No Post, Just Presence
I took the week off to live what I teach. Here’s a reminder of what this project is.
No new post this week. Something better.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
Just Another Plank in The Wall
What if the parts of your story you’ve tried to discard … shame, addiction, betrayal, grief … aren’t your disqualifications, but your foundation? When I record these videos I do so standing in front of a wall I built from discarded pallet wood. It’s jagged and imperfect, and that’s what makes it holy. In this video and post, we explore what it means to stay human by reclaiming the pieces we were told to throw away, both in our selves and our society. This is a call to welcome home the outcasts, in you and around you, and to build something sacred from what others saw as waste.
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.
Trump, America Unmasked
We like to imagine that Donald Trump is an aberration, a break from who we are. But what if he is not the exception? What if he is America unmasked? From Salem to Jamestown, from slavery to Jim Crow, from the Cold War to Gaza, our nation has wrapped exploitation in the language of liberty. Trump simply stripped the disguise away. This essay traces that hidden history, names the power that has defined us, and celebrates the bottom-up movements of love that have always carried the hope of something better.
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:
You've got this nailed. Love that as a reminder.