Inching toward the confessional booth sets my anxiety ablaze. Of course, at seven, you don’t know it’s called anxiety. You just know your body is panicking and your mind is racing, doing its best to recall all the sins I’ve committed in my unworthy seven years of existence.

1. I yelled at my sister when she wouldn’t let me play with her troll dolls.

2. I stole twenty-five cents from my mom’s change bowl (a fortune to a seven-year-old) to buy candy at the convenience store.

3. I lied to my parents about how I had money for candy from the convenience store.

4. I wasn’t listening in class to my teacher and she yelled at me.

1, 2, 3, 4. Don’t forget, Isaac. 1, 2... Wait, what was three? Oh right. LIAR. 4.

The weight of these sins was intense, and I was frightfully grateful that God had hired these wise old men to listen to my shortcomings and wash them from my soul.

The Sacred Booth

When my name was called to enter the confessional booth, there was sweat on my brow. I remember seeing the priest’s face. Maybe they didn’t have the confidentiality barriers for kids—even worse, he knew exactly who I was.

I listed my atrocities for the man.

I’d yelled. I’d stolen. I’d lied.

I had committed the worst crimes in humanity. My shame was catastrophic.

When I stopped my list, he looked at me in silence. Waiting for more.

More?!

I mean... of course there was more, Isaac. You’re a natural-born sinner. You can’t even think of all your sins because you commit them so often.

“Is that all?” the priest murmurs.

Desperate not to fail at failing, I scour my mind for more moments of childhood debauchery.

I tell him I looked at the ladies’ underwear section in the Sears catalog. That isn’t good, right? I don’t even know why I looked at it or why I liked looking at it. But it was sinful, I think.

His eyes are blank. He shows no emotion. Not at all impressed by my ability to confess so earnestly. Not upset that he thinks I’m hiding sins from him. Nothing.

Am I hiding more sins? Am I lying to myself? Come on, Isaac. You know there’s more! All the other kids must have had loads of sins. This priest doesn’t believe you!

So I tell him I stole a brooch from my mom’s jewelry box.

I hadn’t. But I wanted to make the priest happy. I wanted him to know I was a real boy who sinned and that I had a lot of good sins and that I had confessed them all and that I’d understood the assignment.

He nodded as though that was the final sin he’d been looking for and motioned me back to my seat.

The Death of Love

I left that booth with only one thing on my mind: I’d lied to a priest about my sins. I was the worst sinner of all the sinners. God would never love me unless I became pure.

I was exhausted.

Looking back on this moment, I recognize a part of my desire for God died that day. I didn’t feel loved by a benevolent maker. Even though this environment was supposed to be the safe cradle of the Divine—within which we could melt away our shame—as a young, budding seeker, I felt overwhelmed by guilt and unworthiness.

Even my sins weren’t good enough.

The Programmed Belief

An important mechanism was installed into my psyche that day: The Catholic priests were the only ones who had access to God, and the Bible and all its rules were the only path to spiritual freedom.

The priest becomes the mediator between you and the Divine. Not because of any inherent spiritual superiority, but because the institutional mythology says so. This is radically different from the mystical traditions I’d later explore, but I didn’t know any of that yet. I just knew that the pipeline to God ran through men in robes who seemed perpetually disappointed in me.

I squeezed by my mom and dad and sat, head hung low, beside them. Listening as the priest continued to drone on, chanting off-pitch to the organ reverberating off the stone dais.

I don’t know if I like this God, I thought to myself—innocent but significant.

The seed of rebellion had been planted in the young monk’s heart.

I looked around at the other kids. Were they feeling the same way I was? Did any of them care?

The Breaking and the Building

There are many facets to the Catholic Church that I could touch on—the beauty of ritual, the power of communal worship, the intellectual tradition of Aquinas and Augustine, the social justice legacy of liberation theology. But this moment of First Confession was the single most influential experience of my Catholic upbringing.

This breaking of my spirit. It was a part of me that I would spend decades rebuilding.

Years of reteaching my psyche and my soul that I was not inherently flawed. That I didn’t start life at a deficit. And beyond that, that God didn’t care about my “misdeeds”—at least not the ones He claimed were terrible. (More on God’s supposed biases in later chapters)

A part of me is grateful for this breaking. Without it, I wouldn’t have had to claw back to my truth. Without it, I wouldn’t have been forced to find a personal relationship with God. I would have simply drunk the Kool-Aid of scripture, accepted the mythology wholesale, and never questioned the mechanisms of control embedded in the doctrine.

That day, I held the tether between me and Yahweh with a grip of contempt and caution. He’d have to win me over again if there was to be love in this relationship. Trust had to be reestablished.

Lucky for me, God is an abundantly enthusiastic partner. And She was just getting started.

Next in this series: The Evangelical years—from Catholic guilt to Protestant fervor, the altar calls that promised freedom but delivered new forms of control, and the moment I discovered that accepting Jesus as my personal saviour came with fine print I hadn’t read.

I consider myself outlandishly lucky that I was raised in a house that held the presence of God. Not just the abstract idea of divinity, but a living, breathing sense of higher connection—the myth of connection to something Divine and esoteric. For me, it instilled meaning into everything I did. A larger-than-life north star constantly guiding the life I was building, whether consciously or unconsciously.

This wasn’t a neutral upbringing. It was an immersion in competing cosmologies, each claiming some ultimate truth. What I didn’t understand then, but see clearly now, is that I was being initiated into one of humanity’s oldest spiritual tensions: the conflict between exclusivist and universalist visions of the Divine.

One House, Two Gods?

My father was a fair-weathered Catholic. More or less forced to attend Mass every Sunday while growing up, his Irish Catholic mother insisting on the tradition with the iron will that defines certain generations of immigrant faith. But he still clings to the belief with a wistful heart, even into his older age. He never batted an eye at the notion that there was a higher power—though he never identified as someone who lived his life outwardly spiritual.

His is a quiet, personal practice that I’m sure reveals itself more in the still moments of contemplation he would spend lakeside, or late at night in bed. A kind of natural theology—uncomplicated by theological debate, present in the texture of lived experience. His heart knew spirit, whether his pragmatic life showed it or not.

My mother, on the other hand, wears her spirituality on her sleeve with immense pride. An initiate since high school, my mother is a devotee of Paramahansa Yogananda’s teachings through The Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF).

For those unfamiliar: Yogananda was an Indian spiritual guru who was essentially the first yogi to bring the spiritual practice of Yoga to America on a large scale. He immigrated to the USA in 1920 with the explicit purpose of bringing Kriya Yoga to the West and introducing the broader philosophy of universalist spirituality—the radical notion that all paths lead to one ultimate source. To God. To Oneness.

His Autobiography of a Yogi, published in 1946, became a spiritual touchstone for countless seekers, famously including Steve Jobs (who reportedly reread it every year) and George Harrison, of the Beatles. Yogananda’s vision was syncretic, blending Hindu philosophy with Christian mysticism, suggesting that Jesus and Krishna were essentially teaching the same truths in different cultural contexts.

This was the spiritual air I breathed at home.

In our home, we always had a dedicated meditation room filled with images of Yogananda and other ascended masters, including Christ. Diagrams of chakra placements next to St.James Bibles. My mother encouraged relationship with God and with self through prayer and meditation, peace and service throughout life. She is as close to God, and walks the path of righteousness, more than anyone I’d ever known—and she still lives in my top-five-humans for devotional integrity. Her kindness and selflessness are continuously unmatched.

(Keep this in mind. This point will become critically important in later installments when I begin to question the very nature of spiritual authority and the difference between devotion and awakening.)

The Split Begins

I was a young and kind boy—eager to bring joy to others and act in a way that God would approve of. Being raised in a small town in Northwestern Ontario, I didn’t have much introduction to others who lived a yogic lifestyle. So my mother, perhaps sensing my spiritual hunger or simply desiring me more esoteric exposure, placed me in Yoga-adjacent environments. She enrolled me in Catholic school to weave prayer and ceremony into my education, and sent me to Christian Bible camps during summers to continue my relationship with spirit.

It was, admittedly, utterly confusing to walk these paths simultaneously.

On one hand, SRF taught freedom of the soul. It taught true, unconditional love by God—not love you must earn, but love as the fundamental nature of existence itself. It taught that no one church held all the answers, but that each soul found God through its own journey. It taught reincarnation and spiritual sovereignty—the idea that you are not a broken sinner but an evolving consciousness moving through lifetimes of experience. It taught the inevitability of Oneness and the acceleration of that realization through devoted meditation practice. It taught that all souls were born of God and born inherently good.

Meanwhile, at school I was taught original sin. That we are all born tarnished—stained by Adam’s disobedience—and must strive for lifelong repentance. That the devil is always watching, and if you deviate from the Ten Commandments of Moses, your soul may burn in Hell for all eternity. Luckily, the Catholics offered a work-around: just tell a priest about your sins and you get a get-out-of-jail-free card.

(More on the psychological impact of confession later—it’s a brilliant mechanism of social control dressed as spiritual liberation.)

Alongside the eternal damnation and fear-mongering of the Catholic Church, I also doubled down on Evangelical Christianity through the summer camps and some social groups. Here, Christ became the one and only true way to redemption. Jesus thrust himself upon the cross specifically for my soul, and to not honour his sacrifice was to spit on the name of God. It was a story burned into my psyche, and remains one of the greatest guilt trips in the history of mankind. Brilliant myth-weaving, if we’re being objective about it.

The narrative structure is genius: You are born broken. You cannot fix yourself. Someone perfect died horribly because of your brokenness. The only way to honour that sacrifice is total surrender to the doctrine. Deviate, and you condemn him to suffering in vain.

It’s a closed system, mythologically speaking. Kafkaesque in its inescapability.

The Hunger

I’ll dive deeper into my experience of each tradition in later pieces—the specific textures of Catholic ritual, the fervour of Evangelical worship, the quiet discipline of meditation practice. For now, I want to paint the landscape of my early spiritual formation.

Needless to say, I was juggling extraordinary existential turbulence as a youth. And to make things more complicated, I was born with a natural urgent desire to seek God. Not a passing interest or inherited obligation, but a deep, foundational hunger to know Her—more intense than what I noticed in essentially any of the other children around me.

I recognized His name in the wind. I cried at Her face in the sunset. I was so aware of the spirit of God within me for as long as I can remember. I desired Her, and that desiring would not let up.

This wasn’t the casual faith of someone going through motions. This was eros—the ancient Greek concept of passionate, driving love. Not sexual, but that same quality of intensity and focus. I wanted to know God the way others wanted to know another person. I was, in retrospect, a natural mystic trapped in competing orthodoxies.

So I looked for God in every place I could. Devouring the scriptures and rules and lessons and teachings and guidance from the all-knowing elders of these factions. I was a good kid who wanted to do right by Jesus.

Concurrently, my mother’s devotion to the soul’s liberation permeated our home. I was in constant war within myself.

“All paths lead to God. God loves you no matter what.”

“Christ is the ONLY way and you must verbally accept him above all else to be saved.”

“You must drink the blood and eat the body and repent, for you were born flawed and every breath you take in this life is temptation.”

For years, I tried to make everyone happy—my school, my teachers, the priests, my mother, and ultimately God Himself.

My eager, hungry soul didn’t know what to do with the conflicting information, so I continued steeping myself further and further into each path. Getting deeper into the lore until something would eventually make me question strongly enough to slow my pace. But that wouldn’t happen for years.

The Cognitive Dissonance

What I was experiencing, though I had no language for it then, was profound cognitive dissonance—a term to used describe the mental discomfort of holding contradictory beliefs simultaneously. Most people resolve this dissonance by dismissing one belief or the other.

But I couldn’t. Both felt true in their own way.

The unconditional love my mother modelled felt true. The guilt and fear the church instilled also felt true. The mystical experiences I had in meditation felt true. The fervour of worship at Bible camp felt true. How could God be both the distant judge demanding sacrifice and the intimate presence whispering “you are already whole”?

The answer, I would eventually learn, is that God wasn’t contradictory—the myths humans told about God were. But at eight, nine, ten years old, I didn’t have that framework. I just felt the weight of it.

This was my life until around thirteen. This was the internal, voracious war happening within my heart as a child—a war of guilt and failure and shame and not-enough-ness and false idols, desperately trying to win over God’s love. To be good enough to deserve Jesus as my brother. To deserve salvation and redemption and freedom.

While also witnessing and learning about another version of God who was so loving that forgiveness was beneath Him—it wasn’t even in the Divine vocabulary. Love was God’s eternal vibration. That’s all there was. Life wasn’t about redemption or striving for atonement; life was about liberation and becoming whole.

I struggled. For many, many years. Desperate to do the right thing, to follow the right path.

The First Breakthrough

It was then that my mother introduced me to a book called Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. As a struggling twelve or thirteen-year-old, this book spoke directly to my soul. Finally, I was having a conversation with the God I always knew to be real. To be true. To be beyond the petty squalor of human desire and need.

To this God, I was as eternal as the universe itself—miraculously flawed and confused, yes, but not broken. It was all a playful dance of wondrous discovery and experience. Not a test. Not a trial. Just experience unfolding.

It was freedom. Finally—I tasted freedom.

The book reframed everything. God wasn’t a distant father figure keeping score. God was the very fabric of existence, experiencing itself through infinite forms. Sin wasn’t a cosmic crime; it was simply missing the mark, an opportunity to recalibrate. Hell wasn’t a place of eternal torture; it was the hell we create for ourselves through separation from our true nature.

This God didn’t need my worship. This God delighted in my becoming.

Oh, how I wish I had been of solid enough confidence to hold onto this narrative with all my will. But I was about to enter the world of middle and high school—the land of girls and popularity, where, beyond everything else, being stoked about God was anything but advantageous.

The whims of a fragile boy took hold, and though Conversations with God began to form the foundation of my belief system—a foundation I’m only now fully recognizing—it would take many more years for that foundation to petrify.

Instead, I would traverse the storm of the next decade(s) desperately trying to fit into the social network of life while secretly devoting my heart deeper and deeper to God-consciousness.

And what an epic it would be.

Coming up in this series: The performance years—how I learned to code-switch between spiritual identities, the emergence of shame around my seeking, and the long road toward integrating the competing myths I’d inherited. I’ll explore my Mormon years, my eventual break from organized religion, and the turn toward Theosophy that would set the stage for everything that followed.

I’ll start by acknowledging that the title of this series is almost a direct rip off of Erick Godsey’s Podcast. I’m not mad about it—I don’t think he would be either. But to honor the theft, here’s a link to his work. If you listen to it all, your life will likely change significantly.

Listen to the Podcast Here

The word mythopoetic has been circulating in my consciousness lately, a concept that’s become essential as I spelunk deeper into my emotional architecture while infusing psychological exploration with artistic significance.

Here’s the working definition I’ve landed on: Mythopoetic describes the creation or interpretation of myths—think of writers like Tolkien inventing entire cosmologies, or movements like Robert Bly’s Men’s Movement that use mythic archetypes for personal insight. It’s the practice of connecting modern life to deeper, ancient stories through storytelling, art, and ritual to find meaning and wholeness.

I was more intimately introduced to this framework through Erick Godsey’s incomparable work, and once the importance of myth became clear to me, my self-exploration opened up in ways I could never have anticipated.

The Mythic Dimension

We all live in myth. There’s science—fact proven through experimentation and rigour, operating in relative certainties. And then there’s myth: the symbolic structures we adopt from the moment our brain can comprehend the world. We either create them from our own experience or inherit them from the cultural waters we swim in.

Joseph Campbell spoke of myths as “clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life.” What he meant was that myths aren’t just ancient stories about gods and heroes—they’re the operational beliefs that shape how we move through the world. Jung took this further, suggesting that myths emerge from the collective unconscious, those primordial patterns that recur across cultures and time.

So what constitutes a personal myth? Here are some examples:

All religion functions as myth—a collection of ethos built from foundational beliefs, designed to guide us imperfect humans in specific directions. This isn’t dismissive; as Karen Armstrong writes in A Short History of Myth, myths provide frameworks for meaning that empirical truth cannot touch. They are necessary for faith—for hope.

“I am not skilled enough to [insert anything]” is also a myth—a chosen belief structure.

“I can’t make enough money to live happily.” Myth.

“I am too much this.” Myth.

“I don’t have enough that.” Myth.

“People don’t like me.” Myth.

“Everyone loves me!” Also myth.

I’m not claiming these beliefs can’t have correspondence with external reality. Not all myths are fallacies. But they are constructed, and once we recognize their constructed nature, we can examine whether they serve us or constrain us.

Some of you might bristle at this. “You don’t know my life, Isaac! This is my reality.”

I don’t disagree. But you’ve also chosen it—or at minimum, you’ve internalized narratives that were chosen for you, often before you had the consciousness to question them. And if you wish to exist in a different paradigm, you’ll first have to name these myths, then learn to loosen their grip on your life.

The Poetic Impulse

As for the poetic dimension of mythopoetic: for me, this manifests as the hyper-romanticized artist within. I hadn’t realized until recently (thirty-six years into this incarnation) how often I create fantastical myths to propel myself forward.

This isn’t unique to artists. Yuval Noah Harari argues in Sapiens that humanity’s superpower is our ability to believe in shared fictions—money, nations, corporations, human rights. These are myths that allow millions of strangers to cooperate. On the personal level, we each craft heroic narratives: Mine often wade through believing I am meant to be significant. That I have purpose. That I am of the divine and therefore carry deep meaning.

These narratives can be simultaneously true and entirely constructed by our psyche to help us survive and thrive.

The Collision of Myths

I hold conflicting myths constantly. I believe I’m meant to be significant—meant to speak or write or sing words that might guide lost souls back to themselves. Simultaneously, I believe I’m not intelligent enough to execute this vision. In this very moment, while writing, I feel both powerful (because the words are flowing) and inadequate (because I’m not citing more studies or dropping names that exist readily in my mental library). I can’t memorize all that crap. I don’t have that capacity. Or so my myth confirms.

I am the purposeful creator and the embarrassed fraud. A walking paradox.

The difference between now and ten years ago, however, is that I can recognize the myth in real time. I can observe it arising, name it, speak to it, examine its power over me. And on the days I’m feeling brave, I can choose to act despite it.

This recognition has completely altered my path toward self-awareness. I no longer seek to eliminate these myths entirely—that would be like trying to think without language. Instead, I’m learning to hold them more lightly, to question which myths are generative and which are calcified patterns I inherited unconsciously.

This is the work I’ve been exploring through Internal Family Systems—the recognition that we contain multitudes, that the “embarrassed idiot” part of me is just one voice in an internal ecosystem. I write poetry to that broken myth. I whisper to him that somewhere along the way, someone convinced him—or he convinced himself—that he wasn’t intelligent enough. And now, whenever someone’s intelligence feels threatening, he (I) contract. This recognition is significant. (I’ll write more about the IFS process in future pieces.)

Why This Matters

So why am I here? What’s the purpose of this blog on this chilly January Monday?

This serves as an introduction—to you, and to myself as the one organizing these thoughts. Over the coming weeks, I’m going to trace my complete journey through spirituality: from early childhood through Catholicism, into evangelical Christianity, through an exploration of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, into Eastern philosophy, and most recently into the exploration of consciousness through plant medicine ceremonies.

This spiritual thread has been the most constant in my life—that and music. My aim is to excavate these stories and experiences, auditing them for wisdom I may have missed the first time through. This excavation is about discerning which myths are authentically mine and which I’ve been performing out of borrowed scripts.

I’m doing this primarily for myself—an archive of my journey with the sacred, and perhaps raw material to be leveraged in later creative works. But I suspect many of you will find resonance in these explorations. I’ve lived a fairly unusual life, and that experience will show up throughout these pieces. I promise there will be some wild recollection.

So here’s to the myths that make me who I am. The myths I’ll dissolve, and the myths I’ll consciously create moving forward.

Glad you’re along for the ride.

I’ve gotten into the rhythm of spending my mornings washing dishes. It’s become a meditation that I quite honestly find cathartic. I’ll find a YouTube channel or Spotify playlist that has soothing piano music and get lost in thought and repetitive scrubbing.

This morning however, the music wouldn’t stay in the background. It was a soft piano melody with cello stirring the soul in sweeping crescendos and flutters. I became emotional. I stopped mid-scrub to take it in.

I’m not usually one to leave comments, but I was so moved I felt compelled to thank whoever created the video and music. I opened the comment section and one of the first comments read: “Was this made by A.I.?”

The creator had responded. “Yes. It was.”

I spent the rest of my soapy-handed morning thinking about what had just happened. I had been moved by something a machine made. Moved in the way I thought—the way I wanted—only human creation could do.

What is it about art that gets inside us? For me it comes down to story. To myth. It’s the story behind the art or artist that compels our soul, and beyond that, the way we relate to that story. Art is never truly about the thing. It’s about the soul that needed to make the thing. There is a small subtle essential thread of life-lived within good art.

As a boy who grew up in Northwestern Ontario, a painting of the north shore speaks to me differently than it would someone raised in Guatemala. An artist who knows what the Hoito is, who has watched sunrise over the Sleeping Giant—they’re painting something we’ve shared. Even if we’ve never met.

This is what separates human art from what AI can do, at least for now. AI cannot see that sunrise and paint that moment. It cannot choose colours based on the feeling it had while watching the day begin. But a human can, and I can see that painting and recall the exact feeling I had standing at the same shoreline. The artist and I have shared the moment through their creation. Through their expression of feeling. There is a created collectiveness. Glaring evidence of this is when 10 million people watch the same scene in a movie and they all share the same tears.

This is what all art is.

Well, I think art is two things, and both of them belong to us alone.

The first is expression. Our attempt at capturing out loud what happens in our heart in a singular moment. What our body feels. What our mind catches and holds. Artists—all humans—are exquisite recreationists. We use skill and abandon and colour and song and dance to edge as close as humanly possible to a feeling we once had, and then we show it to the world.

“Look at the way my heart broke,” screams the wood carving.

“This feels like the last words I said to my mother before she died,” declares the fantasy novel.

So why do we do it?

I believe it’s because the act of creation itself is the most divine thing we do. Not the product. Not the recognition. The moment when we take something we’ve experienced and transform it into something new—that’s when we’re most like God. That’s when we’re participating in the original creative act.

Think about it: you see something that moves you. A sunset. A face in a crowd. The way light falls through trees. And something in you immediately begins translating. Your mind is already choosing words, hearing melodies, imagining brushstrokes. Or you’re simply excited to tell a friend about it! You can’t help it. The experience alone isn’t enough—you need to remake it, offer your version of it back to the world.

This is the ache that makes us human. We’re not content to witness—we have to participate. We have to add our voice to the chorus. Even knowing we can never fully capture what we felt, even knowing the painting will never quite match the sunset, the song will never quite hold the heartbreak—we have to try anyway. We must war against the desire to express something that cannot be proven, only felt.

AI doesn’t have this ache. It has no sunset to remember, no heartbreak to express. It can arrange and combine and mimic, but it has nothing inside trying to get out. There’s no gap between its experience and its expression because there is no experience. It’s solving a pattern problem, not attempting the impossible translation of feeling into form.

And that gap—that beautiful, frustrating distance between what we felt and what we can express—that’s where the divine lives. In the reaching. In the attempt. In the refusal to let experience pass through us unwitnessed and untransformed.

This is what’s written into us at the deepest level. If there was nothing else, there would still be this: the yearning to experience and recreate. Experience and share. Experience and share. This is the God in us, the machine that drives existence. It’s an unspoken devotion.

The second thing art is: sharing.

You can spend your whole life as a hermit in the mountains, writing poem after poem after prose after novel until they teeter in precarious tilting stacks strewn around your cabin. You can suck the marrow from life’s experience and collect whimsy and wonder all you wish. But until those experiences are witnessed—until you have someone see that moment through your lens—I don’t believe there will be fulfillment.

This isn’t ego. This isn’t some wound needing validation. At its core, it’s the sacred collective agreement we all enter into when we’re born. Our art helps others be seen. It helps others remember who they are. It reminds people of the quality of life, both good and bad. It gives permission. It ignites. It holds. It soothes. It enrages.

We need this. We need to be seen, pushed, prodded, inspired.

When I’m sitting alone after a breakup with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and the right song comes on, I don’t feel alone. Maybe it helps me process. Maybe it cracks open something I needed to explore. Maybe it helps me rest, finally, truly.

We aren’t born to be alone. That doesn’t just mean friends or family. Our species is built for connection. Art is connection.

It’s not a million streams or a worldwide tour. It’s not an art auction or the New York Times Best Seller List. It’s connection. I get to see the sunrise through an artist’s eyes who loves adding extra blue to the lilt of the trees in the foreground. The blue reminds me of my father and how much he means to me. My heart swells. The subtle yet poignant feeling of love washes over me. Connection. A tapestry beyond comprehension.

What else is there in this life?

I confess I’m a supporter of AI. I’m in support of the tool it can become for humanity, even a tool for creativity. But I don’t believe AI will get to the place where it can experience. And if it does, it’ll be a wild ride. For now, the machine is taught to mimic us. The code may feel convincing in its independence. It’s not. It doesn’t know what feeling is. It can’t know what it is to yearn. It won’t ever know the deepest human desire—to become God and create something from nothing. It will never look into the canopy of space and feel small, and therefore it’ll never be able to express that to us on its own.

That is uniquely ours. It is the entire purpose of everything. The meaning of life—to surrender to the desire of creation and share that creation with another soul who craves it.

The dishes have been done for five minutes and my hands sit under the warm running water. I’ve been utterly lost in deep thought. You know how that feels, right?

You may know the lavender scent that bubbles up from my skin. Some fingers wet with texture and others slick with soap. The feeling of cleaning a wooden cutting board, edges rough and offering a subtle scent of pine. You may know what the warmth feels like as it heats only to my wrist, exposing my forearms to the house’s morning chill.

If you do know these experiences, then you and I share this together. We are kin. We have a bond. And if you don’t know these feelings, perhaps you’ve become inspired to slowly and methodically wash your dishes to the sound of soft piano at 5am.

Either way, AI isn’t having this experience. It’s not able to share its experience with you. You and I, and all other humans alone, share this.

And yet, today it moved me. I’m a walking contradiction.

What I know for certain is that art is more than a pretty thing on a wall. It is the language of the soul. It is the quiet rage of the Divine within us, aching to encounter life—all of life—and show our brothers and sisters what it meant to us.

I’ll forever inch toward the Divine.
Toward the immaculate beauty I witness in this life.
I’ll ache to recreate Her splendour.
And I will fail again and again and again.
What a pleasure it is to fail.

What arrogance,
to think these hands could hold what the heart witnessed for a moment!
To believe this voice could carry the note that shattered me completely.
The sunset doesn’t care about my painting.
The beloved doesn’t need my poem.
But I need to try.
I need to fail magnificently,
the way a moth needs to fly toward flame—
not because it will succeed in becoming light,
but because it has seen light and can do nothing else.

I’m writing this on December 31st—our socially accepted day before the new year. Of course, this will be published on a Monday because, well, that’s my thing. #newyearnewme

(I don’t hold on to many conspiracies, but I’m 100% on board with the history of the calendar being all wrong. Our new year, as natural beings on this earth, should begin with nature in the spring. But that’s a topic for another Substack.)

I wanted to sit here consciously and lay out my plans for 2026.

Over the last decade (read: almost always), I’ve tended to flow with whatever the universe laid out before me. Allowing myself to be pulled towards highest excitement or opportunities. It has created an incredibly exciting life, though one I seemed to have little input on.

Admittedly, I’ve romanticized this process. I convinced myself that this lack of order was more akin to connecting with the Divine. And in a lot of ways, it was. It was surrender. It was trust. It was sacred communion and partnership—something I’ll always listen for on the wind.

But I’m beginning to understand that while the universe inevitably guides you towards what the soul desires, having conscious input helps solidify the partnership. The universe wants you to tell it what you want. It wants to provide everything for you. It works as you, of you, and apart from you. All-encompassing.

I rarely guide the universe. I rarely decide what I want from life. It makes the universe work twice as hard to manifest anything.

I am testing a different system this year.

Not one steeped in rigidity, hustle, and hardcore focus, but one where I’m no longer in the passenger seat giving suggestions. Instead, I’m in the driver’s seat, listening to whispers from the universe sitting shotgun, helping guide the way. But ultimately, I know where I want to go and I’m in control.

This partnership feels beautiful for this time in my life. And far simpler than I thought it would be.

The Mirror

In a conversation with a friend, I realized my outer world was beginning to mirror my inner one.

In my day-to-day, I’m currently helping raise my newborn nephew full-time. A commitment that life offered me in a way I never could have guessed, at a time when it worked perfectly. I’ve spent the last two weeks 100% committed to this child and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

What I realized: in the container of this focus, in the container of this love, in the container of this all encompassing, intense devotion is that the child will grow. He will thrive because of the hyper-focus being given to him. This focus requires the ability to say no. No to outings, no to trips, no to jobs, no to anything that isn’t supporting this baby human. It becomes easy to say no, because there is one goal - growth of the child.

My art, in a lot of ways, is taking on this avatar for me.

I have midwifed many creations, but I’ve raised them for a couple of months, then abandoned them for new ones. Some have grown into adolescence. But rarely have they matured.

This year I am choosing to raise very specific creations. And I will, with love and ferocity, say no to anything else. I am here to raise this “child”—distractions from that singular task taste like poison.

Three Creations

I have three main creations I wish to bring to life this year. I want to lay them out here with complete transparency. It will be entertaining to come back to this a year from now and see how it panned out. Throughout the year, I will confess my strategies, fears, hurdles, and dreams. It will help clear my head and set my intention.

1. My Debut Album

I want to finish my debut album. The songs are written, unless new ones present themselves throughout the year. A ~10-song album. A dream I’ve been holding since I was a teenager. These songs have been written over the course of the last half of my life. This is an important milestone for me as an artist.

Along with the album, I want to play more shows. I’m leaving this open-ended, but it still feels important.

The hurdle: I need to raise about $15,000 over the year to make the album the way I’d like. I’m not currently in an overtly abundant work situation, but it’s one allowing for structure—and God knows structure is what I need.

I don’t know where the funds will come from yet. I’ll dial back on expenses as much as I can and focus all extra income towards the album. I’ll likely begin fundraising efforts as well to ensure I reach the goal.

It is going to happen. One way or another.

By this time next year, I will have released my full-length debut album. (And more accurately, several singles throughout the year.)

2. Weekly Substack

I want to recommit to writing a Substack once a week, consistently.

I was doing well before the summer holidays. Then articles spread to every two weeks, sometimes longer. I don’t hold any shame around it. It’s been one of the most important, cathartic writing experiences I’ve ever gone through, and I know the immensity of value it brings me.

I also feel responsible to my paid subscribers and excited to continue pouring myself into pieces in hopes they may find gems within them. But first and foremost, the Substack is for my own processing of life. My own ideas.

Some topics I’ll be exploring this year:

• My true spiritual orientation. The myths, beliefs, and philosophies that guide my life and have brought me intense self-actualization. This will likely be a multi-part series.

• My experiences traversing plant medicine. They will read like science fiction but will be 100% true, accurate depictions of what my mind, ego, and soul went through. Definitely a multi-part series. Boy-oh-boy. Hold onto your butts.

• Continued exploration of the parts of me. My weaknesses. My growths. My wins and losses. The things I contemplate and dream of.

• More poetry, hopefully. But I give this genre full release. She may muse, she may not.

And other stuff.

3. Fiction Writing

I’ve become relatively obsessed with fiction writing after releasing my novella Annie & James last year. So many people read it and responded with such love. People were moved. People were impressed. My ego swelled. It was beautiful having something I created with such intention become important to another human.

I want to continue mastering this craft. I’m a decent writer, but I’m not a great writer yet. I intend to work towards this throughout the year.

As I write this, I’m working on the second draft of a young-adult adventure novel, inspired by my experiences growing up in Thunder Bay and having a summer cottage at Silver Islet. The township was built around a booming silver mine in the late 1800s and now hosts many private cottage-goers. As a child, I always had dreams of adventure through the mines and what treasures may lie in the darkness. This wonderlust helped me create this book.

Writing this has been a doozy. For reference, Annie & James was 8,200 words.

This next novel? 64,000.

If I’m being honest, I don’t think it’s my personal Harry Potter, but it is one step closer to finding my stride. It’s practice. Putting in the reps. And it’s not bad by any means. I actually think it’s quite good.

But what I’m even more eager to work on is the next book.

Between you and I, I have two ideas stewing—but one in particular is pulling on my excitement with wild ambition. I envision it becoming a four-book series. This is the project I want to spend consistent time on this year. Writing daily, as best I can.

This story feels rich and magical and spiritual and philosophical, and still needs much to be flushed out. Worlds to be built. Factions to be defined. Arcs to be developed. It’s a monster of a project. And one I can’t stop thinking about.

By the end of this year, I’d like to have the first draft of the first book written. I’ll likely update you all here as I move through the project. An average fantasy novel runs around 120,000-150,000 words. Double that of my YA (young adult) novel. And as such, I expect this process to take some time.

It’s going to take years. I want to say that specifically because I haven’t lived a life of years. I have lived a life of months and weeks. But this feels like a thread I want to hold onto and make come to life. At least I’ll go confidently in the direction of its birth until I know otherwise.

365 Interactions

And that’s it. Three goals. Three main plot lines for 2026. Everything else will be secondary. (aside from raising my perfect nephew (Sincerely not bias))

I want to touch each of these elements at least once a day.
365 interactions.
365 moments of inspiration.
365 reminders of the direction I’m headed.

I feel inspired and also calm. Excited and grounded.

For a lot of you reading this, it may not sound significant. To focus on “one” thing. But for me it is. It represents a monumental shift in the way I navigate life. There is a force within me that I’ve seen make miracles come to life, all while having one foot out the door. Seeking the next adventure. To aim this force consciously at a specific target almost feels terrifying.

Terrifying and electrifying.

What I know for certain: it will be a year of creativity. A year of making beautiful things out of nothing. I feel as though so many of my experiences in life will weave into these three projects—experiences I’ve longed to share. And beyond share, capture and archive for myself.

As a side effect, I want to make myself proud. I want to hold my books, hold my album. I want to see those creations make money. I want people to invest in the stories I have to share. I want to establish myself as an artist who’s art sustains his life.

“Ten years from now everyone will complain that he was an overnight success” - one of my favourite quotes by mentor and peer, Erick Godsey.

Let the overnight success begin.

Happy 2026 everyone - what are you goals this year? What are you saying yes to?

Let me know below!

I’m sitting at a desk watching children play.

Cool piano music drifts through the room - something minimal, something that doesn’t ask much of me. The low winter sun cuts directly into my eyes, warming my face despite the chill it illuminates beyond the glass. On the field beside the elementary school, frost shimmers across dead grass like morning diamonds scattered over summer’s corpse. God never misses an opportunity to dust beauty into death.

The children scream and laugh without filter, without questioning what they’re meant to do or be in this lifetime. They simply are; the breath they take, the attention they feel, the game unfolding in front of them. I envy them in this. The not-knowing that doesn’t ache.

I came here to write about control. About the desire I have to stop trying to control my life. But even that impulse - the desire to stop desiring - feels like another attempt at choreography. Another way my mind pretends it’s the one leading.

The True Admittance

I don’t know if I’ve ever been in control of my life.

I like to pretend I have been. That I’ve made decisions that propelled me in certain directions, that I’ve dreamed up exact scenarios and executed the steps needed to bring those visions to life. But truthfully? The biggest turning points of my existence have felt utterly beyond me. A breakup. An illness. A firing. An opportunity that arrived from nowhere.

To consider the enormity of the constellation - the infinite moving parts and people required for any single moment to come into existence - is beyond comprehension. It’s beyond our feeble egoic attempt at pretending our species has somehow ascended to the position of true creator.

At least not consciously.

And maybe this is the threshold I’m navigating: At what point does the subtle nudge within become the conscious choice without?

I’ve spent most of my life being influenced by the world around me. Attempting to follow a status quo. Attempting to fit in. Attempting to follow paths laid out by others; those more successful, happier, more spiritual. The ones who seemed to have figured it out.

But there’s this voice. This nudge. It lives inside me, whisper-quiet, and yet it packs a devastating punch in the physical world. Whenever I’m on the subtle verge of abandoning my deepest self, my soul goes into full behind-the-scenes creation mode and flips my entire world on its head. A job evaporates. A relationship dissolves. A door I was desperately pushing on suddenly locks, while another one I wasn’t even looking at swings wide open.

I’m grateful for this power. For this magic.

But my mind? My mind is exhausted by its antics.

He’s constantly trying to make sense of where he went wrong in the planning, how to recover, how to move forward with some semblance of strategy. I live in a constant state of wondering how to live. Caught between the one who plans and the one who knows, between the mind that maps and the soul that moves.

Let’s Be Honest

There’s a moment happening in my body as I write this.

A tightness in my throat. A heat behind my eyes. The kind of pressure that precedes tears but hasn’t quite given itself permission yet. It’s the weight of all the years I’ve spent trying to figure it out. Holding onto narratives, clinging to supposed-to’s, white-knuckling my way through a script I never actually wrote.

I want to cry for the time I’ve spent exhausting myself this way. For the energy I’ve poured into pretending I’m the choreographer of this dance when really, I’ve only ever been one of the dancers.

What’s become clear to me in these last few months - clear in a way I’ve never experienced before - is that I will not live an ordinary life by any means.

I’ve held this knowing since I was a child. But I fought against it. I tried to make it fit into acceptable containers, tried to shape it into something that made sense to the people around me, tried to alchemize the extraordinary into something that wouldn’t make anyone (including myself) uncomfortable.

I’m done with that.

I’m declaring it here, now, in this article: I will by no means live an ordinary life. And I’m letting go of the reins.

Now, I’ve toyed with surrender before. But it was always surrender within boundaries. Surrender, but I need a job that pays well. Surrender, but I’d kind of like to be here, doing this thing. Surrender, but I’d prefer it with these people.

So what does surrender look like when I release everything?

For me, it’s presence. It’s the now.

It’s sitting at this desk and letting the piano music be enough. Letting the frost be instruction. Letting the children’s laughter be permission to stop performing purpose and just... be.

The True Courtship

Here’s where the dance metaphor arrives, and I need you to understand it fully because it’s the only thing that’s made sense to me lately:

Creation is a dance. The lead traded between fate and free will.

If you’ve ever taken a ballroom dance class, you know what I mean. It’s not about one partner dominating or the other going limp. It’s an exchange of energy. An exchange of knowing and releasing. The leader proposes. The follower responds. But the follower also informs the leader through the quality of their presence, through subtle resistance or easy flow. Both are listening. Both are moving. Both are surrendering to something larger than either of them: the music, the momentum, the moment itself.

Fate wants to work with you. She wants to press against you and feel your warmth as you press back. She wants to lead sometimes, and she wants you to lead sometimes, and most importantly, she wants you to know when to do which.

This is the art I’m learning: not to collapse into passivity, but to stay present enough to feel which way the energy is moving. To know when to initiate and when to follow. To trust that the nudge within my body is actually the music I’m meant to move to, even when my mind can’t hear it yet.

Maybe this is why I’ve always loved partner dancing. Why something in me lights up when two bodies find that synchronicity, that wordless communication, that perfect exchange of tension and release.

It’s not about control. It’s about connection. It’s about being present enough to feel what’s being asked of you in real time, and responsive enough to answer.

The Oracle

I’ve always had an intuition my “success” was going to come later in life. That I would create something truly impactful when I was much older.

It’s a difficult premonition to hold. If you were told that at sixty you would step into your full purpose, how would you spend the years leading up to it? Are there specific experiences you’re supposed to have or avoid? What if your life currently looks like pulling back, doing very little for a year? If you’re not constantly moving and meeting and building and exploring, are you failing to prepare for the future version of yourself?

Welcome to my brain. Every day. It’s tiring.

And I want to release it.

I choose to release it.

I choose to listen. I choose to know.

That phrase stops me cold: I choose to know.

Knowing is a special thing. Something underappreciated and not nearly understood enough. What does it mean to truly know something? To feel a knowing in your body?

I imagine it’s what the influencers have deemed a “full fuck yes.” But it’s more than that. It’s not just excitement and energy. It’s still. It’s calm. It’s a quiet yes, of course, that makes sense. It doesn’t announce itself loudly because it doesn’t need to convince anyone, least of all you.

I want to live my life from a place of knowing. Feeling the tides of life brush up against my soul and simply knowing which direction to move. Not thinking my way there. Not strategizing or optimizing. Just... knowing, the way a body knows to exhale after it inhales.

This is what the dance requires: presence enough to feel the lead, trust enough to follow it.

I don’t know if I’m meant to actively create right now. At least not in the way so many explain it - starting a business, building something that helps people, being the face of something that alters the course of humanity.

I also don’t know if I’m meant to work for anything or anyone that exists within the normalcy of Western life.

So I live in the flux. The liminal space. The in-between.

And here’s what surprises me: I feel comfortable here. I use that word carefully because I know comfort can sometimes be a trap, a way the ego lulls you into stagnation. But this isn’t that kind of comfort. This is something else. This is knowing. My soul feels still here. Able to observe and listen and contemplate without the constant pressure to perform or prove or produce.

I’m in a group right now focused on stepping into our dharma, our purpose. On reaching out and taking our creative pursuits into our own hands and creating something for the world. I understand the framework. I’ve played this game before; the vision boards and action steps and accountability partners. And yet, right now, while my brain says go left, my body says go right.

I sit with this daily: Is this fear and resistance pulling me away from what I’m supposed to do? Or is this deep knowing guiding me toward what I’m actually meant to be?

This is the meditation. This is the dance.

Do or do not, there is no try.

What the Future Holds

My guess is that when I’m sixty, I’ll write about it. About whatever this is, whatever this becomes.

That’s what immediately surfaces when I feel into the premonition. Not a business plan. Not a five-year strategy. Just: you’ll write about it later, so live it fully now.

How I spend the next twenty years is the thing my brain desperately wants to figure out.

But maybe he’s not meant to.

Maybe the point isn’t to choreograph every step but to stay present enough to hear the music. To feel when fate is leading and when she’s asking me to take the lead. To trust that the dance itself - this constant exchange between surrender and choice, between knowing and not-knowing - is the path.

My path.

The Commitment

The sun has shifted now. The frost has been melting in patches, revealing the brown underneath. The children have been called back inside. The piano music has looped back to the beginning, or maybe it’s a different song that sounds the same. I can’t tell.

But as I breathe deep, as I let the sunlight warm my face one last time before it moves past me entirely, I am home.

I am with trust and knowing.

I am allowing the unique path of my soul to truly, truthfully unfold. To unravel before me like a red carpet, leading the way and yet, not at all.

I came here to write about control, about surrender, about the exhaustion of trying to figure it all out.

And somewhere in the writing, somewhere between the frost and the children and the dance metaphor that arrived like grace, I found what I was looking for:

Permission to stop choreographing.

Permission to just dance.

Have you ever felt caught between the one who plans and the one who knows? Between the mind that needs to map everything and the soul that just wants to move? I’d love to hear how you navigate this dance.

I’m standing at the edge of the dock, and every cell in my body is screaming no. The lake is 8º Celsius - the air a balmy 2º. My breath is already shallow just looking at it. And the voice in my head - that familiar, seductive voice - is whispering: “No one will know if you only do five minutes instead of ten. You time-lapse the videos anyway.”

This is why I’m here.

Over the last month I’ve been challenging myself to cold plunge into the lake outside my home each morning. I’ve always had a deep, almost spiritual connection with this water. I’ve swam in it since I was a child and each time I come home to visit it seems to cleanse away all that I’d carried while gone. The refreshing clear waters act as sanctuary for me. And as the cool air of October began to bite, I felt called to partner with this sacred water and challenge the body by way of cold exposure.

Sure, there are benefits - improved circulation, boosted immunity, whatever the biohackers and influencers say. But for me, the test is less about the health advantage and more about the mental trial. More about the man I’m trying to become.

Let me be transparent here, because if this substack is going to mean anything, it needs to be honest: I haven’t always been great at challenging myself mentally. I love comfort. I love peace. I have avoided confrontation my entire life. Confrontation of the body, confrontation in relationships, confrontation of the mind. When life got boring I would often quit, or exaggerate, or seek the new shiny thing. A combination of ADHD and waning discipline. I can remember being this way since I was young. Whether it was learned behavior or natural tendency, I can’t say, but it’s been my reality.

As I gracefully age into my late 30’s however, I can feel my inner dialogue whispering of a shift. I’ve always had a vision of myself harbored away in my heart. The highest, most honorable version of the man I am capable of being. Now I don’t want to say I’m not proud or confident in who I am, but I’ve always walked within a relatively safe zone of success and honour. Acting on what came naturally to me, and dismissing what didn’t, even if those things were traits I’d have liked to adopt.

And so, as 40 begins to come into view like a silver-haired, wrinkly-eyed sunrise, I realize I want to become that version of a man I’ve always dreamed of. The version of a father, partner, and citizen I’ve always dreamed of. Not one who takes the easy road when the hard one matters more. Not one who seeks comfort over difficulty. Not one who avoids his highest potential because it doesn’t come naturally.

There is a version of me who is not only proud of himself, but feels capable of absolutely anything. Who breaks through insecurity and powerlessness like a hero of old. One who provides, who builds, who loves, who gives, and who rises to any occasion.

I haven’t always been that man. For myself or for others. I’ve had moments, but they aren’t as consistent as I’d like. And so, as I find myself in a season of contemplation and reset, I wanted to give myself something consistently difficult to rise to. To prove to myself that I could. And of course do it publicly so I can be held accountable if I want to quit (although one day I strive to be able to act with integrity without the need for audience - baby steps).

I’m writing this on October 26th, the Sunday before I post this, and today’s cold plunge was probably the most difficult of them all. I began on October 1st and decided on every day of the month. 31 plunges getting progressively colder. Today’s was brutal. I felt no elation, no joy. Only pain and anger.

But it was the weakness of my mind, not my body, that concerned me most.

Not only did my mind spend 10 minutes convincing me I shouldn’t be doing this, but it spent so much of that time coaxing me into lying to those who would watch. When I post the videos of me plunging I time-lapse them for social media convenience - so my inner dialogue constantly reminded me that no one really knows how long I plunge. I could say I did 10 and instead do 5. A little white lie that harms no one, and still makes me look the hero.

And there it was. The pattern I’ve been running from my entire life, staring back at me from the surface of freezing water.

The Fracture

Admittedly, my life is riddled with these white lies. They are abundant and I realized this morning, in the pain and struggle of that icy lake, that I carry a significant shame around this. Not only shame for lying to others, but shame for lying to myself. Putting myself in situations where I could be praised or honored while the truth of the matter is, I didn’t even do the thing entirely. Or truthfully.

A lifetime of these small lies, these paper cuts, have created caverns of wounding on my soul. On the integrity I hold for myself. They rot the foundation of my word. Of my honor. Of my truth.

I can distinctly remember one of my earliest white lies. I couldn’t have been older than 10 and attending a summer camp for the week (The fact that it was a bible camp makes the story ooze with additional Christian shame). There was a game we played where teams would gather with as many arbitrary items as they could carry. Watches, pencils, wallets, hats, etc. The host of the event would call out an item or a quality. “A blue marker!”, “A $5 Bill!”, “Someone who has blue eyes!” And if your team happened to have the item or quality, one team member, with item, would have to sprint into the field and catch a councillor who would try to avoid the tags. It was a race to gather the item, and catch the councilor.

With 10 groups, chaos would often erupt when 10 kids would take off into the field in a desperate race to win. I was often chosen to run as I was one of the fastest sprinters that summer. The adrenaline and the cheering each time I’d win was a high I quickly became addicted to. And when our team didn’t have the item that was called, I would be wildly disappointed.

The week before camp had begun, back home I had attended a concert for kids. It was one of those touring cover shows - teenage boys doing Backstreet Boys and N*SYNC, teenage girls doing Spice Girls and Britney Spears. When the concert was over, the teen groups were stationed for autograph signing. I couldn’t afford a poster so I got each member to sign my arms. The kind of thing kids do.

Now at camp the signatures still stained my skin. I had been somewhat mocked for it but I was still proud of the superstar’s names I had inked on me. The game’s energy was high and it was time to intently listen for the next item to be called out.

“Whoever has met the most famous person!”

Immediately kids in our group started listing anyone they’d ever met who was famous. Since we were a group of children, our lists weren’t much more famous than local newscasters, but the adrenaline surging in my brain wanted the win, the urgency of the race was upon me, and in a window of time so small it couldn’t have been conscious, I blurted out “I just met the Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls last week!” And thrust forward my arms to prove it.

I was lucky that no one else in my group had attended the concert so my half lie was holding. The councillor in our group paused slightly before saying “Were these from the concert that was just in town?”

My brain panicked and again, in a moment of time so minuscule I don’t know how consciousness was involved, I had registered that the fake concert performers weren’t nearly as famous as the real ones and that, if we wanted to win, if I was going to be let loose into a full-on sprint for another glorious victory, then I needed to seal the deal. I needed the win. I needed the attention. I needed the glory.

“NO! I was in Toronto last week and saw the REAL Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls!”

This was before the internet and our access to all the information always, so my councillor couldn’t be sure of the truth. She looked at me again and calmly, graciously, said “Are you sure?”

Already on my haunches and burying the truth away, ready to launch into my now infamous explosive sprint, I said “Yes.”

With a nod she let me loose.

I was third to be released but first to the councillor. My lungs burned with the fire of victory. My muscles ached with the glory of fame. And somewhere deep within me, a part of the relationship I held with myself, a part of my authenticity fractured. Hairline and almost immeasurable. But it was there. Not deep enough to outweigh the feeling of winning, but enough to scar and to begin a lifetime of thickening callous.

The joy of winning felt better than that of my truth. A whisper that my ego would echo for years and years to come.

Jesus took note that day, I’m sure.

The Pattern

You may think I’m being dramatic but 30 years of these tiny untruths start to define a man. A man I no longer wish to be.

The pattern didn’t stop at summer camp. It followed me through high school, where I’d exaggerate stories to make myself sound more interesting, more traveled, more experienced than I was. It followed me into my spiritual journey, where I’d sometimes let people believe I’d meditated for an hour when it was really twenty minutes, or that I’d completed a practice I’d actually abandoned halfway through. It lives in my relationships, in the small moments where I’d rather tell a convenient story than have an uncomfortable conversation.

These aren’t grand deceptions. They’re not hurting anyone, I’d tell myself. But they were hurting me. Each one was another hairline fracture in the foundation of who I am. Another moment where I chose the performance over the truth. Another time I betrayed the relationship I have with myself.

The Microscopic Moment

There is a tiny window between discomfort and action. A tiny space that lives in the mind between seeing the dishes in the sink and being convinced not to do them now, to save them for later. The millisecond between seeing the basket of laundry on the bed and being wooed into “there not being enough time right now” as you plunk down on the couch instead and begin massaging your dopamine receptors. The micro-resistence easing you away from the runners and the workout.

It’s in that tiny, imperceptible moment between noticing and doing that I think defines most people. At least I believe it defines me. And, over the last 20 years of my delayed adolescence, I haven’t always chosen the path of action. It’s here where comfort and ease sing sweet nothings into my muscles and court me away. Sirens of distrust and illusionary success.

This space lives between action and non-action, truth and untruth, and so many more micro-moments in life. What I am aiming to do is fill that gap with honor. Fill it with the choice that defines who I am. Who I want to be. Who I can be proud of.

Standing at the edge of the dock on October 26th, I could feel that window opening. The space between my body standing on wood and my body submerged in the frigid water. The gap where all my old patterns live, where the voice that’s been lying for me since I was 10 years old whispers its seductions.

“You don’t have to do this.” “No one will know.” “You’ve already proven yourself.” “Five minutes is enough.”

But this time, I saw it. I saw the fracture about to happen in real-time. I saw the choice point, the moment where I could either betray myself again or honor the man I’m becoming.

And I jumped.

I stayed for the full ten minutes. Not because anyone was watching. But because I was.

The Cleansing

I felt called to cold plunge this month by a voice that was beyond my knowing. I was called to put it in front of an audience. And it seems I was called to put a microscope up to the thousands of cuts written in cursive on my heart. To forgive the boy, the teenager, and the man who put those scars there.

I’ve been scared of insignificance for as long as I can remember. Any way that I could stand out, be loved, be admired, I would take it. And when no one was watching, it didn’t matter how I showed up. The performance was everything. The truth was negotiable.

But here’s what I’m learning in this freezing water, in this daily practice of choosing discomfort over convenience: significance doesn’t come from the applause. It doesn’t come from being seen or validated or admired. It comes from the relationship I have with myself in the moments when no one else is watching.

It comes from standing at the edge of the dock and jumping anyway. It comes from staying the full ten minutes when I could have lied. It comes from writing this blog and confessing the pattern I’ve been running from.

I’m becoming someone I consider significant - without the need of anyone else’s validation. And what a beautiful relationship it is.

The lake has always been my sanctuary, the place that cleanses away what I’ve carried. But this month it’s been something else too: a mirror. Every morning I stand at its edge and see reflected back the choice I’m making about who I am. Every plunge is a small death of the boy who lied about meeting the Backstreet Boys, the young man who exaggerated his spiritual practice, the adult who chose performance over presence.

And every time I emerge, gasping and alive and honest, I’m a little closer to the man I’ve always dreamed of being.

Thank you lake water, for continuing to cleanse my soul. For showing me the microscopic moments where character is built. For teaching me that integrity isn’t a destination but a practice, repeated daily, in the cold and the discomfort and the truth of who I am when no one else is watching.

I continue to find monasteries in this life. Here, at the edge of a dock, in the space between comfort and courage, in the choice to honor myself one freezing plunge at a time.

The weathered planks of the dock stretched into the lake like an outstretched hand, their sun-bleached surface still holding the day’s warmth beneath bare feet. Grandfather and grandson sat at its edge, two silhouettes against the dying light—one tall and stooped with the wisdom of decades, the other small and eager, legs dangling above water that mirrored the amber sky like molten glass.

The sun had begun its slow surrender to the horizon, painting the world in shades of honey and rust. Shadows lengthened across the water’s surface, and the air itself seemed to exhale the day’s heat in gentle sighs. Time moved differently here, as if the approaching darkness had thickened it into something you could almost touch.

“I love it when it’s this quiet,” the boy whispered, his voice barely disturbing the cathedral hush that had settled over the lake. His words floated between them like a prayer, spoken more to the evening itself than to his grandfather.

The old man’s eyes crinkled at the corners, deep lines etched by decades of squinting into sunsets just like this one. His weathered hands, mottled with age spots and crossed with the roadmap of a life fully lived, rested gently on his knees. When he spoke, his voice carried the patient cadence of someone who had learned the value of choosing words carefully.

“Listen closely,” he said, tilting his head toward the lake as if receiving communion from the evening air. “There are plenty of noises. Frogs croaking from the reedy shallows, insects buzzing their gossip in the tall grass, wind rustling secrets through the cottonwood leaves, water lapping against the shore like a mother’s gentle shush, ducks murmuring their evening conversations across the water. Seems to be anything but quiet.”

The boy’s brow furrowed in concentration, his young mind working to reconcile what he felt with what he heard. He closed his eyes and let the symphony wash over him—the deep bass notes of the bullfrogs, the delicate percussion of water against wood, the whispered harmonies of wind through reeds. It was all there, just as his grandfather had said, yet somehow it felt like the deepest quiet he had ever known.

“Then why does it feel different than during the day when all those noises are here?” he asked, opening his eyes to find his reflection wavering in the darkening water below.

The grandfather pondered this question as if weighing something precious in his hands. His gaze moved across the lake’s surface, where the last light caught the gentle swells like scattered coins. A great blue heron stood motionless in the shallows, so still it seemed carved from the twilight itself.

A long moment passed before he answered.

“Because, my grandson,” he said finally, his voice soft as the gathering dusk, “this is stillness.”

“What’s the difference between stillness and quiet?” the boy asked, leaning forward as if the answer might be written on the water’s surface.

The old man was silent again, watching as the first stars began to pierce the deepening blue above them. Somewhere across the lake, a loon called out—a sound so pure and haunting it seemed to come from the very soul of the evening. The air held the promise of night-blooming jasmine and the green smell of water weeds, of countless summers that had come before and countless more yet to arrive.

“Stillness is the song of God,” he said at last, his voice carrying a reverence that made the boy hold his breath. “And when your soul hears that song, it feels at home.”

The words settled between them like dust, profound in their simplicity. The boy felt something shift inside him—not understanding exactly, but sensing the truth of it in the way the evening seemed to embrace them both. In the growing darkness, surrounded by the gentle chorus of the lake’s symphony, he glimpsed something larger than himself, something that connected the beating of his heart to the lapping of the waves, the rhythm of his breathing to the timeless pulse of the earth itself.

They sat in companionable silence as full darkness claimed the lake, grandfather and grandson held in the palm of something vast and tender, listening to the song that plays beneath all other songs—the deep, abiding stillness that cradles every sound, every breath, every moment of being alive.

I am passionate about many things.

God. Existence. Philosophy. Spirituality. Poetry. Novel writing. Songwriting. Singing. Storytelling. Acting. Videography. Photography. Technology. Nature. Growth.

To name a few.

So I often hit a striking dead-end in my life whenever I consider the idea of “pursuing my passion” - singular. As though passion were a monogamous relationship rather than a polyamorous love affair with existence itself.

The Permission and the Prison

I’ve been both lucky and disgruntled to have committed to an abnormal life. I was given reluctant permission by my parents to follow what brought me joy, despite the world screaming it wouldn’t bring stability. I’m incredibly grateful that the pull in me was strong enough to resist the path taken by so many. The path of stable jobs, RRSPs, and major achievements by forty.

I also struggle constantly because I resisted that path.

This article will never be meant to criticize the conventional route. Honestly, there are days I wish I didn’t have this whisper in me that I cannot seem to ignore. So often, when I’ve attempted to follow a more standard trajectory, my inner self would coil and ache so intensely that it wouldn’t be long before I needed out. It frustrates me and simultaneously liberates me - this inability to fit into boxes that seem to work perfectly well for everyone else.

The Tyranny of Expertise

Here’s my personal hurdle: the process of becoming an expert at any one thing. I’ll admit, I’m likely above average in my ability to learn most things, especially in the arts. But my level of expertise suffers because I never spend the mythical “10,000 hours” Malcolm Gladwell promised would make me a master before something new catches my attention. A new passion. A new possibility.

And then the question haunts me: Am I truly being pulled toward a new passion, or am I running from the plateau of excitement? Did the thing I was passionate about simply become too difficult? Did I reach the threshold where I’d need to take it seriously (sacrificially serious) in order to pursue it further?

Perhaps I have a passion commitment issue. Actually, I definitely have a few commitment issues, but that’s a topic for another day.

You know what? I’m going to go down this rabbit hole in real time. Come with me as I explore the possible pathology, or philosophy, of pursuing excitement.

The Rebel and the Plateau

Since I can remember, I’ve longed to be abnormal. Exceptional. Unique. Different from the rest. There’s a rebel living in my chest, and even if that rebel sometimes rebels just to rebel, he drives my life more than I’d care to admit. It often leads to brilliance, but sometimes to unnecessary discomfort and a resume that reads like a creative person’s fever dream.

What I’m finding in my current season of existentialism is that the novelty of excitement is wearing off. Maybe it’s my age - closer to forty than I care to admit. Maybe it’s because I’ve been fortunate enough to experience such extraordinary things already. But the “newness” of experiences is losing its vibrato, and I find myself with a grab bag of “almost” skills.

Now, I don’t want to diminish my own journey. I am capable of many things and have worked hard at many things. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t envious of the person I’ve watched become “the painter” or “the architect” - that singular thing. They’re known for it, desired for it, sought out for it. Meanwhile, I struggle to answer the question: “What’s your thing?”

Singing, I suppose, has been the longest through-line in my life, but it feels like a selfish talent. I sing for therapy. I sing for personal creation. I sing to express. I don’t necessarily sing to build a career. I mean, I did for almost a decade but galavanting around the world doesn’t feel as aligned these days so I’m in my “I’m an adult now and have to figure my life out” era. Taylor Swift, eat your heart out.

The Spiritual Dimension of Scattered Devotion

Here’s where it gets interesting for me spiritually. What if my multi-passionate nature isn’t a flaw in my wiring but an expression of how my soul experiences the Divine?

Our culture worships at the altar of specialization. We’re told that depth only comes through narrow focus, that mastery requires singular devotion, that to be valuable you must be the best at one thing. It’s the logical endpoint of capitalism meeting human potential - turn yourself into a highly specialized product that the market can easily categorize and consume.

But what if some souls are designed differently? What if some of us are meant to be translators between worlds, bridge-builders between disciplines, people who see the connecting threads that specialists miss because they’re too deep in their singular well to see the network of underground rivers?

The Renaissance wasn’t called the Renaissance because everyone did one thing really well. It was an explosion of polymathic thinking - people who refused to see art and science as separate, who understood that poetry and mathematics were different languages describing the same cosmic truth.

Maybe my inability to commit to one passion isn’t commitment issues at all. Maybe it’s my soul refusing to betray its nature. Maybe the Divine expresses itself through me not as a laser but as a prism - taking in pure light and scattering it across a spectrum of creative expression.

The Problem With Following Your Passion

So what am I getting at here? I suppose I’m struggling with the idea of “following your passion” as a guiding light when you have thirty of them. How can I possibly build consistency when I’m constantly pulled in multiple directions? I have passion ADHD, and I’m trying to find a cure - if one is needed at all.

But what if the cure is worse than the condition? What if forcing myself into specialization would be like asking a river to choose one direction and ignore the terrain? Water doesn’t have commitment issues - it follows the path of least resistance, adapting to whatever landscape it encounters, and somehow still makes it to the ocean.

Maybe I’m just doing life the way my soul is meant to. The rebellious “I won’t play the game of society” soul. Some days it feels childish. Other days it feels profoundly important. Sacred, even. Those days feel more true to me than anything.

The Beauty of Almost

There’s a particular kind of grief in being good at many things but great at none. A peculiar loneliness in being a jack-of-all-trades in a world that wants specialists. But there’s also a particular kind of freedom.

I get to taste everything. I get to be surprised by unexpected connections. I get to bring insights from songwriting into my writing, from meditation into my photography, from storytelling into my spiritual practice. My life might not have the depth of a specialist’s single well, but it has the breadth of an entire aquifer.

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s exactly what’s needed. Maybe the world has enough specialists and what we’re actually starving for are people who can translate between their isolated islands of expertise. People who can see the whole ecosystem rather than just one species within it. Maybe I’m just trying to justify my existence.

I really came into this Substack with rambling energy, and I’m okay with that. My mind is living in rambling energy these days. Sometimes I’m not consciously poetic or inspiring. Some days I’m just spiraling through the cosmos with the rest of humanity. Actually, most days that feels true.

An Unconventional Offering

So maybe if you’re reading this, and you or someone you know is in need of a kind, spiritual, singer, writer, poet, storyteller, videographer, photographer, meditating, God-seeking, enthusiastic life student who is an expert at nothing but pretty good at most things - hit me up. I know a guy.

And if you are that person - the one who can’t seem to pick just one passion, who feels guilty for not becoming the expert everyone said you should be, who wonders if your scattered attention is a character flaw - maybe it’s not. Maybe you’re exactly who you’re supposed to be.

Maybe your particular genius isn’t in going deep, but in going wide. In connecting dots that seem unrelated. In bringing light to corners that specialists never visit because they’re too far from their area of expertise.

Until then, the world continues to be my playground, my canvas, and my lover. The courtship is real, even if it doesn’t always make sense. And maybe that’s the whole point - to love so broadly that you can’t be contained by any single category, to be so enchanted by existence that you refuse to limit your devotion to just one expression of it.

I’ll let you know if I figure it out.