As of the minute I write this sentence, I am 24 hours away from stepping out of the steaming doorway of a sweat lodge, and walking to a spot in nature where I will sit alone for 4 days -- without food or water.

The circle is made of 411 prayer flags woven through 4 long strands of string. A prayer flag is a little square of cloth with a pinch of tobacco in the center. I spent the past week cutting each square, adding each pinch of tobacco, wrapping the square into a little pouch, and then weaving the string around the flag's tail.

Each prayer flag is a different prayer. I think it's true to say that I've prayed more this week then I have my entire previous life combined. I prayed for everyone I know. I prayed for my voice, my future children, and the renaissance. I prayed thank yous and i'm gratefuls. If we've ever hugged, I prayed for you.

I completed the prayer flags yesterday, and to my surprise, I found myself sporadically weeping for hours -- like, ugly animal face howling-at-times kind of weeping.

I have realized I have a lot of stuck grief in my body.

Our body is god-tier technology. If you'll grant me the crude metaphor, this god-tier tech has, like a car, two modes:

sports mode & regen mode

Sports mode is coffee, high alert, quick mental thoughts, tense muscles ready to twitch, swallow chest breaths, and a subtle anxiety whispering how you can't trust life, love, or God.

aka most of us most of the time

Regen mode is aimless, relaxed, and soft eyed. Mental thoughts are clouds rolling over a field. Muscles are unclenched, the breath fills the belly and we effortlessly see past the petty and make contact with the vulnerable. We don't believe in God, we know God...

and if we can stay there without falling asleep or reaching for a distraction, a visitor arrives at the edge of awareness.

For most of us, the visitor is grief.

As I ween off of caffeine, nicotine, and sugar;
disengage from texts, emails, and digital inboxes;
and step away from my work's infinite to-do list,
i've
s l o w e d
down.

And I have been weeping.

This is the most I've wept without the assistance of psychedelics or heartbreak. I'm weeping the glory, beauty, and end of the previous 7 year chapter of my life. My tenure at Fit For Service is ending after my last Mentally Fit class. I wept for the wild and beautiful montage that plays in my mind; of all we've done and who i did it with.

Being a leader in the Fit For Service community has been my personal graduate school. My cheeks are wet with a gratitude that if it started naming names, this would start to read like the acknowledgement section of a book.

to summarize:

i am more than i ever dreamt i'd be, and who i am is because of everyone who participated in my life these last 7 years. thank you. i love you. for the times it hurt, i'm sorry. and for the times i let you down, please forgive me.

i vow to be the kind of leader who keeps the fire lit.

there will be more of what we've done, but in new incarnations, with new faces, dancing to new music.

But the grief is also because; what we've done is done.

the weeping is like finishing a great book where you fall in love with the heroes, some of them even die, but they save the world, and the book ends. forever it is over. You ache because it was glorious, because you loved, cried, hoped, and for the brief time you merged with that story, you forgot the mundane, preprogrammed, commercials every 7 minutes lifestale you had gotten use too.

We risk the grief of starting a new book for the potential boon of having the horizons of our imaginations widened.

These last 7 years widened my imagination.

I'm bringing that gift into my quest and into the next chapter of my life:

Fatherhood.
Egregore Piloting.
Ethical Cult Building.
Lucid Dream Heralding.
Modern Renaissance Financing.

These are the prayers for the next chapter.

Song I'm Listening on Repeat

​Rise - Lynnic ​

Quote I'm Enjoying

Om mani padme hum (hail to the jewel in the lotus)

“We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstraction police and threaten us.
― Robert Hayden, Collected Poems

PS. last call

I won't be checking my inboxes for awhile. If you want to join the final mentally fit class, email team@fitforservice.com. We start October 28th.
​
PPS. i won't be responding to anything for a few weeks. forgive me. love you.