YES!!!

Find the Others has been a guiding principle in my life for over a decade. It is how I found people like Caitlin Johnstone. And how I continue to meet such folks, watching with delight as my worldview and experiences burst like a fractal flower, leading me to ever-evolving perspectives and experiences.

For me, the major project of the 2010s seems to have been going deeply within AND without to face that alienation I feel from consensus reality and to learn how to become more grounded in my sense of Self, so that the poisoned-tip arrows of denigrating comments no longer work on my System.

I owe SO MUCH to the many Others who have aided my development, people like McKenna, Douglas Rushkoff, Russell Brand and Ken Wilber, not to mention all of the artists I admire, musicians like Phish, Tame Impala, Tash Sultana, Xavier Rudd, oh how the list goes on.

I also owe much to myself, or my Self, for having the courage and perseverance to go on this journey, even as it has isolated me from loved ones and made maintaining long friendships difficult.

And now, less than two weeks from the dawn of the 2020s, I am feeling very excited for I made a decision this September (made official a few weeks back) to go totally against the programming of our culture. You see, I am a father of two and a homeowner but at the end of March, I will leave my steady teaching job of 15 and go on a journey back to my home country of America to become a citizen journalist.

I go in the spirit of Life is an Adventure and Find the Others and the main project I will work on will be a non-fiction book based on a cross-country trip without driving a car – I’ll take trains, ride buses, hail taxes or get rides with friends, old and new – with the goal of letting Life guide me where I need to be to write a killer book about what I find.

I see many aspects of America as being in a Crisis, and one of those is the state of journalism there. I graduated from one of the top journalism schools in the U.S. in the mid 1990s (USC), and practiced journalism until fall 2000. But saw the trends and didn’t have the conviction that I wanted to stay in a business that seemed to de-value its content creators, especially those of us who doggedly sought to speak Truth to Power and weren’t in the field just to sooth our egos.

It’s ironic because at that time, I had almost no financial responsibilities but quit partly because I felt the pay wasn’t equal to the value of the work; now I have financial responsibilities but my attitude about money has shifted from scarcity to abundance. I believe now our world is full of wealth but that wealth is not what is in our bank accounts, those manmade, increasingly ephemeral measurements, but is actually more basic: wealth is each other, its a sunrise, a cold shower, a warm bath, the smile of a stranger, the pictures of a lover, the breeze on our skin on a bike ride, and so much more.

I encourage everyone to use the final two weeks of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 to ponder what you HOPE for, what kind of beautiful world you want to help create.

Caitlin has been doing warrior’s work these past few years, challenging the narrative-makers’ non-sense and helping US wake up. I plan to do my part in 2020.

So, ask yourself, what gift do you have to contribute? How can you aid in the healing of the Collective and the empowering of the individual?

Let’s seriously – and playfully! – ponder such questions and find Each Other. We do that? Then WE got this.

WE.