We came down here to celebrate my partner’s birthday. Friday night was Boyz II Men and Toni Braxton, a step back in time that simultaneously felt like an invitation to see both then and now with fresh eyes. This weekend is also the Easter parade, a whole city practicing resurrection (or at least using resurrection as a reason to celebrate) with brass and color and bodies in the street.

In the process, I am noticing how much of my life lately has been about returning.

Not returning as regression, or nostalgia, or trying to get back to some former self. Returning as realignment. Repentance, in the truest sense. Turning again toward love. Toward what is living. Toward the part of me that still believes new creation is not a doctrine, but a pattern.

This means resurrection is the pattern, not the exception.

Sometimes it looks like a dramatic breakthrough. More often, it looks like small, steady acts of choosing life in a world that keeps trying to grind us into performance. It looks like choosing presence over polish, tenderness over numbness, delight over dutifulness. It looks like letting the body be the sacred interface again.

Three places I feel that “returning” right now:

First, Illuman, an organization that exists to help men heal, connect, and find deeper purpose. I’ve been asked to begin a new rhythm of posting that is less about impressing, and more about telling the truth with light in it. Not bypass light. Not curated light. The kind that shows up when we stop making our wounds into disqualifiers and start treating them like altars. Just a quick monthly hit that I’ll also post on my YouTube channel.

Second, Life After Loss. The course is moving forward. I am building it slowly on purpose, because grief is not a machine problem, and I refuse to treat people’s pain like a funnel. My hope is to offer something that feels like companionship, ritual, and sanity in the long middle where time does not magically heal and yet life still keeps asking to be lived.

Third, my yard, which I’ve started calling Jubilee Homestead. 1.1 acres in Northwest Denver that I’m slowly reworking from lawn to life. A xeriscaped front yard. A small permaculture farm. A large community space. I am getting ready for the spring work, and it is teaching me again what the mystics always knew. Compost is theology. Soil is a gospel. There is a way the earth refuses hurry and still insists on possibility. You cannot bully a garden into wholeness, but you can tend it faithfully, and life will keep breaking through.

This is what I mean when I say we can stay human.

Not by trying harder to be “better.” Not by perfecting our coping strategies. We stay human by practicing return. By letting love be the operating system. By remembering that we are here to play, not perform, and that our longing is not a flaw. It is a compass.

If you want a simple question to carry on this Easter Sunday, here it is: What kind of life are you trying to embody right now?

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And while I’d usually have a paywall here, on this abbreviated week I wanted to give everyone a one hour ritual for embodiment.

Set aside one hour sometime this week. No pressure to make it pretty. Just make it real.

1. Prepare the space (5 minutes)

Put your phone on do not disturb. Light a candle if you want. Make tea. Sit somewhere your body can exhale.

2. Name what is true (10 minutes)

Write without editing:

• What is dying in me right now?

• What is trying to be born?

• Where am I tired of performing?

3. Choose one “quality of life” to embody (10 minutes)

Pick one word or phrase you want to live from for the next two weeks. Examples:

• steadiness

• courage

• tenderness

• honesty

• play

• dignity

• devotion

• enoughness

4. Give it a body (15 minutes)

Ask: If this quality lived in my body, what would it change?

Be specific. How would you:

• breathe

• speak

• walk

• rest

• set boundaries

• love people

• love yourself

Write five sentences that start with: “If I embodied , I would…”

5. Make one small vow (10 minutes)

Choose one action you will take in the next 48 hours that matches your word. Keep it modest and doable. Examples:

• 20 minutes outside, no headphones

• one honest conversation

• one hour on the thing you have been avoiding

• one meal cooked slowly

• one act of repair

• one act of delight

6. Close (10 minutes)

Put a hand on your chest or belly. Say, out loud if you can:

“I do not have to earn my life. I can return to it.”

A death. A hospital room. A sanctuary full of bodies trying to hold it together. A family looking for words sturdy enough to carry what just happened.

And in those rooms, whatever faith we have is no longer theoretical. It becomes practical. It becomes visible. It either helps us stay human, or it gives us an escape hatch.

This is a piece about the version of Christianity many of us inherited, the one that trains us to bypass grief and outsource responsibility, and how the earliest Jesus movement was pointing at something far more grounded. Not an exit strategy, but a way.

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The Whole Story

Earlier this week, I officiated a funeral. Now, if you’re new here, you might not know that this is a regular thing for me. My primary source of income is working with families who’ve lost a loved one but don’t have a pastor, priest, rabbi, or eloquent uncle to help with the actual service.

So a few times a week a funeral director connects me with a family. Together we create the funeral, celebration of life, or ritual to help people step into life after loss.

With one of the families I served this past week they asked me to select music for the service. I did, linking the selected songs to what I was going to say. And then, at the last minute, they swapped one of the songs.

They swapped out “How Great Thou Art” for “Amazing Grace.” That might sound like nothing. Two beloved hymns, both familiar, both beautiful. But I’ve learned to pay attention to what we reach for in rooms like this.

Because funerals can reveal what we believe the way fire reveals what was always inside the wood. When grief is in the room, we stop pretending. And what a lot of modern Christianity reaches for, especially in death, is not the way of Jesus. It’s afterlife insurance. It’s a story that sounds like comfort but often functions like anesthesia.

Your loved one is in a better place. So you shouldn’t feel this much. So you shouldn’t fall apart. So you shouldn’t rage or ache or collapse into the earth.

And in the same move, it quietly says something else. It says the point of your life was simply to get out of it.

Which means it has almost nothing to say about how to live. Not in a rich way. Not in a grounded way. Not in a way that actually makes humans more merciful, more truthful, more repair-capable.

Now, as an officiant I do funerals for militant atheists and devout Christians and everyone in between. I’m grateful for all of it. But the families I love working with most are the Christian-adjacent ones. The ones who are not trying to force the room into a neat religious script. Because in those rooms, there’s space.

Space to bring scripture in as story, not as a weapon. Space to talk about God as presence, not as a transaction. Space to name grief as sacred, not as a failure of faith. Space to ask the real question funerals always raise. Not “How do we get to heaven?” But “How do we live on the other side of loss?”

And if we’re honest, that is the question early Christianity was formed to answer. Not with moral scorekeeping. Not with an escape plan.

With a way. A way of living. A way of being human. A way that, from the start, ran directly against empire. And that’s the story I want to tell this week.

And even if you do not call yourself Christian, at some level you have still been shaped by this story. If you were raised inside it, it probably shaped you enough that it helps explain why you do not want the label now. Because when the version of Christianity we inherit is mostly escape, it does not just fail people in death. It fails them in life.

It turns grief into something to bypass. It turns hope into something to postpone. It turns love into something to earn.

And then, eventually, it shows up in public life too. It shows up when faith conforms itself to political power. It shows up when bombs dropping in places like Gaza and Iran are celebrated because they are squeezed into an end times storyline. It shows up when a religion that once formed people for mercy becomes a machine for certainty, domination, and holy indifference.

So yes, this is about a funeral hymn swap. But it is also about why so many of us have felt faith fail us, and why we need a path back to something truer. Something that once again invites us to stay human.

The gospel was a way, before it became an exit strategy

Did you know that the first Christians did not call their movement “Christianity?” That word comes later.

In the book of Acts, what they call it is simply “the Way.” That matters.

The Way is not an ideology you agree with. The Way is not a product you purchase. The Way is not a moral report card. The Way is a path you walk. It forms you by practice. By community. By the daily work of learning how to live inside a different reality.

Which means the gospel, at its roots, is not a reward system. It’s an apprenticeship. And the apprenticeship is not about earning a ticket out of earth. It’s about becoming the kind of person who can help heaven take root on earth.

And one of the strange, quiet proofs that it was working was not that Christians won arguments. It was that people started asking questions. Not because early Christians were more powerful, but because they were living differently.

There is a line in 1 Peter that always stops me: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” Notice what is assumed. The assumption is that hope is visible. That it is embodied. That it shows up in how you treat people, how you hold suffering, how you share resources, how you refuse to return violence for violence.

It was not just doctrine to be defended. It was a way of life that made strangers lean in and say, “What is it about you?” It was a witness that had shape, not just personal piety, but a social imagination, a new kind of community.

And what did that community look like? There is a line in Galatians that is often quoted like a Hallmark card, but it was originally a declaration of a new world. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, for you are all one.” Many scholars believe it echoes an early baptismal creed, a line you would hear spoken over your body as you came up dripping from the waters.

Not because differences were erased, but because the hierarchy of difference was.

In a world organized by ethnicity, status, and gendered power, the church was meant to be the place where those walls did not get the final word.

Which means the Way was never just about where your soul goes when you die. It was a practiced alternative to the way the world organizes itself.

That’s what Jesus teaches us to pray.

Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done.
On earth.
As it is in heaven.

Not later. Not somewhere else. Not after you die. Here.

This is not a denial of the mystery of what comes after death. It’s just a refusal to turn “what comes after” into a bypass of what’s here. Hope is not an escape. Hope is a way of living. And if that sounds too abstract, let’s make it concrete.

When hope becomes escape, it tends to produce a certain kind of Christian. A Christian who can be at peace with violence as long as they believe the end of the story is guaranteed. A Christian who can tolerate injustice as long as they believe God will sort it all out later. A Christian who can offer grace to perpetrators while withholding mercy from victims.

That last line is not theoretical for me. It comes from my own story.

Early in my theological formation, my faith was shaped by shame. Lots of guilt. Lots of fear. Lots of sin management. And the “good news” I learned was essentially this: You are awful, but Jesus died for you, so you can go to heaven.

It was supposed to create gratitude. But what it often created was moral and relational distortion.

Here is what I mean. When I believed I was fundamentally broken, I lived from brokenness. Shame did not make me holy. It made me desperate.

For me, that desperation showed up in compulsive behavior around sexuality. I was unfaithful. I lied about it. And then I used “grace” like a sedative, a loophole. As long as I could tell myself I was forgiven, I did not have to face the effects of what I had done.

There were consequences, but I treated the harm like it should evaporate. Like confession was the same thing as repair.

And while I told myself I was just trying to manage my chaotic inner world, my chaotic inner world was not contained inside me. It spilled onto the people closest to me.

My former wife once said something that landed in me like a stone. She said, “You have all kinds of grace for the perpetrator, but no mercy for the victim.”

That is what happens when grace becomes a legal loophole instead of a transforming presence. When salvation is framed as a transaction, it can absolve harm without repairing it.

It can comfort the guilty without protecting the wounded. It can soothe the conscience while leaving the world unchanged. And that is not the Way.

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How faith got co-opted: three waypoints in the shift

If the early Jesus movement was a way of life that ran against empire, how did we end up with a Christianity that so often props empire up?

Not with conspiracy. With history. With ideas. With institutional power. With a slow drift that eventually became a new religion.

Here is the through line. When faith marries power, leaves the body, and sells an escape, it becomes controllable. The Way becomes an exit strategy.

Here are three waypoints that help us see the arc without turning this into a seminar.

First, power. Second, body. Third, hope. When those three shift, everything else shifts with them.

Waypoint 1: When empire made Christianity legal, and then useful

For the first few centuries, Christians were a vulnerable minority. They had no state power. They had no army. They had no mainstream cultural dominance.

They had practices. They had a table. They had a story of a crucified Messiah who refused the taking way of power.

Then comes Constantine.

And to be clear, this is where we need to tell the truth about what Constantine was, and what he was not. It was not a moment where someone sat down and decided which books would be in the Bible. It was not the first time Jesus “became” the Son of God, as if early Christians had never said anything divine about him until empire got involved.

It was a political moment. Constantine had an empire to stabilize. Christianity had become large enough to matter. And the church was in a deep internal conflict about how to understand the person of Jesus.

So Constantine convened bishops to debate, argue, and attempt a unified confession, not because he was a theologian trying to find truth in prayer, but because unity in the church helped produce unity in the empire.

That is the shift. The question was no longer only, “How do we follow the Way of a crucified Messiah?” It also became, “How do we make this faith work at scale, in the center of power?”

This is one of the first places the taking way starts to get baptized. The giving way becomes language, while the taking way becomes the engine.

Christianity moves from persecuted movement to sanctioned religion. And once the faith becomes socially advantageous, the incentives change.

When the religion of the poor becomes the religion of the powerful, it will be tempted to reshape itself so the powerful can keep being powerful while still feeling holy.

A God crucified by empire for challenging empire is inconvenient for empire. So the cross gets turned from an indictment of domination into a mechanism of personal forgiveness.

Sin becomes individualized. Salvation becomes privatized. The kingdom becomes future. And empire gets to keep running the world.

And this is not just about “bad leaders.” It is about formation. When your survival depends on belonging to empire, your theology will eventually start to sound like empire. Your God will start to feel like an emperor. And your hope will start to drift away from the work of being human here, into the promise of reward somewhere else.

Waypoint 2: When dualism offered an escape hatch from the body

Alongside political power, there was also a philosophical drift. A kind of spiritualized dualism that treated the body as suspect, the material world as temporary, the “real” story as happening elsewhere.

You can feel the Platonic influence in the background, the idea that the physical world is a shadow on the cave wall, and that the “real” reality is somewhere else, in pure spirit, pure idea, pure light.

And once that story gets under your skin, you do not just become less embodied. You become easier to control. Because if the body is not sacred, then suffering bodies are easier to ignore. If earth is a temporary waiting room, then earth is easier to exploit. If salvation is leaving, then the work of loving becomes optional.

And this is where you can start to see how spiritual dualism becomes a kind of spiritual self-centering. Not a pop-psychology insult, but a posture. A posture that turns faith into my transcendence, my escape, my private purity, while refusing the humility of being creaturely, finite, dependent. It is religion as self-protection instead of love.

The body becomes an inconvenience. Other people become background characters. The world becomes disposable.

And again, the taking way sneaks in, not always with violence, sometimes with sophistication. It teaches us to float above pain instead of entering it.

But the Christian story, at its center, is not disembodied. It’s resurrection. Not a ghost floating away. A wounded body made new. A world restored. A promise that matter matters.

Which means any Christianity that trains you to despise the body is not just spiritually unhealthy. It is politically convenient.

Because people disconnected from their bodies are easier to manage. People taught to endure suffering for a heavenly payout are easier to extract from. People trained to see earth as disposable are easier to recruit into systems that destroy it. And people taught to see their bodies as “less real” are less likely to listen when their bodies say, “This is not the Way.”

Waypoint 3: When hope became evacuation, and faith became a control mechanism

Once Christianity is aligned with power, a new kind of hope emerges. Not hope as a way of living, but hope as an exit.

And here too, the taking way shows up as a temptation. It offers control through fear, compliance through reward, and calls it salvation. The question shifts from “How do we become a people who embody God’s reign?” to “How do I make sure I’m in?”

And when that becomes the central frame, it’s only a matter of time before fear becomes the primary tool. Do the right things. Believe the right things. Avoid the wrong things. And if you fail, there’s a punishment.

Heaven becomes reward. Hell becomes threat. And the Way becomes an anxious moral project.

This is where Christianity stops forming people for love, and starts forming people for compliance.

Not always. Not everywhere. But enough that you can feel the pattern. And you can see the fruit.

You can see it in funeral language that can’t tolerate grief. You can see it in churches that can’t tell the truth about harm. You can see it in Christians who become more invested in being “right” than being merciful.

And you can see it in history. You can see it in slaveholder religion. You can see it in versions of Christianity that trained enslaved people to obey, endure, and wait for heaven, while those who held the whip called themselves saved.

You can see it whenever a theology of the next life is used to pacify people in this one. “Be good and you will be rewarded later.” “Suffer quietly and God will make it right after death.” “Accept your place now, because the real world is coming.”

That is not hope. That is sedation. And when you put sedation in the hands of those who benefit from the status quo, it becomes a tool. A way to keep people compliant. A way to keep harm unchallenged. A way to keep grief from turning into truth. A way to keep truth from turning into repair.

If that sounds extreme, look at our current world. Look at how many Christians are willing to bless war and nationalism and domination, as long as it can be squeezed into an apocalyptic storyline.

Escapist theology does not just bypass grief. It bypasses responsibility. It baptizes empire. And it trains people to call it faithfulness.

Amazing Grace, and the hinge between absolution and repair

This is why the hymn swap matters.

Amazing Grace is not a bad song. But many of us learned it inside a shame-based frame. I once was lost, but now am found. I was a wretch. And now I’m safe. For a lot of people, that becomes a private spiritual story disconnected from repair.

But the actual story behind the hymn is not private. John Newton was a slave trader. Not in some vague metaphorical sense. In an actual historical sense.

He hauled human beings from Africa to the Americas and sold them into bondage. His “wretchedness” had names. It had bodies. It had blood. And yes, he came to see the horror of what he had participated in. Grace found him.

But here is the hinge. There is a difference between absolution and repair.

Absolution is the removal of guilt. Repair is the restoration of what was harmed. And if all you have is absolution, Christianity becomes an exit strategy, even from your own responsibility.

Years ago, I was teaching in Africa. One of my students asked me, in reference to Newton, “What did he do to restore Africa? To repair Africa? To replace what he had taken?”

At the time, I did not have a theology that required repair so the question left me dumbfounded. I had a theology that offered forgiveness. I had a theology that could wash the perpetrator clean. I did not yet have a theology that demanded mercy for the victim.

That question became part of my transformation. Because it forced me to admit something. If grace only moves guilt off the perpetrator’s conscience, but does not move the perpetrator toward repair, then what we are calling grace is not the Way. It’s absolution without transformation. It’s spiritual laundering. It’s cheap hope.

But grace, in the way of Jesus, does something else. Grace moves us from guilt to grief. Not as self-hatred. As awakening. As the moment you finally feel what you have refused to feel. The moment you finally tell the truth about what has been done, and what you have done. The moment you finally let your heart break open enough that you can no longer live the old way.

Grief is not the enemy of faith. Grief is often the doorway into it. Because grief is how we become human again. And humans who can grieve honestly are harder to recruit into empire.

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The Way: two paths, two engines

If you want a philosophical compass for all of this, here it is. There are two ways to be in the world.

Henri Nouwen once named it like this. The taking way. And the giving way. One is the way of power. The other is the way of love.

The taking way is driven by fear. It grasps. It controls. It extracts. It has to win. It has to secure itself. It is always building higher walls.

The giving way is guided by belovedness. It shares. It restores. It tells the truth. It practices repair. It knows that life is found in communion, not domination.

The tragedy is that a lot of Christianity ended up preaching the giving way while serving the taking way. It preached forgiveness while protecting exploitation. It preached heaven while abandoning earth. It preached grace while bypassing grief.

And the result is what you see all around you. A faith that is supposed to make us more human often makes us less.

More afraid. More brittle. More certain. More willing to harm. Less able to grieve. Less able to repair. Less able to be present.

So here is the invitation. Hope is not an escape. Hope is a way of living. The Way is not an exit strategy. It is apprenticeship into a different reality.

A reality where heaven is not a destination. It’s a practice. A reality where the prayer is not “get me out of here.” The prayer is, “Make me the kind of person who can participate in your healing of what is here.” A reality where grace does not just forgive. Grace transforms. Grace moves guilt into grief. And grief becomes the engine of repair.

What it looks like to live this way (not morally, but philosophically)

Not “do this, don’t do that.” Something deeper. A reorientation. A new operating system.

To live the Way is to be guided by a different set of engines than the ones empire offers.

Guided by love, not driven by fear. Guided by embodied presence, not driven by escapism. Guided by mercy that protects the wounded, not driven by grace-as-loophole. Guided by solidarity, not driven by comfort. Guided by hope-as-practice, not driven by hope-as-evacuation.

If you want a simple diagnostic, ask yourself this. What does my faith do to my body?

Does it make me more available to grief, more capable of truth, more able to love real people in real places?

Or does it make me numb? Does it make me certain? Does it make me impatient with pain? Does it make me hungry for a cosmic escape hatch?

The Way is not tidy. It is not efficient. It does not bypass grief. It walks through it. Because the only kind of faith that can resist empire is a faith that has been trained to stay present.

Not just in joy. In loss. In complexity. In the body. In the earth. In the suffering of your neighbor. And yes, in the slow work of repair.

Closing: the prayer we forgot we were praying

Every time we say the Lord’s Prayer, we are not praying for evacuation. We are praying for infiltration. For the life of God to move into the life of the world. For the heaven we keep talking about to start shaping the earth we keep abandoning.

“Thy kingdom come. On earth. As it is in heaven.”

If Christianity is the Way, then the question is not whether you believe in heaven. The question is what kind of person your hope is forming you to become.

A person who can tolerate injustice because “it’s all going to burn anyway.” Or a person who can grieve honestly enough to refuse the taking way. A person who can love. A person who can repair. A person who can help bring heaven to earth.

Hope is not an escape. Hope is a way of living. And the Way is still here, waiting for us. It’s inviting us to stay human.

Before I draw the paywall line, one clear invitation. If you feel grace moving you from guilt to grief, and you want help moving through grief in a way that makes you more present, more human, and more useful to the world around you, I’m creating a course of practices for that. Here’s the link so I can let you know when I’m done and you can get it at a launch discount.

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Three Embodiment Practices To Help You Stay Rooted

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

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It is not the grief of losing a person. It is the grief of losing a place that helped you stay a person.

A room you returned to when the world was too much. A set of faces that became familiar enough to be safe. A ritual of showing up that taught your nervous system, slowly, that you did not have to carry everything alone.

We live in a culture that treats places like products. If the product stops performing, it gets rebranded or erased. But humans do not experience places as products. We experience them as containers, as anchors, as the kind of ordinary holy ground where life can move again.

This is a story about my gym closing. It is also a story about the quiet demolition of third places, and the stubborn work of resistance, which is building new containers when the old ones get taken.

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The Whole Story

Last Friday, I heard the rumor. The kind of rumor that arrives like a hairline fracture. Nothing breaks yet, but you feel the structure shift.

Then Tuesday it became official. The Gravity Haus Denver Clubhouse is closing. The last day is April 30th. Six weeks from now.

At one level, this is a story about my gym closing. At a deeper level, it’s a story about what happens when the spaces that hold our humanity get taken, and what it looks like to build something the system cannot monetize.

A place becomes an anchor

As a bit of background, I’ve trained at Gravity Haus for more than four years. But even saying that does not capture the way a place can become a nervous system anchor. It does not name what happens when a room becomes a refuge, not because it is beautiful, but because it is true.

And that last line reveals why the response now is more than going to find a new gym.

The basement that became holy

With Gravity Haus, it was never the physical space that grabbed me.

At first, it was a small black room with turf and odd windows. Light came in at horrible angles at different times of day. Nothing about it felt curated for transcendence.

Then, last May, it moved into the basement of an office building. Yes, they added coworking to go along with the gym, but to get there, you go down concrete stairs into a decorated basement. And as much as they tried to make the basement space look and feel good, the lack of natural light makes it abundantly clear, you’re in a basement.

So if you are trying to picture the sacredness of this place, you need to understand something. It was not an aesthetic holy. It was not the kind of holy that comes from stained glass or mountain views. It was the kind of holy that happens when humans keep showing up.

That means what I’m trying to name here is bigger than a gym. I’m trying to name what it costs us when the spaces where we can be human get erased, and what it looks like to resist that erasure.

Because while it’s about people, people need a places to gather. Bodies need coordinates. Belonging needs a room. A community without a container eventually dissolves into text threads and good intentions. You can love people deeply and still drift if you do not share time and space.

So yes, it was the people. But the basement mattered too. Not because it was impressive. Because it became a shared altar. We made it holy.

We made it holy by returning. By sweating there. By suffering there. By laughing there. By talking about the things that matter most there. By letting the hardest seasons of our lives move through our bodies instead of staying trapped behind our ribs.

Holy is not always what a place is. Sometimes holy is what a place has held. And so that basement became one of the most important places in my life.

Lesson one: covenant, not just coordinates

That is the first lesson. Place is not only geography, and it is not only people. Place is what happens when people and space make a covenant with each other.

And that covenant is not abstract. It is made out of very ordinary materials. It is made out of the concrete stairwell you walk down when you are tired. It is made out of the smell of sweat that is not glamorous, but honest. It is made out of the half-second pause at the bottom of the stairs where you decide, again, to enter. It is made out of a room full of bodies that are not trying to impress anyone, just trying to stay alive.

A snapshot of what this place actually was

Most days, if you came a few minutes early, you would see the same small scene. People trickling in with the look that says, “I do not know if I have this today.” Water bottles thudding on the floor. Someone rolling out a tight calf. Someone laughing too loud because the laughter is a pressure valve.

And then, inevitably, some small act of recognition. A nod across the room. A “hey, you made it.” A coach looking at you, not like a number, but like a human.

It is hard to describe how much those tiny moments matter when life is heavy. Because even when life is hard, the world does not stop. It keeps demanding productivity. It keeps demanding composure. It keeps demanding that you be fine.

But a third place like this does something different. It does not ask you to be fine. It asks you to show up. And then it gives you a rare gift. It lets your body tell the truth.

The nervous system learns through return

This is why I keep using the language of container. Because what you receive in a place like this is not only fitness. It is capacity.

The nervous system learns safety through repetition, not through slogans. Through return. You walk into the same room. You see the same faces. You do the same warm-up. You suffer the same honest suffering.

And slowly, without you having to force it, your body starts to unclench. Not because your problems are gone, but because for one hour you are not alone inside them.

And when the class ends, something subtle has shifted. Breath is deeper. Jaw is softer. The mind is less frantic. It is not that everything is healed. It is that the grief has moved.

This is the kind of healing that does not come from ideas. It comes from place.

How the place held me

The workouts I did there were class-based. Which means what I really did, five to six days a week, was show up to a shared rhythm. A set time. A familiar suffering. A handful of faces that became steady over the years. People at different times, different days, and somehow it braided into an extended family.

Gravity Haus held me through an abusive relationship, the kind that ends with a permanent restraining order. It held me through my dad’s cancer journey. It held me through my dad’s death. It held me through losing a job.

But it did not hold me by giving me answers. It held me by giving me a container. A place where I could metabolize stress with my body. A place where encouragement came not as a motivational poster, but as a glance, a joke, a simple “good to see you,” a trainer who believed you could do one more rep. A place where grief could move, instead of calcify.

The day I came back

I was never a real gym guy. The first day I showed up, I was completely out of my element. I got my ass kicked. It took three days before I could walk again. And then I came back.

That first week, I went on Monday. Then I came back on Friday, the day before Christmas. It was a tiny class. Just two of us and a trainer. There was some kind of workout pyramid, the Twelve Days of Fitmas. The other person finished in about twenty minutes. At an hour, I was halfway through and dying.

Afterwards, the trainer, the woman who ripped through the workout in no time, and I talked about divorce. I began to think that I’d found my place.

I came three days the next week. Then five days a week after that. It was the first time in my life I made a serious attempt to lift weights.

So a place that initially felt very not-home became the place that felt the most home in my life. And losing a place like that is a real kind of grief. Not because you worship the building. Because what you lose is the container for being human.

The assault on third places

In a disconnected society, we keep losing our third places. Not home. Not work. The in-between spaces where belonging has room to grow. And our nervous systems are paying the price. Because the human animal is not built for floating. We are built for rhythms, relationships, and return.

And the resistance starts here. Not with a grand theory, but with the stubborn insistence on building containers where people can keep showing up.

The email that refused to honor a community

And here is where the righteous fury shows up for me. Not in the fact that a business closes. They can make that choice. It is theirs. But in the way it was handled.

The closure was announced via email. It was positioned like a personal note, like, “you matter, we want you to hear it from us.” Except the email came with the wrong name for some people. Mine came with no name. And it did nothing to acknowledge what those of us who gathered there day after day have built together.

It was basically: We’re shifting the coworker space over to this hotel, we’re closing the gym, and here are other services you can use with your membership.

In other words, we’re rearranging the product offering. But we are not grieving with you. We are not honoring what this place has been. We are not even willing to speak the words: people built a life here.

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Capitalism’s spiritual poverty

This is capitalism’s spiritual poverty. Not only extraction of money, but extraction of meaning. A world where the bottom line becomes a god, and humans become collateral. And I want to slow down here, because this is not just a gym story. This is a parable.

We are living through the steady demolition of place, and most of us are not calling it what it is. We call it convenience. We call it modernization. We call it market forces. We call it “they had to make a business decision.” But in the body it lands as exile.

If you have been paying attention, you have seen this script everywhere. Places that held people get shut down, consolidated, optimized, or repositioned. And the human cost is treated like a rounding error.

The system has a particular kind of genius. It learns how to turn everything into a commodity, even belonging. It will sell you community as a subscription. It will sell you wellness as a brand. It will sell you connection as content. But the moment the spreadsheet says the belonging is not profitable enough, it disappears.

You are not failing at being human

This is where I want to name something that feels obvious, and still has to be said out loud. Humans are not built to live placeless. We are not just minds floating through the internet. We are bodies. We are creatures. We are local.

Your nervous system does not bond with concepts. It bonds with rhythms, with faces, with doors you have walked through a thousand times, with the sound of a room you know, with the ordinary miracle of being expected.

This is why a third place matters. Not home. Not work. The in-between place where your life is allowed to be more than survival. Where you are not performing for a paycheck. Where you are not managing the chaos of a household. Where you can simply be a person among people.

And the tragedy is that we are losing these places while being told we are gaining freedom. We are told that being untethered is the dream. Remote work, digital nomadism, constant mobility, frictionless delivery, endless options.

But options are not the same thing as belonging. Endless choice can be a form of starvation. If you can go anywhere, and you belong nowhere, you end up eating connection like junk food. You scroll. You consume. You binge other people’s lives. You let algorithms simulate intimacy.

Then you turn the phone off and the room is quiet, and your body panics, because it is not meant to live without a village.

If you have ever wondered why anxiety is everywhere, why depression is everywhere, why loneliness is everywhere, why so many people feel like they are barely holding it together, I want to offer one answer. We are trying to survive in a world that keeps dissolving the containers that make life survivable.

A cruel god

And here is the more prophetic layer. It is not accidental. The system benefits when you are isolated, because isolated people are easier to manage.

When you do not have community, you have fewer mirrors. Fewer people who can tell you the truth. Fewer people who can interrupt the story that you are alone, that you are the problem, that you should be ashamed.

When you do not have community, you have fewer hands. Fewer people to help you carry the weight. Fewer people to say, “come over, eat, sit, breathe, let’s figure it out.”

When you do not have community, the system becomes your default provider. Your therapist. Your friend. Your distraction. Your god.

And it is a cruel god. Because the system does not love you. It does not know your name. It does not care that you survived an abusive relationship. It does not care that you buried your father. It does not care that you lost a job.

It will take your money, your attention, your energy, your body. And then it will tell you to buy a little more self-care if you are still tired.

This is where I want to speak directly to the part of you that feels that exhaustion. You are not failing at being human. You are trying to be human in a world that is actively hostile to the conditions that make humanness possible.

Holy ground

And that is why a gym can become holy ground. Not because barbells are sacred. Because place is sacred. Because bodies are sacred. Because a community that keeps showing up, week after week, can become a kind of liturgy. A repeated ritual of suffering and laughter and encouragement. A small rebellion against the story that you are on your own.

So yes, I am angry about the email. Not because I want a better customer service experience. Because the email is a window into a deeper contempt.

The contempt says: Your relationships are not real. Your belonging is not real. What you built here is not real. Only the transaction is real.

And I have had enough of that contempt. Because I have watched what place does. Gravity Haus held me through grief and rebuilding. It held me through the unraveling of a life. It held me while I rebuilt a body I did not know I could have. And I know I am not the only one.

Which means this closure is not just an inconvenience. It is a rupture. A rupture in rhythm. A rupture in connection. A rupture in the nervous system’s sense of safety.

So if you are grieving the loss of a place, don’t try to minimize it. You are not being dramatic. You are having an appropriate human response to the loss of a container that held your life.

The counter-story

Now, the next layer. Here is the counter-story I am refusing to let die. Even if a place closes, the people do not have to disappear.

In my own little circle, there are four of us especially close, two guys and two women. We hang out regularly. We are part of each other’s social circles. We are constantly texting, talking, encouraging each other through life.

And the trainers have been fantastic. The programming has changed my body. I put on about twenty pounds of muscle in four years. I am the strongest I have ever been. I feel fantastic at 51.

But beyond that, they are good humans. I consider them friends. Which means the question now is not only, “where will I work out?”

The deeper question is this. How do we practice solidarity when the system shrugs? How do we refuse to let a community get dissolved just because it is not profitable enough for someone’s spreadsheet? How do we keep choosing each other?

Re-creation as rebellion

Because solidarity is not a vibe. It is not a hashtag. It is not a political identity. Solidarity is the slow, stubborn commitment to shared life. It is the decision that my life is bound up with yours. It is the refusal to let the system turn us into consumers of one another instead of kin.

And here is the deeper claim. I do not actually think the opposite of capitalism is simply different policies. Policies matter. But the deeper problem is formation. Capitalism forms us into a particular kind of human, a human who believes they are alone, a human who believes their worth is productivity, a human who believes relationship is optional as long as they can purchase services, a human who believes everything is replaceable, even people.

This is why losing third places is not just sad. It is strategic. Because third places are where solidarity is trained. Third places are where you learn how to be with people outside your family system, outside your workplace, outside your ideological bubble. Third places are where you practice small repair, small kindness, small resilience. Third places are where you remember you are not a machine.

So when those places disappear, we become easier to exploit. And that is why I want to speak prophetically. If we want to stay human, we have to fight for place. Not only for our own comfort, for our collective survival.

We have to grieve what is being taken. And we have to build what the system refuses to build.

This is where I keep thinking about re-creation. Not as escapism. As rebellion. Re-creation means making again, rebuilding, restoring, creating containers where life can take root. It is what happens when the system says, “everything is a transaction,” and we answer, “no, some things are covenant.” It is what happens when the system says, “you are on your own,” and we answer, “no, we are going to make a village.”

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Bless what was true

This is what I was getting at in a previous post where I argued that the future grows in cracks.

When a corporate email fails to honor what was sacred, we can still honor it. We can grieve what is ending. And we can bless what was true.

Because one of the system’s quieter violences is this. It tries to convince you that if something ends, it did not matter. But that is a lie.

A place can be real, and still be temporary. A community can be sacred, and still be fragile.

The diaspora

So what does that mean for the Gravity Haus diaspora? It means we grieve, not only the inconvenience, but the rupture. It means we tell the truth about how it landed, not to stew in it, but to refuse the gaslighting.

It means we gather. We’re gathering on WhatsApp. We are planning social gatherings. We are talking about future gym possibilities. We are sorting out how we can keep choosing each other.

Because if the place is going away, we will have to build a new container. Not alone. Together.

In other words, we are insisting that we stay human.

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One invitation before the paywall

Before I draw the paywall line, one clear invitation. If this stirred something in you, I’m creating a course on loss. More importantly, it’s about life after loss. It is not a productivity hack. It is tools for staying human when the places and people that held you start to disappear.

Join the waitlist here, and when it’s ready, I’ll send you a discount code: Course waitlist link.

Three Embodiment Practices To Help You Stay Rooted

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

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Instead I’m off staying human.

But a few weeks ago I was on the Sovereign Submission podcast. I encourage you to check it out!

Sovereign Submission

Transforming Anger to Grief through ritual with Joe Burnham

Most men don’t know how to grieve. We know how to get angry. We know how to shut down. We know how to say “I’m fine” when we’re absolutely not fine…

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a month ago · 3 likes · Taylor Ashton Ellwood and Joe Burnham

It is your attention. It is your nervous system.

Because before a nation can be moved into violence, ordinary people have to be moved into a story. A story that makes some lives feel distant. A story that makes aggression feel like protection. A story that makes dissent feel like betrayal.

This piece is about that recruitment. How it happens, how it works on the body, and how it narrows our compassion without asking permission.

It is also about rootedness. The kind of rootedness that refuses to outsource humanity to headlines. The kind that can hold complexity without hardening into contempt.

And it begins, as so many things do for me, with a tree.

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The Whole Story

As my partner and I arrived at the bottom of the Rio Grande Canyon outside Taos, New Mexico this past week I almost immediately sensed we’d come to the right place for the moment. A chance to, at least for an afternoon, leave behind a world where I felt something in me starting to fray.

Not a dramatic unraveling, not a public crisis, just that quiet interior shift where your attention gets hijacked. Your jaw tightens without asking permission. Your breathing climbs into your chest. You find yourself doom-scrolling with the same compulsive energy you used to reserve for old addictions, and you can tell, somewhere in the animal part of you, that you are being hunted.

So we took a day. We stepped away from the noise, the screens, the constant feed of fear and certainty masquerading as information. We drove out, and we walked. Although on this trail, it was more scrambling over rocks on a rugged riverside. The kind of hike that gives you no choice but to not just touch earth, but to grip onto it.

There is a kind of sanity that returns when you let your body remember that you are not an app. You are not a headline. You are not an argument.

Then she said: “Check out that tree.” It was old, gnarly, narrowed by time and weather, twisted in on itself like it had been shaped by a hundred storms it never asked for. It was not a picturesque Instagram tree. It was not a tree trying to impress anyone. It was simply a tree that had lived.

We just sat there. I found myself completely enchanted by this sacred presence. She started to wonder if our hike had ended. If the rest of the afternoon would be one long gaze at the Ent-like creature before us, my own personal Treebeard.

At some point a thought rose up in me so clearly it almost felt like it belonged to the tree itself. As if the wind carried a sacred wisdom from the branches to not just my ears but my soul.

This tree cannot be recruited. It can be bent by wind. It can be stripped by heat. It can be carved by drought and flood, but it cannot be recruited.

It does not get swept into frenzy. It does not outsource its attention to whatever loud force is trying to hijack the moment. It is rooted. It stays with its place. It does what it is here to do.

And then the next thought followed. If this tree has been alive long enough, it has been rooted through most of the history that led us to the war we are watching unfold right now.

Coups, revolutions, oil deals, propaganda cycles, presidents, generals, speeches, sanctions, and the long, slow conditioning of a public that has been trained to accept violence as inevitable. This tree has been here through all of it.

It does not solve any of it. But it witnesses something most of us have forgotten. Time is longer than a news cycle. History is longer than our selective memory. And the human soul, if it wants to remain a soul, has to learn how to become unrecruitable.

Because that is what is happening to us right now. We are being recruited. Not only into a particular opinion about Iran, not only into a particular political posture, but into a particular way of being human. Or to say it more honestly, we are being recruited into being something less than human.

So when the world goes crazy, the question is not only, “What should I believe?” The question is, “How do we stay human?” And the question underneath that is, “What are they trying to recruit me into becoming?”

Because that recruitment always has a destination. It is trying to recruit you into a smaller circle of compassion. Into numbness. Into tribal certainty. Into a nervous system that cannot hold complexity. Into a spirituality that baptizes domination. Into a life where you can watch other people’s bodies be broken and still feel like the “good guys.”

That is the recruitment. And the only thing that can withstand it is rootedness. Not rootedness as escapism. Not rootedness as “I don’t care.” Rootedness as resistance. Rootedness as refusing to let empire colonize your imagination. Rootedness as staying awake.

The Recruitment Machine

We tend to talk about war as if it is primarily a military event. But war is also a narrative event.

War requires consent. Even when leaders act without public support, they still require a social atmosphere where dissent is manageable, where the public is disoriented, and where “complicated” is treated as treason.

So the first battlefield is not the desert. It is your attention. And the recruitment machine has some predictable strategies:

1) Narrative compression

The story is always made smaller. History is chopped into a convenient starting point that makes “us” look reasonable and “them” look insane.

It is remarkable how often the official story begins at the moment someone else reacts, and how rarely it begins at the moment we acted.

This is one of the core tricks of propaganda. If you can control where the story starts, you can control what looks like self-defense.

2) Moral laundering

Aggression is dressed up as necessity. Preemptive violence is described as “stability.” Economic domination is described as “freedom.” The killing of strangers becomes “national security.”

And if anyone asks questions, the question itself is treated as suspicious.

3) Dehumanization

If you want to make violence palatable, you have to make the targets feel less real.

You do it with language, with stereotypes, with selective footage, with simplified archetypes. They are “fanatics,” “terrorists,” “savages,” “threats.”

Meanwhile, our own violence is always “surgical.” Our bombs are “precision.” Our deaths are “tragic accidents.”

Their deaths? They’re just “collateral.”

4) Belonging pressure

The machine does not only persuade you. It threatens you.

If you do not repeat the story, you will lose your place at the table. You will be called naive. You will be called unpatriotic. You will be called antisemitic or anti-American or sympathetic to terrorists.

And because we are human, because we all perpetually feel a tension between belonging and authenticity, many people will choose belonging over truth.

And that is why this is recruitment. It is not just information. It is formation. It is trying to form you into the kind of person who can live with what is being done in your name.

1979 and the Myth of the Reset Button

With all that in mind, if you grew up in the United States, odds are high you were taught that the Iran story begins in 1979. The hostage crisis becomes the first page. It becomes the moment the movie starts. That is the convenient starting point.

And yes, the hostage crisis was real. It was traumatic. It mattered. Human beings were taken. Fear entered families. The nervous system of a nation got lit up. But that is exactly why it makes such a useful recruitment tool.

Because when you start the story at 1979, Iran appears as the aggressor and the United States appears as the injured party. The moral roles get assigned before anyone asks a single historical question. We are recruited into a simple script. They are irrational. We are rational. They are fanatics. We are defenders.

This is narrative compression. It is the propaganda move where history is chopped down to a size small enough to fit inside a slogan. And when you compress the story enough, you can justify almost anything.

Starting the Story Where It Actually Starts: 1953

So if we want to stay human, we have to do something both simple and uncomfortable. We have to widen the timeline. We have to refuse the myth that history began at the moment America felt threatened.

With Iran, one of the clearest places to widen back to is 1953. In 1953, the United States and Britain backed a coup in Iran. Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, had moved to nationalize Iran’s oil industry.

That word nationalize can sound like a policy detail. But it is not. It is the dangerous idea that the people of a sovereign nation should benefit from their own resources. And empires do not like that idea.

So the coup happened. And whether you tell the story through MI6, the CIA, Operation Ajax, oil interests, Cold War narratives, or the mechanics of destabilization, the moral shape remains the same. A foreign power helped remove a democratically chosen leader because that leader threatened economic control.

Then the Shah’s rule was strengthened. A long arc of resentment, distrust, and defensive posture followed.

This is not to say Iran has done nothing wrong. It is to say the villain does not enter the story out of nowhere. When you destabilize a society, when you humiliate a people, when you teach them through decades of policy that sovereignty is only allowed when it serves Western interests, you plant seeds. And those seeds grow.

This is what the tree was reminding me. You cannot keep pouring poison into the soil, then act shocked when the fruit is bitter.

Reagan, the Hostages, and the Shape of Power

There is another chapter here that sits in the category of contested history, and I want to name it with care.

The “October Surprise” theory claims that members of Reagan’s 1980 campaign interfered behind the scenes to delay the release of American hostages, undermining Jimmy Carter.

Official investigations have said the evidence falls short of proving an agreement. So I am not going to state it as settled fact. And still. The hostages were released at the precise moment Reagan took the oath of office.

As a child I was told it was because Reagan was strong and Carter was weak. But as I take a closer look at history, the official narrative sounds more and more like propaganda. Like recruitment.

And the fact that we find ourselves having to even ask these kinds of questions itself reveals something true about the world we live in. Power uses people. Suffering becomes leverage. Human bodies become props. And political mythology needs a villain and a hero so badly that it will shape reality to fit the script.

That is not an Iran problem. That is an empire problem.

The Offer That Didn’t Fit the Script

Another detail that matters in this moment is that in 2015, Iran entered into a comprehensive nuclear agreement with the United States, the EU, and other world powers: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

This agreement included extensive verification and inspection protocols by international monitors. According to those monitors, Iran was complying with the terms of the deal.

In 2018, the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the agreement, despite Iran’s compliance and despite objections from our European allies. As best I can tell, Trump’s actual reasoning for the withdrawal? Because the agreement was achieved by the Obama administration, and in Trump’s mind, an Obama deal is always a bad deal.

What’s more, after that withdrawal, Iran indicated, even in the days before the latest war began, a willingness to negotiate terms even more comprehensive than the original deal. Those offers were not seriously engaged with by the United States or Israel.

And when a story is being sold to you as inevitable, any evidence of alternatives matters. When leaders publicly say they are open to verification and inspection, and that gets treated like a footnote, we should ask why. When there were agreements on the table in the past, and they were dismantled for political theater, we should ask what kind of “security” is actually being sought.

Because sometimes war is less about eliminating a threat and more about sustaining a story. A story where certain leaders need an enemy. A story where certain industries need contracts. A story where fear keeps the public manageable. And if that is true, then refusing the story becomes an act of staying human.

“They Are Crazy”: How Trauma and Reaction Get Weaponized

And that leads us to one of the cruelest dynamics of history. When you traumatize a people, you create conditions where traumatized responses become more likely. Then you point to those responses as proof that your violence was necessary.

This is how the story stays self-justifying. When an outside power humiliates and violates a society, that society does not become calmer. It becomes more reactive. It becomes more defensive. And the wound becomes a recruiting tool for extremists, for fundamentalists, for nationalists, for anyone who can offer a simple explanation and a strong identity.

This is how radical movements gain power. They take legitimate pain and convert it into ideology. They take fear and convert it into purity. They take humiliation and convert it into domination. And then, decades later, the empire looks at the extremists it helped fertilize and says, “See? They’re crazy.”

That is recruitment too. It recruits you into forgetting causality. It recruits you into acting as if our hands are clean.

Israel, Trauma, and the Tightrope of Truth

Now, here’s the larger irony: in mainstream American discourse, Iran gets cast as irrational: “crazy,” “fanatical,” “unhinged.” Israel, meanwhile, gets treated as automatically justified: a rational ally doing what it has to do. But the fringe on both sides are driven by trauma.

While Iran’s is rooted in Western intervention, Israel’s is rooted in her history. Antisemitism is not an idea. It’s a force. It is centuries of scapegoating, expulsions, pogroms, ghettos, and then the Holocaust: industrialized evil on an almost incomprehensible scale.

When children grow up inside a story that says, “People will hate you for being Jewish, and nothing you do will change it,” that’s not just a belief system. That’s the traumatizing of a nervous system. Trauma changes how bodies interpret the world. It makes threat feel omnipresent. It can make preemptive violence feel like protection. It can make domination feel like survival.

And when trauma becomes collective, when it is carried generation to generation, it can harden into national identity: We are always one inch away from annihilation, so anything becomes permissible.

That means there are fanatics on more than one side of this conflict. There are radicals on more than one side. But only one side gets the benefit of the doubt, over and over, even when its aggression is louder, more organized, and far more resourced. That is how recruitment works.

That’s because trauma doesn’t just create villains. Trauma creates narratives that decide, ahead of time, who gets understood and who gets demonized. When a people’s fear is familiar to us, when their story fits our inherited moral map, we call their violence “security.” When a people’s fear is foreign to us, we call their violence “terror.”

So no, Iran is not “crazy.” Iran is traumatized and becoming more so by the day. And Israel is not “crazy.” Israel is traumatized. And trauma, when it is unhealed and politically weaponized, can make almost anything feel justified.

To make matters worse, Israel’s history is now being weaponized so that any honest discourse gets deem antisemitic. This is part of what makes honest conversation about the Middle East so combustible right now. There are real histories of persecution and genocide. And there are also real histories of colonialism, occupation, displacement, and state violence.

The recruitment machine loves nothing more than a conversation so charged that everyone retreats to slogans. Because slogans don’t require grief. They don’t require listening. They don’t require the terrifying work of holding multiple truths at once. If we want to stay human, we have to be willing to do that work anyway.

So let me say something as clearly as I know how. Critiquing the actions of the nation-state of Israel is not the same thing as blaming Jewish people. Jewish people are not a monolith. Jewish people are not responsible for the policies of a government.

Antisemitism is real, rising, and deadly, and it must be confronted wherever it shows up. And at the same time, the state of Israel, like any state, must be accountable for what it does. Because trauma does not justify atrocity. The trauma of the Holocaust does not justify apartheid. It does not justify the systematic destruction of another people.

In fact, if you know what it feels like to be dehumanized, scapegoated, hunted, told you do not deserve to exist, then the moral demand is the opposite: you refuse to do that to anyone else. Israel’s own Scripture says this.

But instead, we have Benjamin Netanyahu and his four decade advocacy for war with Iran, consistently framing Iran as an existential threat requiring military action. It’s the same argument he made about the Palestinians in Gaza where we watched mass civilian death, collective punishment, and the destruction of infrastructure required for life: with American weapons, American funding, and American political cover.

Ultimately, when trauma is unhealed, it doesn’t disappear. It gets weaponized. It becomes a shield for policies that would otherwise be morally indefensible. And that is exactly why staying human matters here: because if we cannot tell the truth about suffering and power at the same time, we will get recruited: either into supporting the Iran war, dehumanizing Palestinians, or into collapsing Jewish people into a caricature. None of those paths is human.

The Money Pipeline: How Influence Gets Purchased in Plain Sight

But there’s more, because alongside trauma, there is another force at work: money. Organized, targeted, and designed to make political dissent expensive.

OpenSecrets shows pro-Israel groups spending about $60.5 million in outside spending in 2024. That is real money aimed at winning races.⁠⁠ It sits in the same weight class as the entire ‘environment’ bucket ($75.4M), and it is more than double the combined spend on gun control and gun rights ($27.0M).⁠⁠ This is what I mean by recruitment. Not just ideas, but incentives. Money shaping which truths are safe to say out loud. The point is, there is a well-funded ecosystem whose job is to reward compliance and punish deviation: especially in primaries, where a relatively small amount of money can reshape a race.

This is the part of the story that reporter Ryan Grim ran into so hard that what began as, “I’m covering the Squad,” became a book that is, in large part, about the pro-Israel political ecosystem surrounding them: specifically the implicit threat of what happens when you speak too loudly, or even just refuse to speak the approved lines.

In interviews about The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution, Grim describes how pro-Israel groups’ spending doesn’t just support candidates, it disciplines the boundaries of what elected officials are willing to say about Israel.

And it isn’t theoretical: the machinery has explicitly targeted members like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, so much so that in their electoral defeats, you can see the warning system working exactly as designed. And when politicians learn, again and again, that criticizing Israeli policy can trigger millions in spending against them, many will choose a safer path: silence, slogans, or moral confusion.

And that doesn’t even touch on individual donations like the $250 million Miriam Adelson gave President Trump during his 2024 reelection campaign. The donation, a thinly veiled bribe that gave her so much control of the US’s policy towards Israel that Trump actually namechecked her at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

So money is also recruitment.

The American Religious Recruitment: Armageddon as Strategy

And then there’s the faith element. Now, before I talk about theology, I want to name something that often stays in the shadows of “serious” political analysis.

A lot of what drives war is not only geopolitics. It is story. It is myth. It is what people think God wants. And that is why religious imagination becomes one of the most potent recruitment engines in American life.

If you can convince a population that violence is destiny, you don’t have to persuade them with evidence. You only have to activate their faith. So when we talk about “staying human,” we are not only talking about ethics. We are talking about what kind of God we are being invited to worship.

Is it the God of domination, the God who blesses empire, the God who needs enemies to prove strength? Or is it the God whose name is Love, whose way is compassion, whose kingdom looks like bread shared and swords laid down? That question is not abstract. It shapes whether we become healers or accomplices.

There is another layer of recruitment that I cannot ignore, because it has shaped American political imagination for a long time. There is a strain of American Christianity that has made peace with violence. Not reluctantly. Not with grief. But enthusiastically.

It has turned the Middle East into a stage for end-times fantasies. It has treated war like prophecy fulfillment. It has imagined devastation as destiny. And I want to say this plainly. That is not Christian faith. That is a death cult wearing Bible verses like jewelry.

Whatever you believe about Jesus, whatever your relationship to Scripture, this much is clear. The call of spiritual maturity is not to accelerate catastrophe. The call is not to bring about the end so we can escape. The call, if it has any resemblance to the heart of Jesus, is to bring heaven to earth. And heaven looks nothing like war.

When religion blesses domination, it is recruitment. It recruits people into calling violence holy. It recruits people into feeling righteous while harming others. It recruits people into being less human.

The Shadow Economy: Sex, Secrecy, and the Leverage of Shame

There is one more layer I want to name with caution. It sits downstream from the recruitment tactics we have already named, and it lives in the shadows.

In 2025, Drop Site News reported on longstanding allegations that Benjamin Netanyahu used the possibility of exposing Monica Lewinsky related material as leverage in negotiations over convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.

I cannot prove that allegation in a court of law, and Drop Site does not present it as a settled fact. But if their reporting is even close to true, it tells us something important about the moral weather. Netanyahu is not opposed to blackmail as a tool of statecraft.

With that in mind, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were public friends for years. Trump even publicly said Epstein liked women almost as much as he did, and liked them young. Moreover, the newly released Epstein documents keep putting Trump’s name back on the page.

Epstein was also closely connected to prominent Israeli figures. Reporting tied to the released material describes an unusually close relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. It also describes connections to senior Israeli military intelligence figure Yoni Koren.

So here is the question I cannot shake. If Epstein built a world where sexual exploitation created leverage, and if political leaders have shown themselves willing to use sexual leverage as a tool, then can we really rule out that some of what we are watching is being steered by blackmail?

I am not claiming I can prove a direct chain from file to phone call to policy. I am saying that power has a long history of using shame as a steering wheel. Staying human means we do not dismiss that possibility just because it makes us uncomfortable, and we do not declare it proven just because it fits our fear.

What Rootedness Looks Like (and What It Is Not)

Which brings me back to the tree, the one that stayed rooted at the bottom of the Rio Grande Canyon, the one that invited me to stay rooted in a world gone crazy.

So what is rootedness? Rootedness is not passivity. Rootedness is not a trendy version of “stay in your lane.” And rootedness is not spiritual bypass, where we go touch grass so we don’t have to confront power.

Rootedness is the inner stance that lets you confront power without losing your soul. It is the ability to stay present when the machine tries to speed you up. It is the ability to keep your compassion wide when the machine tries to narrow it. It is the ability to say, “Yes, this is terrifying,” without letting terror dictate what you call true. Rootedness is how we refuse recruitment into being less than human.

It is not cynicism. It is not “both sides” as a way of avoiding moral clarity.

Rootedness is the ability to stay present when the machine tries to speed you up. It is the ability to hold complexity without collapsing into paralysis. It is the ability to tell the truth without turning truth into a weapon. It is the ability to grieve without hardening. It is the ability to act without becoming what you hate.

Rootedness is how we stay human.

And it is learned. It is practiced. It is built like muscle. This is what I’ve been trying to do throughout this piece.

Grief: The Antidote to Becoming a Monster

It is also important to note that one of the reasons the recruitment machine works so well is that it offers people a way to avoid grief.

Francis Weller talks about what he calls the gates of grief. One of them, the one I think many of us need to stand at right now, is grief for the suffering and injustice of the world.

This is the grief we feel when we watch children pulled from rubble. When we watch propaganda turn human bodies into statistics. When we realize that entire populations get treated as expendable, while the people who profit keep calling it security. It is grief over everything recruitment attempts to do.

That means this kind of grief does something inconvenient to those who are out to manipulate us. It keeps the circle of who matters from shrinking. It makes strangers real. It makes bodies count. It makes it harder to speak in abstractions like “strategic interests” when those “interests” are measured in actual human lives.

And when you feel this kind of grief, it is not a weakness, it is evidence that your heart has not fully been colonized.

Because if you cannot grieve, you are easily recruited. Unwept sorrow becomes conspiracy. Unheld fear becomes scapegoating. Unnamed powerlessness becomes a hunger for domination. And if you watch enough violence, if you let enough injustice pass through your eyes without grief, something in you begins to die. You become less human.

Grief keeps you human. Because grief hurts. Grief makes you porous. Grief makes you feel what you would rather numb.

And for those who’s hearts are hardened, Weller describes grief as a powerful solvent. It softens the hardest places in our hearts. It loosens the calcification that forms when we keep swallowing pain without metabolizing it.

So when we can stay with this kind of grief, when we allow it to break us open, this kind of grief becomes a kind of moral clarity. Not the holiness of certainty. The holiness of a heart that refuses to shut down.

So What Do We Do When the World Goes Crazy?

I don’t trust clean answers for moments like this. But I trust practices. I trust rootedness. I trust the slow work of becoming unrecruitable. Here are three movements that feel faithful to me right now.

1) Tell the truth with receipts, and without contempt

Refuse narrative compression. Refuse the myth that history began yesterday. Learn the timeline, then share it. Not as a weapon. As an act of human dignity. Because propaganda thrives on amnesia. Truth is a form of resistance.

2) Train your nervous system not to be hijacked

If your body is constantly in fight-or-flight, you will be easy to recruit. You will crave certainty. You will crave a villain. You will crave a tribe.

Rootedness starts in the body. Breathe. Walk. Touch bark. Look at the sky long enough for your eyes to remember distance.

This is not self-care as consumerism. This is spiritual warfare against dehumanization.

3) Grieve what is real, so your love stays wide

Let the grief come. Grieve the dead. Grieve the lies. Grieve the way violence becomes normal. Grieve the way trauma multiplies. Grieve the part of you that wants to stop caring because caring hurts. Grief is how you keep your humanity intact.

Tell the truth. Train your nervous system. Grieve what is real. That is how we stay human.

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Three Embodiment Practices To Help You Stay Rooted

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

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This is an essay about the difference between aspiration and actuality. About the ways we confuse a north star with a finished identity. About how our protective strategies are not a moral failure, but a wounded intelligence that once kept us safe. And about the slow work of moving from performance to authenticity, so that what we most deeply believe can become something we can actually live.

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The Full Story

When my long-distance girlfriend started talking about spending most of the summer here, my first response was uncomplicated joy. I love the idea of her being nearby. When she is here, life feels better. She sees me more than anyone ever has. She knows me more than anyone ever has. There is a way she is attuned to my heart and my being that still surprises me. So the thought of “life feeling better” more often, even most days, felt like pure gift.

But then the conversation ended. I laid down to sleep. Things got quiet in the dark. My mind had space to wander. And that is when the question arrived. My chest tightened. My thoughts went frantic and started reaching for control. What if I am not different? What if I have not changed?

Not because she has given me any reason to doubt love, but because there is a part of me that still believes love is safest when I can manage my image. It is easier to feel lovable when I am not fully seen. It is easier to feel in control when I can curate. Daily closeness does not let you curate for long.

I have watched this pattern show up before. I was married to two radically different women, and the struggle in me still rhymed. Different partner. Same gravity in my body. When love got close enough to see everything, I felt the urge to disappear inside myself. To become distant, elusive, escapist. Not because I did not care, but because being fully known felt like exposure, and exposure felt like danger. Why? Because the loudest and most defining message of my childhood was, “You are not worthy of love and acceptance.”

So when the lights go out and my mind wanders in the dark, what is the question I’m asking? It’s not a verdict, it’s a wonder: Is there a gap between who I actually am and who I aspire to be?

Actual vs. aspirational

Let me name what I mean by those words.

Actual is not who I am on my best day. It is who I reliably become when I am tired, triggered, surprised, or exposed, the version of me that shows up when I am not managing my image. Actual is my honest baseline.

Aspirational is the self I long to be, the truer way of loving I can see in my imagination and sometimes touch in real moments. It can be a genuine north star. It can also become a mask, a version of myself I perform to stay safe, stay impressive, or stay in control.

This is the spine of what I am trying to name. Aspiration is holy. It is the soul remembering what it is here for. But aspiration can also become a disguise, a spiritual costume, a version of me that sounds true and feels true, but has not yet been trained into my nervous system.

Actual is what shows up when I cannot curate.

So I lay there and wonder what is actual and what is aspirational.

I have reason to believe I really have changed. I have done real work. I have more presence, more awareness, more honesty available to me than I used to. And at the same time I have not fully lived that reality in the daily heat of a close, local relationship, for a long time. So I find myself wondering, in the quiet: Is there still a gap, or am I only afraid there is?

The tension is that transformation often looks the same at first from the outside. I can move toward who I aspire to be. I can pretend to be who I aspire to be. And over time, with enough truth and enough practice, who I aspire to be can become who I actually am.

When a nation confuses aspiration with actuality

And I want to name something else, because this actual versus aspirational tension does not only live inside individual people. It lives inside groups. It lives inside institutions. It lives inside nations.

Every community has a story it tells itself about who “we” are. We have a sense of our character. We have a sense of our goodness. We have a sense of what we represent. And in that story, “actual” and “aspirational” get braided together.

A nation, for example, can tell a story about itself that is partly honest, partly mythic, and partly aspirational. We can believe we are who we long to be. We can narrate ourselves as courageous, fair, freedom-loving, and generous. And sometimes we really are. Sometimes we are living into the best of our stated values.

But we also have shadows. We also have wounds. We also have strategies for not being seen as we are.

And a lot of political disagreement, I think, is not only about policies. It is about which story we are living in. Some people relate to our national story as if it is already actual, as if we already embody what we claim. Other people keep pointing to the gap, not because they hate the country, but because they cannot pretend they do not see what is true.

One concrete example is the story we tell ourselves about race. Some people look around and say, “We are beyond all that.” They point to obvious signs of progress. They point to the presence of Black leadership in the highest levels of government. They point to laws on the books, to diversity initiatives, to programs intended to help those who have been historically marginalized thrive. And from that vantage point, anything that still names racial inequity can feel like unnecessary division.

And yet the lived experience of many Black, Indigenous, and other people of color does not match the story of a fully post-racial society. The aspiration may be real. The longing may be sincere. But when we confuse aspiration with actuality, we stop listening. We stop telling the truth. We treat the naming of the gap as an attack, instead of treating it as an invitation to become who we claim we are.

When one group needs the aspiration to be treated as reality, and another group keeps naming the reality that contradicts the aspiration, the conversation becomes very hard. It feels like an attack. It feels like betrayal. It feels like accusation.

But it might be something simpler and more human than that. It might be the same pattern we have been talking about at the personal level. If I am not allowed to admit what is actual, then I have to defend the aspirational self as if my life depends on it.

The same thing happens in a body. When we cannot admit what is actual, we defend the aspirational self as if our belonging depends on it.

And there is danger in that, whether we are talking about a nation or a relationship.

Grief, strategy, and the wounded child

And grief, I am learning, is one of the main forces that can keep that question foggy. For me, so much of this is what Francis Weller calls the second gate of grief, the parts of us that have gone without love. Those parts do not just struggle to receive love. They struggle to be seen and stay.

In my body, “gone without love” does not usually feel like sadness first. It feels like strategy. It feels like the wounded child inside me scanning the room for what will win approval. It feels like the part of me that learned to survive by staying impressive, staying useful, and staying hidden.

Plotkin’s four postures

Bill Plotkin has a map for this that I have found painfully clarifying. He says our wounded child tends to organize around two questions: Am I going to try to stay safe by belonging or by leaving? And is the fuel underneath me fear or anger?

So one version of the wounded child becomes what he calls the Conformist. This is the insider who lives by fear. The Conformist learns early that love feels conditional, so it starts studying the room. What do they want? What will keep me included? How do I become easy to approve of? It is not fake, it is adaptive. It is a child trying to survive.

Another version becomes the Prince or Princess, the insider who lives by anger. This part stays close to belonging too, but it is not trying to earn love through compliance. It feels entitled to the rewards of the community, the material and social benefits that signal, “You matter here.” And it will reach for those rewards through entitlement, contempt, intimidation, and control.

Underneath, the Prince or Princess is often carrying a brutal inner truth: I do not have a clue who I really am. There is anger here, and there is hunger. Sometimes this posture forms in a home where performance was demanded, but rewards were also dangled. It was not who the child wanted to be, but the bribe made it worthwhile. Over time, the performance hardens into a belief: I have paid for this. I deserve it. It is still chasing safety, just with a different kind of armor.

Then there is the outsider who lives by fear, the Victim. When belonging feels too costly, this part chooses retreat. It expects rejection before it happens, so it tells a story that explains the distance. Of course they will not understand. Of course I will end up alone. Of course it will not work. It is safer to be resigned than to be surprised.

And finally there is the outsider who lives by anger, the Rebel. This part is often furious about the abandonment it has suffered. It does not believe it is eligible to acquire the rewards of mainstream society in any legitimate way, so it stops trying. Underneath there is often the same ache and confusion: I do not have a clue who I really am. But the Rebel adds a vow: I am not going to act like them. I am not going to be like them.

So the Rebel achieves an outsider pseudo-identity by adopting styles and behaviors that negate, counter, or even try to destroy the mainstream. And here is the irony Plotkin points to. In rejecting one form of belonging, we often end up conforming to another. The Rebel becomes “real” by refusing the mainstream, while quietly conforming to the code, the fashion, and the posture of fellow rebels.

Most of us can find ourselves in more than one of these postures depending on the moment. The point is not to diagnose ourselves. The point is to notice the protective logic. The wounded child makes a very human bargain: If I can just become the right kind of person, I will finally be safe to love.

This is not villainy. It is protection. It is what a nervous system does when it learned early that being fully seen could cost you belonging.

But there is a cost. If I never reveal myself, no one can love all of me. I am left with connection, and yet still haunted by the question: If they saw all of me, would they stay? Or do they only love this crafted, curated version?

The practice is not to shame these strategies, or to “power through” into intimacy. The practice is to grieve what made them necessary, and to thank the protective parts for how they tried to save me, while slowly teaching my body that love can be survived.

This is the long move from performance to authenticity. It is the slow work of becoming someone who can be seen without disappearing.

One of the ways I can tell something is actually different in me now is simple. When fear shows up, I can name it.

Old me did not do that. Old me waited until the fear turned into distance. Old me waited until the fear turned into a story. Old me waited until the fear turned into escape.

Now, when I notice the familiar tightening in my chest, I can say it out loud. I can tell the truth before the strategy has time to become a personality. I can come to my partner and say, “Here is where I’m at. Here is what scares me. I want you to have a heads up that this is probably something I’m going to wrestle with at some point this summer. And I want to do it together.”

That might sound like a small thing, but it’s not.

Because this is where the actual versus aspirational question becomes more than an idea. It becomes a test of what I do when I cannot curate.

For a long time, my aspirational self was the version of me that could be present, generous, reflective, and loving. I could access that self under certain conditions. I could even sustain it for a while. But the moment I felt exposed, misunderstood, or crowded, something else would take the wheel. A strategy would light up. And then I would have to decide, consciously or not, what kind of person I was going to be.

This is why I think so many of us get confused about whether we have changed. We imagine the proof of change will look like peace. We imagine it will look like never getting activated. We imagine it will look like being unbothered.

Containers vs. capacity

But the truth is, you can grow a lot and still get activated. You can heal a lot and still have old reflexes. You can develop good containers, good routines, good structures, and still discover that those very containers are also limiting your capacity.

That was the realization that unlocked a big conversation for me recently. I had read something about capacity, about the difference between having a well-managed life and having a wide enough soul to stay present when life gets messy.

It hit me that I have built my days in ways that make it easier for me to show up as who I want to be. That is a gift. That is also a risk. Because if my goodness is only available inside a carefully designed container, then I am still one hard season away from becoming someone I do not want to be.

Here is what I mean by “container.” I have built a morning ritual that helps me center myself every day. I take time to locate where I am, to process what is happening inside me, and to return to my breath, my body, and my truer intentions.

I have an evening frame too, a way of wrapping up the day, releasing what I am carrying, and finding my way back to myself before sleep.

And I have also built a life that gives me a lot of space. I can show up fully for a funeral, or for a client, or for work that matters, and then I can come home and have room to decompress. I can withdraw. I can think. I can recover my clarity.

Those are containers. They are not bad. They are wise. They have helped me heal.

But daily intimacy does not always allow for that kind of space. When someone lives in your house, you cannot always disappear into your own rhythms. You cannot always get away from the friction of being seen.

And in those moments you do not just need a good container. You need capacity.

Capacity is the ability to stay true to yourself without needing to constantly retreat and rebuild yourself. Capacity is what lets you hold your center in the middle of real life, in the middle of interruption, in the middle of conflict, in the middle of another person’s needs colliding with your own.

This is one of the reasons I think long-distance can feel easier for some of us. It quietly protects our containers. It gives us time to reset. It gives us space to curate.

But if I am serious about love, if I am serious about becoming actual, then part of the work is letting closeness become the gym where capacity is built.

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An alternative vision: spirit as ground, psychology as path

Here is the alternative vision I am reaching for. I do not think the goal is to become the kind of person who never gets activated. I think the goal is to become the kind of person who can stay present when I am activated.

Spiritually, I am trying to live from a deeper claim than my nervous system is often willing to believe. That I am worthy of love and acceptance. That grace is not a prize for good behavior. That love is not earned by being impressive, useful, or easy. Shame cannot form me into love. Only love can do that.

Psychologically, the work is letting my body catch up to that truth. Letting my nervous system learn, slowly, that being seen is not automatically danger. Letting closeness build capacity instead of triggering collapse. Learning to notice the protective reflexes earlier, thank them, and choose something truer.

In other words, the spiritual names what is possible. The psychological is how it becomes actual.

If that language feels tender or confronting, I want to slow down and say this plainly.

This is not a call to stop having containers. Containers are wise. Containers are how many of us survive. Containers are how many of us heal. The question is not whether you need them. The question is whether your goodness depends on them.

Because if I can only be kind when I am rested, only be honest when I have time to process, only be present when I have had my ritual, then my “aspirational self” is still mostly a version of me that lives inside optimal conditions. It is real, but it is not yet reliable.

Capacity is what makes the aspirational self portable. Capacity is what lets you stay yourself when the day goes sideways, when you get interrupted, when you are misunderstood, when you are tired, when someone else’s nervous system is loud, when you cannot retreat into quiet to reassemble.

So if you are reading this and feeling exposed, I want you to hear this with compassion. Your strategies are not proof that you are broken. They are proof that you adapted. The work is not to shame the adaptation. The work is to build enough capacity that you have more choices.

That is the actual versus aspirational question in plain language.

The aspirational self says, “I want to be loving.” The actual self is what shows up when love costs me comfort.

The aspirational self says, “I want to be honest.” The actual self is what shows up when honesty risks my image.

The aspirational self says, “I want to be safe.” The actual self is what shows up when my nervous system decides we are in danger.

And here is the part I am learning to hold with a lot more compassion. The moment those old alarms go off, the question is not, “Am I good?” The question is, “What part of me is trying to save me right now?”

In my case, I can feel how early I learned to survive as the Conformist. If I can just read the room, if I can just be helpful, if I can just be easy, if I can just be impressive, I will be safe to love. And when that does not work, I can feel the Prince or Princess energy rise up, the angry insistence that I deserve something, that I have earned something, that I should not have to keep proving my worth.

This is why receiving love is so complicated for the parts of us that have gone without it.

It is not only that we do not believe love is available. It is that we fear what love will reveal. Because love does not only comfort. Love also sees.

So the real fear is not, “Will I be loved?” The real fear is, “If I am truly known, will I still be loved?”

When I brought all of this to my partner, I did not do it with a neat conclusion. I did not do it with a performance of progress. I did not say, “Don’t worry, I’m better now.” I laid it out more like this. “This is where things are. This worries me. I feel confident because I can see the evidence of growth in my life, but I also want to tell the truth about the edge I am standing on.”

And I could feel that my honesty did two things at once.

It made space for her fear. If someone has never lived with me day to day, it is not irrational for their mind to wonder what they might discover, even at the extreme: “What if you become a different person? What if you lose it? What if I move my life and then regret it?”

And it also made space for love. Because vulnerability is not only disclosure. Vulnerability is an invitation. It says, “Here is the part of me that has felt unlovable. Will you come near anyway?”

This is why I don’t think the proof of change is the absence of fear. I think the proof of change is the absence of escape. I think the proof of change is the willingness to name what is happening inside me before it hardens into withdrawal. And I think the proof of love on the other side is not that someone never gets afraid. The proof of love is a willingness to step into the truth with you, to meet the tender places without punishing you for having them.

That does not mean anything is guaranteed. It does not mean every relationship can hold it. It does not mean we do not need boundaries, wise pacing, and real accountability.

It simply means this. The path from aspirational to actual is not paved by self-hatred. It is paved by honesty. It is paved by grief. It is paved by the slow retraining of a nervous system that learned early that being fully seen could cost you belonging.

And if you are reading this and recognizing yourself, I want you to hear the invitation under all the language. You are not broken for having strategies. You are human. The question is not whether you have them. The question is whether you are willing to see them, and whether you are willing to grieve what made them necessary.

The ethics of aspiration

Because when I confuse aspiration with actuality, I start making promises I cannot keep. I start selling a version of myself I cannot reliably embody.

Sometimes it is not even malicious. Sometimes it is sincere. I really do want to be that person. I really do believe I am becoming that person. I might even be that person in certain conditions.

But if I present aspiration as if it is already actual, I end up creating a mismatch between what someone thinks they are signing up for and what they will actually experience.

That mismatch erodes trust.

In intimate relationship, it can look like this. I aspire to be loving, connected, emotionally present, honest, and steady. I speak about myself that way. I believe it is true.

And then I get scared. I feel exposed. I feel crowded. I feel misunderstood. And what shows up is withdrawal. Defensiveness. Evasion. Escapism.

The other person is not only hurt by my behavior. They are disoriented by the difference between the story and the reality. They are left wondering if they were deceived. They are left wondering which version of me is real.

This is why actual versus aspirational is not just an interesting concept. It is an ethical one.

Honesty about what is actual is not self-condemnation. It is care. It is care for the people we love. It is care for the communities we belong to. It is care for the promises we make.

It is also the only place transformation can begin.

Because aspiration is not bad. Aspiration is holy. Aspiration is the soul remembering what it is here for. But aspiration becomes dangerous when it is used as a cover, when it becomes a way of avoiding the grief, the repair, and the slow practice required for it to become actual.

So the invitation is not to shrink your aspiration. The invitation is to tell the truth about where aspiration is already embodied and where it is still a longing. To tell the truth about the conditions under which you can access your best self, and the conditions under which your protective reflexes still take over.

That is how trust is built. That is how repair becomes possible. That is how the aspirational self stops being a costume and slowly becomes a home.

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Closing

Before I close, I want to return to the sentence that started all of this for me.

Actual is what shows up when I cannot curate.

That is true in a nation. That is true in a relationship. That is true in my own chest, in the quiet, when the lights go out and my mind starts reaching for control.

So my hope is not that I will never feel fear again. My hope is that fear will stop driving. My hope is that the truest things I believe spiritually will become livable psychologically.

That my body will learn what my soul keeps trying to remember.

That aspiration will stop being a costume, and slowly become a home.

Below the paywall, I want to offer three practices that help move this from insight into embodiment, from aspiration into actual.

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Three Embodiment Practices To Help You Move Towards Actual

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

Read more

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The Whole Story

On February 21, 2025, my father died.

I’m writing this one year later, with his ring on my finger and a strange kind of quiet in my chest. Not peace exactly. Not closure. More like the hush that comes after a door shuts and you realize the room has changed temperature.

That weekend has become a marker in my body.

I can still see the light in the room. I can still hear the way my name sounded when he said it. I can still feel the moment everything in me wanted to bargain with time.

And I can still feel the other thing that surprised me: the way I showed up for him in those final months was not the way our relationship had trained me to show up.

For 15 months, I kept finding myself doing something I didn’t think I had in me.

I was fathering my father.

If that phrase makes you flinch a little, good. It should. It’s upside down. It’s tender. It’s complicated. And it raises a question I’ve been carrying ever since.

Why did I do it?

The Breathwork Revelation

It was November 2023, and I was lying on a yoga mat in a room full of strangers, breathing in a rhythm that felt like it might crack my chest open.

It had been the kind of week that leaves you hollowed out. My father had called earlier that week with the word no one wants to hear: cancer.

That announcement sat on top of a pile of other hard things, each one adding weight until I could barely stand upright.

This particular breathwork practice works by triggering something primal in the body. You draw breath in a specific pattern, and it lights up the nervous system. It’s like flipping the sympathetic response into overdrive, but you’re doing it in a safe container where whatever needs to surface can come up.

And it did.

The limbic brain went wild. Old grief, present fear, fury, exhaustion, all of it came rushing to the threshold.

And then I screamed. I let it all out.

In the silence that followed, something else arrived.

It wasn’t a voice exactly. It was visceral. A knowing so clear and true that it bypassed every defense I had.

The thought, if you can even call it that, settled into my bones with absolute authority:

I need to father my father.

There was no resistance. No negotiation. Just this deep, quiet certainty.

This is what I need to do.

This is the work in front of me.

Fathering My Father

Over the course of those 15 months, I think I missed maybe three or four appointments related to my dad’s cancer treatment. Every other one, I was there.

I would drive from my house in central Denver to my parents’ home in the northwest corner of the metro area, pick them up, drive to the VA hospital on the northeast side, sit through the appointment, and then reverse the whole triangle to get them home before heading back to my place.

Every appointment was a full day affair.

And I showed up for nearly all of them.

But presence wasn’t the only thing I offered.

I kept my parents laughing. I kept the mood light. We had nurses and hospital staff literally standing outside our room during appointments because they heard the laughter spilling out from inside. Amid all the fear and uncertainty, I made space for delight. I refused to let cancer turn every moment into a funeral.

At the same time, I was paying attention. I was the one taking notes. I was tracking everything the doctors said, making sure my parents understood the next steps, clarifying medication schedules and side effects, translating medical jargon into plain language. I held the logistics so they could focus on what mattered.

And then there was the deeper work: helping my dad grieve his own life. As the months went on and the treatments stopped working, we began the hard conversation about hospice. My dad started to reckon with his own death. He was afraid. He was sad. He was facing the end, and he needed someone to walk that edge with him. So I did.

I sat with him. I honored his fear. I didn’t try to fix it or rush him past it. I let him name what he was feeling in as much as his old school masculinity would allow him to name a feeling.

And I told him something I’d never said before: I was proud of him. Proud of how he was handling all of this. He could have gotten angry. He could have gotten bitter. But instead, he got softer. He became easier to be with. He received the hard news with grace.

And I wanted him to know that I saw that. I admired it. I respected the way he was moving through this passage. It was one of the most sacred moments of my life.

If you only knew my relationship with my dad through the lens of those 15 months, you would have assumed my dad and I always had a close relationship. You would have thought this was just how we were. That we’d always laughed together like this. That I’d always been able to show up for him with this kind of tenderness and strength.

But that’s not the case.

The Truth Beneath the Surface

I want to name something plainly because it’s one of the hidden tensions in this whole story.

There are two versions of me in it.

There’s the version you would have met in the VA waiting rooms, telling jokes, carrying a notebook, making sure my mom ate lunch.

And there’s the version of me that existed for most of my life, the one who didn’t know how to be close to my dad.

The relationship I had with him for most of my life was not warm. It was not emotionally intimate. I did not go to him for advice. I did not lean on him when I needed fatherly support. The tenderness I longed for was not something I could reliably access.

So when I say I “fathered my father,” I don’t mean I suddenly discovered I was the world’s most devoted son. I mean something more specific. I mean I showed up for him in a way I didn’t receive from him.

And that raises an important question. What made that possible?

A month into this process, my parents said something that made the question unavoidable. They framed my presence as duty. They called me the good oldest son. The one doing what a good oldest son does. And I had a visceral reaction to that language.

Not because I’m above obligation. Not because I never do things out of duty. But because that wasn’t what was happening here.

This wasn’t performance. This wasn’t a box I was checking. This wasn’t me earning a gold star. This was love. This was choice.

Underneath that reaction was a clarity I didn’t have words for at the time: I wasn’t trying to become a better son. I was trying to become a freer human. And freedom required telling the truth.

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The Grief Work That Made It Possible

My goal, the conviction I carried out of that breathwork session, was this: I am going to father my father better than my father ever fathered me.

That sentence holds a world of grief. Because it implies something else: I needed a father I didn’t have. Or at least, I needed a version of him I couldn’t consistently reach.

And part of the reason I was able to show up for him during his cancer journey was because I had done grief work beforehe was diagnosed. Not grief for his death. Grief for what I expected and did not receive.

It started in October on a beach in Miami.

I was taking a couple of days off, and I brought Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow with me. I’d heard about the book from someone I’d call a Soul Guide, and I knew it was time to read it.

Weller writes about five gates of grief.

Most of us are familiar with the first gate: everything we love, we will lose. That’s the grief we associate with death and separation.

But it was the fourth gate that cracked me open: what we expected and did not receive.

That gate names the grief we carry for the love, attention, safety, and belonging we needed as children but never got. It’s the grief for developmental losses. For unmet needs. For the ways we were supposed to be seen and weren’t.

I sat on that beach and wept. Because suddenly I had language for something I’d been carrying my whole life but didn’t know how to name.

When I returned I designed a ritual to move through that grief.

I started by researching the basic needs every child has. I wrote down a list of statements about what children should receive from their parents.

Things like: You should be seen for who you are. Your interests should matter. Your emotions should be welcomed. You should feel safe to be yourself.

Then I took a stack of paper and did something strange. I wrote with my left hand. This moved the exercise out of my cerebral cortex and into something more primal, more connected to the limbic brain.

It slowed me down. It made the writing feel less polished, more raw. It brought the child in me closer to the surface without fully regressing into childhood.

With my left hand, I wrote what I actually remembered receiving as a child. I remember sitting at the kitchen table, bursting with excitement about the football game at recess. That was the thing that made me feel most alive most days. And my dad would blow it off. He’d redirect the conversation to math or science. He wanted to know what I was learning, not what was making me come alive. I was not seen for who I was. I was seen for who he wanted me to be.

After I finished writing with my left hand, I switched to my right hand and wrote what should have happened. I wrote as the adult version of me speaking to the child version of me. I gave myself the affirmation I needed. The encouragement. The acknowledgment. I named what happened and said plainly: This was wrong. You deserved better.

Then I tore those pieces of paper into strips and burned them in a candle holder. I let the ashes sit there for four weeks. I didn’t clean them out. I let them rest. At the end of those four weeks, I did a ritual borrowed from Bill Plotkin’s work with the four directions.

I mixed the ashes with water and painted myself with them. I sat in the north, the south, the east, and the west, asking each direction what message it had for me. What each direction wanted and needed from me.

I don’t remember the specific messages I received. But I remember the feeling. I remember sitting in the ashes of my grief, wearing it on my skin, letting it be part of me instead of something I was trying to escape.

And then I washed it off. I stepped into the water and let it go. Not because the grief was gone forever, but because I had tended it. I had given it the attention it deserved. I had honored the loss.

That ritual changed something in me. It dissipated the anger I’d been carrying toward my parents. It created emotional capacity where there had only been resentment and self-protection. It freed me to show up differently. And a year later, when my dad was diagnosed with cancer, I was ready.

Not ready in the sense of “prepared for cancer.” No one is prepared for that. Ready in the sense of having already met a certain kind of grief. Ready in the sense of having already named the wound. Ready in the sense of not needing to pretend.

Love Without Earning

Here’s the conclusion I reached in the wake of that reaction to the “duty” language. When love is motivated by duty, it becomes fragile. It becomes transactional. It becomes a ledger. It becomes something you can lose if you fail.

But when love is motivated by freedom, it becomes holy. Because then it’s not a performance. It’s not a strategy. It’s not even an identity. It’s a choice.

The strange thing is that choice is more demanding than obligation.

Obligation can be done from the outside. You can fulfill a duty while staying emotionally absent. You can do the “right thing” while nursing resentment.

But love as choice requires presence. And presence costs.

That’s what I was giving my parents. Not the appearance of devotion. Not the performance of being a good son. Presence. And presence is the most countercultural thing we have.

This Is the Path Forward

We live in a culture that has no idea what to do with grief. We avoid it. We outsource it. We drown it. We swipe past it. We buy our way out of it. We numb it. We stay busy enough that it can’t catch us.

If grief is a wave, consumer culture is one of the ways we try to build a seawall. More work. More productivity. More hustle. More entertainment. More Amazon boxes on the porch. More scrolling. More “fixing.”

And when that doesn’t work, we reach for medication. Or ideology. Or the belief that if we can just think clearly enough, we can solve it.

But grief is not a math problem. Grief is not a bug in the system. Grief is not an error to be eliminated. Grief is a passage. Grief is a portal.

It’s the way we metabolize loss so that loss doesn’t calcify into bitterness, numbness, or rage. It’s the maintenance practice that keeps us human in a world that constantly assaults our humanity.

I could not have fathered my father the way I did without doing my own grief work first. The wounds I carried would have gotten in the way. The unprocessed pain would have made me reactive, defensive, distant.

I would have shown up, maybe. But not fully. Not freely. Not with love.

Grief work gave me the capacity to give what I never received. To offer tenderness where I had known harshness. To see my father in his vulnerability and honor it, even though he had never done the same for me.

That’s what grief work makes possible. It doesn’t erase the past. It doesn’t undo what happened. But it transforms how we carry it.

It turns the weight of loss into something we can hold without being crushed by it. It alchemizes pain into presence, resentment into compassion, fear into courage. And it allows us to break cycles that have been running for generations.

The Ring and the Legacy I’m Choosing

By the end, my father was barely moving. He was in and out of consciousness. But the last word I clearly heard him say was my name.

And then, somehow, he managed to remove a ring from his hand.

I couldn’t believe he had the strength to do it. But he did. He took off the ring and gave it to me.

That ring has a history. My grandmother made it for my grandfather. My grandfather gave it to my father on his deathbed. And my father gave it to me on his. I wear it every day.

But here’s what I think about when I look at it. My legacy does not have to be the same as my father’s. I fathered my father differently than he fathered me. And in doing so, I began a new legacy.

At my dad’s reception, my aunt came up to me. She’s his sister. She said, “I know you didn’t want this role. I know you didn’t strive for it. But you have become the father.”

I know what she meant. She meant I was now the one who would carry something forward. She meant I was now the one who would steady the center.

Some people might name that role with older language. But my aunt would never use the word “patriarch.” And honestly, I don’t want it. Not as a label. Not as a legacy. Not as a structure. Because when I hear that word, I don’t just hear “leadership.” I hear emotional distance. I hear hierarchy. I hear power used as protection. I hear the kind of masculinity that makes tenderness feel like weakness.

So the question that’s left for me is not “How do I become the patriarch?” The question is: How do I embody responsibility in a family system that has been shaped by patriarchy, without reproducing its emotional and relational damage?

And I keep coming back to the same answer: Grief.

Grief is what allows us to name what was broken and choose something different. Grief is what gives us the emotional fluidity to be present instead of performative. Grief is what makes repair possible.

I still carry grief about my relationship with my dad. I grieve that there will never be the relationship I wanted. I grieve that I never had a father I could go to for advice. A father I could lean on when I needed relational support. A father who actually saw me for who I am.

That loss is real. And it will always be real. But because I did the grief work, I was able to show up for him at the end in a way that honored both of us.

I was able to father him through his death. And now I get to carry that forward. I get to reshape what fatherhood looks like in my family. I get to embody it differently.

That’s the gift of grief. It doesn’t erase the wound. But it allows us to live from the scar instead of the open gash. It allows us to approach the world, and the people we love, with tenderness instead of defensiveness. It allows us to break the cycles that have been running for generations and offer something new.

The ring on my finger is a reminder. The legacy is different now. Because I did the grief work. And it helped me to stay human.

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The Invitation

If this story resonates with you, if you recognize yourself in the ache of unmet needs or the weight of unprocessed loss, I want you to know: this work is possible. And you don’t have to do it alone.

Grief work is not about wallowing or staying stuck in the past. It’s about metabolizing loss so you can move forward with freedom. It’s about creating the emotional capacity to show up fully in your life, to give what you didn’t receive, to reshape the legacies you’ve inherited.

I offer Life After Loss coaching for people who are ready to do this work.

If you’d like to explore what that might look like, I invite you to book a discovery call. We’ll talk about where you are, what you’re carrying, and whether working together makes sense.

You can find more information and book a call here.

This work is sacred. It’s hard. And it changes everything because it allows us to stay human.

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Three Embodiment Practices To Help You Move Through Grief

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

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Not with tips or techniques or advice about spicing things up. Not with roses and romance and happily-ever-after promises.

I want to talk about what happens when an entire culture, both religious and secular, teaches you to be afraid of your own aliveness. When your body becomes something to manage instead of inhabit. When intimacy becomes performance instead of presence.

I want to talk about what it costs us. And what it takes to get it back.

This post is personal. It’s vulnerable. It includes stories about my own failures, my divorces, my decades of believing lies about my body and my desire. It includes a morning ritual where I moved my hips and spoke truth to my throat. It includes grief about what purity culture stole from me and from the teenagers I taught.

But it’s not just my story. It’s yours too.

Because whether you grew up in purity culture or hookup culture, whether you were taught that sex is sin or that sex is currency, whether you’ve spent your life suppressing desire or performing it, the result is the same:

We were never taught how to be whole.

This post is about reclaiming erotic wholeness. Not as sexual technique, but as a way of staying human. It’s about integrating body and spirit, passion and commitment, desire and wisdom. It’s about learning that pleasure is sacred, that consent is essential, that your body gets a vote.

It’s about what it means to be alive in a world that wants us performing, numbing, hiding, or extracting.

So if you’re tired of performing. If you’re carrying shame about your body or your desire. If you’re wondering why intimacy feels so hard. If you’re realizing that what you were taught didn’t prepare you for real relationship.

This one’s for you.

Let’s talk about missing the intimacy that keeps us human. And let’s talk about how to get it back.

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The Whole Story

This post exists because a couple weeks ago, I woke up with my sacral energy, that sensuality and passion that is more primal than curated, buzzing like a swarm of bees. Not in a way that needed managing or suppressing, but in a way that wanted integrating.

I could feel it as a low hum, a warmth pooling in my pelvis. Not urgent. Not demanding. Just... present. Alive. It’s not unusual for me to feel that way, but on this morning it was particularly intense. And unlike decades past, rather than trying to make it go away, these years I aim to embrace the wisdom on Mantak Chia and cultivate it. Nurture it. Even expand it.

On this particular morning I sat with it in my morning ritual: one hand on my sacral center, one on my heart, breathing from my pelvis through my solar plexus, heart, and throat with the words, “I speak the whole truth of me.”

And what rose through that channel wasn’t shame. It was wholeness.

I let my hips move. At least as much as my 51-year old hips that are about as antithetical to Shakira’s as you can get can move. The goal was slow figure-eights, circles that felt like prayer. And while I’m not sure what an outsider would have observed, my body remembered something my mind had forgotten: that desire isn’t the enemy of holiness. It’s part of it.

“I allow desire. I am alive,” I whispered as my hips swayed.

Then I brought both hands to my throat, that vulnerable space where truth either gets spoken or swallowed, I continued: “I speak the whole truth of me. Sacred and wild, tender and free.”

And that’s when the resistance hit.

Not from my body. From my mind.

The “good boy” voice that’s been with me since childhood. The one that wants to conform so I don’t get in trouble. The one that invites me to be smaller so I can stay hidden in the corner. And this time, it combined with cultural awareness in attempt to get me to limit myself: You’re a 50-something straight white male. Do you really want to focus on sex and desire in a world shocked by the release of the Epstein files? A world where men who look like you have used sex to do so much harm? You? Twice divorced and still figuring out how to be in a healthy relationship, you?

And as abusive as it felt, there is a fairness to the question.

But then another voice rose. Quieter, steadier, rooted deeper: You’re contextually wise.

My partner, she invites this sacral-to-throat integration to show up as consensual possession and claiming. She asks me to speak desire plainly. To take what I want. To delight in our mutual aliveness.

With my friends, it’s playful raunchiness in contexts where everyone knows the game and consents to the banter. We’re real with each other. Unfiltered. Human.

In my grief work, be it funerals, coaching, breathwork or the creation of ritual, this same channel becomes compassionate truth-telling. The courage to sit with what’s uncomfortable, to name what’s real, to hold space for the unspeakable.

And in my public voice, like this one, it’s the willingness to address sexuality, embodiment, and desire with integrity. Not titillation. Not performance. Just truth.

The throat doesn’t need to speak everything everywhere. It needs to speak the right truth in the right context with the right people.

That’s not repression. That’s wisdom. That’s staying human.

As I continued through my ritual space I sat with the ancient texts. Like Ephesians 5:3-4. Ones the church used to beat me with, and sadly, ones I once used to abuse, “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality… nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking.”

Except this time, I read it differently. This time, I wondered: what if raunchiness rooted in gratitude is actually holy? What if desire expressed with consent and context is a form of worship?

And then Thomas Merton’s words landed like a benediction: “For me to be a saint means to be myself.”

I realized something. My body was telling me the truth I’d been too afraid to speak for decades:

Erotic wholeness is not optional for staying human. It’s essential.

And purity culture tried to kill it in me.

The Golden Gate Bridge and the Tragedy of True Love Waits

When I arrived at the church in 1998, one of the first major events I was asked to organize as the new youth pastor centered around True Love Waits.

At that point, it was still relatively light. Just a “say no to sex before marriage” message. A commitment to honor God with your body. But by the time I was a few years into youth ministry, it had metastasized into a full theological system.

Multi-church gatherings for kids ranging from 7th to 12th grade. Mainstage events followed by breakout sessions where groups divided based on age and gender. We talked about purity, about guarding our hearts, about how sex was a gift from God meant only for marriage.

I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris became required reading. We had accountability groups where guys confessed their “struggles” with lust. We taught girls that their bodies were stumbling blocks, that what they wore could cause their brothers in Christ to sin. We framed desire as the enemy, not as information.

Purity wasn’t just about behavior. It was about thought life. It was about guarding your heart so completely that you didn’t even allow yourself to imagine intimacy until you had a ring on your finger.

The message was clear: Your body is dangerous. Your desire is a threat. The only way to be holy is to be sexually dead until the wedding night, and then, magically, to come alive on command.

After some “mishaps” earlier in my twenties, I’d recommitted myself to purity. I followed all the rules.

The Courtship That Wasn’t

I dated the way I was supposed to. We kept ourselves accountable. We set clear boundaries that kept us from even kissing until after the engagement, and not openly until our first kiss at the altar.

I married the woman I was supposed to marry. Not because I was deeply in love, not because we had built something together that felt like life, but because when you’re the youth pastor you’re supposed to marry the woman who spends every non-working and non-sleeping hour at the church.

We had a foundation of friendship. We’d spent a lot of time together in group settings. She thought I was funny. I appreciated her as a person. And according to the theory and theology, that was enough.

Here’s what I knew about her: her church involvement, her commitment to ministry, that we could laugh together in a crowd.

Here’s what I didn’t know: that she avoided conflict like it was contagious. That she carried trauma I couldn’t see. That she had no more framework for thinking about sex and sexuality than I did. I knew nothing about what her body wanted or feared. I knew nothing about mine.

I knew the surface church version of her. She knew the surface church version of me.

We didn’t know each other.

I had my doubts. I remember sitting in a coffee shop in the months before the wedding, reading about how things are different in Eastern cultures versus Western ones. The analogy offered said that in the West, we put a hot cup on a cold saucer, while in the East, they put a cool cup on a hot plate.

The idea was that we tend to start off hot and heavy and then cool with the familiarity that comes during life together, while they would learn to warm up to each other over time.

I went forward, trusting that the warming would come.

I believed that if I followed the formula, if I put in the right input, I’d get the right output. That’s what my theology taught me: obedience produces blessing. Do it God’s way and it will work.

There was a moment I could have walked away.

I remember it clearly. Shortly before the wedding, my parents came out to meet her. We were on a walk, and she was a few steps ahead of me. I looked up and saw her, and something in me whispered, What the hell are you doing?

I could have stopped. I could have been honest. I probably would have had to leave that church, find another job, start over somewhere else.

But I didn’t. I kept walking.

The Switch That Didn’t Flip

On the wedding night, you were supposed to flip a switch. All that dead, guarded, suppressed desire? It was supposed to become holy, joyful, mutual intimacy. Just because a pastor said some words and you signed a legal document.

It didn’t work that way.

The switch didn’t flip. Not for me. Not for her.

Because neither of us knew ourselves, we couldn’t know each other. And because we didn’t know each other, we couldn’t meet each other in that vulnerable, tender, terrifying space where intimacy actually lives.

The warming I’d hoped for never came. Maybe we had a few moments here and there where it felt like something close to connection. But mostly, we stayed cool. Lukewarm at best.

I don’t want to tell her story. That’s not mine to share. But I can tell you mine.

I didn’t know myself. I didn’t know my needs, my aches, my longings. I had no attunement to my own body, no language for what I wanted or feared. All I knew was that she seemed to trigger every wound I carried and leave every longing untouched.

And I’m sure, on her side, I did the same.

She wasn’t ready for any of this. Neither was I.

We tried. We really did. But you can’t build intimacy on a foundation of shame and obligation. You can’t suddenly trust your body when you’ve spent years treating it like the enemy. You can’t experience mutual desire when one person has been taught to suppress all longing and the other has been taught it’s owed to him.

It was tragic.

The Bridge

I remember one day when I was 26, I’d been married just a few months. Still in that early, delusional phase where hope overrides evidence. Still believing that if I just did it right, everything would work out.

It was this day where I led our youth group to San Francisco to join hundreds of other teenagers for a True Love Waits march across the Golden Gate Bridge.

I remember the fog that morning. Thick and cold, the kind that makes the bridge cables disappear into gray. We walked in pairs as the cars rushed by. Someone at the front carried a banner. Parents who’d helped us drive down snapped pictures that would land in the next church newsletter.

We thought we were crossing into a new world. We were crossing into a trap we’d built together.

The tragic irony wouldn’t reveal itself for years. Joshua Harris, the man who wrote I Kissed Dating Goodbye, would eventually renounce the book and divorce. I would divorce. Twice.

As I look back on that season of life I realize I was trying to map my way through a relationship world I was never taught how to navigate. I was too nerdy to date in highschool. I only had one girlfriend in college. As I stepped into my role as a youth pastor, I was offered purity culture as the way forward. But purity culture didn’t prepare me for relationship. It prepared me for performance. It didn’t teach me intimacy. It taught me compliance.

But here’s the thing I’m learning: mainstream culture isn’t any better.

Whether you grew up in purity culture or hookup culture, whether you were taught to suppress desire or commodify it, the result is the same. We were never taught how to know ourselves. We were never given tools for building real intimacy.

We were taught to perform.

I’m sorry to her. For not being ready. For not knowing myself well enough to show up as a whole person.

I’m sorry to those kids. For teaching them a theology that would fracture their ability to trust their own bodies, to feel their own desire, to build real intimacy.

I’m sorry to myself. For staying in obligation when love was never there. For choosing the formula over the truth my body was trying to tell me.

And now, on this Valentine’s Day morning I find myself inviting all of us into something different:

Not performance. Not obligation. Not purity or sex-onomics. But erotic wholeness that keeps us human.

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What Our Culture Stole From Us

So what has our culture stolen from us?

Purity culture is one expression of a much deeper problem in how Western culture teaches us to relate to our bodies, our desires, and each other. Whether the church taught you to suppress sexuality or mainstream culture taught you to perform it, the underlying message is the same: you are not allowed to simply be human.

Your body is either a threat to manage or a product to market. Your desire is either sin or currency. Your relationships are either contracts of obligation or transactions of consumption.

Nowhere in this system are you invited to know yourself. To feel your own aliveness. To build intimacy rooted in presence instead of performance.

So let me name what we lost. Not just in purity culture, but in the broader culture that reduces us all to performers in a script we never agreed to.

1. We lost the integration of body and spirit.

Purity culture taught us that the body is a threat to the soul. That sexual desire is the enemy of holiness. That to be spiritual, you must be disembodied, especially below the waist.

But mainstream culture taught us the opposite extreme: that the body is all that matters. That sexuality is performance. That desire is something to optimize, not integrate.

I learned this viscerally. In those accountability groups, we’d confess our “struggles” with lust, and the prescribed solution was always the same: pray more, read your Bible more, stay busy, avoid triggers. Never once did anyone say, “Your body is telling you something true. Let’s get curious about what it’s trying to communicate.”

We were taught to “bounce our eyes,” literally trained to look away any time we noticed an attractive person. We were told to “take every thought captive,” which in practice meant we spent enormous mental energy trying not to think about sex, which of course made us think about it constantly.

The result? A generation of people who can’t feel their own aliveness without shame. We learned to live from the neck up. We became brains on sticks, disconnected from the very bodies God called good.

And here’s what neither culture told us: You can’t selectively numb sensation. When you shut down your capacity to feel desire, you also shut down your capacity to feel joy, grief, tenderness, delight. You don’t become more spiritual, you become less human.

And when you treat your body as a performance vehicle, when sexuality becomes about metrics and technique instead of presence and mutuality, you lose the same capacity. Different path, same destination: disconnection from your own aliveness.

2. We lost consent.

This one took me the longest to see.

Purity culture didn’t teach us about mutual desire, boundaries, or enthusiastic yes. It taught us obligation. The man was owed sex in marriage because that was his “need.” The woman was supposed to submit, even when her body said no.

In premarital counseling sessions across evangelical churches, couples were taught that sexual refusal was a form of withholding. That both partners had a biblical duty to meet each other’s needs. Pastors quoted 1 Corinthians 7: “The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.”

Duty. Not desire. Duty.

No one ever asked, “But what if one person doesn’t want to? What if their body is saying no? What if they’re tired, or touched-out, or grieving, or just not in the mood?”

The answer was implied: your body doesn’t get a vote. You made a covenant. You owe this.

But secular culture isn’t much better. It just flips the script. Instead of women owing sex as marital duty, women learn to use sex as currency. Give him what he wants physically in hopes of getting what you want emotionally. Trade your body for connection, attention, commitment. Or in the age of rampant seeking of Sugar Daddies, it’s your body for provision or luxury.

It’s the same extraction. Just dressed up differently.

Whether it’s Christian obligation or secular transaction, the result is the same: sex becomes something owed or traded rather than mutually desired.

I didn’t understand consent. Not really. I understood obligation and transaction. And when desire didn’t show up the way I expected, I felt hurt, rejected, like something was being withheld.

It never occurred to me that a body saying no carries wisdom. That “no” is valuable information about what someone needs, what feels safe, what’s actually mutual.

I’m learning this now, at 51, in a relationship that’s teaching me what I should have learned at 20: that consent is not just the absence of “no.” It’s the presence of enthusiastic yes.

That desire is not something one person gives and another takes, trades or earns. It’s something that arises mutually, that both people get to feel and express and honor in each other.

That “I don’t want to right now” is not rejection or withholding. It’s self-knowledge. And it creates space for “I do want to” to mean something real.

Whether you were taught that sex is marital duty, transactional currency, or casual no-big-deal, the result is the same. We were never taught that consent is ongoing, embodied, and sacred. That mutual desire is the only foundation for real intimacy.

And without that? There is no intimacy. Only extraction.

3. We lost curiosity.

Desire is information. It tells you what you long for, what you value, what makes you come alive. It’s a compass pointing toward beauty, connection, and delight.

Purity culture taught us to fear our own desire. To see it as something that would lead us astray. So instead of getting curious (Why am I drawn to this? What is this desire trying to teach me?), we shut it down.

Meanwhile, consumer culture taught us to fulfill desire immediately. Swipe right. One-click purchase. Instant gratification. No space for the slow unfolding that real intimacy requires.

Both approaches kill curiosity. One by suppression, one by satiation. And without curiosity, we lose the ability to be playful, explorative, vulnerable. We lose the capacity to discover ourselves and each other.

4. We lost the sacredness of pleasure.

Purity culture framed sex as duty, not delight. Procreation was holy. Everything else was suspect.

And consumer culture framed sex as commodity, not connection. Pleasure became a product. Orgasms became metrics. Bodies became objects to optimize.

I was taught that sex had three purposes: procreation, unity, and (distant third) pleasure. But even that third purpose was framed carefully. The “marriage bed is undefiled,” sure, but there was always an undercurrent of suspicion around pleasure for its own sake.

Especially women’s pleasure.

I don’t remember a single conversation in all my years of purity-culture youth ministry where anyone acknowledged that women’s bodies were designed for pleasure. That the clitoris exists for no other reason than to feel good. That female orgasm has no reproductive function. It’s pure gift.

Instead, the message was clear: men have needs. Women have duties. Sex is something women give and men take.

I carried that into my first marriage. I didn’t know how to ask my wife what she wanted. I didn’t know how to slow down, explore, be curious. I knew how to perform the mechanics (because that’s what marriage allowed), but I had no framework for mutual joy.

It wasn’t until much later (after divorce, after therapy, after a lot of unlearning) that I began to understand: the body was made for pleasure. God wired us with nerve endings that have no purpose except to feel good.

And that’s not incidental. It’s essential.

Because pleasure is presence. Pleasure requires you to be fully in your body, fully attuned to sensation, fully meeting another person in vulnerable openness.

Both cultures robbed us of sacred pleasure. One by framing it as sin, the other by framing it as transaction.

But here’s the truth: pleasure is incarnation. It’s what it means to be fully alive in your body, fully present with another person, fully meeting in vulnerable mutuality.

A culture without sacred pleasure, whether religious or secular, isn’t liberation. It’s just another form of control.

5. We lost the integration of passion and commitment.

Purity culture sold us a lie: that passion and commitment were opposed. That you either had wild, uncontrolled lust or you had covenant faithfulness.

Meanwhile, secular culture sold us the opposite lie: that commitment kills passion. That real desire requires novelty, not depth. That staying with one person means settling.

But real intimacy, staying human intimacy, requires both passion and commitment.

It requires the fire of desire and the rootedness of trust. It requires showing up to your partner not as a sexless saint or a controlled object, but as a whole person: longing, tender, wild, and free.

We were never taught how to hold both. Religious culture said choose commitment. Secular culture said choose passion. And both left us starving for wholeness.

What if Desire Is Sacred?

Here’s what my theology says now. It’s what I wish I’d known at 26, marching across that bridge:

Desire is not sin’s playground. It’s the compass of the soul.

The body is not an obstacle to transcend. It’s the sacred interface through which we encounter the world, each other, and God. Resurrection doesn’t deny the body, it affirms it. Jesus didn’t come back as a ghost. He came back embodied, with scars still visible, asking for food, inviting touch.

If God honors the body that much, then our sexuality isn’t something to suppress, it’s something to integrate.

And integration doesn’t mean “anything goes.” It means consent and context.

That morning, when I felt that sacral-to-throat activation, I realized something. My erotic aliveness doesn’t have one expression. It has many. And each one requires contextual wisdom.

The throat doesn’t need to speak everything everywhere. It needs to speak the right truth in the right context with the right people.

That’s not repression. That’s wisdom. That’s staying human.

Erotic Wholeness Keeps Us Human

Here’s the through-line I want to offer you this Valentine’s Day:

Erotic wholeness is not about “getting off.” It’s about staying alive.

In a world that wants to commodify your body, numb your longing, and reduce your sexuality to either performance or shame, to stay erotically whole is an act of resistance.

It means:

• Honoring the aliveness in your body without needing to act on every impulse.

• Feeling desire as information, not demand.

• Letting passion and commitment dance together, not war.

• Celebrating pleasure as a gift, not a transaction.

• Speaking your whole truth, sacred and wild, tender and free, in the contexts where it can be received.

Erotic wholeness doesn’t mean you’re always sexually active. It means you’re alive to your own longing. Awake to beauty. Willing to feel the pull of desire without collapsing into compulsion or shutting down into numbness.

It means your body gets a vote. Your pleasure matters. Your “no” is sacred. And your “yes” (when it’s free, mutual, and rooted in trust) is holy.

A Theology of Sex That Keeps Us Human

So here’s what I believe now, at 51, after two divorces and a morning ritual that integrated my sacral fire with my sacred voice:

Sex is not about procreation alone. It’s about connection, play, presence, and mutual aliveness.

It’s about two people showing up as whole humans: not performing roles, not fulfilling obligations, but delighting in each other.

It’s about consent as the baseline and curiosity as the fuel.

It’s about letting your body speak its truth and trusting your partner to hear it without fixing, shaming, or demanding.

It’s about pleasure as a form of prayer, because when you’re fully present in your body, fully alive to sensation, fully meeting another person in mutual vulnerability, that’s incarnation.

God doesn’t ask you to be disembodied. God asks you to be whole.

And wholeness includes your sexuality. Not as an add-on. Not as something you manage until it’s socially acceptable. But as a core part of what makes you you.

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What Now?

If you’re reading this and recognizing the wreckage of purity culture in your own story, if you’re realizing that you’ve been living from the neck up, performing intimacy instead of feeling it, or stuck in shame every time desire stirs, I want you to know:

You’re not broken. You were lied to.

And if you never had purity culture but grew up on the secular side, if you’ve been using sex as currency, trading your body for attention, connection, or the hope of commitment, I want you to know the same thing:

You’re not broken. You were lied to.

Mainstream culture taught you that your body is leverage. That if you give physically, you might get what you need emotionally. That sex is the price of admission for intimacy, the down payment on connection, the audition for commitment.

Maybe you learned to say yes when your body wanted to say no, hoping this time it would turn into something real. Maybe you performed desire you didn’t feel because that’s what keeps someone interested. Maybe you got really good at technique but lost touch with what you actually want. Maybe you gave your body away freely while your heart stayed locked up tight, because vulnerability felt more dangerous than nakedness.

Purity culture dressed extraction up as duty. Secular culture dresses it up as liberation.

Different script. Same disconnection.

The way back to wholeness doesn’t require you to blow up your life or abandon your freedom. It requires you to reintegrate: body and spirit, passion and commitment, desire and wisdom.

It requires you to grieve what was stolen. And then to reclaim what’s yours. That’s the way we stay human.

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Need Something More Personal?

The three practices below the paywall are powerful. Whether you take 60-seconds, 60-minutes, or embrace a larger transition, they are some of the same tools I’ve used to help me reconnect with my body after decades of disconnection. I believe they can help you too.

But sometimes, you need something designed specifically for your story.

Maybe purity culture didn’t just disconnect you from your body. Maybe it tangled itself around a specific trauma, a particular shame, a wound that needs its own medicine.

Maybe secular culture’s transactional script left you performing so long that you don’t even know what your body wants anymore.

Maybe you’re carrying something that needs more than a general practice. You need a ritual built for you.

That’s some of what I do.

I create custom rituals that help you step back into your body. Rituals that meet you exactly where you are. That speak to your specific disconnection, your particular grief, your unique path back to wholeness.

We’ll start with your story. What you were taught. What was stolen. What you’re longing to reclaim. And then I’ll design a ritual that gives your body a way to move from disconnection to integration, from performance to presence, from shame to wholeness.

Sometimes it’s breathwork. Sometimes it’s movement. Sometimes it’s a sequence you do alone. Sometimes it’s something you bring into relationship. Always, it’s yours.

If you’re ready for something designed specifically for your healing, book a custom ritual session here.

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Whatever it is I want you to know: what you’re carrying is grief, and grief is sacred.

This isn’t going to be a short read. What follows is an invitation into the depths, a map for a journey most of us spend our lives avoiding. I’m going to share stories from my own descent, from the people I’ve sat with in their sorrow, and from the teachers who helped me understand that the only way out of grief is through it.

You’ll find practices here, both simple and transformative. You’ll find permission to feel what you’ve been told not to feel. And if you’re ready, you’ll find an invitation to let grief reshape you instead of trying to get past it.

This is not about fixing you. You are not broken. This is about learning to work with what you carry, so it can change shape in your hands.

Take your time. Breathe. And when you’re ready, let’s begin.

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The Whole Story

She sat across from me, looking like she wanted nothing more than to have tears stream down her face, but simultaneously terrified of opening the flood gates because of that voice that still echoed in her head decades after she first heard it, “It’s not appropriate to cry in front of others.” Then came the question. But as soft as her voice was, the question carried the weight and echo of thousands of other voices: “How do I make this go away?”

She had lost her husband after decades of marriage. The grief was everywhere: in her body, in her sleep, in the empty chair at the dinner table. And she wanted it gone.

But as we talked, another layer emerged. This wasn’t her first loss. She had carried others both large and small, and each time she had been told, in one way or another, that she wasn’t supposed to grieve. “Stay strong.” “Don’t dwell.” “Move on.” A lifetime of losses, and nowhere to put them.

I know another woman with a similar story. She lost her husband recently, but what haunts her more is a childhood grief experience when she cried and was told point-blank: “We don’t do that.” The message was clear. Grief was not welcome. So she learned to lock it down.

These aren’t unusual stories. This is what many of us carry: a lifetime of swallowed grief, of losses we were never allowed to mourn, of sorrows we’ve been trained to manage away.

But what if the problem isn’t the grief itself? What if the problem is that we were never taught how to be with it?

Why We Avoid Grief (And Why That’s Completely Understandable)

Of course we want grief to go away. Of course we try to outrun it. We live in what Francis Weller, author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow, calls a “grief-phobic and death-denying society.” We don’t know how to grieve, and we do everything we can to push off death, to avoid it, to refuse to face it.

The messages we’ve received our entire lives reinforce this: “Stay strong.” “Don’t fall apart.” “Time heals all wounds.” Grief, in this framework, is something to get over, not something to move through. An obstacle, not a teacher. A problem to be solved, not a path to be walked.

This didn’t happen by accident. After the Enlightenment, everything in Western culture became about control, management, and rationality. We disenchanted the world. Grief doesn’t fit that paradigm. It’s messy, unpredictable, and beyond our ability to manage. So we try to manage it away.

What does grief-avoidance actually look like? Staying busy. Numbing out. Toxic positivity. The thrust and push cycle: grief surfaces, we shove it back down, then it surfaces again. We recycle our grief, moving into it just far enough to feel the edge of it, and then pulling back, pulling the grief back into our bodies unreleased.

I know this intimately. I spent the first four decades of my life avoiding grief, though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. There was sadness in me, yes, but I couldn’t name it. There was rage underneath the surface, a deep anger I kept buried under a mask of joyful, playful, cherry energy. I had been abused, bullied, rejected. I had experienced losses that didn’t fit the typical grief narrative. No one had died, so I didn’t think I was grieving. I was just… angry. Suffocating. Trying to hold it all together.

And here’s the cost: if sequestered pain made a sound, the atmosphere would be humming all the time. I was humming. We are all humming. The grief doesn’t disappear when we avoid it. It doesn’t just sit there, waiting. It doesn’t stay dormant. When we refuse to work with it, when we push it down and lock it away, it doesn’t disappear. It finds other ways out.

The anger that erupts at small things. The numbness that settles over everything. The anxiety that hums beneath the surface. The addictions we reach for to quiet the ache. The way we withdraw from people we love. The perfectionism that drives us to exhaustion. The cynicism that hardens our hearts. These aren’t separate problems. They’re grief, unexpressed. Grief that’s been denied a voice, so it speaks in other languages. Toxic languages.

This is what I carried for four decades: not the absence of grief, but its toxic expression. I didn’t know I was grieving. I just knew I was angry. Deeply, rigidly angry, though I masked it with joyful performance. The rage was grief that had nowhere to go, so it went inward, calcifying into judgment, defensiveness, and a need to protect myself at all costs.

The grief didn’t wait for me to be ready. It shaped how I showed up in the world. It influenced every relationship, every decision, every moment I couldn’t be fully present. It wasn’t inert. It was active, distorting, demanding.

And it will continue to do so until we put our hands on it and start to work.

A Book That Changed Everything

Three years ago, I picked up a book that completely rewired my understanding of grief: The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller. Much of what I’m sharing in this piece flows from what I discovered in those pages. Weller is a psychotherapist and soul activist who has spent decades working with grief, and his framework gave me language for what I’d been carrying my entire life without knowing it.

It was in those pages I finally realized that contrary to the popular saying, time does not heal our wounds. It becomes a product of them.

We tell ourselves that if we just wait long enough, the grief will fade. But it doesn’t. What fades is our capacity to feel anything fully. What hardens is our heart. What flattens is our emotional range.

Here’s the paradox. When we obsess with joy and avoid grief at all costs, we create a façade. We end up with shallow happiness that never quite satisfies, a performance of wellness that leaves us exhausted. But when we go deep into grief, when we allow ourselves to descend into the sorrows we carry, it expands our capacity at both ends of the emotional spectrum. Grief deepens us, and in that deepening, we gain access to genuine joy, not the manufactured kind.

Our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, when left unattended, block access to the soul. Without some measure of intimacy with grief, our capacity to be with any other emotion or experience in our life is greatly compromised.

Our current emotional arrangement isn’t working. We’re flattened, exhausted, cut off from ourselves and each other. We live in a soul-eating culture, and the ruptures in our emotional lives are frequent.

I didn’t realize until I was nearly 40 that so much of what I had been carrying was grief. I went to therapy. I did the work. But I didn’t know what it was or what to do with it. It wasn’t until I read The Wild Edge of Sorrow that it dawned on me: this suffocating weight, this anger I couldn’t shake, this sense of being cut off from my own life? It was grief. Unprocessed, unwitnessed, unloved grief.

The Clay Metaphor: Grief Changes When We Work It

In my grief coaching sessions, I use a simple exercise. I hand my client a piece of clay and ask them to hold it.

“This is your grief,” I say. “Feel the weight of it. The texture. The way it sits in your hands.”

Then I ask: “What happens if you just hold it? If you never touch it, never work it, never put your hands on it and start shaping it?”

The answer is obvious. It stays exactly the same. Same shape. Same weight. Same feeling in your hands.

But if you start working the clay (kneading it, pressing into it, reshaping it), it transforms. Not gone, but different. The texture changes. The weight shifts. The way it sits in your hands is no longer the same.

This is grief.

Grief doesn’t change shape unless we put our hands on it and start working. As long as we refuse to work with the grief, it remains the same, and it’s going to feel the same. But as we work with it, it changes over time.

This is the work: not to eliminate grief, but to work with it so it can change. Not to make it go away, but to learn how to carry it well.

Because here’s the reframe that changes everything: Grief is not the problem. Grief is love with no place to go. It’s the hurt we feel when something or someone we care about is lost or harmed. Grief is sacred. The problem is that we’ve been taught to push it away instead of learning to carry it.

Grief work isn’t about a cure. It’s about maintenance. Ritual is a maintenance practice that offers us the means of tending wounds and sorrows, of offering gratitude, and of reconciling conflicts. It’s about ongoing conversation with the losses we carry, the love that remains, and the parts of ourselves we’re learning to welcome home.

We don’t abandon the grief. We learn how to hold it, how to work it, how to let it change us.

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Grief Is Bigger Than Death

And here’s something most people don’t realize. Just because no one has died doesn’t mean you’re not grieving.

There are numerous gates through which grief enters our lives. Loss is one of those. It could be people or a relationship or a job. These are the chapters of life that close.

But that wasn’t the primary origin of my grief. For me, much of my grief centers on the parts of me that have not known love. These are the parts of ourselves we’ve rejected, exiled, shamed. The outcast aspects of who we are that were deemed unworthy, unacceptable, too much, not enough.

I grew up conservative Lutheran, immersed in liturgical language that shaped my understanding of who I was at the deepest level. Every Sunday, we confessed: “I, a poor, miserable sinner, confess unto Thee all my sins and iniquities.” We focused on how we’d offended God in thoughts, words, and actions, ultimately coming to the conclusion, “I justly deserve Thy temporal and eternal punishment.”

Poor. Miserable. Sinner. That was my identity. Unlovable. Broken. Worthy only of punishment.

But here’s what shame-based theology never told me: I was beloved all along.

So much of my spirituality growing up focused on my brokenness, my frailty, my unworthiness. I learned early that certain parts of me (my needs, my anger, my sadness, my questions) were not welcome. I exiled them. I pushed them into the shadows and tried to become someone more acceptable.

For four decades, I carried this without knowing it was grief. I just knew I was angry underneath the surface. I knew something was suffocating me. I had been abused, bullied, rejected, and I had no framework for naming what I had lost: the sense that I was lovable, that I belonged, that the fullness of who I was could be received.

I was grieving that I didn’t see my own belovedness. Grief for the parts of me that never knew love. Grief for the child who learned he was unworthy. Grief for the decades I spent trying to be someone other than myself. Grief for a belovedness I couldn’t see.

The breakthrough was realizing that the narrative I had been handed was not true. I was not despised by God and deserving punishment. I was human. Beloved. Whole. And the parts of me I had exiled were not problems to be fixed. They were gifts waiting to be welcomed home.

That realization forced me to rethink everything about my life. And I didn’t even realize it was a grief thing at the time. But yes, there was a derangement. A breaking open. A rearrangement of my entire emotional and spiritual landscape.

Some of you might me most attuned to the sorrows of the world. This is especially true following the release of some of the Epstein files. Injustice. Ecological grief. Collective trauma. Systemic harm. The losses we carry on behalf of the world: the violence, the oppression, the ways we harm each other and the earth.

There’s another kind of grief when we don’t receive what we expect. Unmet needs. Dreams that died. The life we thought we’d have. The love we should have been given but weren’t.

There’s even ancestral grief. So many of us have lost the wisdom that our lineages carried and used to pass down. The weight of history. The unresolved traumas that move through generations.

The point is, grief is bigger than death or even loss. Grief is everywhere, and most of us are carrying far more of it than we realize. Which means no matter who you are, grief is here. It’s in the parts of you that learned they weren’t allowed. It’s in the needs you buried. It’s in the losses you witnessed in the world and felt powerless to stop. It’s in the family patterns you inherited without choosing.

And whatever form it takes, the only way out is through.

What It Means to “Go Through”

Let me say that again. The only way out, is through. We’ve heard this a thousand times. But what does it actually mean?

It means we need both community and solitude. Both containment and release.

Containment is the holding space for grief. It’s the safe place to fall, to descend into the depths of sorrow without fear of being abandoned or shamed. And here’s the hard truth: we cannot be our own container. Grace shows up in community. We need witnesses. We need people who can hold us steady while we fall apart.

Grief has never been private. It has always been communal. Subconsciously, we are waiting for the presence of others before we can feel safe enough to drop to our knees on the holy ground of sorrow.

This is why so many of us recycle our grief. We start to work with it, we feel the edge of it rising, and then we pull back because there’s no one there to catch us. We pull the grief back into our bodies, unreleased.

But we also need solitude. Not isolation, but what Weller calls the house of our aloneness. This is different from the isolation we default to in Western culture. Solitude is a space of fermentation, where grief can ripen and mature. It’s not escapist. It’s not about disappearing into a hole only to reappear and pretend everything is fine. It’s about stepping into a private space so the grief can distill, so it can turn into something more than just an undigested trauma vomit. And when we return, we now have something deeper to share.

It’s in this balance between community and solitude that we find the way forward. We need the vital exhalation of community and the renewing inhalation of our interior lives for our grief to move and change.

We also need derangement: the necessity of being undone, mixed up, rearranged. Derangement is necessary because our current emotional arrangement is not working. We step into ritual, into grief work, into the depths, in the hope of being changed. We don’t want to come out the same as we entered.

For me, that derangement looked like realizing I wasn’t who I thought I was. It looked like four decades of anger cracking open into grief. It looked like learning that the parts of me I had exiled (my needs, my questions, my full humanity) were not problems. They were homecomings.

Carl Jung argues that there are three stages of transformation: insight, endurance, and action. Insights come quickly. But endurance asks us to keep the insight in front of us, to live with it, to let it work on us over time. Only then, after prolonged engagement, do we witness new gestures erupting into the world. This is the work of apprenticeship with grief.

It is out of love that we ultimately reshape our lives. It’s a matter of discipline, a word that shares the same root as disciple. To what will you be devoted? What will you love and serve? Doing the word of grief allows that answer to be your soul.

The Gifts Waiting on the Other Side

And there’s reason to engage in grief work beyond the grief we hold changing shape and texture. Those who do the full descent into grief come back changed and deepened by this work in the ashes. These women and men become our elders, the ones who can hold all of us in times of great challenge.

They become the carriers of medicine for our hearts and souls.

There is something on the other side of grief. Not the absence of sorrow (grief doesn’t disappear), but a deeper capacity. Gravitas. Wisdom. The ability to hold others in their pain without needing to fix it or flee from it.

Those who apprentice with grief gain access to the full range of emotion. Not shallow joy that’s dependent on circumstances, but genuine joy rooted in presence. Not the performance of wellness, but the groundedness that comes from having touched the depths and survived.

Grief is a powerful solvent, capable of softening the hardest of places in our hearts.

If you had met me 15 years ago and engaged me in a substantive conversation, and then met me today and did the same, it would be like meeting two entirely different people.

Fifteen years ago, I was angry. Deeply, rigidly angry, though I masked it with a joyful, playful exterior. I was performing wellness while suffocating underneath. I carried a hardness in me that I didn’t know how to name or release. I responded to the world with judgment, with defensiveness, with a need to protect myself at all costs.

Today, there is deep grief in me. And there is genuine joy on the surface. Not the manufactured kind, but the kind that comes from having descended and returned. I can hold complexity. I can sit with people in their pain without needing them to feel better. I can let my heart break open instead of harden.

There’s a choice we face when we encounter division and harm in the world: do we respond with anger or with grief? Grief gives us a glimpse of the divine heart for the world. When we grieve instead of harden, we see with eyes of fierce compassion instead of judgment. Our hearts break open instead of calcifying into rage.

This is what my grief work has given me: the capacity to stay human. To stay soft. To respond with compassion instead of condemnation. To hold space for the full catastrophe of being alive.

And that means this isn’t just about personal healing. Collective grief work is an alchemical process for social change. When we do our grief work (when we tend to the sorrows we carry, when we welcome home the exiled parts, when we let ourselves be changed), we become people who can hold the world differently.

Grief work is a declaration of and move towards our collective humanity.

An Invitation to Begin

Back to the woman sitting across from me, asking how to make the grief go away.

We’re still early in our work together. I can’t tell you what will happen for her. I don’t know yet how her story will unfold.

But I can tell you what I believe. I can tell you what experience, both mine and that of countless others who have walked this path, says: if we are willing to do the work, if we are willing to move through grief instead of around it, things change. The clay shifts in our hands. We become different people. Not fixed. Not finished. But deepened. Softened. More fully alive.

I know this from what I’ve read. I know it from my own descent and return. I know it from watching others begin to welcome home the parts of themselves they had exiled, watching them stop performing wellness and start living honestly.

But I can’t promise it. I can only invite it.

This work isn’t just about personal healing. It’s about our collective healing. It’s about how we’re going to move forward as a society, as communities, as human beings trying to stay human in a world that often feels inhuman.

And you don’t have to do this alone. In fact, you can’t. Not fully. Grief requires containment. It requires witnesses. It requires a safe space to fall.

If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself, if you’ve been carrying grief you don’t know how to work with, if you’ve been told not to grieve, if you’re exhausted from pushing it down, if you’re angry underneath and don’t know why, I want to offer you an invitation.

If you’re ready for a container, for a structured space where you can turn toward what you’ve been avoiding, where you can learn to work the clay, where you can apprentice with sorrow in the presence of someone who won’t try to fix you or rush you or tell you to move on, let’s talk.

Schedule a discovery call. Let’s explore what it would look like to let grief reshape you instead of trying to get past it. Let’s find out what medicine you might carry for the world if you let yourself descend and return.

Now, if one-on-one coaching is beyond your means right now, below the paywall are three practices for working with grief: one that only takes 60-seconds, another you can do in a 60-minutes, and an all-of-life transformation. Whether you choose coaching, the practices I provide, pick up your own copy of Weller, or just spend time with this post, they’re all tools to help you do the grief work that enables you to stay human.

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Embodiment practices

If you want more than analysis, and you want something you can actually do with your hands and your breath, I put three practices on the other side of the paywall: one that takes a minute, one that takes an hour, and one that changes your life by changing your community.

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It is also a piece about grief. About what happens when a society refuses to metabolize its losses. About the gap between the world we were promised and the world we are living in. About the dangerous things people reach for when that gap becomes unbearable.

And it is a piece about a choice. Not a political choice, though politics will be part of it. A deeper choice. The choice between becoming monstrous or staying human when everything around us is breaking.

I am writing this because I watched the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and felt something shift. Not just anger. Not just grief. Something older. The recognition that we are living through a collapse, and that what we do in the next few years will determine whether we fracture completely or find our way back to each other.

If you are exhausted, I understand. If you are angry, I am with you. If you are scared, you are not alone. And if you are wondering whether there is a way through this that does not require us to become the very thing we are fighting against, this piece is for you.

What follows is long. It is heavy. But it is also honest. And at the end, I will offer you something you can actually do. Not a think piece. Not a sermon. A practice. Because the path forward is not a new opinion. It is a new way of being with each other.

Let’s begin.

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The Whole Story

I stepped out of the portable wood-burning sauna drenched in sweat, directly into the ten-degree morning air. That shock of cold after intense heat, that’s the kind of contrast therapy that makes you feel impossibly alive. Vibrant. Energized. Like every cell in your body just remembered what it was built for.

The morning had already been good. I’d gotten up early, gone to the gym, and taken part in a really intense workout. Afterwards, my gym was doing something special: they had this portable wood-burning sauna on site, and we could use it for as long as we wanted. So I did. I sat in that heat until my muscles went soft and my mind went quiet.

I was still in that clean, animal relief when I got in the car. Blood moving. Breath deep. That rare feeling of being completely at home in your own body.

That’s when I looked at my phone and saw the kind of sentence that does not belong in a society that wants to call itself sane.

A federal agent shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

And the whiplash is immediate. Not metaphorical. Nervous system whiplash.

Because for a few hours you were inside something coherent. Inside heat and effort and restoration. Inside the simple truth that your body can still come home to itself. Then, with one notification, you are back in the other world. The world where the ground feels less like ground, and more like a trap door.

I wrestled with it all afternoon. I could not put it down. I kept turning it over, like a broken tooth in my mouth. I spent hours that night awake, staring into the dark, trying to understand what the hell is going on.

Not just the shooting itself, but the story around it. The immediate, prepackaged narrative. The reflex to justify. The speed with which people decide whose death counts as tragedy and whose death counts as inconvenience.

And I felt something else underneath the rage and the disbelief.

I felt grief.

Not the sentimental kind. Not the tearjerker kind. The older kind. The kind grief workers recognize in the body before it ever becomes language.

The kind that shows up when the social contract breaks.

What we are watching is not just chaos

It is easy to find a simple story to explain what we see.

A man killed on the streets of Minneapolis trying to protect a woman being pepper sprayed by federal agents. A woman shot dead as she tried to drive away from the chaos caused by immigration enforcement. Both killings prompted outrage from those who code left, with the political right aimed to justify the killings.

It’s a simple right vs. left, us vs. them.

But if you step back 13 months it was a healthcare executive killed on a Manhattan sidewalk. An equally horrifying act, one the prompted political elites and the ultra-wealthy to respond with outrage, but also one that much of the public responded to with a with a shrug, or a cheer, or a grim, exhausted “yeah, that makes sense.”

And it’s because of that last killing, the one that seemed sensical even in the midst of tragedy, that makes me think that what we are watching in Minnesota is coherent, but perhaps in a way we don’t realize.

We are living in a time when the systems that are supposed to make life livable feel like they are crumbling. Not in some abstract, policy-wonk way. In a bones way.

Economic stability. Healthcare. Basic trust in institutions. Shared reality. When those systems crumble, something predictable happens. People become unstable.

And when people become unstable, they start reaching for anything that promises relief. Anything that promises clarity. Anything that promises power.

Some people reach for violence. Some people reach for violent leaders. Some people reach for stories that make violence feel like justice.

And when the ground fails us long enough, even decent people start to develop a taste for the idea of vengeance. Not always in action, but in imagination. In the quiet part of the soul that whispers, “Good. Let them feel it too.”

That whisper is not proof that we are evil. It is proof that we are ungrieved.

The social contract is failing, and we can feel it

Let me say this plainly. Humans are not designed to live in a society where survival is a private project. We are not designed to live in a world where healthcare is a profit extraction machine. We are not designed to live in a world where full-time work does not guarantee a dignified life. We are not designed to live in a world where you can do everything “right” and still get one diagnosis, one layoff, one accident, one rent increase, one family emergency away from collapse. Even the idea of needing to earn a living, something most of us take for granted, is a relatively modern concept.

In your body, you can feel what this kind of instability does.

It does not just create “stress.” It creates a constant background hum of threat. It turns people into cornered animals. It makes every disagreement feel existential. It makes scapegoating feel soothing. It makes domination look like leadership.

And we can talk about this like it is new. But part of what is so important to name is that the United States has never been especially good at building systems that care for people. The closest we got, structurally, was the New Deal era. A partial reweaving. A moment where, under pressure, the country admitted that the market is not a god and that the state has responsibilities.

Then we spent decades dismantling it. We hollowed out unions. We financialized housing. We privatized care. We turned healthcare into an industry that profits when people stay sick and stay afraid. We offshored jobs, stripped towns of their economic foundation, and then acted confused when resentment became a dominant emotion in whole regions of the country.

Let me be specific about what that looked like on the ground.

Whole towns built around manufacturing, around making things, around the dignity of skilled labor, were gutted. Not because the work was not valuable. Not because the workers were not skilled. But because profit could be extracted more efficiently elsewhere.

When a factory closes in a small town, it is not just one business shutting down. It is the entire ecosystem collapsing. The diner that fed the workers. The auto shop that fixed their trucks. The schools that were funded by the tax base. The sense of purpose that came from building something with your hands and bringing it home as a paycheck.

When those jobs left, they took more than wages. They took identity. They took community coherence. They took the basic promise that if you work hard, you will be okay.

And then, in the wreckage of that abandonment, something else arrived: pills.

The opioid epidemic did not happen by accident. It was created. Pharmaceutical companies lied about the addictive nature of their products. They paid doctors to prescribe. They flooded communities, particularly communities that were already reeling from economic collapse, with a substance that promised relief from unbearable pain.

And people took them. Not because they were weak. But because the pain was real. Physical pain from decades of hard labor in jobs that broke bodies. Emotional pain from watching your town die. Spiritual pain from losing the sense that your life has meaning.

The pills worked, for a while. And then they stopped working. And then people needed more. And then the prescriptions ran out. And then people turned to heroin. And then fentanyl flooded the streets because it was cheaper to manufacture and more profitable to sell.

And people started dying. Not in ones and twos. In waves. Entire generations were lost. Parents buried children. Children were raised by grandparents because both parents were gone. Foster systems were overwhelmed. Schools were trauma centers. Employers could not find workers who could pass a drug test, not because people were lazy, but because addiction had become the atmospheric condition.

And the rest of the country barely noticed. Or worse, they noticed with contempt. They called it a character problem. They called it poor choices. They used the language of personal responsibility to avoid the language of systemic betrayal.

What happened in these towns was not a series of individual failures. It was structural violence. It was the decision to prioritize shareholder value over human life. It was the decision to let entire regions collapse rather than invest in a just transition. It was the decision to flood traumatized populations with addictive substances and then criminalize them for becoming addicted. It was the decision to look at suffering people and see profit potential instead of human beings.

And all of that, every single piece of it, created what we might call systemic grief. Grief that does not just live in individuals, but in the soil of a place. Grief that gets into the water. Grief that shapes the nervous system of everyone who grows up there.

Children in these towns did not just inherit poverty. They inherited loss that was never named, never honored, never given space to be anything other than rage or numbness or despair.

And then we, as a country, turned to those same people and said, “Why are you so angry? Why are you voting for extremists? Why are you not okay?” As if we did not do this to them. As if we did not abandon them. As if we did not profit from their pain and then blame them for breaking under it.

And here is where the racial grievance becomes fuel for something dangerous.

Because part of the story that took root in these predominantly white communities was this: when these same harms happened to Black and Brown communities, the government cared. When crack ravaged Black neighborhoods in the 1980s and 90s, there was a response.

Now, it was a brutal, carceral response. It was mass incarceration, militarized policing, the destruction of families, the criminalization of entire populations. It was not care. It was punishment.

But in the minds of people watching their own communities collapse, it looked like attention. It looked like the state showing up. And when opioids tore through predominantly white rural and suburban areas, the response felt different. It felt like neglect. It felt like silence. It felt like no one cared enough to even punish them.

This perception, whether fully accurate or not, became a grievance. And that grievance was weaponized.

Because the truth that should have been obvious is this: the government did not care about Black communities when crack arrived. The government enacted policies that destroyed Black families and communities under the guise of “law and order.” And the government did not care about white communities when opioids arrived. The government allowed pharmaceutical companies to profit from mass death and then walked away.

The common thread is not race. The common thread is disposability. The common thread is a system that sees poor and working people, regardless of race, as expendable. But when you are in pain, it is hard to see systems. It is easier to see people. It is easier to see other struggling communities and think they got something you did not.

And so the rage that should have been directed at the pharmaceutical executives, the policymakers, the economic architects who orchestrated this suffering, got redirected. It got turned into racial resentment. It got turned into the belief that the real problem is not capitalism or extraction or systemic abandonment, but that “those people” got help and “we” did not.

That lie is one of the most effective tools of authoritarianism. Because once you convince people that their suffering is someone else’s fault, once you convince them that solidarity is a betrayal, once you convince them that the enemy is the family next to them and not the system above them, you can get them to do almost anything.

You can get them to vote against their own interests. You can get them to accept cruelty as strength. You can get them to hand power to people who will make their lives worse, as long as those people promise to make someone else’s life even worse.

And then, when those same people asked, “What are we supposed to do now,” too many institutions responded with contempt disguised as advice: Learn to code.

This is not a debate about whether coding is useful. It is a symbol. “Learn to code” is what you say when you do not actually intend to build a just transition. It is what you say when you want displaced people to take responsibility for a decision they did not make. It is what you say when you want a human being to solve a systemic betrayal with personal hustle.

It is the language of abandonment. And abandoned people do not just disappear. They become combustible.

This is not an excuse. This is an explanation. And if we want to interrupt this cycle, we have to tell a better story. A truer story. A story that names the real enemy and builds real solidarity across all the lines that power wants us to fight along.

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The pattern: when the ground collapses, people reach for monsters

When you strip away economic security, when you humiliate people, when you collapse the ground beneath their feet, something predictable happens. They reach for anyone who promises order. They overlook brutality because it feels like strength. They tolerate scapegoating because it feels like an explanation.

You can say, “I would never.” But when the nervous system is flooded, the human animal becomes persuadable in ways it is not proud of. That is not an excuse. It is a warning.

This is why fascism is always waiting. Not because people are stupid. Because people are desperate.

Three deaths, and what they reveal about the battle for our souls

I opened this piece highlighting three deaths. Alex Pretti and Renee Good this month in Minneapolis, and Brian Thompson thirteen months ago. Three deaths. And the way we responded to them reveals something about where we are as a people. Because here is what I watched happen.

When Alex Pretti and Renee Good were killed by federal agents, one segment of the population responded with outrage while another either justified it, dismissed it, or simply moved on. This is the culture war at work.

This is how we are kept fighting sideways instead of looking up. Immigration enforcement divides us along the oldest fault lines: who belongs, who deserves protection, who is “really American.” It keeps us arguing about the people standing next to us in the rubble instead of the people who orchestrated the collapse. It keeps us focused on borders and belonging while the systems extracting from all of us continue untouched.

And when Brian Thompson was killed, something different happened. Something that should have terrified the people in power. For a brief, uncomfortable moment, the 99% found something like unity. Not celebration, exactly. But a grim recognition. A shared understanding that this man had presided over a system that killed people with spreadsheets instead of bullets, and that his death felt like a kind of cosmic accounting.

The reaction was not universal. But it was widespread enough to be undeniable. People across the political spectrum, people who agree on almost nothing else, looked at that death and said, “I understand why someone did that.”

This is the class war we are not supposed to name. This is what happens when people stop fighting each other long enough to look up and see the real architecture of their suffering. Thompson’s death revealed that the real enemy is not the immigrant next to you or the person who speaks a different language or practices a different faith. The real enemy is the system that treats all of us as disposable in the name of profit.

Now, I want to be clear about something. I am opposed to violence. All of it. But I also want to reveal what these three deaths reveal about the game being played on us.

The people in power know this. They know that if we ever stop fighting each other long enough to look up, the whole house of cards collapses. So they keep us focused on the culture war, on things like immigration and border security and who is a true American versus a threat. They keep us pointing our rage sideways instead of up.

This is the spiritual crisis we are facing. This is the moral injury.

In a twisted, terrible way, Brian Thompson’s death united people. It gave us a glimpse of what could happen if we stopped accepting the lie that our enemies are each other. But it did so through violence. It did so through bloodshed. It did so in a way that rots the soul even as it reveals the truth.

And that is not the path forward. We do not heal harm by multiplying harm. We do not build a just world by becoming executioners. We do not reclaim our humanity by dehumanizing anyone, even the people who have caused enormous suffering.

So here is what I want to offer. Not as a naive fantasy. Not as a way to avoid hard truths. But as a North Star. As the only way I know how to stay human in a world that is trying to make us monstrous.

The two stories about the same wound

In 2016, both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders broke through because they did something the establishment refused to do: they looked at towns where the factories had gone silent, at communities where the pill bottles outnumbered the paychecks, at people who had been left to drown while both parties argued about the temperature of the water. And they said, “Your pain is real. The system is failing you. You are not crazy for feeling like the ground is collapsing.”

That refusal to gaslight people was powerful. It was like finally being seen after years of being invisible. But what they did next was everything. Because they both identified the same wound, but they pointed to completely different sources of the infection.

Bernie pointed to the top of the tower. He said the super-wealthy and corporate power have rigged the system. Wall Street crashed the economy and got bailed out while working people lost everything. Healthcare, education, and housing have been turned into profit machines. The solution is solidarity. The solution is weaving ourselves back together across every line that power uses to divide us. The solution is building an economy that serves the living, not the dead weight of shareholder value.

Bernie offered the class war. The hard work of it. The long labor of building power together.

Trump pointed to the people standing next to you in the rubble. He said immigrants, globalists, and corrupt political elites have stolen what is yours. The factories left because of bad trade deals and treasonous politicians. The country has been invaded. The solution is a strongman who will fight for “us” against “them.” The solution is domination, exclusion, and the restoration of a hierarchical order where you are no longer at the bottom.

Trump offered the culture war. The quick hit of scapegoating. The immediate relief of having someone to blame who you can see and touch.

And here is what matters: when people are destabilized, when their nervous systems have been flooded for decades, when the ground beneath them feels more like quicksand than bedrock, they do not automatically choose the most accurate story. They choose the story that feels like it will stop the bleeding fastest.

Trump’s story was simpler. It did not require the patient work of building coalition. It did not require transforming systems. It just required a villain you could see and a strongman who promised to crush that villain on your behalf.

That is the seduction of authoritarianism. It is not about ideology. It is about nervous system relief. It offers the fantasy of an easy answer when the real answer requires a root system that takes years to grow.

But here is where the story gets darker, and where you start to see who really benefits from keeping us fractured.

When the elites closed ranks

Bernie built a movement. He won state after state in the primary. He filled arenas with people who had written off politics as a scam. He activated young people and working-class voters who had nothing left to lose. He offered a grief-capable path. A solidarity path. A path that could have interrupted the cycle. And the party machinery closed ranks.

Superdelegates. Coordinated media narratives. Institutional gatekeeping that looked less like democracy and more like damage control. The message was clear: we will not allow you to disrupt the system, even if the system is killing people.

This was not an accident. This was the elites protecting the status quo. Because the people who benefit from the current system, the people who profit from our fragmentation, the people who extract wealth while we fight each other, they do not want solidarity. They do not want us looking up. They do not want us naming the real enemy.

So they crushed the solidarity candidate. Not with violence. With institutional power. With the quiet, bureaucratic brutality of gatekeeping. And people watched it happen in real time. And when they watched the party protect itself instead of responding to the pain of its base, it fertilized the very story Trump was selling: the elites are corrupt, the game is rigged, and no one inside the system will ever fight for you.

Meanwhile, Trump bulldozed through offering permission to stop pretending the old story still worked. And people who were desperate, people who were exhausted, people who had been abandoned, said yes. Not because they were stupid. But because when you are drowning, you will grab onto anything that looks like it floats, even if it is made of bones.

This is the pattern we are still living inside.

When the ground collapses and people are not offered a grief-capable, solidarity-based way to rebuild it, they will reach for the authoritarian one. When the institutions that claim to protect people choose instead to protect the systems that are breaking people, they do not stop the authoritarian. They create the conditions for the authoritarian to thrive.

And this is where we have to zoom out. Because if we only see this as a story about two men or one election, we will miss the deeper architecture. We will keep treating symptoms. We will keep hoping the removal of one person will solve what is, at root, a sick story and a sick structure.

Who benefits when we fracture

When communities collapse, private equity buys the wreckage. When people lose healthcare, insurers profit. When wages stagnate, shareholders gain. When the public fights itself, the powerful remain protected.

Exploitation is not just greed. It is a system that tells the poor, the sick, the working class, the immigrant, and the desperate to blame each other while the extraction continues untouched.

Solidarity is the refusal to play that game. It is remembering that the people next to you are not your enemy. It is seeing that the real divide is vertical, not horizontal.

And solidarity is impossible without grief, because grief is how we tell the truth about what has been done to us and what we have done to each other.

We need an ancient architecture for social healing

Francis Weller writes about grief work as something larger than private catharsis. As something communal. As something that belongs to villages, not just individuals. As something that helps a society metabolize what it has lived through, so it does not keep reenacting it.

There is the phrase I cannot stop thinking about right now: an ancient architecture for social healing.

Because what we are doing right now is not social healing. It is social acting out. It is the cycling of outrage without integration. It is the constant re-traumatization without ritual. It is the performance of certainty in the absence of groundedness.

And when we do not have an architecture for grief, we will build one out of whatever materials are available.

In America, our default materials are:

• consumption

• distraction

• domination

• scapegoating

• violence

• nationalism

• denial

None of those heal. They numb. They harden. They fracture.

Grief work is different. Grief work is a declaration that we refuse to become less human in response to a world that is trying to make us less human. Grief work is the refusal to let the wound define the story. Grief work is the alchemy that turns pain into wisdom instead of pain into poison.

And yes, grief has to move. It cannot just be lament on repeat. If grief is only endless expression with no integration, it becomes a loop. And when people are stuck in loops, they seek release. If the culture does not offer a healthy release, people will find a dysfunctional one. That is what we are watching.

The path forward is not a new opinion. It is a new practice.

If you are trying to make sense of what you are seeing, I want to offer this as a grounded claim: The opposite of violence is not passivity. The opposite of violence is not “being nice.” The opposite of violence is not pretending everything is fine. The opposite of violence is a grief-capable community.

A grief-capable community tells the truth without turning it into cruelty. A grief-capable community holds anger without worshiping it. A grief-capable community can face what is breaking without needing to make a god out of a strongman. A grief-capable community can feel loss without needing to make someone else pay for it.

And if that sounds too idealistic, I want to make it concrete. Grief-capable community looks like:

• people who can sit with sorrow without rushing to fix it

• people who can name harm without dehumanizing

• people who can practice repair instead of revenge

• people who can build real mutual support networks for survival, not just vibes

• people who know how to slow their nervous system down enough to stay accountable to love

That is not theoretical. That is training. That is practice. That is spiritual work and political work and nervous system work all at the same time, because in a world like this, they cannot be separated.

Call to action

If you’re not sure how to embody this in your own life and want support that is personal and structured, my grief coaching is the clearest next step. You can book a discovery call from this page.

If coaching is not a fit right now, the paid version of We Can Stay Human is the low-barrier on-ramp: $5/month or $50/year. The practices to help embody each post lives beyond the paywall.

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But because I don’t want to leave you completely hanging, here’s a bonus one:

Do this today (practice preview, 30–60 seconds)

Before you scroll, do this with me.

Put one hand on your chest and one hand on your belly. Feel the contact. Feel the weight.

Inhale through your nose for a slow count of 4.

Exhale for a slow count of 6. Longer exhale than inhale.

Do that three times.

Now name what is true, out loud if you can:

• “My body is responding to a world that does not feel safe.”

• “Rage is here.”

• “Grief is under it.”

• “I do not have to turn my pain into violence to prove it matters.”

That’s it. That is a beginning. Not a solution. A beginning. A moment of honesty in a world of deception. Because learning to be honest is the first step in how we stay human.

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Embodiment practices

If you want more than analysis, and you want something you can actually do with your hands and your breath, I put three practices on the other side of the paywall: one that takes a minute, one that takes an hour, and one that changes your life by changing your community.

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In the wake of yet another tragedy, Renee Good’s death at the hands of an ICE agent, Romans 13 is being invoked again. As justification. As final word. As divine permission.

This post is my refusal.

It’s a deep dive into what Romans 13 really says, what it has been used to justify, and how we can return to a reading of Scripture that heals instead of harms. It’s for people of faith, people on the edge of it, and people who’ve walked away because of how it’s been wielded.

This is not a takedown. It’s an invitation. To read more deeply. To stay human. To see Jesus again.

Because when the sword is praised and the towel forgotten, it’s not just theology that suffers. It’s lives.

Let’s talk about it.

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The Whole Story

Romans 13.

That is the scripture I have been seeing everywhere lately.

It shows up in feeds with tidy typography and warm beige backgrounds. It shows up in sermon clips and “hot take” reels. It shows up in comment sections after someone names an injustice, like a stamped seal meant to end the conversation.

“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.”

It is shared by politicians as they blend church and state. It is echoed by Christian leaders who talk about “order” as if order is the same thing as goodness. It is posted by former classmates from seminary like it is a divine mic drop, like quoting Paul means you do not have to do the harder work of discernment.

And recently it has been used again as a justification, not just for policy, but for blood.

In the wake of ICE raids. After protests. And now, as people try to justify the killing of Renee Good, a 37-year-old woman shot by an ICE agent during a federal operation in Minneapolis.

They quote Romans 13 like it settles everything. As if violence done by government agents is sanctified by a single sentence pulled out of a letter.

But this reading of Romans 13 is not just flawed. It is an abuse of the text. And in its consequences, in the harm it blesses, it is fundamentally anti-Christ.

I do not say that lightly. I am not trying to win a debate. I am trying to protect the possibility of human dignity, especially for the people who get crushed when Christians confuse obedience with holiness.

Because the goal of spiritual life is not to be correct. The goal is to step into the fullness of your humanity. And Jesus, the Human One, shows us that becoming human always involves solidarity with the vulnerable, not alignment with the machinery that keeps them vulnerable.

This Post Is For You … Whoever You Are

This is for you if you have posted Romans 13 in the last week. If you shared it with good intentions, thinking you were defending order or honoring authority. If you quoted it in a comment thread, confident that it settled something. If you used it to silence someone grieving, to justify a death, or to sanctify violence done by people wearing badges.

I am not here to shame you. I am here to tell you the truth. You have been handed a verse stripped of its context, its history, and its humanity. And the way you are using it is causing harm. Real harm. To real people. To the vulnerable. To the witness of the church. To your own soul.

So this post is an invitation. Not to shame. To repentance. To realignment. To stepping back into the river of the whole story, where love is the law and Jesus is the lens.

If that feels uncomfortable, good. Holy discomfort is where growth happens.

This is also for you if you are a person of faith who has felt something twist inside when you hear Romans 13 quoted this way. If you have sat in church or scrolled through feeds and thought, “That does not sound like Jesus.” If you have wrestled with whether you are allowed to question, whether your discomfort is rebellion or discernment. If you have been told that good Christians submit, and yet something in you keeps resisting.

You are not crazy. You are not rebellious. You are awake. And your discomfort is a gift. It is the Spirit refusing to let you confuse obedience with love. It is your conscience doing exactly what it is supposed to do: naming misalignment.

This post is permission. Permission to trust what you feel. Permission to read Scripture with Jesus as the lens, not empire as the framework. Permission to say, “I do not think God blesses cruelty, no matter who is doing it.”

You are not losing your faith. You are finding it.

And finally, this is for you if you are outside the Christian faith entirely. If you have watched this unfold and thought, “So this is what Christians are about.” If you have seen the verse-slinging and the cold justifications and concluded that Christianity is fundamentally aligned with power, control, and violence. I do not blame you. The evidence is everywhere.

But I want you to know something. What you are seeing is not the whole story. It is not even the true story. It is a distortion. A loud, well-funded, politically powerful distortion. But it is not what Jesus was about.

Jesus was about solidarity with the vulnerable. Jesus was about naming systems that crush people and refusing to bless them. Jesus was about love that looks like presence, not domination. Jesus was executed by the state for being a threat to the order Romans 13 is now being used to defend.

So if you have written off Christianity because of what you are hearing right now, I understand. But I also want to offer you a different lens. Not to convert you. To tell you the truth. The truth is that the gospel has always been good news to the oppressed and bad news to the comfortable. The truth is that every time the church has aligned with empire, it has betrayed its calling.

The truth is that there is a deeper stream, a wider tradition, a truer witness. And it sounds nothing like what you are hearing from the people quoting Romans 13 to justify a killing.

So whoever you are, wherever you are in relation to this conversation, this post is for you.

Because staying human requires us to tell the truth. Even when it is uncomfortable. Even when it costs us something. Even when it means naming harm done in God’s name.

System analysis: how Romans 13 becomes a tool of dehumanization

Now, to be clear, this is not the first time Romans 13 has been weaponized. It has a long and bruised history of misuse, and part of the reason this matters is because history leaves fingerprints on the present.

In the American South, Romans 13 was used to defend slavery, warning Christians not to interfere with “God ordained” systems of bondage.

In Nazi Germany, it echoed from pulpits to justify obedience to Hitler’s regime, to silence dissent, and to bless conformity.

In Apartheid South Africa, it propped up racial segregation from church lecterns.

In the United States during the Civil Rights era, white clergy cited it to chastise Black leaders for civil disobedience.

In 2018, a U.S. Attorney General invoked it to defend the forced separation of immigrant children from their parents.

And now, it is being quoted to excuse a government killing.

This pattern is not an accident.

A verse that sounds like “submit” will always be attractive to those who benefit from the current arrangement of power. A verse that sounds like “submit” will always be used against those who are already being told, in a thousand different ways, that their lives are less worthy of protection.

When we take sacred story and turn it into a weapon for the powerful, we lose our witness. But more than that, we lose our humanity. Because the Bible was never meant to be a blunt instrument.

Scripture is a sacred meta-story. It is a living narrative that shapes collective imagination. It is not a static rulebook where you can pull out one sentence and ignore the river it belongs to. When we forget that, we stop reading scripture as a mirror. We start using scripture as a club. And a club in the hands of the powerful is never neutral.

Empire is not only a government. Empire is a pattern. Empire is any arrangement where the comfort of the powerful is secured by the vulnerability of the many. Empire is a story that says safety is built through control. Empire is a story that says scarcity is inevitable. Empire is a story that says some people are problems. Empire is a story that says violence is the price of peace.

You can watch that story work its way into the Christian imagination. We start to treat “law and order” like a sacrament. We start to treat punishment like protection. We start to believe that if people are suffering, it must be because they “broke the rules.” We start to confuse compliance with virtue.

And then a verse like Romans 13 becomes the perfect spiritual shortcut. It lets us avoid grief. It lets us avoid complexity. It lets us avoid the harder, slower work of asking whether the rules themselves are harming people.

It gives anxious bodies a way to feel clean. It gives fearful hearts a way to feel righteous. It gives privileged lives a way to stay unbothered.

The problem is that the gospel does not exist to keep us unbothered. The gospel exists to wake us up. The gospel exists to make us more human.

If your theology makes you less tender, less awake, and less capable of solidarity, it is not formation. It is deformation. And that deformation does not just live in ideas. It lives in bodies.

It lives in the way we tense up around the “wrong” people. It lives in the way we withhold eye contact. It lives in the way we assume guilt. It lives in the way we stop listening. It lives in the way we rush toward certainty because certainty feels like safety.

What Romans actually is, and why that matters

One of the most damaging habits in modern Christianity is treating the Bible like a stack of fortune cookies.

We crack it open. We pull out a line. We tape it to a moment. We call that “faithfulness.”

But Romans is not a collection of disconnected chapters. It is a letter. It is a long, carefully constructed argument written by Paul to a struggling, divided church in the heart of empire.

Rome was not a neutral setting. Rome was a system. Rome was a machine. Rome was a story about power. And the Christian communities in Rome were fractured by ethnic tension, split by privilege, confused about what it meant to follow Jesus when Caesar still ruled the streets.

So Romans builds. From chapter one through twelve, Paul is constructing a theological arc. He is naming how both Jew and Gentile get trapped in false stories of belonging. He is naming how human beings participate in systems that fracture relationship with self, with neighbor, with creation, and with God. He is announcing that Christ is the revelation of a new way of being.

Not through force. Through sacrificial love. Not through dominance. Through mercy. Not through control. Through presence.

Romans 12 is a manifesto for what it means to be human in light of Jesus. “Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world.” “Bless those who persecute you.” “Do not repay anyone evil for evil.” “Overcome evil with good.”

That is the river Paul is standing in when he writes Romans 13. So if your interpretation of Romans 13 contradicts Romans 12, you are not reading Paul. You are using Paul.

And I want to say this with tenderness and firmness. Using Paul is not the same thing as following Jesus. Because following Jesus always drags us toward the vulnerable. Following Jesus does not allow us to stay safely aligned with power while pretending it is holiness.

Romans 13 is not a blank check for violence

Romans 13 does not say governments always act justly. Romans 13 does not say their violence is God’s will. Romans 13 does not say, “Do not resist.” Romans 13 does not say, “Whatever the state does is sacred.” What it does say, in context, is something more complicated and more human.

It acknowledges that Christians are living inside structures of power, and it calls them to live wisely and distinctly within those structures.

Not passively. Subversively. With discernment. With humility. With love as the law.

Paul is not writing as someone dazzled by empire. Paul knew the Roman Empire. Paul was beaten by it. Imprisoned by it. Eventually killed by it. So no, he is not offering a theology of submission as moral virtue. He is offering a strategy for staying human under a system designed to erase humanity.

That phrase matters to me. Staying human. Because what empire does best is flatten people into categories. Citizens and non-citizens. Legal and illegal. Deserving and undeserving. Pure and impure. In group and out group.

And the moment we allow those categories to override the image of God in our neighbor, we have already begun to die. Not physically. Spiritually. Relationally. Imaginatively.

We become less capable of presence. Less capable of compassion. Less capable of truth.

A theology check: God is love, not a permission slip

If your reading of Romans 13 makes God sound like a violent bureaucrat, that reading is not aligned with the God revealed in Jesus.

God is love, fully and always. Love is not a strategy or sentiment. Love is the elemental fabric of the divine.

That means something simple and terrifying. God does not endorse cruelty. God does not sanctify domination. God does not outsource holiness to the state. God does not become more righteous when the vulnerable become more afraid.

Just because God can work through anything does not mean God endorses everything.

If the state punishes, God is not automatically applauding. If the state kills, God is not automatically sanctifying. If the state enforces borders with brutality, God is not automatically “establishing authority.”

We can talk about providence without turning every event into divine approval. We can acknowledge that Presence moves through the world without imagining Presence as the puppet master of violence. Because God is love.

So if something looks like domination, exploitation, exclusion, or cruelty, I do not care how many verses you quote. It is out of alignment with the heart of God. And if your theology requires you to call cruelty “good,” it is time to re-story God.

Not into a safer, softer god. Into the truer God. The Beloved. The Breath. The Radiance. The One Jesus reveals.

Authority, in Scripture, is always on trial

One reason Romans 13 gets distorted is because we treat “authority” like a holy substance. But the biblical story does not treat authority that way. The biblical story is suspicious of authority.

It is honest about kings. It is brutally realistic about rulers. It is clear-eyed about how power corrupts.

Israel asked for a king, and the prophet Samuel basically said: are you sure? Kings take. Kings tax. Kings conscript. Kings build their own security on the backs of the vulnerable.

That is not cynicism. That is wisdom.

And then Jesus shows up, and what does he do with authority? He refuses to use it like Caesar. He heals instead of harms. He touches lepers instead of quarantining them into shame. He eats with outcasts instead of protecting his reputation. He tells his followers not to lord power over each other.

And when he is arrested by state and religious authorities working together, he does not say, “This is God’s will because they are the authorities.”

He names the violence. He endures it. He exposes it. And in resurrection, he announces that the violence of empire does not get the last word.

So if your reading of Romans 13 trains you to bless the violence that Jesus refused, something has gone wrong. Not just intellectually. Spiritually.

The deeper story: from power-over to love

There is a pattern beneath the politics. It is the ancient pattern of power-over. The taking form of existence. The instinct to secure yourself by controlling someone else. The instinct to manage anxiety by enforcing order. The instinct to treat human beings like problems to be solved instead of mirrors of God.

And then there is the forgiving form of love. The way of vulnerability. The way of presence. The way of shared power. The way of communion.

The reason Romans 13 becomes so dangerous is because it can be made to sound like God endorses power-over.

But the whole gospel, from Exodus to Jesus to resurrection, is God undoing power-over from the inside. It is God refusing to be the kind of god empire expects. It is God choosing a manger over a palace. A cross over a throne. A towel over a sword.

If Romans 13 is used to bless domination, it is being used against the gospel.

A wider lens: from exploitation to solidarity

Part of staying human is learning to see suffering in its larger context. Not to excuse anyone. To tell the truth.

ICE raids do not happen in a vacuum. They are the fruit of policies, narratives, and social agreements that treat some bodies as disposable. They are tied to histories of colonization, racial hierarchy, and economic extraction. They are tied to the story that some people deserve to move freely, and others should be caged.

When someone like Renee Good dies in the machinery of that system, the question is not only, “What happened in that moment?” The question is, “What kind of world makes that death feel acceptable to so many people?” And the church, if it is truly following Jesus, does not exist to make that world feel normal.

The church exists to interrupt it. To tell the truth. To mourn. To organize. To protect. To practice solidarity.

Not as a political brand. As a spiritual posture. Because love takes the shape of solidarity when it shows up in history.

If you want to understand the conflict in our moment, do not start with partisan labels. Start with bodies. Start with who is allowed to breathe without being watched. Start with whose kids get to sleep without a knock on the door. Start with who gets to be presumed innocent. Start with who gets to be presumed human. That is the place where the gospel becomes concrete.

And this is where I want to say something that might sound like a contradiction. Solidarity is not the same thing as hatred. To stand with the vulnerable is not to dehumanize the people inside the system. That includes agents. That includes officers. That includes bureaucrats.

It is possible to name harm clearly and still refuse to become what we resist. It is possible to say, “This system kills,” without telling ourselves that the only path forward is revenge. This is part of what I hear Paul trying to do in Romans. Not to quiet the church. To keep the church from becoming another empire.

A natural metaphor: what happens when we confuse fences for gardens

Here is an image that keeps returning for me. I think about a garden. A healthy garden has boundaries, yes. Fences can keep out deer. Borders can protect tender seedlings.

But a fence is not the garden. A fence can be necessary and still be used wrongly. If you build the fence too tight, you choke the soil. You block the pollinators. You trap heat. You turn protection into control. And if you worship the fence, you forget why you planted anything in the first place.

Some Christians have turned authority into a fence they worship. They confuse control with cultivation. They confuse enforcement with flourishing. They talk about “law and order” as if it were the fruit of the Spirit.

But Jesus is not a fence. Jesus is the seed. Jesus is the gardener. Jesus is the composting love that turns death into nourishment. Jesus is the table where enemies become kin.

So when Christians quote Romans 13 to justify violence, it is like pointing at a fence while the garden burns. It is like protecting the structure while forgetting the life.

Alternative vision: authority as towel, not sword

If you want a Christian vision of authority, you do not start with Caesar. You start with a basin and a towel. You start with Jesus kneeling. You start with a teacher who takes the lowest place. That is authority in the kingdom.

Not the power to take. The power to give. Not the power to dominate. The power to serve. Not the power to protect your own. The power to expand the circle of belonging.

So when the state claims authority, Christians should ask: does this authority look like towel or sword? Does it move toward the vulnerable? Does it protect dignity? Does it make room for breath? Or does it make people disappear?

The gospel is not neutral on those questions. And for those of us who claim Jesus, the towel always gets the final word.

Scripture in mixed-belief rooms

I know not everyone reading this shares my faith. Some of you are inside Christianity and exhausted by what it has become. Some of you are outside it and wary, for good reason. Some of you carry spiritual trauma. Scripture was used against you. God was used to control you. “Authority” was used as a threat.

If that is you, I want to say this plainly. You are not broken because your body flinches. You are not faithless because you mistrust power. You are not beyond grace because you have questions.

The God I trust is not offended by your resistance to abuse. The Beloved does not demand that you surrender your discernment. The Breath does not ask you to stop being human.

If scripture is going to be used in rooms like ours, it must be handled like fire. Not fire used to burn people. Fire used to warm, to illuminate, to purify the lies.

If a reading makes the vulnerable less safe, it is not holy. If a reading demands silence from the oppressed, it is not faithful. If a reading makes cruelty feel righteous, it is not the way of Jesus.

A gentle re-reading of “submit”

When most people hear the word “submit,” they hear a collapsing. They hear a shrinking. They hear the old religious script that says your job is to be small.

But the way of Jesus is not smallness. It is humility, which is different. Humility is not self-erasure. Humility is clarity about what is true. Humility is knowing you are beloved dust, fragile and finite, and still worthy. Humility is refusing the seduction of power-over.

So what if “be subject” in Romans 13 is not Paul asking Christians to collapse? What if it is Paul asking Christians to live with a kind of grounded realism? A kind of nervous-system steadiness? A kind of social wisdom?

Not because the empire is holy. Because Christians are called to be holy. Not because the state is always right. Because the church is called to be unmistakably different.

When a system wants you to become reactive, holy nonconformity looks like presence. When a system wants you to become violent, holy resistance looks like creative nonviolence. When a system wants you to become numb, holy faithfulness looks like grief. When a system wants you to become cruel, holy love looks like tenderness that does not collapse.

Paul is not naive. Paul knows that empire punishes. So in Romans 13, I hear him saying something like: Do not give empire an easy excuse. Do not let your method betray your message. Do not let your rage become the same taking form of existence you are resisting.

And that is not permission for the state. It is a warning for the church.

From shame to embrace: what this does inside a person

I want to name another layer that often gets missed.

Romans 13 does not only get weaponized outwardly, against immigrants, against protestors, against the people the state wants to mark as dangerous. It also gets weaponized inwardly.

Some of us grew up in religious environments where “authority” was the unchallengeable god. The pastor. The father. The husband. The elder. The institution. The leader who claimed spiritual power and demanded silence.

For people with that history, Romans 13 does not just bring up politics. It brings up your childhood. It brings up your body. It brings up the moment you learned that disagreeing was “rebellion.” It brings up the moment you learned that your instincts were dangerous. It brings up the moment you learned that your questions made you unworthy. So if Romans 13 is landing in you as dread, you are not weak.

You might be waking up. The body is the sacred interface. The soul speaks through skin, breath, and tears. That means your reaction is not just a problem to fix. It might be an invitation to listen. To ask where fear lives in flesh. To ask what you had to do to survive. To bless the part of you that got you through.

Shame will tell you, “You are wrong for feeling this.” Grace will tell you, “Of course you feel this. Come closer.”

The point is not to bully your nervous system into compliance. The point is to let love re-form you. From performance to authenticity. From exploitation to solidarity. From power-over to love.

A note about trauma and “good people” inside harmful systems

When we talk about state violence, it is easy to collapse into simple stories. There are monsters, and there are victims. There are villains, and there are heroes. But real life is messier than that.

That is not an excuse. It is an invitation to stay awake.

Because systems do not run on monsters. Systems run on ordinary people who have learned to go numb. Systems run on incentives. Systems run on fear. Systems run on propaganda. Systems run on the human desire to belong.

You can be a “good person” and still participate in harm. You can be kind at home and still enforce policies that break families. You can care about your kids and still dehumanize someone else’s.

This is one reason I refuse the easy comfort of hatred. Hatred keeps me from seeing the parts of the story where I am also capable of numbness. Hatred keeps me from seeing how the same empire that cages immigrants also trains me to perform and produce and compete. Hatred keeps me from seeing how the “other side” is not the only place where power-over lives.

If we are going to stay human, we have to be able to name harm without surrendering to dehumanization. That is not softness. That is strength. That is spiritual maturity. That is what love looks like when it refuses to become a mirror of empire.

A deeper reading: Paul, Rome, and the art of subversive survival

Sometimes people ask, “Okay, but what do we do with the words themselves?” It is a fair question. Because it is one thing to say, “Context matters,” and another thing to actually let context change the way you hear the sentence.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Paul is writing to a vulnerable minority community in the belly of Rome. He is writing to people who can be targeted. He is writing to people who can be accused. He is writing to people who can be crushed.

This is not the same as a majority church speaking from comfort. It is not the same as Christians being the cultural default. It is not the same as a pastor with a platform telling everyone else to “submit.”

When Paul tells a community to live peaceably, to overcome evil with good, to refuse vengeance, to pay what is owed, he is not trying to baptize Rome. He is trying to keep the Jesus movement alive. He is trying to help the church refuse the empire’s bait. Because empires love to provoke the oppressed into reactivity.

They love a riot they can point to. They love a narrative where violence is necessary. They love a story where the state becomes savior.

So part of what Paul is offering is strategy. A way to inhabit a dangerous world without becoming what the world is. A way to live in the cracks. A way to practice nonconformity that does not get the whole community wiped out.

This does not mean Paul is endorsing Rome. It means Paul is dealing with reality. The same way Jesus dealt with reality.

Jesus told people to turn the other cheek, not as a call to passivity, but as a way of refusing humiliation. Jesus told people to go the extra mile, not because empire is good, but because empire’s scripts can be interrupted. Jesus told people to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, not because Caesar is holy, but because Caesar is not God.

What if Romans 13 is closer to that kind of teaching than we want to admit? Not “obey because God loves the state,” but “live with wisdom because empire will use your reactivity against you.” Not “submit because authority is sacred,” but “stay human because your humanity is sacred.”

This is where the verse becomes less like a weapon and more like a mirror. It forces the church to ask: are we using scripture to protect life, or to protect control?

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Alternative vision: the state is not the source of your belovedness

One reason Romans 13 gets used so aggressively is because we have forgotten where belovedness comes from.

If your belonging depends on being “law-abiding,” then the law becomes a god. If your dignity depends on being “respectable,” then respectability becomes a god. If your safety depends on the state being strong, then the state becomes a god.

But belovedness does not come from the state. Belovedness comes from Love. Belovedness is not earned. Belovedness is not revoked. Belovedness is not a reward for compliance. Belovedness is the starting place. Grace is the operating system.

So when Christians invoke Romans 13 to argue that some people deserve what they get, what they are really doing is preaching a theology of performance. They are saying, “If you are good enough, you are safe.” That is not gospel. That is a transactional religion. And transactional religion always needs scapegoats.

It needs someone to blame. It needs someone to punish. It needs someone to keep the illusion of control alive.

The way of Jesus is not transactional. The way of Jesus is relational. The way of Jesus begins with embrace. And from that embrace, we begin the slow work of staying human.

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Embodiment Practices

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity. While these practices are usually behind the paywall, this week they are my gift to you.

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Not just about your gait, your pain, or your shoes. But about your story. Your culture. Your god.

This isn’t just about footwear. This is about the scaffolding we’ve been sold in place of strength. About how our bodies have been medicalized, managed, and mistrusted. About the way modern life keeps us numb, disembodied, and dependent. Then it convinces us it’s for our own good.

In this piece, I explore how orthotics and lawns, high heels and heel drops, fashion and faith all trace the same arc: from embodied wisdom to artificial support. From sacred design to dependency. And I ask what might happen if we stopped compensating and started cultivating the capacity we were born with.

Feet first.

Because how we walk tells the story of how we live. And maybe, just maybe, that story’s ready to change.

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The Whole Story

I was standing in the middle of the LA Convention Center, surrounded by thousands of bodies moving through The Fit Expo. Behind me, a banner highlighting the brand I represented. The Foot Collective, a group that believes “the key to better movement, less pain, and greater freedom starts with our feet.” Their goal, to provide the tools and training needed to, “empower people along the journey of restoring natural foot function and balance.” And they want to have as much fun as they can along the way.

So the question I keep asking those passing by was, “How are your feet doing?” and the follow up, “How will they be in a couple hours.” For those who were or would be suffering, I’d introduce them to a Soulmate.

While I did this hundreds of times over two days, there are a few people who really stood out in their responses. One was a woman in her sixties. When I asked that opening question she pointed down at her feet, encased in what looked like small orthopedic fortresses, and said with genuine pride, “I finally found the right orthotics and the right cushioned shoes. My feet have never felt better.”

She wasn’t the only one who had that response. Person after person would share their relief at finding the right insert, the right arch support, the right amount of cushion. And each time, I felt the quiet ache of watching people celebrate a scaffolding they’d been taught to mistake for strength.

So what did I do? I smiled. I nodded. And then I told her what I knew.

“It sounds like you’ve found a manufactured, outside-of-your-body solution to address the problems you were experiencing,” I said gently. “What we offer here are tools and resources that will help restore your body so it’s in a place where it can do what it’s designed to do without that support.”

She looked confused at first. Then curious. But also a bit traumatized at the idea that those she trusted to provide a solution might have actually just sold her a band-aid.

And in a world where we’ve been told to obsess over high arches and flat feet, along with the notion that healthy feet need support, the simple suggestion that feet, if we take time to strengthens and mobilize them, are designed to endure anything we can throw at them, sounds radical.

Some people weren’t ready to hear it. Some were defensive. But others leaned in. They sensed something true in what I was saying, even if it challenged everything they’d been told about how bodies work.

The Body as Sacred Interface

Here’s what I’ve come to understand, both through my work with The Foot Collective, my years at Xero Shoes, and through my own stumbling journey back into my body: your body is not a problem to be solved. It is a sacred interface with the world.

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When the Christian tradition talks about being made in the image of God, the Imago Dei, it’s not just talking about some abstract spiritual quality floating above our meat and bones. It’s saying that this body, with its thirty-three joints per foot, its ten thousand nerve endings, its ability to feel stone and soil and temperature and texture, is the very means by which we encounter the divine.

The body is not an obstacle to transcend. It is the canvas of our becoming.

And what we’ve done, in our modern brilliance, is build an entire industry around the assumption that this sacred interface is fundamentally broken. That it needs constant intervention, perpetual correction, endless compensation.

But here’s what I need you to hear: this isn’t just about feet. This is about the body as sacred interface, about what it means to be fully human in a world that profits from our fragmentation. The story of the foot is the story of everything. It’s how we’ve been taught to mistrust our own design, to outsource our strength, to believe that the scaffolding is the structure. And once you see this pattern in your feet, you start seeing it everywhere: in how we eat, how we move, how we rest, how we relate, how we think about ourselves and our place in the world.

The question isn’t just “How do we restore our feet?” It’s “How do we restore our humanity?” Because every time we choose compensation over cultivation, every time we reach for the external fix instead of tending the internal capacity, we’re participating in a larger story. A story that says we’re fundamentally broken. That our bodies can’t be trusted. That we need constant intervention just to function. And that story, friends, is a lie that keeps us dependent, disembodied, and disconnected from the very ground beneath us.

So what is the story of feet? How did we get here and what might it reveal about a larger story of staying human?

How We Got Here

For thousands of years, human feet moved across varied terrain: rock, sand, mud, root, snow, grass. Our feet learned to grip, to adjust, to respond to the earth beneath them. Every step was a conversation between body and ground, a tiny negotiation that kept joints mobile, muscles engaged, balance sharp.

Then we invented the modern shoe. It’s appearance isn’t an accident of progress. It’s a two part story, with the first one involving fashion born from function, then frozen into form long after the function faded.

So what are the characteristics of the modern shoe and where did they come from?

Medieval Function Becoming Fashion

Have you ever noticed how modern shoes taper into points at the toe, never mind that feet, especially healthy ones, are widest at the toes? Who decided that, rather than shoes being foot shaped, shoes should reshape our feet?

When we go back in history, it becomes clear that the narrow toe and elevated heel weren’t originally designed for walking. They were designed for riding. In medieval Europe, those wealthy enough to own horses needed footwear that would slip easily into stirrups and lock securely in place. A pointed toe made insertion smooth. An elevated heel caught the stirrup’s edge, anchoring the rider’s foot so they could maintain control of a thousand-pound animal beneath them.

This made perfect sense if you spent your days on horseback. But here’s where the story turns: because the people who rode horses were the people with wealth and power, they were also the people who set the standard for what looked dignified, respectable, fashionable. The riding shoe became the status symbol. And status symbols, once established, rarely stay tethered to their original function.

By the 15th century, narrow-toed shoes had become wildly fashionable across Europe. The wealthy weren’t just wearing them for riding anymore. They were wearing them everywhere, each generation making the toe boxes narrower, the points more exaggerated, the heels more pronounced. It was a way of announcing, without words, that you belonged to the class that didn’t walk far, didn’t labor with their hands, didn’t need their feet to be practical.

And the bodies paid the price.

Skeletal remains from 15th-century England tell a story the fashion historians missed. Among the wealthier segments of the population, there’s a sudden explosion of bunions, deformed toe joints, and broken arms. The bunions came from years of squeezing feet into shapes they were never meant to hold. The broken arms came from falls: people losing their balance because their feet, trapped and weakened in rigid, narrow shoes, could no longer do the subtle work of keeping them upright. They were literally breaking their bodies to signal their status.

One of the women I encountered at The Fit Expo, a woman who spent the day walking around in high heeled boots, summed up their lives in a single sentence, “Beauty is pain.” she told me. And the terrifying part, she meant it and embraced it.

The Lawn as Status Symbol

There’s another perfect parallel here, and it’s literally right under our feet: the American lawn.

The manicured grass lawn isn’t native to most of America. It’s a European import, specifically from the English and French aristocracy, where vast stretches of perfectly maintained grass signaled that you had so much land and so much wealth that you could afford to dedicate acres to something purely ornamental. You didn’t need that land to grow food. You didn’t need it for livestock. You had enough resources that you could pay people to maintain grass for the sole purpose of looking at it.

It was the ultimate status symbol: perfectly useless land.

And we imported that symbol wholesale, but here’s the problem: most of America doesn’t have the climate for it. England is cool and rainy. Grass grows there with minimal intervention. But we’ve taken this European status marker and tried to force it onto desert climates, arid regions, places where grass has no business growing naturally.

So what do we do? We pump massive amounts of water, a precious and increasingly scarce resource, into keeping these lawns alive. We dump fertilizers and pesticides to maintain that perfect green color. We mow obsessively, often with gas-powered equipment that pollutes the air. We’ve created an entire industry around maintaining something that doesn’t belong in most of the environments where we’ve planted it.

And for what? So we can signal the same thing those European aristocrats were signaling centuries ago: that we have resources to waste. That we can afford to maintain something purely decorative. That we belong to a certain class, a certain vision of suburban respectability.

The lawn isn’t just environmentally destructive. It’s a perfect example of how we’ve mistaken the scaffolding for the structure. We’re not creating actual wealth or actual beauty or actual connection to the land we live on. We’re maintaining an imported symbol of wealth that made sense for the greedy and opulent in a completely different context, and we’re destroying our local ecosystems and depleting our water resources to do it.

Just like the narrow-toed riding boot that became fashionable footwear centuries after anyone needed it for riding, the manicured lawn persists as a status symbol long after the conditions that made it sensible have disappeared. We’re breaking our environment the same way medieval Europeans broke their feet: sacrificing function for the appearance of status.

And just like with our feet, the solution isn’t more intervention, more products, more chemicals to force the lawn to thrive where it doesn’t belong. The solution is to ask: What actually belongs here? What could grow naturally in this climate, in this soil, with the water that actually falls from the sky?

That’s cultivation. That’s working with the capacity of the land instead of constantly compensating for what it lacks. That’s letting go of the imported symbol and discovering what’s actually sustainable, what’s actually beautiful, what actually makes sense for where we are.

The Running Revolution

But as I implied before, there’s another shoe that needs to drop, the rest of the modern shoe story to tell. This one tells the story of the modern athletic shoe and the 20th century’s athletic shoe revolution. Finally, we thought, footwear designed for movement. Shoes built for function, not fashion. Except we made the same mistake all over again, just with different materials. Rigid soles that eliminate ground feel. Arch supports that do the work our foot muscles were designed to do. And cushioning, so much cushioning, that we lost all feedback from the ground. We traded the narrow constraints of the riding boot for the numbing comfort of the modern running shoe, and called it progress.

The turning point came in 1972. Frank Shorter won the Olympic marathon in Munich, and something unprecedented happened in American culture: people who had been largely sedentary suddenly wanted to run. It was beautiful. A collective impulse toward embodied movement, toward reclaiming something primal and human. But bodies that had been sitting in cars and offices for decades weren’t ready for the sudden demand. And predictably, injuries spiked.

Now, back in 1972, athletic shoes were the old school Puma and Adidas. Completely flat with minimal cushioning. Since that’s what was available, that’s what people wore. So that’s what people got hurt wearing. And here’s where the athletic shoe industry saw an opportunity. Instead of teaching people how to train well, how to gradually build capacity, how to let their bodies adapt the way human bodies have adapted for millennia, researchers came to Phil Knight and others in the early days of what would become Nike with a proposal: elevate the heel. The logic was seductive in its simplicity. Calf pain came from the eccentric lengthening of the calf muscle during running. If you elevate the heel, you shorten the range of motion, reduce the strain, eliminate the pain.

And it worked. Sort of. The immediate calf pain decreased. People felt relief. The shoes sold. The industry exploded. But here’s what they didn’t tell anyone, or perhaps didn’t yet understand: when you change the heel height, you change everything.

The elevated heel shifts your center of gravity forward. It invites overstriding: that reaching-out-in-front-of-you gait that looks fast but is actually a braking motion with every step. It encourages heel striking, slamming your heel into the ground first instead of landing on your midfoot or forefoot the way barefoot runners naturally do. And both of those changes send shockwaves of impact up the kinetic chain. The very problems the elevated heel was supposed to solve, it simply relocated. Calf pain decreased. Knee injuries, IT band syndrome, hip issues, and stress fractures skyrocketed.

The running industry has spent the last fifty plus years chasing its own tail, inventing increasingly complex solutions to problems the original “solution” created. More cushioning to absorb impact. Stability features to control pronation. Motion control systems to compensate for weak hips. Orthotic inserts to support collapsed arches. Each innovation addressing a downstream consequence of the elevated heel, without anyone willing to name the obvious: maybe we shouldn’t have elevated the heel in the first place.

What they could have done, what they should have done, was teach people how to train. How to build mileage gradually. How to strengthen feet and calves so they could handle the load. How to run with form that distributed impact naturally instead of concentrating it in vulnerable joints. But education doesn’t scale like products do. You can’t patent a training plan. You can’t build a billion-dollar empire by telling people a product will make their bodies capable.

So instead, we got an entire industry built on the premise that human feet are fundamentally inadequate for the activity they evolved to do. As time passed, all of these supposed solutions became the baseline for how every foot should be supported, all day, every day. We medicalized normal foot function and then sold the corrective as essential.

The orthotics, the arch supports, the maximum cushioning, these aren’t solving a design flaw in the human foot. They’re compensating for what centuries of fashionable constraint and modern overprotection have taken away. We didn’t just change what we put on our feet. We changed how our feet function. We weakened them. We restricted them. We turned them from strong, adaptable tools into dependent passengers. And then we sold orthotics to fix what the shoes broke in the first place.

The woman at the expo wasn’t wrong to feel relief. The orthotics were helping. But they were helping her manage a problem that modern footwear had created. She was celebrating the scaffolding without realizing she’d been robbed of the capacity to stand on her own.

My Journey Back to “Normal”

Seven years ago, I discovered barefoot shoes in the most unexpected way.

I was at an outdoor expo with my then twelve-year-old when they spotted a prize wheel at a vendor booth. You know the kind: bright colors, promises of free stuff, that magnetic pull that twelve-year-olds can’t resist.

“A spinner!” they shouted, and took off running before I could say anything.

I followed a few moments later to find my kid absolutely lit up with excitement, and some guy at the booth talking to me about these shoes his company sold. He was bending them, flexing them, rolling them into balls, going on about “natural movement” and barefoot mechanics and a bunch of stuff that made absolutely no sense to me at the time. I’m sure I looked like that 60-something year old at the expo this past weekend.

And when I looked at the shoes, I thought they were ridiculous. I’d had eight significant knee injuries and a surgery on each knee. I needed all the arch support, all the cushioning, all the structure I could get just to avoid being in constant pain. The idea that these thin, flexible, zero-drop shoes could possibly work for someone like me? Absurd.

But my kid was excited. And the booth guy told them they’d won a free pair of shoes, which was funny because there was definitely no “free shoes” option on the spinner. But they didn’t have any youth sizes at the display, so we’d have to go up to the brand’s offices to pick them up. When we got there, they ended up giving me a pair too.

Because my kid was so excited about the whole thing, I wore them a little. Just around the house at first. Then for short walks. Slowly building up time in them, mostly to humor my kid, mostly convinced this experiment would end badly.

After about a month, I decided to really test them. I wore them to work where I’d spend all day on my feet. Now, when I left the house that morning, I was absolutely convinced I would come home in agony. That there was no way these things actually worked. That they might feel fine for a little while, but they couldn’t possibly hold up for any real length of time, especially not for someone with a body like mine.

I came home that night feeling great. No pain. No problems. No knee issues. Nothing. Everything actually felt good. And outside of a couple instances where I had to wear something else for a specific occasion, I haven’t worn a traditional shoe since.

But what I wasn’t expecting was the added benefit that came with them. At the time, I was in the thick of my own mental health battle. I was stuck in patterns I couldn’t seem to break, depression pulling me backward into a past I couldn’t change, anxiety yanking me forward into a future I couldn’t control.

When I put on those barefoot shoes, suddenly, I could feel everything. Every pebble. Every crack in the sidewalk. Every shift in terrain. Where my old shoes had numbed me to the ground beneath me, these shoes made me aware of each step I was taking.

And something shifted. Every step became an anchor. A tiny invitation back into my body, back into this moment, back into the only place I actually had any power: right here, right now.

Depression lives in the past. It tells you the story is already written, that you are who you’ve always been, that nothing can change. Anxiety lives in the future. It spins catastrophic narratives about what might happen, what you need to prevent, what you must control.

But presence? Presence lives in the sole of your foot meeting the ground. It lives in the breath filling your lungs. It lives in the sensation of being here, in this body, in this step, in this singular unrepeatable moment.

The barefoot shoes didn’t cure my depression. But they gave me a practice. A way back. A reminder, with every step, that I was still here. Still embodied. Still capable of feeling.

The Architecture of Dependency

Now as much as I’ve talked about the history of footwear and feet, about barefoot shoes and balance tools, hopefully you picked up early on that it’s about so much more. It’s about a pattern I see playing out everywhere: We are sold solutions to problems we didn’t have until the system created them.

Modern shoes weaken feet, then orthotics “fix” them. Industrial food depletes nutrients, then supplements restore them. Sedentary work destroys our backs, then ergonomic chairs support them. Screen addiction fragments our attention, then productivity apps organize it.

We’ve built an entire economy on creating dependency. On weakening capacity and then selling the scaffolding to hold us up.

And we’ve internalized the lie that this is just how bodies work. That we’re inherently deficient. That without constant intervention, we’ll fall apart.

But what if that’s not true? What if our bodies, when given what they actually need, when asked to do what they were designed to do, are far more capable than we’ve been taught to believe?

Flat Surfaces, Flat Lives

When doing my contracting work in the foot health world, one of the most common objections I hear is about hard surfaces. “We’re not designed to walk on concrete all day.” And there’s truth in that. But here’s what most people miss: the issue isn’t the hardness. It’s the flatness.

Human feet are designed to adapt, to adjust, to respond to varied terrain. That’s why a quarter of your body’s joints are in your ankles down. What hurts feet isn’t hard ground. It’s the fact that every surface is exactly the same. Flat sidewalks. Flat floors. Flat parking lots. Flat everything.

Our joints don’t have to work. Our stabilizing muscles don’t have to engage. Our proprioceptive system, the intricate network that tells us where our body is in space, barely gets a signal.

And this flatness isn’t just literal. It’s everywhere.

We’ve flattened our lives. Flat schedules, same routine every day. Flat emotional ranges, medicating anything too high or too low. Flat spiritual experiences, domesticated into predictable Sunday services. Flat relationships, reduced to performative social media exchanges.

We were made for variation. For seasons. For the unpredictable terrain of being fully alive.

And when we eliminate all variation, when we cushion and support and stabilize everything, we don’t just lose strength. We lose aliveness.

The Slow Work of Cultivation

So what do we do?

Here’s what we don’t do: We don’t throw away all our shoes tomorrow and wonder why our feet hurt. That’s just swapping one form of violence for another.

The transition from scaffolding to strength is slow. Careful. Incremental.

When someone comes to The Foot Collective with decades of wearing conventional shoes, we don’t tell them to go run a marathon in huarache style sandals. We teach them to wake their feet back up. To spread their toes. To feel the ground. To build the capacity that modern footwear has been doing for them.

It takes time. Sometimes months. Sometimes years. But what they gain isn’t just stronger feet. It’s agency. It’s the knowledge that their body can be trusted, that it can adapt, that it doesn’t need constant external management to function.

And this is true beyond feet.

Wherever we’ve been living on scaffolding, wherever we’ve outsourced our capacity to products or systems or other people, the path back to strength looks the same: slow, patient, intentional cultivation of what has atrophied.

What This Means for Your Life

While I’m not just talking about feet anymore, if you’ve read this far and you’re still wearing shoes that squeeze your toes or elevate your heels or cushion every step, maybe start there. Your feet are the foundation. Literally.

But I’m also talking about everywhere else you’ve been taught you need scaffolding.

The emotional regulation app that does the work your nervous system could learn to do. The productivity system that compensates for scattered attention instead of cultivating focus. The spiritual practice that’s more about consuming content than encountering presence. The relationship dynamics where you’ve outsourced your stability to another person’s approval.

What would it mean to identify the scaffolding and ask: What capacity have I lost? What strength could I cultivate if I slowly, carefully, let this go?

This isn’t about rejecting help. Sometimes we genuinely need support. Sometimes the scaffolding saves our lives. But there’s a difference between temporary support while you heal and permanent dependency that keeps you weak.

For example, recently, my girlfriend was dealing with significant foot pain and inflammation. The kind that wasn’t stopping, that was interfering with her ability to function. And in that moment, the answer wasn’t “tough it out” or “just go barefoot and your feet will adapt.” The answer was strategic support.

We got her a pair of cushioned shoes that limited foot mobility to reduce the pressure on her joints and inflamed tissues. But here’s what made it different from the dependency cycle I’ve been describing: we also got shoes with a foot-shaped toe box, one that allows her toes, especially the big toe, to spread naturally. While it seems like a little thing, an individuated big to is not only the key to natural structure to the foot but it also improves blood flow through the entire foot.

So even while her feet were resting, even while the cushioning was protecting inflamed joints from further stress, the increased blood flow was supporting the healing process. We created the conditions for her body to do what it does best: repair itself.

But the goal was never to keep her in those shoes forever. The goal was to use them as temporary medicine while healing happened, then transition her out as quickly as possible to restore the strength and function that had been compromised.

It’s just like a broken arm. You don’t put a cast on when it breaks and then leave it on indefinitely so you never break your arm again. You wear the cast during the acute healing phase, and then as soon as it’s medically appropriate, you get it off and begin the work of restoring the muscle and function that atrophied while you were immobilized. The cast isn’t the problem. Wearing it forever is.

So yes, sometimes we need scaffolding. Sometimes we need support. Sometimes the intervention is exactly what allows healing to happen. The question is: Are we using it as medicine with the intent to restore capacity? Or are we using it as a permanent solution that keeps us dependent?

The Invitation

The simple point of all these stories about feet. Your body is not broken. It is made in the image of a God who became flesh, who walked on dusty roads with bare or barely covered feet, who knew the ache of muscles worked and the satisfaction of rest earned.

Your body is the sacred interface through which you encounter the world, through which love moves, through which presence becomes possible.

And when we honor that, when we stop treating it as a problem to be managed and start relating to it as a partner to be trusted, something shifts.

Every step becomes a conversation. Every sensation becomes information. Every moment of discomfort becomes an invitation to adapt rather than a sign of deficiency.

You are strong enough, or at least you have the potential to be. You just might need to remember how, and devote yourself to the process, to slowing developing the capacity your body is capable of achieving. And as you do, we’ll discover that this remembering is how we stay human.

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Embodiment Practices

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity. While these practices are usually behind the paywall, this week they are my gift to you.

Read more

But lately I’ve been wondering if we’ve asked diagnosis to do more than it can carry.

What happens when the language meant to help us understand ourselves quietly becomes the walls of our lives? When explanation replaces transformation. When relief becomes the highest good. When the ache that might be calling us back to ourselves is met first with management.

This isn’t a rejection of therapy, medication, or mental health care. Some of them have saved my life. This is a question about formation. About what kind of humans we are becoming in a culture that names pain quickly and listens slowly.

Because beneath all our labels, there is a more ancient truth waiting to be remembered.

You are not a problem to solve. You are a human to restore. And restoration, unlike consumption, asks for participation.

Watch or Listen

The Whole Story

On New Year’s Day I sat in a Harkins theater, waiting to watch the newest Avatar movie. The lights were down, the room was filling up, and I was doing what people do before a film: settling in, letting myself get quiet, letting my body shift into rest.

And then a pharma ad started playing. Not on a TV in a living room where commercials are already a kind of background noise. Not in a doctor’s office where you can at least pretend it belongs. In a theater.

It hit me like a violation. A disgust. A shock. It was not only the content. It was the expansion. Like, really? We cannot even have this space? We cannot even watch a movie without being invited to see ourselves as a problem?

The ad was structured like an invitation. Do you struggle with this? Do you ever feel that? Do you find yourself doing this? And the tone was almost tender. Almost communal. Almost like it was letting me in on something. Are you one of us?

That is what struck me, more than the product. It was selling belonging. It was saying: you are not alone. There is a name for what you feel. There is a community for this. There is a category that can hold you. And there is a pill that can make you normal.

But the “normal” it promised was not aliveness. It was not thriving. It was not re-creation. It was relief. It was management. It was, at best, symptom abatement.

And part of me wanted to scream, not because relief is evil, but because I could feel how the invitation works. It takes the ache that makes you human and offers you a product as the first response.

It trains you out of curiosity. It trains you out of the body. It trains you into consumption. This is not just medicine. This is catechism. This is formation. This is a world teaching us, again and again, that the answer to pain is to buy something that mutes it.

That night in the theater, I realized again how deep this goes. Our culture does not just diagnose, it disciples.

Consuming Solutions

We were taught to manage pain by consuming solutions. Healing asks us to participate in our own re-creation.

That sentence is not a metaphor. It is a diagnosis of the culture we live in. A culture where the default response to discomfort is consumption.

You feel off. You feel heavy. You feel restless. You cannot focus. You cannot sleep. You are too much, or not enough. You have an ache you cannot name, a loneliness that won’t loosen its grip, a nervous system stuck in the on position. And almost immediately, the world around you offers the same kind of answer:

Name it. Label it. Pathologize it. Treat it. And “treat it” usually means: shut it down.

I want to say clearly, right up front, what this is and is not. I am not anti-medication. I am not anti-therapy. I am not anti-diagnosis.

There are situations where medication is necessary and lifesaving. There are people with real chemical imbalances, real conditions, real crises, and medication can be a bridge back to stability. Therapy can be a place where shame unknots itself for the first time in years. Diagnosis can be a tool. A map. A flashlight.

But a flashlight is not a home.

My critique is not diagnosis as a tool. It’s diagnosis as an identity. It’s the moment a label stops being a helpful description and starts becoming a definition of who you are. It’s the moment we start confusing explanation with transformation, and symptom suppression with healing.

Because here’s the thing I’m willing to say plainly: A diagnosis can be accurate and still be spiritually and biologically incomplete.

Accurate and incomplete. Because you are more than your symptoms. You are more than your past. You are more than your story. You are more than the worst things that happened to you, and more than the ways you learned to survive them. And if we stop at diagnosis, if we stop at the label, we might relieve shame, but we will not necessarily restore life.

And I am increasingly convinced that we live in a society that is not just overly diagnosed, but overly pathologized.

We’ve been trained to talk about everything in the language of disorder. We take ordinary human struggles and turn them into clinical identities. We take nervous systems that learned to protect us and call them broken. We take pain that may be calling us toward reorientation and call it a problem to manage.

We are obsessed with diagnosing people. And then we are shocked that people feel less human.

Diagnosis as identity, and the comfort of being named

I know why diagnosis is appealing. I have felt its comfort. Not theoretically. In my own skin.

There was a season when I sat in a therapist’s office and went through what felt like an exhaustive diagnostic process. He was mapping my life like it was a series of inputs and outputs. Concussions. History. Patterns. Family stuff. Nervous system stuff. He moved through it all with a kind of authority that felt like wisdom.

At one point he looked at me and asked, “You were a C-section, right?”

Then he started talking about birth canal hormones. Cortisol. Sympathetic activation from the very beginning. As if my nervous system had been set to overdrive before I even had a chance to choose anything.

And then he said a line that landed like absolution. Based on your history, I totally get right where you are. I totally get why you are the way you are.

In that moment, I felt something lift. I had been living inside deep shame, convinced I was broken. Convinced I was fundamentally defective. So to have someone look at me and say, “This makes sense,” felt like being released from prison.

I felt seen. I felt relief. I felt shame loosen its grip. And if I am honest, I also felt let off the hook.

Because if this is just where life brought me, if this is the natural extension of what happened to me, then what more can be asked of me? I am simply the product of my story.

This is where diagnosis becomes seductive. It gives you an explanation for who you are. It names the chaos. It gives you a reason. It can reduce the shame that says, “You are bad.” It can replace it with a story that says, “You are understandable.”

That is not nothing. Shame is not a tool of transformation. Shame fractures relationship with self, with others, and with the Beloved. If a diagnosis helps someone breathe for the first time in years, I am not here to take that from them. But what I did not realize in that season is that explanation can become a hiding place.

Because after that appointment, I started calling my therapist “my Yoda.” He had the wisdom. He had the map. He had the language. And I slipped into a posture of victimhood.

Not victimhood as in, “What happened to me was not real.” It was real. It shaped me. It mattered. It left grooves in my nervous system. But victimhood as in: agency moved outside of me. It became, “This is what happened. This explains me. This is why I am this way.” And I lived like that explanation was the end of the story.

Here is how I know it was a trap. It did not resolve the dysfunctional behavior. It did not heal my relationships. It did not stop me from doing things that harmed other people. It gave me a story that felt good, but it did not give me a new way of being.

The comfort of diagnosis can be real, and it can also become a cage. Diagnosis can be a tool, but when it becomes identity, transformation often stalls. You get a name. You get a narrative. You get a community. And sometimes you stop moving.

When treatment becomes suppression, and suppression becomes a way of life

I have also felt the comfort of diagnosis in a more direct way. I was once diagnosed as type II bipolar. And I remember, in the beginning, it felt good. There was a strange relief in the idea: “Oh. This is why. There is an explanation.”

Before that, my days were often marked by stagnation, then sudden bursts of hyper productivity. I would struggle to do anything, then cram everything into a short window with frantic intensity. There were compulsions, including a deep and restless craving for human connection; physical connection. It was chaotic. It was exhausting. It felt like I was being dragged by something I could not name.

So when the label came, it gave me a sense of orientation. It offered me a coherent story. And then came the solution. Lithium.

Now, I want to be careful. I know medication can be a bridge for people. I know it can be necessary. I know it can save lives. But in my experience, lithium also felt like a numbing of myself. It did not feel like re-creation. It felt like shutdown. And the shutdown had a shape. It looked like playing solitaire games all day. It looked like sleeping and taking naps. It looked like drifting through life in a fog. It looked like disconnection.

It also carried shame. Because when you are numb, you do not just lose pain. You lose desire. You lose presence. You lose the signal that tells you what is true. And then you feel guilty for being numb, which adds another layer of heaviness. It affected relationships. It made intimacy harder. It made aliveness harder. It made my inner world quieter, but not necessarily more whole.

I only took lithium for about eight months. Eventually I hit a point where I knew, deep down, I could not live this way. I did not want a life that was simply the absence of symptoms. I wanted a life that was full. I wanted thriving. And that is where I started to see the deeper problem.

Sometimes our solutions are also part of the assault. Sometimes we respond to a nervous system screaming for care by giving it something that mutes the scream, but never attends to what caused it. Sometimes we treat the symptom as the enemy, instead of treating the symptom as a messenger. Sometimes, what we call “treatment” is simply the management of a human being back into functioning. Back into productivity. Back into compliance. Back into performance.

I am not saying medication is always that. I am saying it can be used that way in a culture that is addicted to consumption. In a culture that wants relief fast, and wants discomfort quiet, and wants people to keep moving.

This is why I keep coming back to the same line. We were taught to manage pain by consuming solutions. Healing asks us to participate in our own re-creation.

The hidden theology of “consumption as healing”

This is bigger than medicine. This is a story we live inside. Consumption as healing is a cultural religion.

It tells you: If you are hurting, buy relief. If you are anxious, buy calm. If you are lonely, buy distraction. If you are restless, buy stimulation. If you are overwhelmed, buy escape. If you are empty, buy a product that promises fullness.

It is a system that trains us to outsource our inner life. It keeps us from developing the muscles of presence. It keeps us from practicing discernment. It keeps us from the slow work of re-creation, the work that cannot be packaged or sold because it requires participation.

And yes, there is an exploitation element to this. Because if I am defined by my diagnosis, then I become predictable. I become marketable. I become a demographic. I become a recurring revenue stream. Diagnosis as identity can be the hook. Consumption as healing can be the business model.

And if I never move toward re-creation, if I never learn how to return to my body, if I never reclaim agency, then the system gets to keep me as a customer. Not as a human. Not as a neighbor. Not as a beloved. As a consumer.

This is where I want to name something with righteous fury and deep compassion at the same time. I am angry at any system that profits from people staying stuck. I am also tender toward anyone who has taken the only path that was offered.

Because it makes sense. We grew up in this. We were trained in this. We learned, early, that discomfort is dangerous, and that relief is the goal.

So if you have pursued medication, if you have pursued labels, if you have pursued the language of pathology as a way to make sense of your life, I am not here to shame you. I was you. You are not weak for wanting relief. You are not wrong for following the path that was laid in front of you.

But you may be ready for a different invitation. Not relief as the end. Relief as a bridge. A bridge back to re-creation.

The turn I did not expect, and what it taught me about healing

This past summer I had a moment that surprised me. I felt chaotic in my mind in a way I had not felt since back in the days when I was diagnosed bipolar. It was unsettling. It was familiar in the worst way.

It happened after I hurt my elbow and could not work out. I had been less active. Less in motion. Less in my body. And then suddenly my brain felt like it was spinning. I could not focus. I felt anxious and compulsive. There was a kind of panicked lust, a restless hunger for something, anything, to discharge the energy.

Years ago, I would have panicked. I would have assumed I was sliding backward. I would have treated it as proof that I was broken. This time, something different happened. I got curious. I paused. I listened. And I asked a question that does not fit well inside a culture of pathology. What is this trying to tell me?

That question prompted reflection. I went back through “Eastern Body, Western Mind,” and I noticed something about the energy in my head. Sometimes that pattern points to a longing to reconnect to the root. A longing to return to the body. A longing to come back to earth.

Most of my anxiety was about physicality. About embodiment. And the truth was, without working out, I had become more disembodied than I realized. I had drifted into my head. And my nervous system was trying to find its way home.

So I did something that felt almost too simple. I went outside and walked on grass. I made coffee slowly. I sipped it slowly. I engaged my senses. I returned to my body. And it changed everything.

That moment taught me something I wish our culture understood. System suppression is not the same as system regulation. Suppression says: make it stop. Regulation says: come back. Come back to breath. Come back to sensation. Come back to the body as the sacred interface, the place where life meets you, the place where the Beloved meets you.

Healing is not numbing. Healing is not shutting down. Healing is not plugging a volcano. Healing is learning how to feel what is true without being destroyed by it. It is letting anger move through you without becoming violence. It is letting grief soften you without collapsing you. It is letting anxiety become a signal, not a sentence.

For me, healing has meant learning to regulate my nervous system. Not by suppressing emotion, but by resourcing my capacity to feel it. It has meant practices over products. It has meant return over escape. It has meant re-creation.

Trauma culture, and the way identity can get anchored in injury

Now, in the midst of all this, we need to talk about trauma, because trauma language is everywhere now.

On one hand, I am grateful. There are people who lived for decades believing they were broken, when what they were actually carrying was a nervous system shaped by pain. Naming trauma can be the first crack in the shame story. It can be the first moment someone realizes: “This response makes sense.” That is a gift.

But trauma language can also become another identity trap. Trauma culture, as I am using the phrase, is the obsession with trauma as a defining feature of the self. It is the way “I am traumatized” can become both a core identity and a social shield.

It can turn into: You cannot challenge me because I have this trauma. You cannot call me toward growth because you might trigger me. You cannot tell me the truth because my story is the trump card.

And again, I want to be tender here. Sometimes those boundaries are necessary. Sometimes a person is genuinely not resourced for certain conversations. Sometimes safety is the first step. But I have also seen trauma language become a defense mechanism against growth.

This is the distinction that matters. Trauma as explanation says: this is why the pattern formed. Trauma as destiny says: this is who I am forever.

The first can be liberating. The second becomes a prison.

Trauma is not only what happened to you. Trauma is your response to what happened. And here is the hopeful part. Responses can change.

That does not mean you can rewrite history. It means you can rewrite the way your body holds it. You can change the groove. You can build new pathways. Neuroplasticity is real. The nervous system can learn safety. The body can repair.

In other words, you can move from “this explains me” to “this shaped me.” “This explains me” often keeps you in victimhood. “This shaped me” becomes a compost story. It becomes, “This happened, and it was real, and it left a mark. And I am still here. And I am still becoming. And I can metabolize this into wisdom and tenderness and strength.” That is re-creation.

The alternative vision, becoming human again

If consumption as healing is the villain, then re-creation is the alternative.

Re-creation is not self improvement. It is not hustle. It is not another performance project dressed up as spirituality. Re-creation is participation in the slow restoration of wholeness. It is the ongoing healing of fragmentation within self, with others, with earth, with God, with the Beloved. It is embodiment, not evacuation. It is presence, not perfection. It is learning to live from belovedness instead of fear.

And it has a doorway. Returning to the body. Because the body is not an obstacle to transcend. The body is the sacred interface. It is where we encounter the world, and where we encounter Spirit.

This is why the most human thing you can do in a dehumanizing culture is often painfully simple. Breathe. Feel your feet. Taste your coffee. Walk on the earth. Notice the tension in your jaw. Let your nervous system know it is safe. Let the story move through you. Come back.

Returning to the body is not a cute wellness trend. It is resistance. It is solidarity with your own humanity. It is the refusal to be reduced to a diagnosis, or a consumer profile, or a set of symptoms to manage. It is the practice of becoming human again.

What I want you to hear, if you are holding a diagnosis right now

If you have a diagnosis, I am not here to rip it away. If the label gave you language, I honor that. If it helped you feel less alone, I honor that. If medication has helped you survive, I honor that.

But I want to offer an invitation.

Do not confuse the name of the wound with the path of healing. Do not confuse relief with re-creation. Do not confuse management with aliveness.

Let diagnosis be a flashlight. Use it to see. Use it to orient. Use it to find support. But do not let it become the walls of your life.

Because you are not a problem to solve. You are a human to restore. And restoration is possible. It’s how we stay human.

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Embodiment Practices

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity. While these practices are usually behind the paywall, this week they are my gift to you.

Read more

My girlfriend was in town and we spent the days walking slow, laughing loud, lingering over food, soaking in hot springs, and welcoming the new year not with hustle but with presence.

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It felt more important to live human than to talk about staying human. So that’s what I did.

But since you’re here, maybe it’s a good time to reintroduce myself. I’m Joe. A storyteller, spiritual misfit, recovering pastor, funeral officiant, grief worker, holistic life coach, breathworker, aspiring permaculturist, father, friend, neighbor, and human-in-process. I’m trying to live a life shaped not by algorithms or urgency, but by presence, wonder, and radical love.

“We Can Stay Human” isn’t just a tagline. It’s a quiet rebellion. A weekly invitation to become more real, more rooted, more whole. It’s for anyone who’s tired of playing the game and wants to find another way.

This project unfolds in four movements:

• From shame to embrace.

• From performance to authenticity.

• From extraction to solidarity.

• From consumption to re-creation.

  We Can Stay Human is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Sometime I explore this more from a system perspective, looking at our body politic and how we’ve collectively chosen to organize ourselves. At other times, it focuses on more of an individual journey. Here you’ll find history and psychology, current events and confessions, all expressed through stories guided by a mystical spirituality that, while rooted in the Christian tradition, looks nothing like what you’d find in a church on Sunday morning.

Each week, the main post is printed in full. If you want embodiment practices, one you can do in 60-seconds, another in 60-minutes, and a third that’s a full on life rebellion, that’s what’s below the paywall.

If you’re new here, or just want to revisit the terrain we’ve been walking, I’ve pulled together a few posts. You’ll find them below.

Thanks for walking with me. Even in the pauses, the path is still unfolding.

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1. This was the first post I thought of as We Can Stay Human came into being. It might not be my best work, but it tells the origin story of the project:

2. Another early post, one that formed as I built the wall I stand in front of each week, but it’s also one that seems to have permanent standing in my top posts:

3. For a taste of the political, this piece argues that Trump isn’t an exception, but he’s actually the most American of Presidents. It explores our history as a country and invites us question what we want moving forward.

4. Finally, one that I see as one of the more important pieces. One that explores a text that impacts us all, especially when it is misused and abused by so many in power. At the same time, there’s something in it that’s powerful, if we learn to read it well:

A reflection shaped by soil and silence, disappointment and persistence. A thread that began with a stranger’s comment, but unraveled into something deeper. A story about systems, shame, and the sacred possibility of becoming human again.

If you’ve felt the weight of performance. If you’ve sensed that the world is asking more of you than it’s willing to return. If you’ve tried to speak up or build something better, only to feel dismissed or disillusioned…

This is for you.

What follows is not a manifesto or master plan. It’s a testimony. A lived meditation on what it means to stay human in the shadow of systems that feed on our numbness.

Read it as story. As soil. As slow rebellion.

And if a key appears, take it.

Watch or Listen

The Whole Story

I saw the comment at the gym, right after I finished a workout.

That moment when your body is still humming, sweat drying, breath settling. The rare pocket of clarity you get when you have done something real with your muscles and your breath, and you are not trying to be a brand or a product for five minutes.

I opened Instagram, and there it was. A stranger under a clip I had posted about how the system is screwed up.

“It’s cute that you think systems, structures, and powers actually care what you think.”

My heart sank. Not in a dramatic way, more like the air got let out of a balloon. A quick collapse inside my chest. Confusion first. That kind of confusion that is not intellectual, it is bodily. Like, Why would you come here and do that?

Now, to be honest, cynicism is not how I operate. I am honest about what is. I am not pretending the machine has a conscience. But I am also relentlessly optimistic that there is possibility for more.

So my first instinct was not to clap back. It was to try to understand. To hope there was something underneath it. A real question. A real wound. A real perspective. Something with substance. I found myself wanting to invite that forward.

Because if you are going to challenge me, fine. I can take a challenge. But this was not a challenge. It was a door slam. And maybe that is the point. Cynicism rarely arrives with curiosity. It arrives with a verdict. It shows up to say, “You do not matter.” It’s the very lifeblood of a shit post.

And it does not even say it in a cruel way, most of the time. It says it in a cool way. A detached way. A world-weary way. A way that lets the cynic feel like they are simply reporting reality. But cynicism is not neutral. Cynicism is one of the system’s most dependable defense mechanisms.

The system does not just govern us. It trains us.

In my posts here over the past few months I have spent a lot of time lately trying to help people see the system more clearly. Not because awareness is a magic wand, but because naming the bars matters. You cannot walk out of a prison you refuse to admit you are in.

In my own language, I have been trying to rattle cages. Not to shame prisoners. To help people recognize the sound of the lock. Because the system is not only “out there,” in politics and policy and power. It is also “in here,” in the way we are shaped. In the reflexes we develop to survive. In what we learn to normalize. In the kind of human being we are being trained to become.

Here is what I mean when I say the world around us is crafted to assault our humanity.

1) Shame: the inner whip

The system runs on shame. Shame turns humans into compliant labor. Shame turns living beings into performance machines. Shame tells you:

• You are behind.

• You are not enough.

• You are failing at being human.

And once you believe that story, you will do almost anything to stop feeling it. You will overwork. You will under-rest. You will keep the peace by swallowing the truth. You will apologize for needs that are simply human needs. You will stay in relationships, organizations, jobs, and identities that keep you small because the cost of leaving feels like death.

Shame does not only hurt. Shame governs. Shame is how the system gets inside your nervous system and starts making decisions for you.

2) Cog-making: the flattening of soul

But shame is not the only tool. The system also tries to turn us into cogs. Not unique creatures with a soul-call and a strange, holy particularity. Not people meant to embody a specific kind of beauty in the world. Just interchangeable units. Replaceable. Optimized. Quantified.

This is why so many people feel like their life is a series of tasks rather than a story. This is why the question “What do you want?” can feel offensive, like someone is asking you to speak a language you never learned. This is why we have to relearn how to feel desire without immediately turning it into a performance plan.

That is not just economic. It is spiritual violence.

3) Exploitation: extraction dressed up as normal

And the system does not only ask for effort. It extracts. It trains you to give your life away to something that will never love you back. It asks for your best hours, your clearest attention, your creative fire. And then it offers you crumbs of status and a thin, anxious kind of security.

It calls this “success.” It calls this “being responsible.” It calls this “adulting.”

But if you pay attention, you can feel the trade. Your body knows when it is being used. Your soul knows when it is being harvested.

4) Numbing-by-consumption: sedation disguised as self-care

So when shame hurts too much, and exploitation leaves you empty, the system offers anesthesia.

Consume. Scroll. Buy. Binge. Dissociate. Do whatever it takes to not feel the ache.

I do not say that with contempt. I say it with recognition. Because numbness is not a moral failure. Numbness is often a survival response. Sometimes it is the last mercy your body can offer you when life has been too much for too long.

But numbness is also a kind of captivity. It keeps you alive, and it keeps you asleep. And most people I know are there right now. Not raging. Not organizing. Not “changing the system.” Just trying to make it to the end of the day without falling apart.

My detour through “the movement” and what it taught me

Part of what made that Instagram comment hit so hard is this. I have tried to do the big systemic thing. I have tried to join a political organization. I have devoted countless hours in collective spaces that were supposed to be aimed at liberation. And what I found there was sobering.

Not because the dream of democracy is stupid. Not because collective action is impossible. But because human formation does not magically appear just because we put a justice word on the banner.

In one particular movement I poured myself into, I found myself as the Co-Coordinator of the Regenerative Culture Circle. A group created within the organization to help it embody values around respect and partnership. Functionally that meant conflict resolution. Dispute handling. The attempt to keep the body intact.

And then the moment came that clarified the whole thing for me.

Two dynamics were happening at the same time.

The first: the vote that was never allowed to become real

First, a key person on the team overseeing political outreach resigned.

The people actually doing that work wanted to hold a vote to decide who the new coordinator or coordinators would be. The founder wanted to appoint someone.

There were long discussions. An interim coordinator was appointed. And then there was an agreement that mattered. There would be a vote within a set time frame. I was integral in helping bring about the conditions where that vote could actually happen.

The vote came. The committee elected co-coordinators who would work together to run that committee and take a seat on the steering committee. And then, before that vote could take effect, it got neutralized. Not with an honest “no.” With timing. With procedure. With the kind of maneuver that keeps the illusion of democracy alive while making the people’s will irrelevant.

The second: the national organizing committee that kept getting postponed

How? Even before the head of political outreach resigned, there had been a strong push for months to begin moving toward the formation of a national organizing committee.

If you want to become a real political body, this is not optional. It means forming state parties that then come together to form a national party. The infrastructure of democracy.

Month after month, there was pushback. Delay. Deflection. A quiet resistance to letting that become real. And then, right after the vote on the political outreach committee, the founder announced the formation of an interim national committee.

And inside that announcement was a move that froze the central leadership group exactly where it was. The interim coordinator stayed locked in as the ongoing coordinator. The vote that had happened by the people had not been “affirmed” yet, which meant it could be treated as irrelevant.

And then, after demanding immediate action on forming state committees, the national organizing project was put back on hold again. Another stretch of time. More stalling. Not because the work was impossible. Because the work needed to be controlled. Because there was a desire to rig the formation of the national organizing body and ensure that any elections aligned with what the founder wanted.

When organizing meetings began, a proposal would be read and someone from the inner circle would immediately “call the question.” A vote would happen. They had just enough people to ensure every vote they wanted passed.

And they had one more agreement that made the whole thing feel like gaslighting. If a vote passed, it would be listed in the minutes in a way that made it look like everyone was in agreement. No debate. No discussion. Forced agreement, at least for the public record. And this was what was sold as democracy.

Ultimately, no amount of conflict resolution can heal a system where people are continuously dishonored. You can teach communication skills all day. But if one person has the power to silence the body, then the conflict is not a misunderstanding. It is structural.

What followed was the predictable spiral. People got exhausted. People got suspicious. People started reading one another through purity tests. Someone disagreed on an issue, and suddenly they could not be trusted on any issue. One group splintered into three. Then three into five. Then five into a hundred tiny factions, each convinced their own nuance was the only faithful path.

This is not a critique of passion. It is a critique of what happens when our nervous systems are still living in scarcity and threat, but we are trying to build liberation on top of that. It is what happens when we have not yet learned how to stay human with one another.

A poem about cages, and the quiet work of keys

Disheartened, I walked away. Not because I don’t believe change is possible, but because change has to happen a different way.

There is a poem from the Sufi mystic Hafiz that lives in the rhythm of my life. It was first spoken over me by a soul guide four years ago, and images from the poem captured my imagination:

The small man builds cages for everyone he knows.
While the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low,
keeps dropping keys all night long
for the beautiful rowdy prisoners.

I do not claim to be a sage. But I do know what it is to live in a cage, and then to find a key.

I have gone from a life that felt imprisoned to a life with far more freedom. Not because the system suddenly got kind. Not because I cracked the code. But because I started rebuilding my humanity in the shadow. And now, when I speak, that is what I am trying to do.

Rattle cages. Then drop keys. Not a master plan. Not a new ideology. Keys. Small, real, usable ways out.

We do not overthrow the system by yelling at it

So I want to be careful here. Sometimes naming the system sounds like yelling, but it is not the same thing. I am not interested in performative outrage. I am not interested in outrage as a substitute for love. And I am not interested in the fantasy that if we just say the perfect sentence, the whole machine collapses. I am interested in something slower, and in the long run, stronger.

We do not overthrow the system by yelling at it. We outgrow it. We outgrow it by building pockets of shalom.

The system is not only held together by law. It is held together by imagination. By habit. By a million daily acts of compliance that we have been trained to call “normal.”

Which means the system does not only break through confrontation. It also breaks through replacement. Through building something more beautiful, more nourishing, more human.

Shalom: not calm, but wholeness

There’s a word I dropped there: shalom. It’s a Hebrew word that gets translated as “peace,” but it is deeper than calm.

It is wholeness. Health. Human thriving.

It is the kind of well-being where your nervous system can unclench. Where your dignity is not up for debate. Where you can tell the truth. Where you can belong. Where you can rest. Where your life is not a commodity.

I am not offering shalom as a religious brand. I am offering it as a human possibility. A way of being in the world that can be rooted in spiritual soil without being trapped in religious gatekeeping.

And here is what matters. Shalom is not a theory. Shalom is a lived environment. It is what it feels like when you are with people who are not trying to use you. It is what it feels like when someone makes room for your “no.” It is what it feels like when conflict can happen without contempt. It is what it feels like when people can disagree and still choose one another. It is what it feels like when the goal is not winning. The goal is thriving.

Beauty grows in the shadow

Here is the vision that is holding me right now:

In the shadow of the system, something beautiful is growing. Like a plant finding life in the least hospitable place. A shoot pushing up through a crack in rock.

The rock is hard. The conditions are brutal. The system is indifferent. And still, life insists.

At first it looks insignificant. One green thing. One person doing one small human thing. One pocket of shalom. One friend group telling the truth. One garden bed. One shared meal. One neighborly act.

But roots do something shouting cannot. Roots go deep. Roots keep growing when no one is watching. Roots find water. And over time, when enough roots do their quiet work, the rock begins to split.

That is how the future arrives. Not as a sudden clean reset. As life rising. As commons returning. As communities of shalom growing in the shadow until the old stone cannot hold.

A word about “reset” and “transition”

I was listening to a podcast recently where two people were arguing about systems change. One was naming all the ways material conditions shape what we call “public safety,” and how investing in care can reduce harm. The other kept returning to a different point: we cannot just flick a switch and jump from the world we have to the world we want. We need a real transition. I found myself nodding at both.

Yes, we need transformation. And yes, we cannot pretend the way there is instant.

Which is exactly why the work of shalom matters. It is transition work. It is seed work. It is building what we wish existed, in the places we actually live.

This is one of the system’s great traps. It whispers: “If you cannot fix it all, do nothing.” And then it calls that “realism.”

But real life does not happen through switch-flipping. Real life happens through seasons. Through compost. Through time. Through fidelity.

Re-creation is rebellion

Here is the key I am trying to drop, as plainly as I can: The system trained you to consume. Re-creation is rebellion. Not re-creation as escapism. Re-creation as cultivation. Re-creation as choosing aliveness. Re-creation as building a life you do not need to numb yourself to survive.

This is where the word “re-creation” matters. Not entertainment. Not distraction. Not retail therapy.

Re-creation as making again. Re-creating a human life. Re-creating a nervous system. Re-creating friendships that can hold truth. Re-creating shared space. Re-creating beauty. Re-creating rest. Re-creating community.

That is not small. That is not apolitical. That is not selfish. It is the beginning of a new commons. It is the return of the human.

Always be ready to name the hope

There’s a line in 1 Peter that has been following me around for years. “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” And then it adds, “Do this with gentleness and respect.”

I love that pairing. Hope is not a vibe. Hope is not denial. Hope is a practiced posture. And it has to be speakable. Not in a defensive, debate-me way. More like, “If you are curious why I refuse to give myself to cynicism, here’s the soil I’m rooted in.”

Because we have seen world-changing transformation happen before.

Long before Christianity became an institution, it was a way. A way of living. A way of being in community. A way of being in the world.

It sprang up in the wake of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Not as an organization you joined, but as a new kind of human life you practiced. And in a Roman world built on hierarchy, division, and domination, it was shocking.

There are hints in the historical record of communities where old separations started to lose their power. Where people refused the usual sorting mechanisms, race, gender, class. Where the poor were not treated as disposable. Where resources were shared. Where care was not a charity project, but a communal responsibility.

In other words, it looked like shalom in public. Not perfect. Not painless. Not free of conflict. But real enough that the world noticed.

And when something like that becomes visible, empires do what empires do. They move to contain it. They absorb it.

It was both appropriation and co-optation. A distortion, and a redirection. A strategic domestication that took something living and powerful and folded it into structure.

A movement becomes an institution. A way becomes a membership system. A table becomes an org chart.

I’m not saying that story with contempt. I’m saying it with grief and clarity. Because it means two things can be true at once.

First, this kind of transformation is possible. It has happened.

Second, if we build pockets of shalom now, we should expect the system to try to tame them. Not necessarily with violence at first. Sometimes with respectability. Sometimes with funding. Sometimes with “partnership.” Sometimes with a seat at the table that comes with a muzzle.

So when I talk about hope, I am not talking about a clean revolution that never gets compromised. I am talking about something more resilient.

I am talking about a way of life that keeps reappearing, like shoots through cracks in stone. A way that makes the world ask, “Where did you get that kind of hope?”

The system is not only held together by law. It is held together by imagination. By habit. By a million daily acts of compliance that we have been trained to call “normal.”

Which means the system does not only break through confrontation. It also breaks through replacement. Through building something more beautiful, more nourishing, more human.

Where I am practicing this right now

My own “crack in the rock” is not glamorous. It is land. It is friendships. It is the slow work of turning 1.1 acres into something more like an urban homestead, and also something more like a gathering place.

One of the first projects that really got me started was almost laughably ordinary. There is a strip between the street and the front fence at my house. In that space was a mix of rocks, dying juniper, and weeds. It looked like neglect. And it felt like neglect.

But I wanted it to become something that worked well for the neighbors. Something pleasant to walk by. Something that communicated, in the quiet language of landscaping and care: “I am with you. I live here too. I want this place to be beautiful.”

So I started clearing. Getting rid of the rock. Pulling the dying juniper. Working with the stubbornness of the soil instead of fighting it.

And then, in a way that felt like a tiny parable, the rock I removed did not become trash. I gave it to another neighbor who needed rock for mud mitigation. What could have been waste became support.

Then I started composting what I was removing. Mulching the juniper down. Feeding it into compost bins. Letting what was dying become the beginning of soil that will feed garden beds later.

And it kept expanding.

Fallen branches from around my house. Fallen branches from neighbors. I started taking what was already here, mulching it, and using it to fill in the dirt where the juniper and rocks had been.

In the spring, I will plant and xeriscape that whole strip. But even now, it feels like a different story is being told. Not because it is finished. Because it is moving. Because it is becoming.

And then there is compost in the more communal sense. I am on the MakeSoil app, which means I keep a trash can at the end of my driveway. People can drop off compostable scraps which feed my compost bins today and will nurture my fruits and vegetables tomorrow.

There is something small and holy about that. Neighbors feeding the soil of a place we all share. And it has made me notice how the earth does what the system refuses to do.

The system tells us: Extract. Consume. Discard.

But the earth composts. It takes what was and turns it into what will be. Even the pine needles that fall and start suffocating the ground beneath the trees, I have been gathering and spreading out in an area where I have rabbits.

Then I spread clover seed. So they have a place that feels safe and vibrant and alive.

This is the practice that keeps returning to me. How do I take what is here and feed it back into what is here? How do I take what was and use it to give life to what will be?

And in the midst of it, how do I partner with neighbors? Receiving from them. Helping clear out their debris. Participating in life cycles instead of feeding the machine.

And alongside the land, it is friendships. Not networking. Not clout. Not transactional community. A friend group that can tell the truth, hold tenderness, and stay human together. A friend group that can laugh. A friend group that can disagree without turning disagreement into exile. A friend group that can name the system without becoming a replica of it.

This is not me opting out of care for the larger world. This is me refusing to let the system dictate the only way change is allowed to happen.

Because the system loves two kinds of people. The numb. And the addicted-to-outrage. Both are predictable. Both are controllable.

But a person who is quietly becoming free is dangerous.

Numb to tenderness to agency

So if you are numb, I want to say this gently: Your numbness makes sense. It is not laziness. It is not failure. It is often the last mercy your body can offer you when life has been too much for too long.

But numbness is not the end of the story. There is a path. Not a perfect path. A human one. A path that moves from numbness to tenderness. And from tenderness to agency.

Not the agency of “fix the whole world.” The agency of “build something living in the shadow.” The agency of “practice shalom where you actually are.” The agency of “choose re-creation over consumption, one small key at a time.”

Agency, in this frame, is not heroic. It is not performative. It is not one more thing you have to do to prove you are good. Agency is what happens when your life stops being dictated entirely by the machine.

It is what happens when you can say:

• I can make soup.

• I can plant something.

• I can host one person.

• I can walk outside without headphones.

• I can put my phone down.

• I can tell the truth to someone safe.

Small things. But small things, repeated, are how a different world grows.

Below the paywall

Below the paywall, I am sharing a simple set of practices in three layers.

• A micro practice you can do in a minute.

• A deeper rhythm that takes more time.

• A longer reorientation toward a pocket-of-shalom life.

Not because you have to do it my way. Because I want you to have something you can use. Because I want more keys in more hands. Because the beautiful rowdy prisoners deserve a way out. Because we all deserve the opportunity to stay human.

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Embodiment Practices

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity. While these practices are usually behind the paywall, this week they are my gift to you.

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It’s just a box. A ridiculous, brilliant, 3D-printed puzzle box from my kid. Part prank, part project, part parable. The kind of thing that makes you laugh and groan and feel deeply seen all at once.

What starts as a story about that box (and a Christmas card that refused to stop playing Rick Astley) unfolds into something more: a meditation on the lies we’re sold about freedom, the places we think will save us, and the realization we all eventually face: You always bring yourself with you.

This piece is about play and presence, inner maps and honest healing. It’s about what it means to stay human in a world that depends on our fragmentation.

There’s a compass inside this one.

Let’s find our way together.

Watch or Listen

The Whole Story

My kid is a fantastic gift giver. Not, like, “here’s a thoughtful thing you asked for” gift giver. More like, “I studied your psyche and built a small comedic device to mess with you for an entire afternoon” gift giver.

Last year for Christmas they handed me a plastic box with a plastic bow on top. It looked innocent. It looked like the kind of thing you would set under a tree when you want the person opening it to feel a little more anticipation.

It was not innocent.

When I first picked it up it seemed unopenable. After tinkering for a moment I realize the bow was not just a decoration, it also concealed a tool. Unscrewing the plastic bow revealed a tiny key, one that would allow me to remove a collection of screws along each of the four ribbons that ran down the side of the box.

Five screws on each of the four ribbon segments. Twenty screws. Twenty. This was not gift wrapping. This was an engineering project. This was my kid looking at me and saying, “You are going to work for your joy.”

I sat there for a long time, slowly undoing screw after screw, laughing because the whole thing was so ridiculous.

I could feel the satisfaction in the room. Not in me. In them. They were watching their design do what it was designed to do.

Eventually, I got the ribbon off. Eventually, I got the box open. Inside was another little box. Small. Like an oversized ring box. On it, it said Just for you.

I opened it. A middle finger on a spring shot straight up.

I lost it. I laughed so hard. One of those deep belly laughs that makes you want to hit the floor and roll. It’s the response that prompted the original lmfao.

It was stupid. It was perfect. It was intimate in the strangest way. Because this is what good gift giving does. It says, “I see you.” It says, “I know what will make you laugh.” It says, “I know what kind of play you can carry right now.” And in a world that is increasingly allergic to play, that kind of attunement is not small.

It is holy. It is a way of staying human.

Next came the Christmas card. I opened it. It started playing Rick Astley. “Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down.”

A classic gag. I laughed again. And then I closed the card. And the card kept playing. On repeat. Over and over and over.

I opened it again thinking maybe it was motion activated. Nope. It just wanted to live. The song kept playing. The Rick Roll to end all Rick Rolls.

I did what any reasonable adult does when faced with a tiny piece of paper that will not stop making noise. I hid it. I took it out to the garage and locked it away until it finally died.

And the whole thing was hilarious.

But also, if I am honest, it was a tiny parable. Because so much of our modern life is loud. So much of our modern life is designed to keep playing even when we close the card. We try to shut it down. We try to escape. We try to silence it. But the music keeps going.

The notifications.

The hustle.

The doom scroll.

The subtle sense that we are behind.

The belief that if we could just get to the right place, the right job, the right body, the right relationship, the right schedule, then the noise would stop.

But the noise does not stop. It just follows us. And at some point, if we are brave enough, we admit the thing that we thought would bring us liberation, far too often, brings us devastation.

Why? Because even when all the externals change, no matter where you go, you bring yourself with you. There you are. And everything you are carrying is there too. The question is not whether we carry our story. The question is whether we will keep trying to outrun it. Or whether we will finally turn toward something more human.

The lie we keep buying

There is a lie we keep being sold, and it is powerful because it contains a small grain of truth. The lie is that you can do something external that will finally change your internal reality. If you move. If you buy. If you grind. If you rebrand. If you reinvent. If you find the perfect morning routine.

If you finally become the kind of person who does cold plunges and makes sourdough and never has a messy house. If you leave your town. If you leave your people. If you leave the version of yourself that remembers too much. Then, maybe, you will become free.

Now, to be fair, sometimes external changes matter. Sometimes you do need to leave. Sometimes you do need to get out of the environment that is actively harming you. Sometimes you do need distance to breathe. Sometimes you do need therapy and medication and community and new rhythms and a new zip code.

I am not here to romanticize staying stuck. I am here to name the trap.

Because there is a difference between leaving a cage and believing that the cage was the only thing in the way. There is a difference between change that supports your healing and change that replaces your healing. And our culture is very good at selling replacements.

It is good at telling you that the next purchase will finally make you feel like yourself.

It is good at telling you that the next place will finally make you feel alive.

It is good at telling you that the next relationship will finally make you feel whole.

It is good at telling you that the next achievement will finally make you feel safe.

It is good at telling you that hustle is a spiritual practice.

It is good at turning your life into a brand.

It is good at turning your pain into content.

It is good at turning your longing into a market.

And the whole system depends on you believing a very specific story. That the problem is out there. That the solution is out there. That you can outrun what hurts by moving fast enough. But sooner or later you arrive at the place you thought would save you, and you realize something.

You brought the haunt with you.

I have seen this a thousand ways:

People move to Denver.

People move to Nashville.

People move to Austin.

People move to LA.

They think the move will be the first step in their healing. They think the mountains, or the music scene, or the sunshine, or the new friend group will finally unlock something inside them.

And sometimes it does. And then, slowly, the deeper truth shows up.

I thought when I got away from my family I would no longer struggle. I thought I could finally be myself. I thought I could express myself more clearly. And then I got here and realized I did not really know who I was without them.

Or I thought when I got here and could do all these outdoor activities life would be more fun. But I am not having fun. I am distracting myself. I am staying busy. I am staying moving. I am avoiding the quiet. And when the quiet comes, there I am.

Still carrying fear.

Still carrying shame.

Still carrying grief.

Still carrying all the parts of my story that are not solved by a new skyline.

This is not a reason to despair. It is a reason to get honest. Because once you admit that you bring yourself with you, you stop wasting energy trying to perform your way into freedom. You start doing the work that actually changes you. You start turning toward something more human.

The gift I wanted to give

My kid’s gifts are playful. They are ridiculous. They are designed for laughter. They are also designed for connection.

When they give like that, it is not a distraction. It is a signal. It says, “I am paying attention.” It says, “I know you.” It says, “We are still capable of delight.”

And that kind of play is part of what I mean when I say staying human.

Not performing.

Not optimizing.

Not consuming.

Re-creating.

Reclaiming delight.

Reclaiming presence.

Reclaiming the ability to laugh at the absurdity of being alive.

So when their graduation came in May, I wanted to match that energy. I wanted to give them something that said, “I see you.” Not in the shallow way. Not in the social media way. In the real way.

I was proud. And tender. And scared. Because this is what it means to love someone who is stepping into the world.

You want their future to be bright. You want them to be free. You want them to be seen. You also know the world is not gentle. You know being human is not simple. So I gave them a big box.

On the tag I wrote, “I promise you, your future is bright.” Inside the big box was a box of light bulbs.

A dad joke, yes. But also a blessing. A way of saying, “Your life has light in it.” A way of saying, “You will not be swallowed by the dark.”

And then I wanted to give them something more substantive. Not as a lecture. Not as a sermon. Not as a “here’s how to live your life” monologue. More like a staged gift.

Wisdom that comes in phases. Because that is how real life works.

So I gave them a book. Lauren Graham’s In Conclusion, Don’t Worry About It. Inside the book cover I wrote something like this:

I think this is where I’m supposed to drop some dad wisdom bombs. But I’ve learned over the years that while sometimes valuable, they come best in stages and when invited. So I picked up four books for you. Four resources. After this one, I’ll only give you the next one when you finish the previous one and ask for the next.

1. This one: a great starting mantra.

2. And invitation to adventure and discovery.

3. For when you realize that no matter where you go, you bring yourself with you.

4. The rest of your life.

At the end of the book I left a note. Let me know when you are ready for an invitation to adventure and discovery.

A couple months later they came back. “Yeah. I’m ready.” So I handed them the next book. Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go.

And again, at the end, I tagged it. Because the point was never the book. The point was the arc. Adventure. Discovery. And then the moment where you realize something no one really tells you when you are young. No matter where you go, you bring yourself with you.

We have all met that moment.

Some of us meet it at 19.

Some of us meet it at 29.

Some of us meet it at 49.

Some of us meet it after a divorce.

Some of us meet it after a promotion.

Some of us meet it after a move.

Some of us meet it after our body finally says, “I can’t do this pace anymore.”

But we meet it.

And the question becomes, “Now what?”

This is where the gift of staying human matters. Because if you believe the cultural lie, the answer is, “Do something bigger.” Move again. Buy more. Hustle harder. Start over.

But if you are willing to tell the truth, the answer is, “Go inward.” Not as narcissism. Not as self-absorption. As reclamation. As healing. As wholing.

Healing and wholing

When I say healing and wholing, I mean something simple and also not simple at all.

It means learning to recognize the parts of your story that shaped you. The parts that informed you. The parts that have been trying to guide how you move through the world. Even when they guide you in ways that are not actually helping you anymore.

Shame does this.

Fear does this.

Grief does this.

Old coping strategies do this.

They are not evil. They are not proof that you are broken beyond repair. Most of the time, they are parts of you trying to help you survive. But survival strategies are not always life strategies.

Healing and wholing is the work of going back to those parts. Listening. Blessing the original ache. Giving those parts what they needed then, and what they need now.

So you can stop being run by the loudest voice in your inner world. So you can live from your wholeness. So you can live from belovedness. So you can move toward something more human.

And yes, I think it is almost impossible to do this alone. Sometimes we have to start by simply noticing what is happening inside us. And then we realize what is happening inside us is too big for us to hold by ourselves.

We need guides.

We need therapists.

We need coaches.

We need spiritual directors.

We need friends who will not flinch when we tell the truth.

We need community.

We need people who can sit with us long enough for the nervous system to stop believing it is in danger.

Not because we are weak. Because we are human.

A nature-based map for the psyche

One of the most helpful frameworks I have found for this work comes from Bill Plotkin.

In his book Wild Mind, Plotkin offers a nature-based map of the human psyche. It is not a formula. It is not a personality test. It is not a neat little box you can put yourself in. It is a compass.

A way of noticing where you are living from. A way of naming the parts of you that keep grabbing the steering wheel. A way of understanding why you keep ending up in the same patterns, even when you change the scenery.

Plotkin uses the image of the four directions. Each direction holds an aspect of wholeness. Each direction also has its own distortions. Its own sub-personalities. Its own ways of trying to keep you safe.

And the work of staying human is learning how to integrate the whole circle. Not just your favorite quadrant. Not just the part of you that performs well. Not just the part of you that can hold it together. The whole thing. The whole human.

Plotkin’s Map

In the South, Plotkin locates our wounded children. The parts of us that learned early what it takes to belong. The parts of us that carry the insider and outsider stories. The parts of us that still flinch in rooms that resemble our childhood.

When we are trapped here, we tend to live from fear or anger. We react. We brace. We protect. We become small.

Or we become sharp. Not because we are bad. Because a part of us is trying to keep us safe.

The path toward healing in this quadrant is not to shame the wounded child. It is to meet it. To listen. To offer it what it needed. A voice from the North. A voice Plotkin calls the Nurturing Generative Adult. The part of you that can care. That part of you that can hold tenderness. That part of you that can parent your own inner world.

But even the Nurturing Generative Adult has its distortions. Plotkin names one of them the Loyal Soldier. That protective mechanism that thinks safety equals smallness. That voice that says, “Do not risk it.” That voice that says, “Do not be too much.” That voice that says, “Stay in line.”

And here is the thing. Our culture loves the Loyal Soldier. It can monetize it. It can recruit it. It can build whole economies off your fear. It can convince you that your smallness is virtue. That your silence is maturity. That your compliance is wisdom. And part of staying human is learning to thank the Loyal Soldier for its service, and then inviting it to stand down.

In the East, Plotkin locates the Magician and the Mystic. This is the part of you that can look up and see the cosmos. The part of you that can sense meaning. The part of you that can feel wonder. The part of you that can name patterns. The part of you that can access insight.

When we are integrated here, we are awake. We are curious. We are attentive. We are connected to the sacred.

But when we get trapped here, especially in a culture that is exhausted and overstimulated, the distortion often looks like escapism. Addiction. Dissociation. Numbing. The desire to get away from it all.

Some of us escape through substances. Some of us escape through scrolling. Some of us escape through work. Some of us escape through constant self-improvement. Some of us escape through spiritual experiences that never touch the body. We become people who can talk about the universe but cannot sit with our own grief. We become people who can name everyone else’s patterns but cannot tell the truth about our own.

And again, it is not because we are broken. It is because a part of us is trying to survive. The invitation here is not more shame. It is more presence. It is coming back into the body. It is learning to tolerate reality without running. It is learning to let wonder become grounded, not floaty.

In the West, Plotkin locates the Dark Muse and the Beloved. This is the realm of soul. Shadow. Depth. The underworld places where we encounter what we have buried.

This is where grief lives. This is where desire lives. This is where the parts of you that do not fit the brand live.

When we are integrated here, we are honest. We are humble. We are rooted. We are not terrified of complexity.

But when we get trapped here, the distortion can look like shadow avoidance in its sneakiest form. We tuck things away. We deny. We pretend we do not see it. We tell ourselves, “That is not me.” Even when it is.

Even when it is shaping our relationships. Even when it is shaping our choices. Even when it is making us reactive. Even when it is making us cruel.

And a culture built on performance rewards this kind of denial. Because if you never tell the truth about your shadow, you can keep curating your image. You can keep being “fine.” You can keep being “good.” You can keep being “successful.” And you can stay fragmented forever.

The invitation in the West is to let the buried things come into the light with safety and support. Not to indulge them. Not to glamorize them. To integrate them. To let the truth become metabolized. To let shame lose its grip. To let the Beloved in you remember it is beloved even with the shadow on the table.

The Gift of Plotkin’s Map

Plotkin’s map is more detailed than this. There is more nuance. There are more layers. But even this simple circle offers a gift.

It tells you that your coping mechanisms have a context. It tells you that you are not randomly broken. It tells you that your patterns are intelligible. It tells you that there is a way forward.

Not a shortcut. A path. And this matters because so many of us are living from one corner of ourselves.

We are living from the wounded child and calling it “being realistic.” We are living from the Loyal Soldier and calling it “being responsible.” We are living from escapism and calling it “self-care.” We are living from denial and calling it “being positive.” And the system cheers us on. Because the system does not want you whole.

A whole person is harder to manipulate.

A whole person is harder to sell to.

A whole person is harder to recruit.

A whole person is harder to shame.

A whole person is capable of solidarity.

A whole person is capable of saying, “No.”

A whole person is capable of re-creation.

So the system keeps offering replacements. Move. Buy. Hustle. Reinvent. Distract.

And the inner work stays undone. Until the body says, “Enough.” Until the relationship fractures. Until the anxiety becomes unbearable. Until the quiet finally catches you.

And then, if you are lucky, you get honest. You bring yourself with you. So now you have to learn how to be with yourself.

Staying human: belovedness, authenticity, solidarity, re-creation

If I had to say what staying human is in one sentence, it would be this: Staying human is learning to live from belovedness, embrace your authenticity, practice solidarity, and embody re-creation.

Belovedness says, “You do not have to earn your right to exist.”

Authenticity says, “You do not have to perform a self you cannot sustain.”

Solidarity says, “Your healing is not just personal relief, it is part of reweaving the world.”

Re-creation says, “You were not made to consume your way into meaning, you were made to create, to play, to rest, to become.”

This is why my kid’s prank gifts matter. Because play is not childish.

Play is a form of resistance.

Play is a way of remembering we are not machines.

Play is a way of remembering we belong to each other.

Play is a way of remembering the world is still enchanted, even when it hurts.

And this is why the “substantive” gifts matter too.

Because we need maps.

We need language.

We need practices.

We need companions.

We need ways to do the inner work that the outer world will never do for us.

We need ways to tend the parts of us that are still afraid. Still ashamed. Still grieving. Still bracing.

So we can stop outsourcing our healing to the next move. So we can stop outsourcing our identity to the next purchase. So we can stop outsourcing our worth to the next achievement. So we can stop outsourcing our hope to the next politician or pastor or influencer. So we can turn toward something more human.

A simple invitation

If any of this is landing in your body, here is my invitation. Pick up Bill Plotkin’s Wild Mind.

Not because it will fix you.

Not because it will give you a one-size-fits-all plan.

Not because it will replace therapy or community.

But because it might give you a map.

A way to name where you have been living from. A way to locate the sub-personalities that keep grabbing the wheel. A way to understand why the move did not save you. A way to understand why the hustle did not heal you. A way to understand why the distraction stopped working. A way to start doing the work that actually changes you.

You bring yourself with you.

So let’s stop running.

Let’s stop buying replacements.

Let’s stop treating our inner world like a problem to manage.

Let’s become curious.

Let’s listen.

Let’s take an hour and sit with the four directions.

Let’s journal what comes up.

Let’s notice what part of us is loudest.

Let’s offer it kindness, and truth.

And slowly, steadily, let’s move toward something more alive. Toward something whole. Toward a life that feels like yours. Towards something that will help us all stay human.

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Embodiment Practices

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity. While these practices are usually behind the paywall, this week they are my gift to you.

60-Second Reclamation Reflection: “You Brought Yourself With You. That’s the Gift.”

One-Hour Resistance Ritual: The Fourfold Listening Circle

Inspired by Bill Plotkin’s Wild Mind, this is a solo ritual of sacred reorientation. You’ll need a quiet space and ideally something to mark each direction (a stone, candle, branch, etc.).

Preparation:

• Mark a central space.

• Set four markers around you at approximate cardinal directions: South, North, East, West.

• Sit at the center. Breathe. Set your intention: to listen within, from every angle of your own becoming.

Then take time sitting in each direction, facing back toward the center. At each stop, ask:

🐾 SOUTH — Wild Indigenous One

• What wildness, longing, or instinct is rising?

• Where is life calling me to run barefoot again?

🧡 NORTH — Nurturing Generative Adult

• What wisdom or grounding does my inner caregiver have for me?

• What needs tending in my life right now?

🧠 EAST — Magician or Sage

• What clarity or insight is breaking through?

• What old stories am I being invited to rewrite?

💀 WEST — Dark Muse Beloved

• What grief, rage, or shadow seeks to be heard?

• What truth has been locked in silence?

Take 15-minutes at each location, taking time to journal about whatever stirs.

Close by returning to the center.

Place your hand on your heart. Whisper:

“All of me is welcome. All of me is here.”

Step Into A Life-Changing Rebellion: A Year With Your Wild Mind

If you’re serious about integration, about staying human in the face of fragmentation, don’t just dip a toe in. Get the book. Order Wild Mind by Bill Plotkin.

And don’t speed-read it.

Sit with it. Wrestle with it. Dialogue with it. Let it guide you through the coming months as a counter-map to every story that told you you had to be one thing, perform one way, or hide your inner world.

Make it your New Year’s soulwork.

Mark your calendar. Read one chapter per week or per two weeks. Journal what each of the four quadrants stirs in you. Step into the practices. Bring it into walks, prayer, dreams, breathwork, coaching, or conversations with those who can hold all of you.

Because the world doesn’t need more polished personas.

It needs humans who have met themselves. And stayed.

For me, December 8 is that date. It is the day my double life as a pastor came crashing down, my moral failure became public, and the god I thought I was serving turned out to be much smaller and harsher than the God who is actually there.

Fifteen years later, I am no longer trying to be a “good pastor.” I am trying to be a human being who trusts that belovedness is more fundamental than brokenness.

This essay sits right at that fault line. It weaves together three scenes from this past week (a watch, a runaway dog, and a theology document) and traces how I moved from a shame-soaked religion to a mystical way of being that still tells the truth about harm, but refuses to weaponize it.

If you have ever looked at your own life and thought, “This is who I really am, and it ruins everything,” I wrote this for you.

Watch or Listen

The Whole Story

On December 8, I was not thinking about anniversaries. I was checking the time.

There was nothing special about the moment. No stained-glass light pouring through a sanctuary. No dramatic music. Just an ordinary day in an ordinary body, moving through the ordinary motions of getting things done.

Then my eyes slid past the numbers on my watch and landed on the date. December 8.

My stomach tightened before my mind caught up. Fifteen years. Fifteen years since the world as I knew it collapsed in on itself. Fifteen years since the bottom dropped out and the version of me I had worked so hard to curate was dragged into the light.

If you’ve been following We Can Stay Human or my story for any amount of time you know that I used to be a pastor. You also know that while serving doing as a pastor, I lived a double life. One was about being a faithful pastor and devoted family man, the other was a frantic attempt to cultivate some semblance of inner peace, no matter the cost.

But that Wednesday evening so many years ago, as my secretive moral failings became public, it revealed something deeper: my unfaithfulness was not just a private struggle. It was a choice to place my inner chaos above the people I claimed to love most. It exposed that while I postured devotion and integrity, I had been living in a divided way that made my family secondary to my hidden life. And the remembrance wrecked me all over again.

I did not choose to start this week in such a tender place. It started in a hallway, with a watch, and a date that refused to be neutral.

The air felt a little thinner. The light, a little harsher. I remembered not just what happened back then, but what it felt like in my body. That strange hum of adrenaline and shame. The way every room suddenly felt too small, as if the walls had learned things about me they were not supposed to know.

December 8 is not simply a square on the calendar. It is a doorway into a version of myself I would rather not see. It is the moment when the story I told about who I was finally snapped under the weight of who I actually was.

This year, the date did not just remind me of what I did. It reminded me of how I understood myself when it happened, and who I am becoming now.

It reminded me that I have not just shifted beliefs. I have shifted gods.

When your worst truth becomes public

The next day, December 9, 2025, I found myself sitting in that space again.

Not physically. Physically, I was just… here. Present-day me. Present-day life. Present-day room.

But internally, I was back in the moment when everything first went public. Back in the days when what I believed to be “the truth about me” had finally leaked out into the open. Back to December 9, 2010. Back to a chilly morning filled with impossible conversations.

That feeling is hard to explain if you have never been there. It is more than embarrassment. More than getting caught. It is the sensation that the very parts of you that you were most ashamed of, the ones you worked so hard to hide, are now common knowledge.

It is the sense that the story about you has been rewritten in one sentence: “This is who you really are.”

Back then, I lived inside a theology that told me I was fundamentally broken. Depraved. Sinful to the core. I preached it. I prayed it. I measured myself and everyone else by it. So when my failure became public, it did not just feel like something I had done. It felt like proof of who I had always been.

In that frame, moral failure is not a human fracture to be tended with honesty and repair. It is confirmation of your depravity. It is God catching you in the act and saying, “See? This is why I am angry. This is why judgment is justified.”

Sitting in the hollow on December 9, 2025, I could feel how deeply that old story still lives in my nervous system. Even as my theology has shifted, the old scripts still know how to find the volume knob on my shame.

But I am not the same man who walked out of pastor-world with that theology as his only language.

Fifteen years later, I move through the world with a very different conviction: that beneath every fracture, belovedness remains.

But the week did not stop with an anniversary, or even one life altering events. It kept offering scenes that had me thinking about then vs. now.

The dog, the chain, and the father I used to be

That evening, another small thing happened that opened a much larger door. And it all started with my kid’s dog escaping the yard … twice.

The first time I went out with the dog and left him off leash. I saw a fence railing that needed to get fixed and wanted to get it taken care of quickly. I assumed he would run around the yard, but wouldn’t leave it while I was watching. I was wrong.

Almost immediately he darted under the split rail fence into the neighbors yard. As I hopped the fence to retrieve him, he crossed their yard and went under another fence leaving only a small easement between him and a busy street.

That’s when he turned, looked back at me, and smiled. I don’t mean smile in the literal sense, but that physical posture where you can tell that if he were human, he would have been smiling. Me chasing him had become a game.

Eventually, I managed to retrieve him, but I was convinced not to make the same mistake again. So when he acted like he needed to go to the bathroom, I did the responsible thing. I put the dog on the chain. I made sure everything was clipped. I checked the way you check when you want to feel like you did your due diligence.

Then, in the way that dogs and life and attachments often do, it all came undone.

The chain yanked free. The collar popped off. At first, he just ran around the yard proud of himself. But as soon as I noticed he’d come undone and stepped onto the back porch, he stopped. He turned towards me and gave me that same playful look before bolting towards the fence.

Suddenly it was late-night scramble, calling a name of a black dog into the dark, that mix of irritation and fear that only comes when something you love is moving too fast away from you.

My heart rate quickened. I could feel the familiar tightness in my chest. Part compassion for a dog struggling with his own attachment issues, part anger at myself for not being more careful.

There was panic, too: the creeping dread that something horrible was going to happen and I’d have to tell my kid that the dog was gone. I messaged my kid, who was out on a date, worried I was about to ruin their evening with dog news.

And then the realizations started stacking: even if I found the dog, he’d bolt the moment he saw me. Even if I got close, there was no collar to grab. No way to hold on.

In those minutes, my body was doing what it had been trained to do for years: catastrophize, brace for impact, find someone to blame, and search for evidence that I was failing.

This is what the old nervous system theology does. It takes a moment of ordinary struggle and turns it into a referendum on your worth. It does not just notice the dog is loose. It declares that you are fundamentally unreliable, that harm is inevitable, and that love will be withdrawn the moment the truth comes out.

Thankfully, we got the dog back. No tragedy. No headline. But the next morning, as I sat in the quiet, the inner narrative started: I failed my kid. Not in some abstract theological sense. In a very ordinary, domestic way. I did not take proper care of the dog. I was supposed to be the adult, the responsible one, the safe one. Instead, the dog ended up running loose.

If you listen closely you can hear the echo: You failed your kid.

The sentence did not stay small for long. It rarely does. My mind began to gather evidence from past seasons, old patterns, earlier years.

Who I was when my kid was young. The choices I made. The ways my unhealed story leaked into parenting. The days I was preoccupied with some twisted mix of saving the world and trying to cope with my inner chaos while missing the world in my own home. In a few breaths, a dog slipping a chain became a portal into years of feeling like I had failed my family.

This is how the ghosts of our past selves usually arrive. Not with trumpets. With a dog, a chain, a small mistake that wakes up old scripts.

Sitting there, I could feel two versions of myself in the room. There was the old pastor version, the one who saw every failure as a fresh verdict and would have done anything in that moment to blame anyone for what happened.

I’d point fingers at the previous owners who’d traumatized the dog and then left him at a shelter. Or at my kid for having the dog on a collar that would be pulled apart. Or at whoever put the fence up leaving enough room between the ground and the first rail so a dog could slip under. Literally anyone to blame as a desperate attempt to unload some of the burden I was carrying, because that version of me believed that any misstep proved that God’s anger had all the evidence it needed.

And then there was the mystic I am becoming, who has learned to listen to these moments as invitations rather than indictments. It’s the me who recognizes that blame does not ease the burden, nor does being at fault have any connection to belovedness. When the dog slips the chain, the mystic does not ask, “What does this prove about me?” The mystic asks, “What is actually happening here, and what does this moment need?”

The mystic has learned that responsibility is not the same as carrying shame. That I can acknowledge my part in what went wrong without collapsing into the old narrative that I am fundamentally unreliable. That I can reach out to my kid and say, “I messed up, and I’m sorry,” without needing that apology to be followed by self-flagellation or a performance of penance.

Where the old pastor version would have turned this into evidence for a trial, the mystic turns it into an invitation to tend what is tender. To notice where the old scripts still live in my body. To practice a different response: one rooted not in fear of judgment, but in trust that love does not abandon us when we stumble.

The first voice says, “See, you are still the same guy who ruins everything.” The second voice says, “Look at how quickly your shame reaches for the microphone. Can we sit with the part of you that is afraid of failing your kid, without turning it into a sentence?”

The dog on the chain was not just about responsibility. It was about the father I was, the father I am, and the father I am still learning to become. And it pressed me into the question that had been humming beneath the whole week: Who am I now, and what story am I living inside?

Writing down what I believe now

As if that were not enough, while getting ready to produce this piece, I found myself doing something very tangible: building out a theology framework document.

On the surface, it looks like any other sort of planning work. Headings, bullets, definitions. A Google-doc-feeling kind of task, except I was doing it in Notion.

Under the surface, it was something else entirely. It was me putting into words what I actually believe now. Line by line, I was noticing how far I have moved from the religion that once defined me.

Where I once preached that God is fundamentally angry at our sin, I was writing that God is Love, fully and always. Not love as strategy or sentiment, but as essence. Not a God who occasionally chooses to love, but a God whose very being is relentless love.

The language I use now for what we call “sin” is not a criminal category. It is the naming of fracture, the ways we live out of alignment with love: for ourselves, for others, for the earth, for the Holy.

Back then, moral failure meant displeasing God and triggering divine judgment. Now, when I talk about fracture or misalignment, I mean not living in at-one-ment with Love. I mean moving against the grain of the universe, which is compassion.

And perhaps most harmful of all, the old theology said my fundamental nature was depravity. The best you could expect from me, left to my own devices, was lies, deception, and duplicity. But then God would forgive me because of Jesus. If you stop and think about it, it’s a move that dismisses any harm caused to another person. After all, what more could you expect from a poor miserable sinner?

So where I once understood myself as fundamentally depraved, I now find myself writing about fundamental belovedness.

Where Jesus once served as a divine loophole, the exception God made to tolerate us, I now embrace Jesus as the Human One. The embodied invitation into what it means to be fully human.

Where I once used words like salvation to describe an evacuation plan away from judgment, I now describe salvation as the gradual healing of fracture. Not escape from earth, but deeper presence within it.

It is one thing to feel these shifts in your bones. It is another to see them in writing and realize: I have changed gods.

The God I know today is not the one who presided over my downfall with crossed arms and a gavel. The God I move with now is relentless love, grieved by harm yet never reduced to vengeance.

The God I speak of today is the One I describe when I say “God is Love, fully and always.” Not love as mood, but love as the elemental fabric of reality. Salvation is no longer an escape hatch away from judgment, it is the slow healing of all the ways I have been out of tune with love. Grace is not the surprise twist at the end of the story. It is the operating system from the first page.

The greatest irony of all: I learned both while reading the Bible. Although, if you ask me today, it is impossible for both readings to be honest and accurate. The first began with me being taught, “This is what the text says,” and absorbing the broader themes of American evangelicalism. The second flowed from me asking the text, starting with the stories of Jesus, “What are you saying?”

The stories are the same: the same characters, events, places, and poems. But how I understand them now would make you think I had picked up an entirely different sacred text.

Sitting with this document I had prepared, I could feel the distance between who I was and who I am becoming. Not as an erasure of the past, but as a widening horizon.

In one week, three scenes:

• the date on the watch,

• the dog on the chain,

• the theology on the page,

they all pointed toward the same revelation: My journey has not just been from one set of doctrines to another. It has been a shift from religion to mysticism. From a system obsessed with my fundamental brokenness to a way of being rooted in fundamental belovedness. From a God whose primary posture toward me was disappointment, to a Presence whose primary posture is embrace.

Maybe for you it is not a dog and a date. Maybe it is the way you still flinch when you miss a quiet time, or the way your chest tightens when someone calls you “faithful” because you remember all the ways you are not. Mysticism does not ask you to pretend those flinches are gone. It invites you to bring them into the light of belovedness and ask, “What if this fear is not proof that I am trash, but proof that I was trained to be afraid of my own humanity?”

Religion as base spirit, mysticism as the finer pour

One of the ways I have started to make sense of this shift is through distilled spirits.

Imagine a row of bottles: tequila, whiskey, rum. On the bottom shelf, you have the harsh versions. The ones you can drink if you have to, but they burn going down. They get the job done, if the job is numbing or proving something, but you are mostly bracing yourself for impact.

As you move up the shelves, something happens. The tequila is still tequila. The whiskey is still whiskey. The rum is still rum. Each has its own base, its own origin, its own distinct story. But the finer the spirit, the more complexity you taste. There is nuance. Character. Layers.

If you slow down enough to really taste, something surprising becomes clear: The top-shelf tequila has more in common with the top-shelf whiskey than either of them has with their own bottom-shelf versions. The harshness has been refined. The burn is still there, but it is not the point. It is part of a larger symphony.

The base versions are easy to get. They are cheap. They are loud. They promise a lot in a small amount of time. They also leave you with a headache and a hangover. The finer versions take time. Patience. Attention. You cannot rush them.

For me, religion has come to feel like the base spirit. Mysticism feels like the finer pour.

Religion, in the way I inherited it, started with my depravity and built from there. It was obsessed with who’s in and who’s out, who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s pure and who’s contaminated. It offered certainty and belonging at the cost of my own humanity.

Mysticism rises up from the same raw materials: our sacred texts, our traditions, and our stories about God. But it has been aged in the barrels of silence, suffering, contemplation, and encounter. It has been tested in deserts, not just classrooms. It does not throw away form. It deepens it.

When I listen to the mystics of different traditions, be it the Christian contemplatives, the Sufi poets, the Buddhist monks, or the Jewish Kabbalists, I hear that same pattern. Each one is still profoundly rooted in their own stream. The flavors are distinct. And yet, their deepest experiences of union, compassion, and presence have more in common with each other than with the rigid, fear-based versions of their own religions.

The more refined the spirit, the more it knows how to unite. The more refined the spirituality, the more it knows how to say: We are made for love. We belong to one another. We are more than our worst day.

This does not mean mysticism is soft on harm. If anything, it is more honest about it. Because when Love is the starting point, fracture matters more, not less. Harm is not just “breaking the rules.” It is violating the very fabric of what is real.

So when I look back at my failures, mysticism does not invite me to minimize it. It invites me to tell the truth about it, to own the damage, to seek repair where possible, and to remember that even there, belovedness has not given up on me.

Religion handed me a God who was preparing a verdict. Mysticism introduces me to a Presence who sits with me in the wreckage and says, “We are not done yet.”

Desert and table

Fifteen years ago, when everything collapsed, it felt like a desert. The desert is where all the illusions burn off.

In the desert, your strategies do not work. Your reputation does not matter. Your clever sermons and spiritual credentials do not impress the sand. The desert is where you discover that the God who loved your performance is gone, because that god was never real.

What is left is the question: is there a Love that can meet me here, when I am no longer useful, successful, or impressive?

For a long time, I lived in that desert without a clear sense of where I was going. Religion had given me a map that no longer worked. Mysticism did not hand me a new map. It taught me to listen to the terrain. To the ache in my chest when I held my kid and wondered what kind of father I was becoming. To the quiet whisper in my nervous system that said, “You cannot keep living from fundamental brokenness and call it the gospel.” To the way my heart lit up when I encountered voices who spoke of God as relentless love, not retributive anger.

Over time, the desert started to reveal something I had not expected: a table. Not a grand banquet to show off how far I had come. A simple table, set in the middle of my ordinary life.

At that table, the ghosts of my past selves still show up. The pastor who manipulated shame and pitched Jesus an escape route. The man whose failure wounded people he loved. The father who missed things he wishes he could go back and redo. They all have a seat.

So do the people I have hurt. They are not props in my redemption story. They are human beings whose pain I have to reckon with.

At this table, mysticism does not ask me to pretend it all “worked out for the best.” It does not offer cheap closure. Instead, it invites me into a different kind of at-one-ment:

• To be at one with the truth of what happened, without spin.

• To be at one with my own belovedness, without denial.

• To be at one with the call to repair, as much as it is possible.

This is the movement from religion to mysticism in my actual life. Not a new set of doctrines to sign. A new way of sitting at the table with myself, with others, with God. A way that insists: your past matters, but it does not get the last word. Your ghosts are real, but they do not get to drive. Your humanity is not the problem. It is the place where Love keeps wanting to meet you.

When the date comes back again

December 8 will roll around next year. The ghosts will not vanish. The dog will get loose again, in one form or another. There will be days when the old god tries to climb back onto the throne of your imagination. On those days, I picture the table in the desert.

I see pastor-me, mystic-me, my kid, my kid’s dog, the people I have hurt, the people who have hurt me, all sitting there together. Not in cheap reconciliation. In honest presence.

I imagine the Holy there too, not at the head of the table with a ledger, but in the middle of it all, hands on the bread, eyes full of grief and joy. No one is excused from accountability. No one is excused from belovedness.

Accountability does not mean staying trapped in the worst chapter of your story forever. It means telling the truth, tending to the harm as best you can, and refusing to use your healing as an excuse to forget the people your pain has touched.

Religion taught me that God was most present in the sanctuary, at the height of the song, when I was at my best. Mysticism keeps teaching me that God is just as present in the hallway, with the watch, on the day I would rather forget.

Maybe staying human is nothing more and nothing less than learning to meet that Presence there. In the anniversaries we did not choose. In the dogs we cannot always keep on the chain. In the ghosts who still walk beside us. In the simple, stubborn truth that we are, all of us, more beloved than our worst day, and more connected than our favorite doctrines ever taught us to believe.

And the more we grasp that, the more we can stay human.

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Embodiment Practices

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

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That if you’re struggling, you just need to try harder. Wake up earlier. Grind longer. Push through. And if that doesn’t work, then maybe you’re the problem. Maybe you’re lazy. Undisciplined. Entitled. Broken.

I believed all of that once.

I believed it the first time someone handed me a dollar a hole to dig fence posts in the Colorado summer heat. I believed it when I poured sweat into the dirt, blistered my hands, and told myself this is what it means to become a man. I believed it when I watched people with power shrug off the effort I poured in, certain I just hadn’t earned their respect yet.

But somewhere deep down, something didn’t add up. And I couldn’t name it yet, but I could feel it.

Something was wrong with the ground beneath my feet.

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The Whole Story

A couple weeks ago, in a piece about the abnormal things we’ve come to accept as normal, I shared a short clip on TikTok that talked about poverty.

I argued that poverty has more to do with systems and structures than individual failings. I pointed out how, at least in the United States, people can work full-time, or even multiple jobs, and still not get ahead. That poverty is not the result of laziness, but of systems designed to exploit labor while hoarding wealth.

And right on cue, the comments rolled in.

Some were just the really simple, “You’re wrong.”

Others offered some kind of reasoning, “People just need to work harder.” or “Stop making excuses.”

Then there were those who appointed blame, “It’s your choices that determine your outcomes.” or, “Success is a direct measure of IQ.”

There’s a certain comfort for people who say those things. The world they describe feels predictable. Linear. If I work hard, I’ll be okay. If someone else isn’t okay, they must not be working hard. And if I’m doing well, it gives me a sense of superiority over those who aren’t.

The logic is clean. Reassuring. It’s also cruel. Because the world doesn’t always work that way, and this edition of We Can Stay Human explores what’s actually going on.

My “Lazy” Trees

Out on the west side of my property is a row of trees. They offer a bit of backyard privacy in a neighborhood where the fences are all split rail. It’s open by design. They also form a windbreak from the potent gusts that rip off the foothills of the Rocky Mountains just a few miles away.

I dug the holes for those trees as a teenager, about 35 years ago. And when I took over the property earlier this summer, my brother commented that he thought they might need to come down. That they didn’t look healthy.

And there’s some truth to that. I cut off dozens of dead lower branches, limbs that hadn’t felt life-giving nutrients flow through them in who knows how long. When I look up the trunk, it’s clear: these trees are still standing tall, but they’re struggling.

Still, something in me resists the idea of taking them down.

Maybe it’s the memory of getting paid a dollar a hole that summer. Six inches of easy digging and then grinding through layers of thick Colorado clay. And those pine trees needed deeper holes than many of the smaller trees and shrubs we planted. It took hours and gallons of sweat to earn each and every one of those dollars. And honestly, I don’t feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth. But somehow, if the trees stay standing and I benefit from them, maybe, in a couple years, the enjoyment will provide the value.

But whether I can make that digging worth it or not, I’ve got to wonder: what happened? After all, these trees are over 30 feet tall. Some of them top out closer to 40 feet. They didn’t always struggle. What’s choking them now?

As I cleared away the dead branches, the answer revealed itself. Hidden underneath the canopy, beneath where the needles are still green, was a foot of fallen pine litter. A full foot of carbon buildup, sealing off the soil, denying it the nitrogen that all plants need to survive.

Instead of receiving fresh nutrients through plant life or rabbit droppings or other natural processes, these trees are slowly starving. They have to reach wider and deeper to find the nourishment they need. But like a field that’s harvested every year with nothing sown back in, the nitrogen supply gets thinner and thinner. Until there’s nothing left.

The issue isn’t the trees. It’s the ground they’re planted in. Or more accurately, what’s happened to the ground over the decades. And with that in mind, I can’t help but wonder: How many people do we dismiss as lazy or broken when really, they’re doing everything they can to grow in soil that’s been stripped bare?

What Cultivates “Lazy” People?

When I think back to that summer digging holes in thick Colorado clay, it is not just the effort I remember. It is the wage. My dad paid me a dollar a hole. Thirty-three holes. Thirty-three dollars. Some of them took two hours. Some took five. I was fourteen, sure. But even then, something about the exchange didn’t sit right.

It wasn’t just about how hard I worked. It was about the return on the work. The value of the labor. The fairness of the soil I was planted in.

And that’s part of what we miss when we say people just need to work harder. Because most people are already working hard. They are grinding. They are raising kids, holding two jobs, caring for aging parents, navigating chronic pain, pushing through grief and trauma and burnout just to make it through the week.

A child born into generational poverty isn’t lazy. They are growing in a field stripped bare by redlining, disinvestment, and stolen opportunity.

A survivor of abuse who freezes in conflict isn’t weak. They are growing in the aftershock of a world that once told them danger was everywhere.

A worker who clocks sixty hours a week but still can’t afford healthcare isn’t undisciplined. They are growing in a system that hoards reward at the top and leaves everyone else overextended and underpaid.

Michael W. Green recently put numbers to what many already know in their bones. Using a basic needs framework, he calculated that a family of four would need around $140,000 a year to cover essential living costs in today’s economy. Not luxury. Not indulgence. Just food, shelter, transportation, childcare, and healthcare. Nothing extra. That’s nearly five times the federal poverty line, a line based on food alone, ignoring all of the other expenses necessary to successfully navigate today’s world.

But the median family income, that’s just over $105,000. What that reveals is staggering: our systems are not just failing to nourish human thriving, they’re actively structured to undernourish. We are cultivating struggle. Not because people don’t work hard, but because the soil they’re working from is barren by design. That barrenness isn’t accidental. It’s the byproduct of an extractive economy that rewards those who hoard while asking everyone else to make do with less. This isn’t a crisis of discipline. It’s a crisis of design.

And here’s the kicker: the average family income is actually around $155,000. That number gets pulled higher by billionaires and hedge fund managers and celebrity CEOs. And that’s just the numbers that get counted as income. But income isn’t the whole picture.

When you add in corporate profits not distributed as wages, stock buybacks, deferred compensation, tax loopholes, executive perks, and off-the-books wealth accumulation, the gap grows even wider. One recent analysis from the Economic Policy Institute estimated that corporate profits alone reached over $2.8 trillion in 2023, while stock buybacks topped $1 trillion.

Combined, those dollars are almost a third of wages, nearly four trillion dollars, that doesn’t even show up in income stats. Money generated by labor, but siphoned off before it ever touches the ground where most people live. It doesn’t feed families. It doesn’t pay for housing, healthcare, or childcare. It just concentrates in the portfolios of the already rich. If even a portion of that money were redistributed, the average family income wouldn’t just be $155,000, it could be far higher.

This isn’t a scarcity crisis. It’s a distribution crisis. A values crisis. The system isn’t broke. It’s rigged. Not because there’s not enough to go around, but because so much gets siphoned off before it ever touches the ground where most people are trying to grow.

When the average sits so far above the median, and the average doesn’t do the real disparity justice, it means we’re not suffering from economic drought. We’re suffering from deliberate misallocation, from a system where nourishment flows uphill, leaving everyone else to scrap for what’s left in the dust.

The problem isn’t that people are lazy. It’s that they are being asked to grow in depleted soil. To survive on wages that no longer cover even the basics. To raise families without childcare. To stay healthy without healthcare. To pay rent while housing costs spiral and real earnings stagnate. The issue isn’t the work ethic of the seed. It’s the scarcity built into the soil.

The Dignity of Quitting

And maybe this is the part we’re not supposed to say out loud: I understand why some people give up. If you’ve been trying to grow for years in soil that doesn’t nourish you, if the sun never quite reaches your corner, if every time you stretch upward something cuts you back, there comes a point where surrender stops feeling like weakness and starts to feel like the only sane option. It’s not that you don’t want to thrive. It’s that your roots are exhausted. And the energy it takes to keep pretending it’ll all work out is more than you can give.

There’s a grief in that. And a quiet dignity too. Because giving up isn’t always about apathy. Sometimes it’s the body’s wisdom. A refusal to keep offering yourself to systems that consume and discard. A protest, even if it looks like silence. And instead of labeling people as broken, we could ask what it would mean to create a world where giving up isn’t the most honest option left.

I think about my own kid, who recently walked away from a job at a grocery store. Not because they were lazy, but because they were the hardest worker there. Everyone knew it. Management knew it. They picked up shifts, trained new employees, went above and beyond every job description. And still, no raise, no promotion, no pathway forward. Just more expectation and the same stagnant return. Eventually, they had the clarity and the courage to say, if you won’t recognize my effort, if you won’t treat me with dignity, then you don’t deserve my labor. That’s not laziness. That’s self-respect. That’s knowing your worth, even when the system tries to deny it.

In all of these examples, the issue isn’t the tree. Nor is it the seed. It is the ground it is planted in. This is why we need to talk about soil. Because the soil shapes the outcome. And when the soil is depleted, no amount of effort can make the harvest come.

Lessons from the Summer Sun

And yes, these ideas first took root in my psyche as a teenager working all day in the summer heat for a dollar a hole. The ground beneath my feet wasn’t neutral. It was shaped by cultural ideas about the value of labor, about what a boy should learn, about what it meant to earn your way. But those ideas didn’t just shape a summer job. They shaped my sense of worth, my idea of justice, my understanding of what a fair return looks like.

The older I get, the more I see what that summer actually taught me. It taught me that hard work is not always valued, and often is not rewarded. It taught me that you can pour everything you have into a task and end the day with almost nothing to show for it. It taught me that the world’s definition of dignity is often conditional, that the hands that blister and bleed are rarely the hands that are honored. There was no fair return for the work I did, no correlation between effort and outcome. And beneath that lesson was something even more corrosive: the realization that the people who control the soil decide the worth of the work. They claim it’s the market establishing the wage, even as they rig the market.

Now, my dad was a mining engineer who earned his MBA during the 70’s as lessons from the Chicago School of Economics took root. His job was to oversee a mine, to oversee miners, to maximize output from the labor of others. In his world, extracting the most value for the lowest cost was efficiency. It was how things worked. And he allowed that worldview to shape how he engaged with me that summer, not maliciously, but because he believed that was simply how the ground was structured.

It was normal to him. It was expected. It was the way the world rewarded those in charge. But what it taught me, even if I couldn’t name it at the time, was that the system he operated in was built on taking more than it ever returned. It was a worldview that treated labor as expendable and people as tools, and it shaped me long before I ever questioned it.

Looking back, I can see how easily we accept that logic as normal. How quickly we absorb the idea that this is just how things are. But none of it is normal in a world that seeks to honor the dignity of human beings. None of it is natural for people who are meant to thrive. It is a distortion we have learned to live with, a poisoned soil we have mistaken for the real thing. And once you see it for what it is, you cannot unsee it. You begin to wonder how many other parts of your life, your story, your worth, were shaped by ground you never thought to examine.

What Can Faith Teach About Economics?

One of those unexamined places, for me, was faith. The spiritual soil I grew in was rich with discipline, devotion, and scripture. But it was also laced with fear. With the manipulation of shame. With a persistent voice that told me I was nothing more than a beggar. That asked for more of me as a human while simultaneously telling me I’d never be anything more than a poor miserable sinner. That tension, the one where the text called me to become more than the theology said I could be, came to a head when I began writing my dissertation.

The topic was supposed to be spiritual formation, an exploration of how people grow. But the deeper I went, the more I realized I had nothing honest to say. I could sketch out frameworks and quote scholars, but none of it rang true. Because beneath every one of my theories sat an understanding of myself that said I was fundamentally and irreparably broken.

Theology taught me that I was the problem. That there was something defective in my seed. And that no matter how sincerely I believed, how diligently I prayed, how hard I tried, I would always fall short. My job, then, was to accept this fallen state, to trudge along in shame, to hope that someday God might choose to save a wretch like me.

And when you believe your seed is defective, you start living like it. You play the part people want to see. You hide the parts they shouldn’t. You build a life on the outside that looks one way, while the inside quietly rots.

That was me.

I was duplicitous. I said the right things in public and did the opposite in private. I wore the mask of a good man, a godly man, while covering up anything that might prove otherwise. I needed approval like oxygen, but couldn’t receive love without suspicion. I was emotionally volatile: sometimes charming, sometimes cruel. I would lash out, then shrink back. I didn’t know how to be known without being condemned, so I stayed in hiding, even in plain sight.

And when I failed, which was often, I didn’t confess. I deflected. I lied. I found someone to blame. Not because I lacked a conscience, but because shame had convinced me that if people saw the real me, they’d walk away. I didn’t need to be told I was a sinner. I knew. I lived with the weight of it every day. But no amount of knowing made me whole. It only taught me how to survive.

I wasn’t growing. I was coping. That’s what bad soil does to the soul. It doesn’t just stunt your growth. It warps your roots. It trains you to twist yourself toward whatever source of light will keep you going, even if that light is artificial. Even if it burns.

But what if the seed wasn’t the problem? What if the problem was the soil? That question cracked something open in me. It didn’t come all at once. But as I wrestled through that dissertation, I began to encounter a different story. A different soil.

I discovered a theology that didn’t begin with sin, but with love. That didn’t call me fundamentally depraved, but fundamentally beloved. That didn’t demand shame as proof of my sincerity, but invited joy as a fruit of my belonging. And that changed everything.

Because once the soil shifted, I could finally breathe. I could begin to imagine growth that wasn’t rooted in groveling. I could begin to trust that there was something sacred in me that didn’t need to be erased, but revealed. I wasn’t trying to earn divine approval anymore. I was learning to live from divine embrace.

That change was more than theological. It was ontological. My entire sense of being, of what is most true, most real, was rewired. And from that rewiring came freedom. Not the freedom of moral laxity or spiritual apathy, but the freedom to grow. The freedom to stretch toward the light. It taught me something that has stayed with me ever since: the seed matters, but the soil shapes the possibilities.

Fixing Our Economic Ontology

Now that shift in my own soil didn’t fix the economic world I walked back into. It didn’t erase the economic pressures, the burnout culture, or the grind. But if a change in the soil of faith brought about such a radical transformation in how faith is embodied, can’t it also be true in life?

That’s why I can’t bring myself to join the chorus that blames people for struggling. That insists they just need to work harder, push farther, do better. Because I’ve seen what happens when someone starts from belovedness instead of shame. I’ve seen what becomes possible when the soil stops poisoning the seed and starts nourishing it instead. And I’ve come to believe that if we want to see people thrive, we can’t just lecture the seed. We have to tend the soil.

The question, then, is what kind of cultural soil are we growing in? What if the problem isn’t that people are lazy or broken or undeserving? What if the problem is that our economic soil is toxic? That it demands more than it gives, that it hollows out meaning, that it feeds some while starving others, and then dares to call that normal?

Maybe it’s time we stop blaming the seed and start asking what kind of ground we’ve been planting in. Because the soil we share shapes more than we know. And if changing my spiritual soil changed my life, what might it mean to change the soil we share? What would it look like to cultivate a cultural ecosystem where people are not only allowed to thrive, but actively nourished in their thriving? Where exhaustion isn’t the price of survival, and giving up doesn’t feel like the most honest choice left?

It would mean rewriting the rules that shape the ground. Because soil, whether in a field or in a society, is not neutral. It reflects the decisions we make, the priorities we uphold, and the stories we tell about who matters and what they deserve.

First, we have to address exploitation. Because right now, too many people are living in a system where their labor fuels someone else’s wealth, and the more they give, the more depleted they become. Changing this means unrigging the system at its most foundational level. That starts with removing private money from our political processes. If lawmakers are accountable to donors instead of constituents, the soil will always be poisoned. We need clean elections, free from the influence of corporate lobbying and campaign checks written by the very people who benefit from extraction. And we need antitrust enforcement that breaks up monopolies, dismantles the strangleholds that allow a handful of companies to dominate entire industries, suppress wages, and eliminate meaningful alternatives. That’s not just policy. It’s a call to restore dignity to the worker and integrity to the economy.

Second, we need to incentivize investment in people. In employees. In research. In the kind of long-term growth that builds something beyond short-term profits. That could look like a corporate windfall tax. Something that doesn’t just let companies sit on record-breaking gains while their workers struggle to afford groceries. It means rewriting the tax code so that it’s not cheaper to buy back your own stock than to raise wages or invest in innovation. It means showing corporations that the best return isn’t in speculative plays or quarterly manipulation, but in the development of human potential and sustainable growth.

Third, we have to discourage speculation and the financialization of everything. Because when the economy becomes a casino, people become chips. Homes become investments. Schools become profit centers. And people, real people with rent to pay, bodies to care for, and families to love, are left in the dust. We can shift that. Reinstating something like Glass-Steagall would separate investment banks from everyday consumer banking, reducing systemic risk and keeping predatory behavior out of the places where people deposit their paychecks. A restored set of progressive taxes on income, capital gains, and inheritance would help redistribute wealth that’s been hoarded for generations and curb the runaway accumulation that fuels inequality. These changes wouldn’t solve everything. But they’d till the soil. They’d create space for nourishment to reach more than just the roots at the top.

Fourth, we need to encourage entrepreneurship. Not the hollowed-out version sold by hustle culture, where you’re told to bootstrap your way to freedom while drowning in debt and health insurance premiums. But a system that actually supports people in creating what the world needs. That includes single-payer healthcare, not just as a moral imperative, but as a backbone for small businesses. When healthcare is no longer tied to employment, people can take risks. They can start companies, build cooperatives, chase ideas without gambling their lives or their children’s future. It also means creating access to capital for those who’ve been shut out of traditional funding routes, especially communities of color and historically marginalized groups. Entrepreneurship thrives not when people are desperate, but when they are supported.

Finally, we have to increase competition. Not as a race to the bottom, but as a field where innovation, quality, and service can flourish. One way to do that is by introducing public options in critical markets. Think of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which didn’t just provide electricity, it provided a model. A standard. A benchmark that forced private companies to improve or lose relevance. Public competition creates accountability. It puts people over profit. And it reminds us that markets should serve the public, not the other way around.

Each of these changes is more than a line item in a policy brief. They are efforts to cultivate a new kind of soil. Soil that is rich with dignity, moist with possibility, full of nutrients for human flourishing. Soil where the seed of a person’s life doesn’t have to fight so hard just to survive. Where growing tall isn’t a miracle, but a reasonable expectation.

None of it is easy. All of it takes work. But the work is different when the soil gives something back. When systems are built to nourish, not deplete. When agency is honored, and thriving is possible, not rare.

Because in the end, the real question is not simply how hard someone works. It’s whether the soil returns anything for their labor. Whether the ground we share allows for growth, or just demands it until there’s nothing left.

The Lazy vs. “The Lazy”

Now, none of this is to say that laziness doesn’t exist. I’m sure there are people who’ve checked out, who’ve chosen not to try. But that’s not the real question. The real question is why we’re so quick to label people that way.

Because when you start looking closely, you realize how many people we call lazy are actually something else entirely. They’re discouraged. Disillusioned. Exhausted from trying so hard for so long with so little to show for it. They’ve been underpaid, overlooked, and overworked. They’ve stretched themselves thin, made impossible choices, and still can’t get ahead. And eventually, something inside just stops reaching.

But what if that doesn’t mean their seed is broken? What if it just means the soil has failed them? What if the problem isn’t their work ethic, but the ground they’re planted in? Because when the soil is rich with possibility, when it offers dignity, return, support, and room to grow, something changes. Hope takes root. Effort feels worth it. The light becomes more than a distant dream.

And people stretch again. Not because they were lazy before, but because now, finally, the soil gives something back. And when we’re planted in soil that nourishes us, we’re far more likely to stay human.

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Embodiment Practices

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

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What if the magic wasn’t in the music, the matching pajamas, or the manicured nativity scene, but in the mess: the real, gritty, sacred mess of our lives?

I’ve spent years trying to find my way back to the wonder I felt as a child during this season. But for a long time, I came home exhausted, disoriented, and disconnected. The faith I once carried didn’t fit the way it used to. And the holiday I used to love felt more like pressure than peace.

This year, I’m returning to the house I grew up in. Not as a guest, but as the one who now calls it home. It’s still in transition. So am I.

In this long-form Christmas reflection, I turn to the three of the gospels (Matthew, Luke, and John) to ask not what Christmas demands of us, but what it offers. How it meets us in our grief, our questions, our half-decorated homes and unresolved stories. From ancient genealogies and crowded family rooms to winter solstice rituals and messy living rooms, this is a post for those trying to stay human in a season that often forgets what that means.

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The Whole Story

When I was a kid, I loved Christmas. Not in the forced “Jesus is the reason for the season” kind of way, but in the real sense of wonder. I loved the smell of pine and the flicker of lights. I loved setting up the nativity and lying on the floor to stare at the tree late at night. I loved the carols, the buildup, the way the whole world felt like it was leaning toward something. Well, I never would have used this word at the time, but sacred.

But somewhere along the way, that magic faded.

When Wonder Wandered

In college, the weeks leading up to Christmas were a sprint. Exams, papers, and the constant pressure to perform left me wrung out by the time I got home. And even though I was back with family, I didn’t feel connected. I was tired. Disoriented. Like a plant ripped from its soil mid-season, roots exposed to cold air.

After undergrad, I stepped into church work as a youth pastor. Christmas became a job. And while I poured everything I had into helping others experience the season, I often felt completely alone in it. I didn’t have family traditions of my own, no shared rituals that grounded me. Just long nights, empty rooms, and the quiet ache that I was helping others celebrate something I no longer felt.

By the time marriage and family entered the picture, I was out of seminary and working as an urban missionary. Our community didn’t hold Sunday services, so I spent most weekends preaching at churches in pastoral transition. During the holidays, everything doubled. More services to lead, more sermons to write, more expectations to manage. I still remember the year I preached two Christmas Eve services and one on Christmas morning, at three different churches, each requiring a different sermon. Three messages in sixteen hours. When it ended, I didn’t feel festive. I just felt hollowed out, like a tree struck by lightning, still standing but burned through the center.

Even after leaving ministry, the season still feels complicated. I wrestle with the faith I was given and the faith I now try to live. The old theology doesn’t hold me anymore, but there are times when the new one still feels tender, like something I’m learning to trust one slow breath at a time. Like winter soil softening toward spring, but not there yet. The lights go up, the songs return, but I’m not always sure how to enter in.

And beyond faith, there’s the cultural machinery of the season. The pressure to bake the cookies, hang the lights, host the parties, wrap the presents, and post the perfect picture. It’s the story our culture tells about what the season should look like. Joy, beauty, family, tradition. And when your life doesn’t match that story, the silence becomes deafening. The grief gets louder. The gap between what you’re told to feel and what you actually feel grows harder to cross.

As a funeral officiant, I’ve seen how this season brings those fault lines to the surface. December is not just Advent and anticipation. It’s also increased funerals. It’s the weight of empty chairs around the table. It’s suicide rates ticking upward. It’s the quiet unraveling of people who feel like they’re the only ones not caught up in the magic. We don’t talk about that in the carols. We don’t name it in the Instagram posts. But it’s there. Real as winter darkness closing in at four thirty in the afternoon.

The Question I’m Asking

So when I ask if there’s still a way to rediscover Christ in Christmas, I’m not asking as a theologian looking for doctrinal clarity. Nor am I echoing what we hear from some Christians who tell us we need to put Christ back in Christmas or insist on saying Merry Christmas rather than Happy Holidays.

I’m asking as a human who wants to make it through the season without losing my soul. I’m asking for myself. And for the tired, the grieving, the disconnected, the doubting. I’m asking if there’s a story that can hold us too. And as someone who has received so much from faith, not from the Christless Christianity of America, but from an ancient collection of stories that center around God putting on skin, it makes me wonder: What would it mean to actually rediscover Christ in Christmas?

Not as a slogan. Not as a childhood memory. Not as a theological idea. But as a presence that still enters the world through vulnerability, through longing, through people who are tired and still searching for light. Moreover, how might rediscovering Christ, whether seen as the historical man or something more mythological, be a path to staying human during the holiday season?

The Christian liturgical season of Advent begins now. Four weeks to wait. Four weeks to prepare. Four weeks to remember that Christ does not arrive in perfection, but in the middle of everything. In the mess. In the waiting. In the dark soil of winter where seeds dream of spring. Could it be that the Gospels, the different stories about the person and life of Jesus, can help us find a different kind of Christmas story?

The Mess and Magi of Matthew

With that question pulsing, let’s start with Matthew, the first book of the Christian New Testament. Now, if you’re looking for a grand opening to the Christmas story, something cinematic and full of magic, Matthew doesn’t give it to you. There’s no angel choir. No animals breathing gently on a sleeping baby. No snow-dusted fields or flickering candles. No manger. No shepherds, at least not in this telling.

Matthew opens with a genealogy. A long one. The kind of passage most people skim past to get to the good stuff. But this is the good stuff. Or at least, it’s the real stuff.

It reads like a legal document. A family tree stretching from Abraham to David to the exile to Jesus. But pay attention to who’s listed. This isn’t a polished record of saints and heroes. It is a lineage filled with wreckage.

Tamar shows up, the woman who dressed as a prostitute to seduce her father-in-law after he refused to provide for her. Then there’s Rahab, the Canaanite sex worker who helped Israel’s spies escape and ended up woven into the line of the Messiah. Ruth, a Moabite widow, crossed cultural and religious boundaries out of loyalty. Bathsheba, named only as “the wife of Uriah,” reminds us of David’s abuse of power and the violent cover-up that followed. The line goes through kings who were faithful and kings who were monsters. The genealogy doesn’t hide any of it. And Matthew does not explain it away.

This is the ancestry of Emmanuel. God with us. Not God above us, or beyond us, or God with the nice and neat. God tangled in generational dysfunction. God entangled in scandal. God emerging from the long story of human fracture. Moreover, it’s not a bug in the system. It’s the whole point. This is the bloodline of God-with-us. Christ comes through it, not around it.

So if you’re staring down this season and feeling like your life doesn’t line up with the glittering photos, the Pinterest-perfect trees, or the expectations you can’t seem to meet, this part of Matthew is for you. If you’re carrying family fractures, financial stress, mental health struggles, or just an aching disconnect between how you thought life would feel and how it actually does, take a breath.

Because Matthew begins the story not with triumph or magic, but with tension and wreckage. Not with purity, but with people whose stories were stained and still called sacred.

Christ does not show up in spite of the mess. He shows up through it. So do not count yourself out. You do not need to clean up your life before something holy can grow from it. This season does not ask for perfection. It asks for presence. Your honesty. Your hunger. Your cracked and open heart. That is where the story has always taken root. Not in palaces. Not in stability. In vulnerability. In the wreckage. In lives just like yours.

But Matthew doesn’t stop there. Because after the genealogy, we get the birth. Joseph, confused and wounded, learns the child growing in Mary is of the Spirit. They stay together, naming the boy Jesus, “the one who saves.” And then, at some unknown distance of time, the Magi, the wisemen, show up.

In our modern nativity scenes, we always jam the wise men and the shepherds together, even though they come from different Gospels and very different directions. The shepherds belong to Luke’s telling, arriving poor and local, unshaven and unclean, startled by angels and stumbling toward the newborn in the night. The Magi, in contrast, come from Matthew’s version. They arrive much later, after Jesus is no longer an infant. But we keep them in our nativity sets anyway. Maybe because something in us needs the whole picture.

And here’s where Matthew doubles down on his original theme. Not only does Jesus come from a family full of outsiders. He is recognized first by outsiders, too.

The Magi were astrologers, not prophets. Foreigners, not Jews. From the East, not from the land of promise. They tracked stars, not scriptures. They show up asking, “Where is the child born king of the Jews?” not because they studied Torah, but because they watched the sky.

They should have been the last people to see what was happening. But they saw. They followed wonder. They followed longing. They followed a thread of meaning that didn’t come through a synagogue or a sermon, but through the cosmos itself.

They brought gifts, but also disruption. Their arrival tipped off Herod and unleashed a wave of fear and violence. Children were killed. Families fled. The Holy Family became refugees, running for their lives. The arrival of Christ was not all is calm, all is bright. It was trembling and terror and flight into the night.

So when Matthew tells us that Christ is born into this world, this is what he means. Christ comes through scandal, and he is recognized from the margins. Not by priests. Not by political elites. Not by the ones who had the right answers. But by those on the edge of the story.

The sexually scandalized. The ethnically excluded. The religiously impure. The ones with dirty hands and strange beliefs and questions that don’t have neat answers. The ones who are simply paying attention, even if they do not know what they are seeing. That is who Christ comes from. That is who Christ comes for. That is who sees him first.

Which means if you find yourself outside the usual Christmas frame this year, you may be right where you need to be. If you are exhausted, disconnected, or still holding your faith together with spiritual duct tape, you may be closer to the Christ of Matthew than those who show up polished and certain.

This is not a Christ who fits in the box. This is not a Christ who rewards religious purity. This is not a Christ who crowns the powerful.

This is a Christ who sees you when you’ve been shut out. A Christ who comes through your wreckage. A Christ who welcomes you even when you’re not sure what you believe anymore. A Christ who keeps showing up, even if you don’t recognize the light at first.

The Mute Mark

Now, if you’re flipping through a Bible at home, double checking what I say, when you come to the next Gospel, Mark, you’ll see that he skips the birth story entirely. No manger. No magi. No angels or shepherds or stars in the sky. Mark begins with a grown man in the wilderness. Maybe that’s its own kind of invitation. A reminder that the good news does not depend on childhood nostalgia or holiday perfection. Maybe Mark knows that for some of us, the beginning isn’t soft and sweet. It’s wild. Raw. Loud with the voice of someone crying out in the desert.

Luke: The Story We Thought We Knew

In stark contrast with Mark’s silence, Luke gives us the story we’re familiar with. And not just in churches. Luke’s version is the one that shows up in movies, on greeting cards, even in Charlie Brown’s Christmas special. This is the version we think we know. Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem. No room at the inn. A manger. Swaddling clothes. Shepherds in the field. Angels announcing good news of great joy. It’s the most iconic and cinematic version we have.

Which is why we need to say it clearly: the Christmas story we think we know and the one Luke actually tells are not the same thing.

We imagine a young couple turned away from hotels, giving birth alone in a barn. But that’s not what the story says. The word we translate as “inn” more accurately refers to a guest room, likely in the home of extended family. There’s no evidence of isolation. On the contrary, it’s hospitality. Community. A first-century home where animals were kept on the lower level during the night for warmth and safety. Where guests stayed upstairs. Where the manger wasn’t in some detached stable, but built into the very floor of the home.

This story is not about rejection. It’s about presence.

Yes, there is lowliness. Yes, there is tension. But Luke’s telling is grounded in connection, not alienation. It’s a story of God showing up in the middle of a family gathering, in a space that’s already full, and still making room for what is holy.

And who shows up first? Not the priests. Not the socially accepted. Not the religious elite. But shepherds. Men on the edges of society, mistrusted and mostly invisible. The very ones whose testimony wasn’t even valid in court are the first to testify to the arrival of Christ. Luke gives the angelic announcement not to the powerful, but to the overlooked. And that, too, is the point.

This isn’t a story of perfection. It’s a story of showing up.

So if this season is pushing you to perform joy, to display a picture-perfect life, to hold your pain behind a smile, maybe Luke has another invitation. Maybe Christmas isn’t about getting everything right. Maybe it’s about being present. About staying open when life is hard. About choosing, again and again, to be with one another. Not in some performative version of love, but in the mess of real life.

Because in Luke’s version, Christ doesn’t arrive as a royal proclamation or a sanitized spectacle. Christ arrives in the warmth of a crowded home. In the exhaustion of labor. In the presence of animals and family and outsiders who are paying attention. That’s what makes it holy.

So if your family looks more chaotic than curated this year, if your life is too full or too fractured to match the Christmas cards and curated posts, you might be closer to the real story than you think. This isn’t about escape. It’s about incarnation. About God showing up not in spite of our lives, but right in the middle of them. And that changes everything.

All that said, even if the Jesus of Matthew, the one who comes from a lineage of deception and dysfunction, speaks to you. Or if the Jesus of Luke, the one born into ordinary hospitality where you’re welcomed just as you are, even if it means sleeping on a cot in the kitchen, feels like home. You may still have been told this story isn’t for you.

Maybe your background doesn’t match the theology. Perhaps your questions pushed you to the margins. Then again, it’s possible the routines and rituals of faith didn’t align with your soul. Whatever the case, you were made to believe that this story couldn’t belong to you. And that’s where John comes in.

John and the Cosmic Christ

Because John doesn’t begin with a manger or a miracle birth. He starts before time. Before Bethlehem. Before Mary or Joseph or the Magi. He starts with the Word. The Logos. The pulse of sacred wisdom running through everything that has ever existed. Not confined to one people. Not locked inside one religion. Not owned by one tradition.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And this Word became flesh and lived among us.

It’s a bold move. John doesn’t root Jesus in genealogy like Matthew. He doesn’t ground him in a historical setting like Luke. He lifts our eyes to the cosmic. And from there, we begin to see: this story is not about exclusivity. It’s not about drawing lines. It’s about tearing them down.

John tells us that Christ is the light that gives light to everyone. Everyone. Not just the religious. Not just those with tidy lives. Not just those who say the right prayers or hold the right doctrines. This is a story wide enough to hold your grief, your questions, your longing, your past.

A story big enough to include Melchizedek, the priest-king who shows up in Genesis without origin or lineage, and later becomes the blueprint for Christ’s priesthood. A story open enough to honor Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, a Midianite priest who worships the Divine in his own tradition and still becomes a trusted spiritual guide. This is not a story that tries to erase the wisdom found outside its pages. It is a story that reveals how divine wisdom has always been at work everywhere.

The Word was in the beginning, and that means the Word was already pulsing through every tribe and tongue. Already stirring in the hearts of sages and seekers. Already whispering in languages not written in Hebrew or Greek.

So when the Magi arrive in Matthew’s Gospel, following stars instead of scriptures, we’re seeing John’s vision come to life. They do not belong to the tradition. But they see. Because the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

Not even the darkness of exclusion. Not even the darkness of gatekeeping. Not even the darkness of our own fears that we will never belong.

So if you’ve been told that this story isn’t yours, John disagrees. If you’ve been made to feel like you need to earn your way in, John invites you to let that burden go.

This is not about earning. It’s about receiving. The Word became flesh and lived among us. Not just once. Not just there. Not just then. Still now.

In every moment you choose to show up with honesty. In every act of compassion. In every whisper of beauty or ache for something more. The Word still arrives.

And when it does, it carries the light of a love that always included you. Before the story started. Before the page turned. Before anyone told you otherwise.

Where Will Christmas Find You?

So what does all this mean today? What does it mean for me? For you?

This Christmas, I am back in the house I grew up in. The one filled with childhood memories and the echoes of college breaks, when I returned exhausted from finals with a semester’s worth of sleep debt in my bones. I used to step through the door hoping to feel held by the magic I remembered. The lights. The warmth. The baking. The laughter. But more often than not, I felt detached, as if I were showing up late to a party I used to belong to.

Now, three decades later, I live here. The house is not what it once was, and neither am I. My dad is gone. My mom grieves in a senior living center ten minutes down the road, carrying the weight of his absence. The rooms echo differently now. I have begun to shape parts of the space into something that feels like mine. An office. A bedroom. A living area curated just enough to function. Yet so much remains unsettled. There are closets I have not touched. Cabinets filled with memories I have not yet claimed or released. A whole front room that holds more of the past than it offers welcome to the future.

Maybe Matthew’s Christmas genealogy is reminding me that all of this belongs. That long list of names is not polished or pristine. It is raw and gritty and filled with people most churches would rather not mention. Maybe this house, in its unfinished and in between state, belongs in that same lineage. Not as a shrine to what used to be. Not as a perfectly styled holiday space. But as a real place. A place where grief and becoming live side by side. A place where Christ might still be born.

In the midst of all this, I find myself drawn to something like the hospitality we see in Luke. The nativity was not isolated in the cold or tucked away from community. It took place in the crowded front room of a family home. Space was tight. A cot was likely close to the kitchen. It was not serene or silent or aesthetically pleasing, but it was full of life. That feels like this season. And it’s what I’d like this how to feel like. I am not a natural host, but I want this to be a place where people are welcomed. A place where belonging does not require performance. A place where presence matters more than polish.

This is especially true with my mom. She knows every creak in the floorboards and every inch of drywall, yet the house no longer feels like hers. The mix of familiar and foreign shows up in her eyes every time she walks through the door. So I try to offer something steady. Not answers. Not distractions. Simply steadiness. It is slow work. Quiet work. But it feels like the kind of work the Christmas story invites.

While Matthew and Luke have me thinking about people and place, John feels like an invitation to new rhythms and routines. His cosmic approach has me paying closer attention to the season itself. Not just the church calendar or the cultural to-do list, but the season as it’s written in the sky. The Winter solstice arrives just before Christmas. The darkest day of the year. The longest night. And it is right there, in the cold and the stillness, that the turning begins. The light starts to return. Slowly. Imperceptibly. But faithfully. This, too, is part of the story.

So one of the things I am exploring this year is whether winter solstice might serve as a kind of threshold for me. A moment to pause. To honor the darkness, not with fear or avoidance, but with quiet reverence. To mark the slow return of light with practices that root me in creation and remind me of rhythms older than religion.

The truth is, some of the traditions we’ve come to associate with Christmas (like trees, wreaths, and candles) trace their lineage back to solstice celebrations. I used to treat that like a theological threat, something to downplay or correct. Now, I wonder if it’s an invitation. Maybe this is part of what John means when he says the true light gives light to everyone. Not to some. Not only to those inside the lines. But to everyone.

The light has always been arriving. The wisdom has always been speaking. The invitation has always been unfolding.

Maybe staying human this Christmas means trusting that whatever is sacred does not need to be protected by exclusivity. Maybe it means honoring the quiet return of light. Not with spectacle. But with presence. With breath. With a candle lit on the longest night. With a whispered prayer that does not ask for answers, only light enough to take the next step.

I wish I could say that writing all this helped me find the magic again. That I feel Christ in Christmas in some new and radiant way. But that wouldn’t be honest.

What I feel is more like a small stirring. A quieting. A sense that I don’t need to chase the feeling, or replicate some past perfection, or make everything just right. Maybe it’s enough to let the story hold me. Maybe it’s enough to believe that God shows up not in the ideal, but in the in-between. In a cluttered house. In a tired body. In the slow clearing of old rooms. In grief that still lingers. In hope that flickers, but has not gone out.

Maybe that’s what staying human in this season looks like. Not mastering the moment. But letting the moment be what it is. Letting it be messy. Letting it be sacred. Letting it be enough.

So if you’re coming to this season feeling like you’re too much or not enough, if you don’t know where you belong or what you believe, if the noise is loud and your heart is tired, know this: You are not outside the story. There is room here. For grief and gratitude. For questions and quiet. For family and solitude. For tangled histories and new beginnings. The light is returning. Slowly. Quietly. Faithfully.

And that, somehow, is still good news. And embracing it, is part of how we stay human.

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Embodiment Practices

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

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But what if it’s not? What if these tragedies aren’t unfortunate flukes, but symptoms of a society that’s been structured for extraction instead of care? This post is a refusal to normalize the abnormal. It’s an invitation to remember what we were made for, and to reimagine what else is possible. Not through politics or protest, but through a grassroots resurrection of presence, community, and love.

Because this is not how life works. This is how empire works, and empire only wins if we forget we are human.

Watch or Listen

The Whole Story

I sat in my car for a moment after pulling up in front of the house. I popped open my iPad, made sure I was online, pulled Notion up to the right page, and double checked the names of family members, saying each one and hoping they would lock into my short-term memory. Then I took a deep breath, walked up to the door, and knocked.

As a funeral officiant, I’ve done this more times than I can count. You walk in. Shake hands. Offer hugs. Nod when they say they’re doing okay, even when you both know they’re not.

Normalizing the Abnormal

This time, it was a 38-year-old. Dead from an overdose. Found alone in a hotel room. Grandson. Son. Brother. Father. Uncle. Gone.

And what struck me, what arrested me in a strange kind of horror, was how not shocked I was. I didn’t feel surprised. Not at the way he died. Not at the age. Not at the grief spread like ash across the faces in the room. This has become normal. And that realization wrecked me.

I sat with the family. We sifted through photos. We talked about his smile, his humor, his struggles. The child he once was. The man he wanted to be. The ways he showed up. The ways he didn’t. And under it all was this hum. This background static of resignation. Another young man. Another overdose. Another story that ends in a funeral home instead of a full, messy, mid-life unraveling.

Just a few weeks earlier, it was a 16-year old murdered in the street as a party took a violent turn. A few weeks after, I presided over the burial of a 24-year-old. We’ll never know if she was murdered or committed suicide in that Vegas hotel. A few weeks later, it was another 38-year-old, lost in a car crash, one her four-year-old daughter survived. The stories keep coming.

A few days after the first 38-year-old’s service, I was talking with someone about the funeral business. They asked how things were going, and I said what I always say when this time of year rolls around. “It’s going to be a busy winter.” I don’t say that to inspire shock. It’s just the rhythm of things. Winter is always heavier. Like trees that shed their leaves, winter strips away pretense. The cold reveals what the warmth allowed us to hide.

Natural Rhythm vs. Abnormal Rupture

There’s a softness to this season, if you know what to look for. Older people sometimes hold on just long enough to see their family gathered one more time at Thanksgiving or Christmas. They catch that last flicker of connection, and then they let go. There’s something holy in that. The body knowing its time. The soul easing into release.

But winter also brings loneliness. And depression. And suicide. Which is not holy. It’s hell. It’s not normal that the holidays increase suicide rates. It’s not normal that the pressure of joy makes people feel more isolated than ever. It’s not normal that economic stress pushes people to the brink.

And here I am. The one who walks into living rooms and chapels and churches and gravesides, finding words that don’t dismiss the emotion, but walk people into the grief and guilt and shame and loss, not so those feelings can be amplified, but so they can be honored, witnessed, and moved through.

I’ve come to realize, again and again, that the problem is not the grief. The grief is sacred. The grief tells us we loved. The grief, in many ways, is what keeps us human.

The problem is that this untimely grief has become so routine. It is no longer a disruption. It is a fixture. In the society we’ve chosen to create, it is normal. And as much as it stirs discomfort, as much as we might live in denial of it, we’ve normalized death in youth. We’ve normalized isolation in winter. We’ve normalized despair in the season of joy. And sadly, for me, stepping into it now feels frighteningly normal.

The Sickness of Normal Abnormality

There’s a quote I come back to often. It’s attributed to the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

I’ve never seen that quote stitched on a pillow or printed on an office wall, but it belongs there. Tattooed on our collective conscience. Branded into the bones of anyone trying to survive modern life with their humanity intact. Because we are adjusting. All the time. Adapting to absurdity.

We tell ourselves it’s just how things are. That funerals come in waves. That holidays are hard. That suicide, overdose, loneliness, and economic collapse are all just part of the landscape. We shrug and adjust. We learn to carry the weight. To silence the ache. To fold our grief into a socially acceptable size. And then we call it normal.

But what we’re grieving isn’t just death. It’s the architecture of a world built on false assumptions. We are suffering not because this is human nature, but because this is the nature of the systems we’ve constructed.

The death and despair we’re experiencing isn’t inevitable. It’s not biology. It’s not fate. It’s not the will of the divine. It’s a system we built. A society we’ve chosen, whether actively or by inertia. And like any system, it can be unbuilt. Remade. Reimagined.

Because these tragedies aren’t just individual misfortunes. They are collective symptoms. Symptoms of a society where we’ve mistaken productivity for worth and profit for value. Where connection is rare, but performance is required. Where we medicate instead of support, consume instead of care, isolate instead of gather. Where grief is privatized. Health is monetized. Love is conditional. Where the most vulnerable are always the most expendable.

The grief we experience when loss comes home is sacred. But the systems that cause it? They are not. And the greatest danger isn’t the violence or the loneliness or the injustice. It’s how easily we accept them. How we stop being disturbed. How we start calling this normal.

This isn’t a sermon. This is a rupture. A plea to feel again. To name what’s wrong. To stop numbing ourselves with acceptance. Because when we stop grieving, we stop longing. And when we stop longing, we forget what we were made for. We forget what it means to be human.

Why We Normalize the Abnormal

And I get it. I really do. I understand why we numb ourselves with acceptance. So when we see these abnormal outcomes from what we’ve settled for as normal, we reach for the familiar lines. “God wanted them more.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “They were spared some future pain.” I’ve sat with parents who’ve clung to those phrases like life rafts. Not because they’re true. But because having to admit the society we’ve created is profoundly sick is too much to bear.

Yet that is exactly what we need in those moments. It isn’t explanations or justifications, it’s the lifejacket of presence that allows us to sit with the silence and feel all the emotions, and as we feel, to allow the questions that form from the ache to rise from beneath the surface:

• What if the grief isn’t just personal?

• What if it’s pointing to something deeper?

• What if the suffering isn’t a test, or a lesson, or a punishment?

• What if it’s a symptom, a symptom of a profoundly sick society?

Because when our stories of normal stop working, the soul starts searching. And it’s there, right there, that theology in the truest sense begins. Not as certainty. Not as doctrine. But as the ache to remember who we are and why we’re here.

We Have a Choice

And that ache opens a choice. Not just what we believe, but how we live. Not just what we worship, but what form we take in the world.

As humans, we are meaning-makers. Whether we name it as faith or not, we all live liturgically. We practice beliefs we never choose. We inherit rituals we never named. We are formed, shaped, discipled. Not just in churches or temples or mosques, but in checkout lines, corporate trainings, scroll loops, and policy decisions. And what we worship, what we allow to have ultimate say, shapes what we call normal.

James K.A. Smith writes about “cultural liturgies.” He names how our hearts are shaped not by the ideas we believe, but by the practices we repeat. And while churches may teach belief, malls teach desire. Markets teach allegiance. Social feeds teach identity.

The mall has an altar. The brand is a god. The scroll is a prayer wheel. You become what you repeat. And what you repeat becomes normal.

We’ve baptized the marketplace. We’ve theologized capitalism. We’ve traded the living God for a curated algorithm of self-justifying wants. And we wonder why it’s so hard to stay human.

The Taking Form

The world we’ve inherited, the world we keep recreating, has a form. A shape. A posture it trains us into. Catholic priest and educator Henri Nouwen called it the “taking form.” It doesn’t always take with violence. Sometimes it takes with a smile. With a headline. With a price tag. Sometimes it doesn’t even feel like taking at all. It feels like being seen, being liked, being safe. But it is still taking.

The taking form is always about control. It wants power over how others see you. It crafts the image. Projects the self. Performs certainty. Hides the wound. It seduces with stability but deals in shame. It uses performance to cover fear. It builds systems that look like care but are structured for profit. Healthcare that calls itself compassionate while extracting billions. Food systems that promise nourishment while engineering addiction. Religions that speak of love while policing bodies and branding belief.

The taking form is not just a spiritual metaphor. It’s an economic model. A political logic. The shape of empire. And it works because it has taught us to value appearance over essence. Image over integrity. Performance over presence. You can see it in every ad that sells salvation. In every influencer post designed for envy. In every policy that rewards the efficient over the honest. We live under a regime of managed perception.

And so we adapt. We curate ourselves to be acceptable. We normalize the spectacle. We call it branding. We call it professionalism. We call it spiritual maturity. But what it really is, is hiding. What it really is, is fear. And the more we shape ourselves according to fear, the more our world begins to reflect that shape.

The (For)Giving Form

But there is another form. Nouwen called it the “forgiving form.” We might also call it the vulnerable form. The human form. The Christ form.

This is not a form that grasps or hides. This is the form that kneels. That bleeds. That forgives. That shows up unguarded and says, “Here I am.” The forgiving form is the posture of sacred presence. It is not efficient. It is not profitable. It is not polished. But it is real. And it is life. It is the way a seed breaks open in dark soil, surrendering its shell to become something new.

Where the taking form builds walls, the forgiving form builds tables. Where the taking form says, “I must be seen as powerful,” the forgiving form says, “You can see me as I am.” Where the taking form demands payment, the forgiving form gives itself away.

It’s not that one form is religious and the other secular. It’s that one is human and the other is not.

(For)Giving Across Traditions

All of the great faith traditions echo this contrast.

In Buddhist practice, there’s the renunciation of illusion. Not just illusion in the mind, but illusion projected by culture, consumption, and control. To see clearly is to let go of what is not real, it is to abandon taking so you can embrace giving.

In Jewish theology, the prophets speak again and again of teshuva, which is often translated as repentance. While repentance has connotations of guilt or potential punishment, teshuva translated more literally connects to the idea of return. Return to justice. Return to truth. Return to the human we have hidden beneath our idols. Again it is the movement from taking to giving.

A Sufi proverb declares, “I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God.” This is the paradox at the heart of all true religion. The more we let go of managing how we are seen, the more we are truly seen. The more we relinquish control, the more we experience connection. The more we surrender our illusions of power, the more we discover the sacred in the center of our being.

And in Indigenous spiritualities, especially those rooted in relationship with land, the human is never isolated. The human belongs in a web of reciprocity. To dominate, to hoard, to manipulate the image, these are symptoms of disconnection, not strength.

So much of what we call normal is simply what we’ve practiced long enough to stop noticing. But if we stop noticing, we stop resisting. And if we stop resisting, we stop transforming. And if we stop transforming, we settle for survival instead of love.

Life vs. Empire

This is not how life works. This is how empire works. And empire is very good at hiding in plain sight. It doesn’t march in with banners and boots anymore. It shows up with buzzwords and branding. It speaks in metrics and margins. It hides in what we call normal. In the expected. In what we’ve come to believe we can’t change.

Empire tells stories too. But not the kind that makes you more human. Empire tells the kind that makes you compliant. Empire says: This is just the way things are. Markets are natural. Poverty is deserved. Success is proof of virtue. Wealth is wisdom. God helps those who help themselves.

But every one of these lines is a lie. A beautifully marketed, algorithmically reinforced, industrial-grade lie.

Empire and Markets

I heard the “This is just the way things are” argument in my TikTok comments a couple weeks ago. Based on the 79 in the username and the tone of the replies, I’m guessing this forty-something man, proud of his passport stamps and degrees, was certain of his point. He insisted that markets are the only natural way for humans to live together, so whatever outcomes they produce are unavoidable. He insisted it’s been that way since the first caveman offered his wheel for a slab of mammoth meat. We exchanging goods and call it society. It was Adam Smith, simplified and sanctified.

Never mind that David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years blows that myth to pieces. Graeber shows that for most of human history, economies were not driven by markets or money, but by trust, obligation, reciprocity, and relationship. Not transaction, but connection. Not profit, but presence. We have not always lived this way. We do not have to keep living this way.

Empire and Poverty

The same is true of poverty. Poverty is rarely about laziness or moral failure. It’s about policy. It’s about who has access and who is excluded. It’s about systemic disinvestment, racialize exploitation, inherited trauma, and the fact that the harder some work, the less they have. Poverty is not the absence of character. It is the result of extraction.

Empire and Success

The opposite is true at the other end of the spectrum. Success is often not a result of hard work, but proof of proximity to power. Take Elon Musk. He’s celebrated as a self-made genius, an icon of innovation. But the rise of Tesla and SpaceX is not a story of pure entrepreneurial brilliance; it’s a story of billions in government subsidies. From Department of Energy loans to lucrative federal contracts and tax breaks, Musk’s empire is built with public money. His success isn’t just innovation. It’s access. It’s being in the room where decisions are made and dollars are allocated. It’s empire rewarding its own.

Others achieve success by finding ways to maximize monetization of what others generously laid the groundwork for. Consider the mRNA vaccines. The foundational technology was nurtured by decades of publicly‑funded research at the National Institutes of Health and other agencies, with hundreds of research grants and inventions that directly contributed. When the pandemic struck, private firms built on that base, secured patents, and earned billions in revenue. Citizens and taxpayers paid first for the research and then again through the market for access. The result: a preventive medical breakthrough, for some of the population yes, but also a sharply illustrated case of how the dance between public investment and private profit plays out in our world.

In Pharma, this kind of grift is institutionalized. What corporations too often call ‘research and development’ is, in significant cases, not a fresh discovery but a carefully‑scripted lifecycle play. Minor tweaks to existing drugs (a reformulated dosage, new delivery mechanism, or repackaged indication) become new patents, delayed generics, extended monopolies. The goal shifts from better medicine to longer exclusivity. It becomes profit rather than healing. Innovation gets the marketing spotlight while the real engine runs on extraction and enforcement.

And it’s not just the drug companies. It’s the same with your smartphone. GPS, touchscreen tech, the internet itself. These weren’t corporate inventions. They were government-funded advances, birthed in labs and universities, freely shared with the world. Apple simply wrapped them in sleek design, claimed the rights, and locked them behind a brand.

The Lessons of Empire

Because all of that is how empire works. Empire is not just a nation. It’s not just a government. Empire is a way of organizing life where power concentrates, where worth is measured in production, and where those with the most resources shape reality for everyone else. Then it tells you lies to justify itself.

It hides in corporate language. In religious platitudes. In policy decisions that feel like destiny. And when empire becomes the air we breathe, it starts shaping the world in its own image. Not out of malice. But out of efficiency. Control. Fear.

Empire teaches us to take. To hoard. To dominate. To hide. To perform. And then it tells us this is just being responsible. Just being safe. Just being smart. And what does empire breed? Overdoses. Murders. Car crashes that shouldn’t happen. Funerals that should have been birthday parties. Grief that isn’t tragic anymore. It’s just expected.

This isn’t empire in decay. This is what empire produces.

The End of Empire

But yes. Empires do decay. They always do.

Sometimes they collapse under their own weight: bloated, overextended, disconnected from the people they claim to serve. Sometimes they are torn down in revolution, when the people finally decide survival is not enough. Sometimes they’re conquered from the outside. Sometimes, they cannibalize themselves from within.

But something new is happening now.

For the first time in history, empire may no longer need people. At least, not the masses. AI replaces workers. Automation replaces community. The ultra-wealthy retreat to enclaves, no longer dependent on the labor or loyalty of the many. They don’t need human batteries anymore. They’ve built machines to mine our attention, mimic our empathy, and monetize our emotions.

So what do we do? Violent revolt will not save us. It just becomes another story empire will sell back to us later. Another brand of patriotism. Another myth of blood-earned freedom.

Creating Something New

We need something slower. Something quieter. Something deeper. A grassroots resurrection. A return to the forgiving form. Not a storming of the gates. A lighting of fires in every home. Not a toppling of structures. A nurturing of lives in the shadow of what no longer serves us. Mutual aid instead of market exchange. Community instead of consumerism. Sufficiency instead of scarcity.

And this does not have to happen via some grand political turnaround. It can, sure. It may include ballots, civic reform, policy shifts. But it doesn’t depend on them. This isn’t about showing up every four years and hoping for something better. It’s about showing up now. In neighborhood kitchens. In lending a hand across the driveway. In sharing a table, not waiting for permission. It’s the quiet revolution of people who choose each other over the system. Who build the structures of care beneath the radar of empire. Together. Not waiting. Because the world we were made for is not on loan. It’s being built here. By us.

This is the true beginning of empire’s undoing. Not with swords. But with presence. With shared meals. With shelter offered. With needs met. With stories told. With the courage to name that this, this world we’ve made, is not the only one possible. And not the one we were made for.

So what might the world we were made for look like?

Life Beyond Empire

Let’s imagine a world beyond the lies of empire. A world where intelligence isn’t measured by how well it can manipulate or extract, but by how deeply it can connect and uplift. Where we no longer entrust our future to machines built to mimic humans, but to communities committed to becoming more fully human. Machine learning, not as artificial but enhanced intelligence, supporting what is humane, not out to replace humans.

Let’s imagine a world where wealth is no longer accumulated through proximity to power or by manipulating what the public paid to discover. mRNA technology, GPS, touchscreen tech would not be privatized behind corporate patents. They would be shared as a common good. Because what was birthed from our collective effort should benefit our collective life.

Let’s imagine we structured our economy not around scarcity and extraction, but around sufficiency and well-being. We would no longer measure economic strength by profits during global crises or soaring stock prices while the shelves of food banks are depleated. We would measure it by how few go to bed hungry. By how many are lifted into wholeness.

We would no longer believe the lie that everything must be market-driven. That the only value worth naming is the one with a dollar sign. We would dare to believe in systems that serve people, not profits. In solutions rooted in care, not competition.

And when we begin to undo those lies, when we start to unlearn what empire taught us, we create space for something new. Or rather, something ancient and eternal to return.

Children would be raised not with pressure to perform, but with permission to play. Education would center joy, curiosity, and wonder. The question wouldn’t be, “How will you contribute to the economy?” but, “Who are you becoming?”

Safety would no longer be a luxury afforded to the gated few. It would be a right woven into every neighborhood, every policy, every streetlight and sidewalk and school hallway. We would stop building cages and start building trust.

Food would not be a commodity engineered for addiction. It would be communion: nourishment for body and soul, grown in reciprocity with the earth and shared with gratitude at the table.

Innovation would be a shared blessing, not a corporate goldmine. It would arise not from urgency to dominate but from the desire to heal, to restore, to tend to the world with reverence.

Work would be restored to dignity, not reduced to exploitation. No longer the endless hustle to survive, it would become a means of contribution, creativity, and care. We would measure success not by promotions but by presence. Not by revenue but by restoration.

Healthcare would no longer be a privilege wrapped in bureaucracy. It would be a sacrament: a sacred expression of our shared humanity. Not something earned by employment or luck, but something offered as a basic act of love.

And if we built such a world, if we structured life around presence instead of performance, around care instead of control, then winter and the holidays would no longer be the season of despair. It would become what it was always meant to be: a time of reflection, of gathering close, of connection in the quiet.

Death would still come. It always does. But it would arrive with gentleness, in its time. Not as the shock of overdose or suicide, not as the violence of despair or the silence of isolation. The early death, the tragic death, the funeral before the mid-life unraveling, these would become rare again. An aberration, not an expectation. Because in a world where we honor our humanity, where we care for one another, where presence is prioritized over performance, untimely death no longer needs to be normal.

And that is not fantasy. That’s what it’s like when we collectively rise up, reject what’s not normal, and come together so that we can stay human.

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Embodiment Practices

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

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